Tommies: The British Army in the Trenches

by Rosie Serdiville

  As a consequence the county associations found themselves competing with the War Office, though, by the end of 1914, the overall strength of the Territorials had doubled. On 15 September 1914, these ‘Terriers’ were called upon to volunteer for active service abroad. They would be amateurs no more. Thereafter, recruitment was in the hands of local cross-party committees. On 15 January 1915 in Durham and in other counties, men of otherwise good physique but who had been below the minimum height requirement of 5 foot 3, were recruited to ‘bantam’ battalions with the standard reduced to five foot. Miners tend to be stocky, and Durham miners flocked to the bantam battalions.

  Tommy Atkins in 1914 was pretty much universal. He came from the old pre-war regular army and his average age was 28. Most regulars and reservists were drawn from poor, working-class backgrounds, either the industrial slums or rural shires where standards of living for most farm workers were little better. Their officers were provided, in the main, by the public school system. These two worlds had very little in common. The average subaltern (life expectancy on the Western Front – six weeks) was likely to be a good 6 inches (150 mm) taller than any of the squaddies he commanded.

  Field Marshal Herbert Horatio Kitchener (1850–1916) originally came to fame after defeating the Mahdi’s successor at Omdurman in 1898 – avenging Gordon and conquering the Sudan. He was Chief of Staff during the Second Boer War and then commander-in-chief in India 1902–09, where he and Lord Curzon did not get on. Forceful, autocratic and brilliant, Kitchener became Secretary of State for War and was one of the few to perceive that the war would be long and costly. He could never quite reconcile his military instincts with ministerial policy, rather cramping ‘Wullie’ Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Kitchener drowned aboard HMS Hampshire when she went down taking him to Russia on a top-secret mission in 1916.

  While 1914 saw a vast outpouring of patriotic fervour, it was not the only motivation to join up. Enlistment was a cure for unemployment, for boredom, and offered a chance to see the world. Plus it was a means of escape – many joined up to avoid life’s complications, adopting aliases. For most working-class people, civilian life was grindingly hard, desperately poor, overcrowded, insanitary, and all too often short. The army offered a chance for adventure as well as travel. Few ordinary people had ventured abroad. Mainland Europe was unknown, exotic – far more remote in their eyes than the most ambitious long haul would be today.

  Kitchener’s new army volunteers were younger than the regulars of the BEF, many just 18. Some were underage. At Essex Farm CGWG Cemetery, just north of Ypres, lies the grave of Joseph Valentine Strudwick (he preferred Joe). He didn’t quite make his 16th birthday, dying in January 1916. There are many others. Conversely, the oldest man killed was 68.

  In khaki

  In terms of tactics and training, lessons that could and should have been learnt from colonial wars were often overlooked. The straight shooting, adept and very tough Boers took a heavy toll during the opening stages of the Second Boer War. Lord Roberts introduced levels of training that placed far more emphasis on fire and movement. Marksmanship was prized and by 1914, Tommy could fire 12–14 rounds a minute and expect to kill his man at 600 yards (550 metres). The record set in 1913 was 38 aimed shots in a single minute.

  The Germans with their heavier Mauser bolt could not match the versatility of the Lee version, which permitted the shooter to fire continuously, working the bolt without dropping the stock from his shoulder. This paid off in 1914 to the extent that the Germans, when they first encountered the BEF at Mons in August, thought they were facing men armed with automatic weapons. Tommy was better armed than his adversaries. Defeats in South Africa meant that bull, Blanco and square bashing were augmented with new more flexible drills stressing methods of attack, retreat and the full use of cover.

  Such was the rush to join the colours in 1914, so overwhelming was the response to Kitchener’s call, that the army’s capacity to feed, house, equip and train these vast, enthusiastic hordes was overwhelmed. Officers on leave from the Indian Army, from officer training corps based in schools and universities were all dragged in. It’s small wonder the lingo of the New Army formations would resonate with words and phrases that originated on the Veldt or among the foothills of the Hindu Kush. For the recruits, their first months were often spent in makeshift camps, without uniforms, still in the Sunday ‘civvies’ they’d worn to sign up. They were officered in many cases by ageing retirees, whose experience was a world away from the new realities of industrial war. Undeterred, by the end of that first year, 1,190,000 volunteers had signed up.

