Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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– who sent them and how much they cost: all the details evoke families anxious to provide as impressive a display as possible, and neighbours determined to see that they did.61
Most working-class families paid into burial and sick clubs, the latter to ensure a basic income if the breadwinner fell ill, and the former to avert the crowning insult of a pauper’s funeral.
Although most working-class communities generated a powerful sense of identity and shared values, they were by no means as crime-free as they appear in rosy retrospect. Drunkenness and its frequent concomitant wife-beating were common, and there was frequent violence, often on a small scale but sometimes, especially in Glagsow, where Catholic versus Protestant riots occurred, on a much larger scale. Even the small Hampshire brewery town of Alton (where I spent my middle years) was once so violent that policemen patrolled in pairs. The police were widely unpopular, and at least one of the reasons for widespread suspicion of the Military Police amongst First World War soldiers was an attitude forged in civilian life.
There were urgent political issues too. Lloyd George’s radical ‘Peoples’ Budget’ of 1906, which raised taxes to pay for social reforms, including old age pensions, had been passed at the cost of confrontation with the Lords, whose powers were reduced by the 1911 Parliament Act. Suffragettes campaigning for votes for women risked death for their beliefs. The apparent imminence of Home Rule for Ireland encouraged thousands of Ulstermen to arm and drill, and the so-called Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 originated in the possibility that the army might be used to coerce the North when Home Rule was granted. In June 1914 David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer (and as unreliable a prophet of the future as he was to prove a commentator on the past), assured London’s business leaders that the international skies had never been bluer. The government was far more concerned about domestic issues, and there seemed little doubt that it was right.
The Old Army mirrored this divided world. It had never been the mass army that French or German conscripts would have recognised, with middle-class men serving in rank and file alongside industrial workers or farm labourers. French infantryman Henri Barbusse tells us how:
Schoolteachers are rifle company NCOs or medical orderlies. In the Regiment, a Marist friar is a sergeant in the medical section; a tenor, the major’s cyclist; a lawyer, the colonel’s secretary; a landlord, mess-corporal in headquarter company.62
Stephen Westmann, a German medical student called up in 1914, described his own army as:
a kind of mixing bowl, where young men from all classes of the population met and had to adjust themselves to an extremely rigid discipline. The aim was to create a team spirit; of course, there were square pegs who did not or would not fit into round holes and who let their side down.63
In addition to being polarised by class, the British army was small. In August 1914 it had 247,432 regular officers and men against an authorised establishment of 256,798. The army reserve, ex-regulars who had completed their service but were liable to recall in the event of war, numbered 145,347. The Special Reserve, whose members had carried out six months’ full-time training, topped up with two weeks a year, was 63,933 strong, and the Territorial Force had 268,777 officers and men against a theoretical strength of 316,094. The grand total, including the Channel Islands Militias and the Bermuda and Isle of Man Volunteers, was 733,51464 – tiny by the standards of Britain’s allies and opponents alike. Germany had a standing army of 700,000 men in peacetime, inflated to 3.8 million on mobilisation, and French figures (in her case swollen by colonial troops) were roughly comparable. The French and German armies would receive regular reinforcements as successive classes of conscripts came of age; both were used to training and equipping men on a large scale, and had thought (though their conclusions were different) about how best to integrate reservists and regulars.
They were, in short, armies which reflected the societies from which they sprang, and were geared to continental war. The British army did neither of these things. While British generals of the war have been subjected to persistent critical attention, some justified and some not, the politicians who both supported a military rapprochement with France, likely to produce British involvement in a major war, and maintained exactly the sort of army suited to wage small wars rather than large ones have been let off more lightly. Osbert Sitwell, aesthete and foot guards officer, was inclined to be less forgiving. ‘Even today you see references to the immense achievements of the Liberal administration of 1906–14,’ he wrote,
but can any government whose policy entails such a lack of preparation for war as to make that seeming solution of difficulties a gamble apparently worthwhile for an enemy, and this leads to the death or disablement of two million fellow-countrymen … Can any government which introduces old age pensions, so as ‘to help the old people’ and then allows half the manhood of the country to be slaughtered or disabled before it reaches thirty years of age, be considered to have been either benevolent or efficient?65
The BEF of 1914 was sired by the Boer War out of the redcoat army that Wellington would have recognised. After peaking at around a quarter of a million men in the year of Waterloo, the army had settled down to an annual strength of around 180,000 men, about a third of them stationed in India. The purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871, branding was also abolished that year and flogging (except in military prisons) in 1881. Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War 1868–75, embarked upon a series of reforms which were completed by his successor. To boost recruiting, perennially sticky in peacetime, enhance the status of the soldier in society, and create a system which would link battalions serving abroad with their training and recruiting bases in the United Kingdom, the old numbered regiments of the line, with loose regional affiliations, were combined into county regiments.
The first twenty-five line infantry regiments already had two regular battalions and were left untouched: the remainder were amalgamated. Usually the marriages were logical, if not always happy: the 37th (North Hampshire) was amalgamated with the 67th (South Hampshire) to form the Hampshire Regiment, and the 28th (North Gloucestershire) was a logical bedfellow for the 61st (South Gloucestershire). There were some ruffled tartans elsewhere: the 73rd (Highland) was swallowed by the 42nd (Royal Highland) in the Black Watch, and the 75th (Stirlingshire) was devoured by the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders). We cannot be quite sure what the 99th (The Prince of Wales’s Tipperary Regiment) made of its amalgamation with the 62nd (Wiltshire) to form the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire Regiment, but we can guess. Depots, many of them red-brick pseudo-keeps, sprang up in many towns. Le Marchant Barracks in Devizes, named after a hero of Salamanca, housed the Wiltshires; Brock Barracks in Reading, commemorating Sir Isaac Brock, who brought some much-needed lustre to the War of 1812, accommodated the Berkshires, and Roussillon Barracks in Chichester, named after a French regiment whose plumes had allegedly been captured at Quebec, was the Royal Sussex depot.
Cardwell’s army with its linked battalions, one at home and one abroad, was optimised for Queen Victoria’s little wars. It was less well suited for a long war against the Boers. There were too few regulars, and although that hardy perennial, a combination of patriotic sentiment and local economic recession, encouraged tens of thousands of young men to volunteer, the performance of some war-raised units was patchy. Kipling wrote of:
Cook’s son, Duke’s son,
Son of a belted Earl, Forty thousand horse and foot Going to Table Bay …
The reality was less splendid. Wags quipped that the brass IY shoulder-title worn by the Imperial Yeomanry really stood for ‘I Yield’, and the lugubrious ditty ‘The Boers have got my Daddy’ became all too popular in music halls. It is probably true to say that neither the German nor the French armies, many of whose officers gained a good deal of pleasure from watching the lion’s tail getting twisted, would have done much better, and the eventual British victory owed much to the experience of colonial campaigning elsewhere. But it was clear that the army required thoroughgoing reform. It had been compelled to field almost 450,000 men to win, losing 5,774 killed in action and 16,168