Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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and office workers than ever appeared in the old army. The division’s 92nd Brigade had four battalions of East Yorkshires, known as the Hull Commercials, the Hull Tradesmen, the Hull Sportsmen and, for want of a better name, the Hull T’others. In 92nd Brigade were three West Yorkshire battalions, the Leeds Pals and 1st and 2nd Bradford Pals, as well as 18/Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals. The third brigade, 94th, contained 12/York and Lancaster (The Sheffield City Battalion, with many university students in its ranks), 13/ and 14/York and Lancaster (1st and 2nd Barnsley Pals) and our old friends 11/ East Lancashire (The Accrington Pals).
The divisional pioneer battalion, T’owd Twelfth (one of several northern battalions to use that name), was 12/King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, many of them miners from Charlesworth Pit who had streamed into Leeds to enlist in 1914.151 Its composition underlines another important point about the New Armies. Many volunteers came from working-class areas with a tradition of industrial militancy: these were not the products of a cowed, deferential society. But by mid-1915 over 230,000 miners, about one-quarter of the workforce, had volunteered. ‘The compatibility of class consciousness and patriotism,’ observed J. M. Winter, ‘could have no better illustration. Of course, we should never completely discount the desire of some miners to get out of the mines, but sentiments about nation and empire rather than discontent, were behind mass enlistment in the industry.’152
Wide variations in regional enlistment can barely be summarised here, and so I pass lightly over the rich tapestry of the New Armies. But three specific divisions deserve early mention. In late September 1914 a Welsh National Executive Committee was formed, with the aim of raising a Welsh Army Corps of two divisions for inclusion in the New Armies. David Lloyd George had already given the concept his eloquent support.
I should like to see a Welsh Army in the field. I should like to see the race who faced the Normans for hundreds of years in their struggle for freedom, the race that helped to win the battle of Crecy, the race that fought for a generation under Glendower against the greatest captain in Europe – I should like to see that race give a good taste of its quality in this struggle.153
The committee, along with the numerous individuals and corporations already recruiting in Wales, made a serious attempt to attract Welsh-speaking officers and men. Recruiting posters, in both Welsh and English, bore calls to arms from Prince David, ‘Brother of Llewelyn, the last Prince of Wales’, though there was no historical basis for the words. A short-lived attempt to clothe the troops in Welsh grey homespun cloth called Brethyn Llwyd was marred by a shortage of cloth and the fact that the grey jackets at £1 apiece were more expensive than khaki at 14/7d or Kitchener Blue at 14/2d: and in any event officers and men preferred khaki. There were sharp clashes between Kitchener, who complained that the army could not be ‘a political machine’, and Lloyd George, inflamed by Kitchener’s refusal to allow Welsh to be the language spoken on parade and his reluctance to shift other Welsh units into the new corps to bring it up to strength.
It was soon clear that there would be too few volunteers to raise a full corps, and in December the single division that could be brought to full manning was called 43rd (Welsh), and renumbered 38th (Welsh) in April 1915. Local politics was generally well to the fore when it came to raising the New Armies: indeed, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. But several factors, such as Welsh nationalism, concerns about the impact of Nonconformity with its strong element of pacifism, and the personality of Lloyd George, all played a greater than usual part in colouring the composition of 38th Division. One of Lloyd George’s sons was aide de camp to the divisional commander, and some senior commanders owed their selection more to their political backing than their military ability. And the division seems to have suffered more than most from the slow arrival of its equipment, another consequence of the army’s rapid expansion: 16/Welsh (Cardiff City) received its first eighty working rifles in August 1915, and it was not until October that enough rifles were available for men to fire at their range course at Winchester prior to embarking for France. The divisional artillery had no horses till April that year, and even then its gunners were still drilling on tent poles mounted on wheels.154
But how painfully hard the division tried in its first big battle. On 7 July 1916, in the early stages of the Somme, it was sent in to clear the great slab of Mametz Wood, jutting down from Longueval Ridge and the German second position. It was unutterably confusing fighting in a wood in full summer foliage, and would have tried more experienced troops and staffs. ‘I could not push a way through it,’ wrote Captain Llewelyn Wyn Griffith,
and I had to return to the ride. Years of neglect had turned the Wood into a formidable barrier, a mile deep. Heavy shelling of the Southern end had beaten down some of the young growth, but it had also thrown large branches into a barricade. Equipment, ammunition, rolls of barbed wire, tins of food, gas-helmets and rifles were lying about everywhere. There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf …
A message was now on its way to some quiet village in Wales, to a grey farmhouse on the slope of a hill running down to Cardigan Bay, or to a miner’s cottage in a South Wales valley, a word of death …155
His brother Watcyn, a private soldier in the same Royal Welch Fusilier battalion (unthinkable in the old army), was killed. ‘I had not even buried him,’ lamented Griffith as he left this charnel place, ‘nor was his grave ever found.’
At the very end of the fighting in the wood the division’s Welshness was still painfully evident. ‘I crouched with some men to shelter,’ recalled Griffith. ‘We talked in Welsh, for they were Anglesey folk; one was a young boy, and after a thunderous crash in our ears he began to cry out for his mother, in a thin boyish voice, “mam, mam…”156 The division lost over 4,000 men, and was so badly jarred that it was not engaged in another major battle till the first day of Third Ypres, 31 July 1917. It suffered 28,635 casualties in the whole of the war, but somehow Mametz Wood is the right place for its memorial, a proud red dragon glaring out across Happy Valley towards the blank-faced wood and Flat Iron Copse Cemetery full of the division’s dead, with ripped-up barbed wire in its claws.157
It was not easy for all Welshmen to reconcile nationalist politics of the Chapel’s reservations about violence with service in the British army. However, the problems confronting many Irish recruits were even more serious. The long-running issue of Home Rule had not simply divided Ireland but had infected British politics more broadly, and had produced the Curragh ‘mutiny’ of March 1914, when the officers of the Curragh-based 3rd Cavalry Brigade, under Brigadier General Hubert Gough, declared that they would resign their commissions rather than march north to compel Ulster to join a united and independent Ireland. Indeed, so heated were passions on both sides of Ireland’s cultural divide that it has been well argued that the outbreak of war in 1914 actually prevented a civil war in Ireland which seemed inevitable if the British government pressed ahead with Home Rule.
But if the outbreak of a large war did indeed delay a smaller one, it nonetheless faced Irish nationalists with a cruel dilemma. Should they take the view, as some of their ancestors might have done, that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, or should they support the war in the hope that by doing so they would demonstrate their responsibility and maturity? The nationalist leader John Redmond immediately declared that the war was:
undertaken in defence of the highest principles of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, and a regret to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of history, if young Ireland continued her efforts to remain at home to defend the shores of Ireland from military invasion, and shirk from the duty of proving