Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes

it was not simply an important victory in its own right, it was, in the most profound way, the shape of things to come.

      Over the next three months the British elbowed the Germans back across northern France. Theirs was not an isolated effort. The French and the Americans attacked further south and south-east, called on by Foch’s ringing ‘Tout le monde à la bataille’. The Americans pinched out the St-Mihiel salient in mid-September, and then swung northwards to slog through difficult country against a stout defence in the battle they call Meuse-Argonne. Yet it is no reflection on Allied valour to observe that, during the war’s last three months, the British took twice as many prisoners, and almost twice as many German guns, as the Americans, French and Belgians put together. And lest it be thought that the British were simply snapping up exhausted Germans who were now too tired to fight, let Private Stephen Graham of the Scots Guards assure us otherwise.

      The brave [German] machine-gunners, with resolute look in shoulders and face, lay relaxed beside their oiled machines … and beside piles of littered brass, the empty cartridge cases which they had fired before being bayoneted at their posts … On the other hand … one saw how our men, rushing forward in extended formation, each man a good distance from his neighbour, had fallen, one here, another there, one directly he had started forward to the attack, and then the others, one, two, three, four, five all in a sort of sequence, here, here, here, here, here; one poor wretch had got far, but got tangled in the wire had pulled and pulled and at last been shot to rags; another had got near enough to strike the foe and been shot with a revolver.¹¹³

      The breaking of the Hindenburg line by 46th (North Midland) Division in late September caused particular satisfaction, as these Midlanders had been badly mauled on the first day of the Somme.

      The last Hundred Days of the war cost the British army over 260,000 casualties, well over twice the total strength of the British regular army at the time of writing.¹¹⁴ The headstones in the comet’s tail of cemeteries that trace the army’s path from Santerre across to the Belgian border tell the story all too well. In York Cemetery near Haspres, between Cambrai and Valenciennes, lie a company’s worth of the York and Lancaster regiment, with, up by the back wall, most of the machine-gunners that killed them.

      The whole agonising mixture of triumph and tragedy that constituted the Hundred Days is nowhere better summed up than in the Communal Cemetery at Ors, not far from Mons. It contains the graves of two Victoria Cross holders, Second Lieutenant James Kirk, commissioned from the ranks into the Manchester Regiment, and Lieutenant Colonel James Marshall, Irish Guards by cap badge but killed commanding a Manchester battalion. It is also the last resting place of Lieutenant Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC of the Manchesters, killed when his battalion crossed the Sambre Canal on 4 November 1918. His parents received the official notification of his death as bells were ringing to announce the armistice.

II

ONE WAR, FOUR ARMIES

      In one sense there was not really a single British army in the First World War, more a collection of regiments, drawn together in loose association into brigades and divisions which had personalities of their own. As we look at infantry battalions across the best part of a century we might be tempted to assume that the Old Army 1/Grenadier Guards had much in common with the territorial 4/Queen’s or the New Army 11/East Lancashire. To be sure, on one level they did look alike. All were commanded by lieutenant colonels, had four companies, and formed part of brigades which had four battalions apiece. But on another they had different histories, traditions, compositions, attitudes and aptitudes. Although the remorseless corrosion of casualties meant that, especially after mid-1916, these characters began to change, this was an army which, start to finish, revelled in an extraordinary diversity.

      There were allegedly rurally-recruited regiments which marched past to A Farmer’s Boy and cultivated close contact with the county’s gentry, but actually drew their strength from mean streets and smoky factories. There was a single battery of artillery which shot two of its soldiers for striking a superior, and whole regiments which shot only enemies. One cavalry private always called his troop sergeant ‘Charlie’: in another regiment such flippancy might have seen him strung up to a wagon wheel for two hours a day. There were Englishmen who wore the kilt with all the panache of a native-born Highlander; a much-wounded Belgian, Adrian Carton de Wiart, who won the VC as a British officer; and an ex-Boer guerrilla, Denys Reitz, who commanded a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers.

      There were some officers who would have fitted comfortably into a Wellingtonian mess: and others who might have sold the great duke his coal. And then there were ex-officers who served as private soldiers because they had no other way of getting to the front. Arthur Arnold Crow resigned his captaincy in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment because of ill-health in 1916. When he recovered he found that he could not regain his commission without giving up hope of foreign service: he enlisted and was killed as a private in the Essex Regiment in 1917. J. B. Osborne, invalided out as a lieutenant, rejoined as a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and was killed in October 1918. And the Hon. M. F. S. Howard, son of the 9th Earl of Carlisle and once a lieutenant in the 18th Hussars, died as a private at Passchendaele, and has no known grave. There were ex-privates who commanded battalions, ex-convicts honoured with His Majesty’s commission, sexagenarians who soldiered on and boys, like Private Reginald Giles of 1/Gloucesters, killed on the Somme at the age of fourteen, who died in the trenches when they should have been at school.

      Reality sometimes confounded expectation. Some veterans argued that the territorial 5th Scottish Rifles was more reliable than one of the regular battalions of the same regiment. Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, who went to war as a regular lieutenant in the Royal Berkshires in 1914 and commanded a Berkshire battalion at Passchendaele three years later, reckoned that most temporary officers were good as long as their units were well commanded, and ‘many were better than regulars’.¹ One officer with the rare combination of Distinguished Conduct Medal (won as a corporal in South Africa) and Military Cross (won as an officer on the Western Front) was never a professional soldier, but fitted both conflicts into a long and successful career as a tea planter in India. Sidney Farmer MM, seventeen times wounded, with a record that many a regular might have been proud of, served only for the duration of the war. After it, like so many others, he returned to the community from which he had sprung, running the Golden Lion in the Herefordshire town of Knighton, though troubled by the occasional appearance of shrapnel which travelled down his body to emerge from his feet.²

      Although the casualties of the Somme created a demand for reinforcements which helped blur many old distinctions, British regiments remained resolutely different. The Grenadiers, the senior regiment of foot guards, trace their origins back to the Low Countries in the 1650s, when they were formed to guard Charles II, and in consequence have an enduring rivalry with the Coldstream Guards, who trace their descent from General George Monck’s (Parliamentarian) Regiment of Foot. Three regular battalions strong in 1914, the Grenadiers raised a 4th battalion during the war. As one of the regiment’s historians observed, ‘they did not have a monopoly of discipline, smartness and professionalism in the BEF, but as an elite they did believe in the highest standards in all three, believe in them, demand them and maintain them whatever might be the circumstances and whatever the cost’.³ A regimental history written forty years before the war had suggested that:

      The soldier in the hour of need and danger will ever be more ready to follow the officer and gentleman whom education, position in life, and accident of birth point out to be his natural leader … than the man who, by dint of study and brainwork, has raised himself (much to his own credit, certainly) from the plough or the anvil. In no profession should the feeling of noblesse oblige be more recognised than in the army …⁴

      Noblesse