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

In the immediate aftermath of the Boer War Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the commander in chief, pressed ahead with the development of the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle and the quick-firing artillery which the army was to take to war in 1914, giving a crucial impetus to marksmanship training. But William St John Brodrick, the Secretary of State for War, had a rougher ride. He had a grandiose scheme for a substantial increase in the size of the army, but his Cabinet colleagues would not allow him to consider conscription in order to sustain this new force and it became clear that voluntary recruitment would not meet its needs. Brodrick departed, his only legacy the bitterly-unpopular peakless cap which bore his name. ‘We thoroughly detested this new cap,’ recalled Frank Richards,

      which the majority of men said made them look like bloody German sailors, but we much preferred it to the poked cap which followed it … When this cap first appeared the men said that the War Office was being run from Potsdam. They were rotten caps to carry in a man’s haversack.⁶⁶

      Brodrick was replaced by Mark Arnold-Forster. He initially hoped to save money by sharply reducing volunteer and auxiliary forces (how history repeats itself), but was seen off by opponents in both Houses, and although he had more success with his ‘New Army Scheme’, based on a mix of long and short service, the Conservative government fell before substantial changes could be made.

      Yet the period was by no means sterile. Although the report of the Royal Commission on the South African War was delivered in 1903 at the time of a political crisis which limited its impact, Lord Esher, one of its members and a close associate of the king, had chaired a small committee which made several useful proposals. Amongst them were the strengthening of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the addition of a permanent secretariat; the restructuring of the army’s command structure by the abolition of the post of commander in chief and the creation of an Army Council with a chief of the general staff as its professional head with the adjutant general, quartermaster general, master general of the ordnance, permanent under secretary and financial secretary as its members. The three main branches of the general staff were created – the directorates of Army Training, Staff Duties and Military Operations. Indeed, the general staff thus created remains recognisable at the time of writing.⁶⁷

      R. B. Haldane, Secretary of State in Asquith’s Liberal Cabinet, was a German-educated lawyer who brought formidable intellectual gifts to his task. At the first meeting of the Army Council after taking office, Haldane was asked what sort of army he envisaged. ‘An Hegelian army,’ was his reply, and with that, he observed, the ‘conversation rather fell off. Indeed, there was a philosophical logic to his scheme. He hoped to create a genuinely national army, with its regulars constituting ‘a sharp point of finely tempered steel’, its Special Reserve providing immediate back up, and the Territorial Force furnishing a basis for expansion and support. Haldane was lucky in several respects. His government could expect to run a full term, so time was not pressing; he chose as his military advisers Gerald Ellison and Douglas Haig, who had a very good grasp of organisational politics; and the Esher reforms were already beginning to bear fruit.

      Although Haldane later argued that his reforms were overshadowed by his knowledge of the Anglo-French staff talks, the instrument he created was not forged with a specific purpose in view, but was simply the best he could do within his reduced budget. It would consist of two distinct entities: a regular element, geared to producing an expeditionary force of six infantry divisions and a cavalry division, and a part-time Territorial Force, formed by combining the various militia, volunteer and auxiliary forces, which would take responsibility for home defence, thereby freeing up the regulars for foreign service. He reverted to the Cardwell terms of enlistment, seven or eight years’ service with the colours and four or five on the reserve. Haldane’s reforms did not please everyone, and the National Service League loudly proclaimed that nothing but compulsory service would do. Such a step was politically unacceptable to what was, at least by the standards of the age, a left-leaning Cabinet, and Haldane had done the best he could within his constraints.

      Wellington would have recognised the regular army that emerged from Haldane’s reforms because, in many key respects, it had changed little since his day. The majority of men who enlisted as private soldiers were unemployed when they joined, and few even laid claim to a trade on their enlistment papers. One 1913 recruit admitted frankly that it was ‘unemployment and the need for food’ that encouraged him to join. John Cusack enlisted in the Highland Light Infantry when he was fourteen, telling the recruiting sergeant he was eighteen: urchins shouted ‘beef and a tanner a day’ as the recruits marched past, suggesting that that was why they had joined the army.⁶⁸ His mother reclaimed him and took him home, but three weeks later he signed on again, this time in the Royal Scots Greys.

      What is striking about those pre-war regulars who have left some record of their motives is just how many were attracted by more than a full belly and a good pair of boots. Herbert Wootton recalled that he was:

      Very keen on becoming a soldier. I had two uncles, both regulars who had served through the South African War of 1899–1902. As a youngster I was thrilled with their stories. I became a keen reader of G. A. Henty’s books on war, and later read Rudyard Kipling’s books. I loved to be in the company of old soldiers.⁶⁹

      R. A. Lloyd ‘had always wanted to be a soldier, and a cavalryman at that’.⁷⁰ Frank Richards grew up in the South Wales coalfield, and his cousin David joined the army during the miners’ strike of 1898. But despite ‘all the Socialist propaganda’ he was ‘a rank Imperialist at heart’, and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers because:

      they had one battalion in China, taking part in the suppression of the Boxer Rising, and the other battalion in South Africa, and a long list of battle honours on their Colours, and … they were the only regiment in the Army privileged to wear the flash. The flash was a smart bunch of five black ribbons sewed in a fan shape in the back of the tunic collar, it was a relic of the days when soldiers wore their hair long, and tied up the end of the queue in a bag to prevent it from greasing their tunics.⁷¹

      Uniform also helped attract R. G. Garrod. He was a junior clerk when he saw ‘a gorgeous figure in blue with yellow braid and clinking spurs and said to myself “that’s for me …”.’⁷² William Nicholson, whose grandfather had charged with the 13th Light Dragoons at Balaklava, ‘was attracted by the full-dress uniform of mounted regiments’, and joined the Royal Horse Artillery in 1911.⁷³ John Lucy and his brother Denis went ‘a bit wild’ after their mother’s death and duly joined up.

      We were tired of landladies and mocked the meaning of the word. We were tired of fathers, of advice from relations, of bottled coffee essence, of school, of newspaper offices. The soft accents and slow movements of the small farmers who swarmed in the streets of our dull southern Irish town, the cattle, fowl, eggs, butter, bacon and the talk of politics filled us with loathing.⁷⁴

      They were ‘full of life and the spirit of adventure …’.Joseph Garvey, too, was:

      obsessed with a desire to get out into the world … I was looking to the new life with joyful anticipation. Being fit, strong and athletic I could not see anything that would prevent me from enjoying the life of a soldier. So ended one phase of my life, and despite all the head shaking at my foolishness in throwing up a good job, I had no doubt in my own mind that I was doing the right thing.⁷⁵

      Training was hard. John Lucy thought its strain ‘so hard that many broke under it’.

      The military vocabulary, minor tactics, knowledge of parts of the rifle, route marches, fatigues, semaphore, judging distance, shooting, lectures on ‘esprit de corps’, and on the history of our regiment, spit and polish,