Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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arms, and so it did. The fact that it attracted many middle-class men who would have been unlikely to join the ranks of the regular army meant that many of the men who joined specialist units such as the Tyne Electrical Engineers – formed to maintain searchlights and communications in the Tyne defences – already had skills which the army could use. It was harder to create purely military skills in the training time available. Norman Tennant enlisted in 11th Battery, 4th North Riding Howitzer Brigade, in 1913, with several friends from Ilkley Grammar School. In August that year his unit camped at Aberystwyth. ‘To this day,’ he mused, ‘the smell of crushed grass, which is always to be found inside marquees, reminds me of the rough and ready meals on the bare trestle tables, slightly flavoured with smoke from the cookhouse fires …’. He found that the experience was useful in more than a military sense.
It was natural that groups of school friends should be drawn together, in addition to making new contacts, and this continued throughout the war. In due course we came to appreciate the sterling qualities of some of the rougher local types and responded to their innate friendliness but here in our first annual camp we felt rather shy and tended to associate with those we already knew so well.
Horses presented a real challenge, especially his ‘spare wheeler’ –
a vast immobile brute with thick hairy legs and drooping head; it seemed quite happy to spend much of its existence standing perfectly still, an occasional tremor of its lower bearded lip indicated that life was still present.
Tennant served in the same battery throughout the war, and recalled ‘the care and devotion to his men by the battery commander, Major P. C. Petrie DSO MC, who helped raise it, train it and commanded it till the end of the war’. Its discipline, he believed, ‘was derived more from a sense of comradeship than from the methods normally employed by the Regular army’.120
Haldane also formalised the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC). The forerunners of these had been founded in Victorian times as rifle volunteer corps attached to universities or public schools. Some of the latter took their corps very seriously: the Eton College Rifle Volunteers had a regular adjutant and turned out in a natty shade of the French grey. Enough members of Cambridge University Rifle Volunteers volunteered to fight in the Boer War for the unit to earn a ‘SOUTH AFRICA’ battle honour. Haldane established junior divisions of the OTC at public schools and some grammar schools: successful cadets earned Certificate B, a very basic certificate of military knowledge. Senior divisions were at universities, and their cadets could earn Certificate A, which was believed to fit them for a territorial commission. More broadly, the scheme was expected to attract men and boys of ‘the intellectual and moral attainments likely to fit them for the rank of officers’, even if they did not immediately put these qualities to use. Between August 1914 and March the following year, 20,577 officers were commissioned from OTCs, and another 12,290 ex-OTC men were serving in the ranks.121
That arch-regular Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in the summer of 1914, had a low opinion of the Territorial Force. In part it stemmed from his experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when he had served briefly with Chanzy’s Army of the Loire and had been less than impressed by French irregulars. In part it reflected the fact that he had spent most of his career abroad, and had been wholly untouched by Haldane’s advocacy of a national army. Indeed, he admitted to the formidable leader of the Ulster Unionists: ‘I don’t know Europe; I don’t know England; and I don’t know the British Army.’ And in part it embodied his own instinctive mistrust of the amateur: on the morning that he took over the War Office he declared that ‘he could take no account of anything but regular soldiers’.122 And to raise a new one he decided to bypass the territorial system altogether.
Kitchener’s decision has been widely criticised, but it was not wholly illogical. Many territorials immediately volunteered for foreign service: F. S. Hatton proudly remembered that in his unit ‘the men who did not wish to volunteer for foreign service were asked to take a pace to the rear. The ranks remained unbroken.’123 The Northumberland Hussars affirmed that all its men had already accepted foreign service as a condition of their enlistment. But the picture was far patchier elsewhere. Walter Nicholson, a regular staff officer in what was to become the very good 51st Highland Division, admitted: ‘We were very far from being a division fit for defence.’124 Some men immediately volunteered for foreign service; some officers automatically assumed that their men would volunteer, and unwisely took this assumption for assent. Others would not serve abroad. ‘It was not cowardice that decided them to say they wouldn’t fight,’ wrote Nicholson, ‘it was the belief that the Government had broken faith with them … The Territorial had not joined for foreign service, but to defend his country.’ One of the division’s officers observed that: ‘There must be something wrong if employers go out to fight alongside Regular private soldiers.’125 In the Suffolk Yeomanry the officers of one squadron, an MP amongst them, told their men not to volunteer for foreign service and not to give way to the government’s blackmail.
The overwhelming majority of territorials did indeed undertake to serve abroad (perhaps 80-90 percent of many units), and some were fighting in France as early as October 1914, when the fine performance of the London Scottish at Messines showed that territorials went into battle, and to their deaths, with the same determination as regulars. But a few did not, and there remained a slightly curmudgeonly rump of territorials who stuck defiantly to their rights until the changes in the law in 1916 rendered them liable for foreign service anyhow. Nicholson also felt that the problem of post-mobilisation training had not been thought through by the War Office. Adjutants were immediately returned to their regular battalions (and often as promptly killed in action), and this, Nicholson reflected, was: ‘a blow from which the Territorial divisions did not recover for many months … It is very easy to be wise after the event, but in this case no great wisdom was necessary.’126
And there was also the question of the County Associations. These did not control the Territorial Force once it was mobilised, but their responsibility for the supply of some equipment led to frequent difficulties. Nicholson’s servant was a regular soldier, and so could not draw equipment from the association, but had to apply for a new shirt to his old company of 1/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, by then in the trenches in France, which was palpably absurd. Procedures for pay and allowance were not the same as those in the regular army, and as Nicholson saw first-hand, many territorials were paid less by the army than they had been in civilian life, and got into difficulties. One officer on the divisional staff: ‘was for ever digging deeper and deeper into his capital to keep his business going in the East End, till the war slowly froze him out. He had no time away from his military duties, save to sign his money away.’127
The legislative defence against incorporating territorials, individually or collectively, in units other than the ones they had joined, which had made good sense to Haldane and his associates prior to 1908, was far less logical during a major war. It caused constant problems as men complained to their MPs that they were being transferred against their will or their units were being broken up; in 1919 the War Office felt compelled to issue a formal defence of its actions.128 Lastly, the Territorial Force had been formed for home defence, and it was not immediately clear what the extent of the German threat to the mainland of the United Kingdom would actually be: even Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, admitted that ‘the period of maximum danger’ would extend until early 1915.
On 13 August 1914 Kitchener told Lord Esher that he was perfectly happy to use territorials either to reinforce the New Armies or to release regulars from overseas garrisons. But he had already