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

expected to work till 1.00 or even 3.00 in the afternoon: who would pay to serve in the cavalry and have to work too?¹⁰⁰ The Hutchinson Committee of 1905 was inclined to agree. It believed that many young men would like to join the cavalry if only they could afford it, and urged that the government should make it cheaper for young officers to maintain themselves in the cavalry by providing chargers and saddlery at public expense.

      Alan Hanbury-Sparrow joined the Royal Berkshires in 1912 with just £175 a year, and found it hard going. In the following year E. G. W. Harrison survived in the Royal Artillery with only £18 a year which brought his total income to £92. ‘Mess bill without a drink or a cigarette [was] £6 monthly’, he wrote, ‘soldier servant and washing £1 monthly, so a penny bus fare was a matter of deep consideration’.¹⁰¹ Towards the other extreme, Osbert Sitwell’s father (advised by the wonderfully-named Major Archie Gowk) gave him £530 a year in 1912 as a Yeomanry officer attached to a regular cavalry regiment, but stressed that if young Osbert received any pay he would expect to be given it. But some officers survived despite the odds. William Robertson had joined the army as a private in 1877 despite his mother’s declaration that she would rather bury him than see him in a red coat. He reached the rank of sergeant major before being commissioned, and managed to survive on his pay, though he acknowledges the kindness of his brother regimental warrant officers who clubbed together to buy him his saddlery. He became chief of the imperial general staff during the First World War, making the British army unique amongst allies and enemies in having as its professional head an officer commissioned from the ranks.

      Officer training reflected old traditions. Officers destined for the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, the ‘gentlemen of the Ordnance’, went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, known as ‘the shop’, which had trained them since the eighteenth century. Entry was by competitive examination: the young Alan Brooke sweated blood at an army crammer’s, eventually passing in to Woolwich 65th out of 72. The entrance exam included compulsory papers in English, French or German, and mathematics, and a choice of two papers from further mathematics, history, German, Latin, French and science. Those who passed out with the highest places in the final order of merit tended to go to the Royal Engineers, and the remainder to the Royal Artillery: in the December 1909 list numbers 1–11 became sappers and 12–36 gunners.¹⁰²

      Officers for the cavalry, infantry, Indian army and Army Service Corps went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which had existed since 1799, though it had not trained the majority of officers until after the abolition of purchase. Entrance to Sandhurst too was by competitive examination, and its final order of merit was no less important than that at Woolwich. Officers who hoped to go to the Indian army, where they could live on their pay, had to pass out towards its top. Young Bernard Montgomery (already under a cloud for setting fire to a fellow cadet’s shirt-tail) passed out too low to be admitted to the Indian army and joined the Royal Warwickshires instead. It is fashionable to decry the standards attained at Sandhurst: one scholar has observed that it was amazing what a young man did not have to know to get into the cavalry or artillery. However, anyone choosing to look at their examination papers would be struck by the fact that these were no brainless hearties.

      While Woolwich trained 99 percent of artillery and engineer officers, Sandhurst trained only 67 percent of the officers destined for the infantry and cavalry. Some 2 percent were commissioned from the ranks. These were combatant commissions, whose holders would take rank and precedence alongside their comrades from public school, as opposed to the holders of quartermaster’s or riding master’s commissions, appointed to honorary commissions for specific jobs. Of the remainder, about half came from universities, where they had undertaken some training in the Senior Division of the Officers’ Training Corps: the Junior Division – ‘the Corps’ – comprised contingents in public schools. Most of the others had entered the army through ‘the militia back door’. Officers holding a commission in the militia or Yeomanry (or the Special Reserve or Yeomanry from 1908) could bypass Sandhurst altogether by taking a competitive examination for a direct commission. This was how Field Marshal Sir John French, who had started his career in the navy, had got into the army, and Henry Wilson, his deputy chief of staff in 1914, had followed the same route.

      Rory Baynes, considering a military career, confessed that:

      I much preferred the idea of sporting a militia officer’s magnificent uniform than that of going to Sandhurst, where in those days I would have had to spend almost two years in what was a rather strict public school atmosphere.

      He was accordingly commissioned in 1906 into the 3rd Bedfordshire Militia, a ‘strange and exclusive crowd’: no experience was necessary, but the personal approval of the regiment’s colonel, the Duke of Bedford, certainly was. Young Baynes trained with his battalion, spent some time attached to a regular battalion of the Bedfords, and studied for the militia competitive examination with Major Heath, an army crammer in Folkestone, a distinctive character with Kaiser Bill moustaches, and duly came top in the 1907 examination. Although he was by then a full lieutenant in the militia, he had to revert to second lieutenant on joining his preferred regular regiment, the Cameronians.¹⁰³ Osbert Sitwell found it all arranged for him by his forceful father:

      Even Henry, who usually appeared to possess a special insight into the workings of my father’s mind, could not help me … Then, one morning, I found out: for I read, suddenly turning a page of the newspaper that had just arrived, that a 2nd Lieut. F. O. S. Sitwell had just been granted a commission in the Yeomanry, and was, from the Yeomanry, attached to a famous regiment of Hussars.

      Osbert duly reported at Aldershot in the foggy winter of 1911–12, and his first shock was getting in to his mess kit, then worn for dinner on weeknights: officers relaxed in the down-market black tie for dinner at weekends.

      Every part of the body had to be dragged and pinched and buttoned, and the boots were so tight that one could neither pull them on nor take them off, and remained for many minutes in a kind of seal-like flipper-limbo as to the feet. Only by the kindness and perseverance of Robbins – my new servant who, as I write, some thirty-three years later, is still with me … was I able to encase myself in this unaccustomed glory.¹⁰⁴

      In November 1912 he transferred to the regular army, and joined the Grenadier Guards at the Tower of London. Here he was interviewed by the regimental lieutenant colonel who seemed to be:

      the improbable realisation of an ideal; an ideal cherished by a considerable number of contemporaries, including most officers and all the best tailors and haberdashers, hosiers, shoemakers and barbers in London, indeed in England … At a single glance it might be deemed possible by the inexperienced, such was the apparent sincerity and straightforwardness of his self-presentation, to know all about him, even to write a testimonial, strong sense of duty, hard-playing (golf, cricket, polo), generous, brave, fine shot, adequate rider, man of the world, C. of E.

      He remembered the great royal review of the Brigade of Guards on 28 April 1913 as ‘a final salute from an old order which was to perish, and constituted for those taking part in it – and how few survived the next two years! – a sort of fanfare, heralding the war’.¹⁰⁵

SATURDAY NIGHT SOLDIERS

      There were part-time soldiers in Britain long before the foundation of the regular army in 1660, and the London’s Honourable Artillery Company, once the Guild of St George and then part of the London Trained Bands, can trace its origins back to 1537. By Haldane’s time there were three distinct strands in the volunteer and auxiliary forces of the Crown, and the Norfolk Committee, one of the bodies which had investigated British military performance in the Boer War, had concluded that between them they were neither fitted for taking the field against regular troops nor for providing a framework of future expansion. Yet part-time forces provided relatively large