  For the first two years of the war, Britain and the Empire relied solely upon volunteers. This was unique; all the other Great Powers needed mass conscription from the outset. But the war took everything, it consumed blood and sacrifice at a rate undreamed of. Every day newspapers recorded the litany of death, page after page, column after column. Scarcely a family in the land remained untouched. Swollen by volunteers, some regiments, like the Northumberland Fusiliers would field 52 battalions, the Durham Light Infantry, 38. It still wasn’t enough. Lord Derby became the architect of wartime conscription, an anathema to the British but the great flood of willing volunteers had dried to a trickle. Derby’s scheme was originally limited to unmarried males according to age. Later conscription became more universal; by April 1918 men aged over 50 were being called up. The patriotic myth had turned sour.

  Canvas webbing was of the 1908 pattern, state of the art in its day. With no restrictions across the chest it could easily be slung on and taken off. The 3-inch-wide waist-belt, fitted to a pair of narrower shoulder straps, secured five .303 ammunition pouches on each side, a bayonet hanger or frog, water bottle holder, haversack, pack, supporting straps and an entrenching tool carrier for both blade and handle. Messing kit was slung from the pack. Many of Kitchener’s new army had to make do with a half-way house which comprised leather webbing, similar in design but with belt-hung ammo pouches reminiscent of earlier patterns.

  Tommy went to war in coarse heavy wool tunic and trousers, robust but chafing. He had a woollen issue shirt and underwear, the shirt so rough that many shaved it before use. Recruits from the industrial slums were delighted by three square meals a day. Many were under-size and underfed. The army built them up; they put on pounds and inches, good solid muscle, during training. In 1914 there were no steel helmets, and the men wore peaked caps that, while elegant, gave absolutely no protection. Their calves were encased in woollen wrappings or puttees (intended to prevent wet and dirt getting inside the boots). Wound round the leg from the boot upwards, they were tricky to get on and soon got very wet. On Tommy’s feet were stout leather boots with hobnails, fearfully uncomfortable as feet swelled from forced marches on hot, unyielding paving stones.

  He was also issued with a woollen greatcoat that – like his service dress – was warm and durable, rather too warm in summer and not warm enough in winter. When it got wet it stayed wet. In the trenches lice became a constant irritant. The creatures laid eggs in the seams of tunics which even boiling wouldn’t kill. Jackets had to be steamed and ironed, carefully crunching the eggs. On the march back after many visits to bath houses behind the lines, where bodies and kit were scrubbed, the men would feel the old, horribly familiar itching erupt as they sweated.

  Herbert Waugh from Newcastle was very much a Saturday night soldier, an aspiring professional who had joined the rather smart 6th ‘City’ Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers:

  All battalions of infantry were and are very much alike. They were composed of the same type of men, who dressed alike, were armed in the same way, trained in the same way, and fought and suffered in the same places and in almost exactly the same circumstances. Throughout that August Bank Holiday weekend, there had been incredible headlines in the newspapers and then, one midnight a special postman delivered a small, blue form which intimated that the Battalion would parade in St. George’s Drill Hall at six o’clock
the following morning.

  They were still there waiting at noon. The CSM ‘whose South African Medal ribbons lent great weight to his words’ was heard to prophesy, ‘this is too big a thing to last, it will all; be over in three weeks’: so much for the voice of experience.

  Those of the ‘collar and cuff’ brigade enjoyed a relatively calm if somewhat tedious first winter in khaki. Their time, as days shortened, was spent digging trenches at Backworth and guard duties at Blyth, which as a thriving port, was thought to merit the Germans’ hostile intent (none came). Battalion ‘pub crawls’ enlivened cold, dark winter days and nights spent in billets in mining hamlets. The weekend warriors discovered that the nation’s martial fury had so swelled that they were no longer caricatures in uniform but heroes in khaki, even though they had yet to fire a shot in anger.

