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

officers and 88 men missing, believed killed, and 12 officers and 336 men wounded.¹⁹ The battalion remained on the Western Front for the rest of the war, and while avoiding the disbandments of early 1918, and the fate which befell 3/4th Queen’s, it was never the same as it had been at 7.30 on the morning of 1 July 1916. And neither, for that matter, was Accrington, which had lost too many of its dearest and its best that day.

      These three battalions were not simply different in origin, tradition and composition. They behaved differently, in the line and out of it. The relations between their officers and men were different, and their approach to the war was different too. Second Lieutenant P. J. Campbell was appointed artillery liaison officer to a Grenadier battalion in 1917 and joined it in the trenches. Its commanding officer asked whether he had been to Eton and whether he was a regular: on receiving a negative answer to both questions:

      He appeared to take no further interest in me as a person, but I was impressed by him and what I saw that night. The discipline of the Guards was very strict and their behaviour even in the line very formal … The Grenadier Guards went out, an English county regiment came in, and the difference was perceptible immediately. There was an atmosphere of warm-hearted banter, cheerful inefficiency; packs and gas-masks, revolvers and field-glasses were thrown about anyhow. Now we were all civilians who hated war, but knew that it had to be fought and would go on fighting until it was won.²⁰

      Major Charles Ward Jackson, an Etonian and Yeomanry officer serving on the staff, made the same point in a letter to his wife in June 1916. Some battalions seemed good enough.

      But we had not seen the Guards. You never saw such a difference. In the first place the officers all looked like gentlemen, and the men twice the size, and in the second their discipline is extraordinary. Different altogether from other regulars. Not a man sits down as you pass, no matter how far off you may be.²¹

      Soldiers from other regiments who failed to salute properly as the Guards Division passed on the march were arrested and taken with it. At the day’s end they were interviewed, had the error of their ways pointed out, and were invited to return whence they had come. Saluting improved for miles around. The Old Army’s discipline could survive stern shocks. In the chaos following the battle of Le Cateau in August 1914, Lieutenant Roland Brice Miller, a regular officer in 123rd Battery Royal Field Artillery, described how:

      A private soldier of the Bedfordshire Regiment, grey with fatigue, approached me, came smartly to the slope [-arms] and slapped the butt of his rifle in salute. ‘Can you tell me a good position to retire to?’ he asked. One man!²²

      A battalion like 3/4th Queen’s or the Accrington Pals was perfectly capable of laying on a smart formal parade, and there was a latent dandyism in many soldiers that found military ritual perversely satisfying. But guardee smartness was not their concern, and their discipline continued to reflect pre-war relationships. Private Bewsher of the Accringtons remembered that his company sergeant major, revolver in hand, had checked the shelters in the front-line trench for laggards before the attack on 1 July. ‘He had no need to do that,’ complained Bewsher. ‘All the lads were ready to go.’²³ And while the regulars accepted robust discipline as a matter of course, territorials and New Army men, far more conscious of what they had once been, and, God willing, would be once again, were far less prepared to tolerate its more extreme manifestations such as Field Punishment No. 1.²⁴

      Sergeant Jock Chrystal of the Northumberland Hussars, a Yeomanry (territorial cavalry) regiment, reproved by his RSM, told his officer that he resented the rebuke. ‘Now, Sor, did ye ivvor hear such cheek?’ he asked. ‘Him, Halliday, a Sergeant-Major jaist, an’ me, the Duke’s Forester, talkin’ to me that way?’²⁵ It was not a remark which would have gone down well in the Grenadiers.

      The different identities of regular, territorial and New Army units were blurred, though rarely wholly obscured, but casualties and the sheer caprice of battle meant that some units survived the war with their identity intact while others lost it relatively quickly. Captain James Dunn, that ‘doctor with a DSO, and much unmedalled merit’ who compiled the history of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, recorded his unit’s evolution as its regular content steadily diminished. In early 1915 there were still enough old sweats about to delight the corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking, when he inspected the battalion: ‘He chatted and chaffed, pinched their arms and ears, asked how many children they had, asked if they could be doing with leave to get another … When it was over he said to the GOC, “That’s been a treat. That’s the sort we’ve known for thirty years.”’²⁶ Dunn reckoned that the battalion then had about 250 originals left, mainly in transport, drums, signals and amongst the NCOs. But by the summer of 1918 he admitted ‘we were a regular battalion in name only’.²⁷ This is scarcely surprising, for the battalion suffered 1,107 killed, and four times as many wounded, amongst its non-commissioned personnel during its four years on the Western Front, getting through the whole of its 1914 establishment strength five times over. It was actually luckier than the New Army 10/Royal Welch Fusiliers, which lost 756 soldiers killed in only two and a half years at the front.

      The Royal Welch Fusilier regimental depot at Litherland held officers and men from the regular, territorial and New Army battalions of the regiment, who had come from hospitals, long courses or recruiting offices. As Second Lieutenant Lloyd Evans discovered in 1916:

      They would be sifted and trained, and detailed singly or in batches to all fronts where Battalions of the Regiment were serving. In the huge mess were officers who had served with one or more of these battalions. There were ‘returned heroes’, so I thought of them, from the First and Second. Some struck me as being really heroic. Others were the talkative sort who worked to impress on ‘these Service Battalion fellows’ that ‘of course it was somewhat different in the Regular Battalions’.

      He had mixed feelings about being posted to the 2nd Battalion because ‘it used up subalterns by the dozen’, but found himself very happy in it.²⁸

      During the process of drafting the Welsh content of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers seems to have increased. There had been a substantial Birmingham contingent in the pre-war battalion which led to outsiders, careless of their dentistry, calling it ‘The Brummagem Fusiliers’, and Captain Robert Graves recalled his CSM, a Birmingham man, giving a stern talking-to to a German prisoner caught with pornographic postcards in his pack. Dunn observed that a July 1917 draft comprising largely young South Wales Miners was ‘much the best that has come to us of two years’. Nonetheless, only 37 percent of the battalion was Welsh-born.²⁹

      A survey of another regular battalion, 2/Durham Light Infantry, makes the same point. It mobilised at Whittington Barracks, Lichfield, in 1914, and took 27 officers and 1,000 men to France. A single day that September cost it more men than the entire Boer War, and during the whole of the First World War it suffered 5,313 casualties, which included 30 officers and 1,306 men killed.³⁰ The 2/Green Howards lost 1,442 officers and men killed in the war, 704 of them regulars, regular reservists or members of the Special Reserve. Of these experienced soldiers who were to be killed in the war just over half were killed in 1915, and over three-quarters had died by the end of that year.³¹ Ralph L. Mottram, driving across the Somme back area in 1916, ‘overtook an infantry regiment that bore my badge, and I looked in vain for any face I could recognise. But from out the ranks of the rear company rose a cheer, and I found that a few knew me. It was my own battalion, nearly all strangers …’.³²