  The TA was now ‘guarding the shores of old England while Jack is busy on the sea’. When the call to volunteer for overseas service went out, all flocked. The pressure was subtle but considerable. As the battalion paraded, officers called for all who were willing to serve abroad to ‘slope arms’. Everyone did. Many a loyal toast followed in the fleshpots and ale houses of the metropolis. Then, it was back to digging trenches.

  Northumberland Fusiliers in captured equipment at St. Eloi. (Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office Commons: W. L. Crowther Library)

  The footsoldier is a professional dawn-watcher; he has been so since Hadrian’s legionaries peered northwards from the crags at Housesteads. This is the hour of fate. There are three stages in the life of an ex-soldier: (1) the ‘fed up and let’s forget it’ stage (2) the annual reunion stage and (3) the arm-chair and grandchildren stage.

  Waugh was writing some 16 years after the end of the war. Winter was enlivened by airship raids, the dreaded Zeppelins ‘a cigar-shaped shadow’. Despite much drama and standing-to, punctuated by the odd angry shot, these monsters passed overhead without incident.

  ‘Some enthusiastic statistician has calculated the average duration of an infantry subaltern’s sojourn at the front … as a matter of two or three weeks. We were untried, unbroken. We had a fresh nerve, health and youth. There was an end of term spirit about.’ Hours of boring oratory from senior officers and padres were made memorable by one sermon on the eve of battle: ‘Many of us who are standing here will not live to see the end of this war, and those who do will be martyrs to rheumatism before they are forty!’ As the battalion marched away from their homes in north-east England they sang It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, Who’s Your Lady Friend and Blaydon Races.

  When Waugh, blooded and wounded at St. Julien in the Ypres salient in 1915, finally returned from war he would be sounding an altogether more sombre note:

  Do you remember (you at the street corner or you in your private office), the thaw near Peronne which turned dry trenches into miniature canals, the march up to Arras in the snow, when someone burst a blood vessel and died by the roadside, the promulgation of a court martial before daybreak near a Belgian farmhouse, followed by a volley in the next field and, within two hours, a newly filled grave in the field beyond?

  TIMELINE

  1743 First recorded instance of British soldiers referred to as ‘Tommy Atkins’.

  1854–56 The Crimean War. British public begins to be aware of the need to provide for soldiers.

  1857–59 Indian Mutiny.

  1870s/80s The Cardwell and Childers Reforms reorganise and reform the British Army.

  1878–80 Second Afghan War.

  1879 Zulu War.

  1880 First Boer War.

  1890 Kipling publishes ‘Tommy Atkins’.

  1898 Kitchener’s River War, battle of Omdurman.

  1899–1902 Second Boer War.

  1902 Short Magazine Lee Enfield Rifle (SMLE) introduced.

  1908 The Haldane Reforms; creation of the Territorial Army (TA).

  1914 28 June: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie murdered in Sarajevo.

  August: Britain declares war on Germany, battles of Mons and Le Cateau. First call for divisions for Kitchener’s New Army.

  September: battle of the Marne.

  October: battle of Armentières.

  October/November: first battle of Ypres.

  December: Christmas truce.

  1915 Introduction of Brodie helmets.

  February: start of Gallipoli campaign.

  April: Second battle of Ypres. First use of chlorine gas by Germans at Pilckem Ridge.

  Spring/early summer: British offensives at Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Aubers Ridge.

  June: introduction of gas hoods.

  July: National Registration Act requires all British men not in the military to register.

  September: battle of Loos.

  October: Lord Derby launches the Group Scheme.

  1915–18 Sinai and Palestine campaign.

  1916 January: withdrawal from Gallipoli. Military Service Act provided for the conscription of single men between 18 and 41. The scheme is extended to married men in May.

  April: surrender at Kut.

  July–November: battle of the Somme. First use of British tanks at Flers-Courcelette.

  1916–18 Salonika campaign.

  1917 April: battle of Arras.

  June: battle of Messines.

  July–November: third battle of Ypres.

  November: battle of Cambrai.

  1918 March–July: Kaiserschlact offensives.

  April: Upper age for conscription under the Military Service Act raised to 50.

  August: battle of Amiens, ‘Black Day of the German Army’.

  August–November: the Hundred Days.

  11 November: the Armistice.

  1920 Unveiling of the Cenotaph.

  1927 Opening of the Menin Gate.

  1932 Opening of the Thiepval Memorial.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  BEF British Expeditionary Force

  CO Commanding officer

  CWGC Commonwealth War Graves Commission

  DLI Durham Light Infantry

  DCRO Durham County Records Office

  HE high explosive

  HQ Headquarters

  KOSB King’s Own Scottish Borderers

  KOYLI King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry

  MC Military Cross

  MG machine gun

  MGC Machine Gun Corps

  MGO machine-gun officer

  MO medical officer

  NCO non-commissioned officer

  RAMC Royal Army Medical Corps

  RAP regimental aid post

  RE Royal Engineers

  RFC Royal Flying Corps

  RNF Royal Northumberland Fusiliers (though the ‘Royal’ was awarded after 1918)

  UNIFORMS AND KIT

  British marching kit P08 of 1914, showing large pack and entrenching tool holder. (Rob and Emily Horne)

  Side view of P08 webbing showing frog, bayonet and entrenching tool shaft. (Emily Horne)

  Typical ‘Tommy’ marching kit from 1916. He wears the steel Brodie pattern helmet, P08 webbing, gas mask and case with the .303 SMLE rifle with 10-round box magazine, the best rifle of the war, latterly used by Taliban fighters against British troops in Afghanistan in the 21st century. (Emily Horne)

  The clumsy gas hood, ill fitting, constrictive and prone to misting. (Emily Horne)

  German infantry 1914 marching kit. Note the leather webbing, Mauser K98 bolt action rifle and the distinctive if impractical pickelhaube. (Emily Horne)

  Later German kit; much of the pre-war uniform detail has gone, he now wears the steel helmet and carries a stick grenade. (Emily Horne)

  CHAPTER 1

  DEADLOCK

  1914

  Then I knew that I’d been sleeping, while the Yeomen were awake;

  I had simply been ‘a slacker’ when my country was at stake.

  So I joined the gay Commercials, and I did the Swedish drill,

  Till I found myself expanding and my chest began to fill;

  And when m
arching with my comrades in the scarlet shoulder-straps,

  I could see another meaning in the blue around the caps.

  O. Hall, And the Blue Around their Caps

  From Mons to the Aisne

  IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE WAR, General Sir John French led 100,000 men of the BEF, divided into two corps, each with two divisions. Sir Douglas Haig commanded I Corps. Dour and uncommunicative, the prudish Scot was scandalised by French’s numerous affairs.

  One of those who marched up the dusty pave to Mons was J. B. W. Pennyman, from Ormesby Hall near Middlesbrough. He served as MGO in 2nd Battalion, KOSB, from the start of hostilities until he was wounded on the Aisne in October 1914. The battalion embarked from Dublin on 13 August 1914:

  Left Dublin on the Bibby Liner ‘Gloucestershire’ – expecting a hostile demonstration from the citizens but none occurred. 14th August: We passed quite close to the Cornish coast. I’m sure there was a general though not expressed idea that for each man this might be his last sight of England. We were packed very tight and the ship and each regiment messed in the saloon. At Havre, teams of London dockers were already in situ.

  17th August: Left camp at 04.00 hours, entrained at 06.00. We all, officers and men, performed our ablutions and shaved at the station. Breakfast was at 07.00 hours and we left two hours later, still having no idea of our destination. We were in a passenger train and reasonably comfortable, arriving at Rouen about midday. We were cheered by the French who were begging souvenirs; half the men gave away their badges. Everyman we saw in the fields first pretended to twist his moustache up to his eyes and then to cut his throat to show by what means the Kaiser should die! About 22.00 or 23.00 hours we passed through Amiens.