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

I felt really fit, too, with cross-country running and the gym exercises we had daily, and I loved the musketry lessons and the shooting on the firing range with the .22 rifles.

      There was also a school and a teacher in the barracks where one could go in the afternoon and sit at desks with pen and paper to improve one’s education. There were examinations, and we could get a third-class certificate. If you were also a first-class shot with the rifle you got sixpence a day on your pay.¹¹²

      Haldane faced a far greater challenge in forming the Territorial Force, which came into being on 1 April 1908. It was organised in fourteen mounted brigades each consisting of three regiments of yeomanry, a battery of horse artillery and a field ambulance, and fourteen infantry divisions, each with three four-battalion infantry brigades, artillery, engineers, transport and medical services.¹¹³ He hoped that it would both support and expand the army, first providing home defence, thus freeing the regulars of the BEF to go abroad, and then, after six months’ post-mobilisation training, being fit to take the field abroad itself. But the Territorial Force was the child of compromise. The National Service League was right to see it as a means of avoiding conscription, and by 1913 the Army Council was itself in favour of conscription. Yet in order to persuade men to sign up, they were not to be liable for foreign service unless they volunteered for it. Because he rightly believed that, given a chance, the regular army would drain territorial funds in order to finance itself, he created County Territorial Associations which maintained the Territorial Force property, with drill halls and rifle ranges, and supplied units with much of their equipment. These not only went some way towards protecting the Territorial Force from regular army pillaging, but, with the active co-operation of King Edward, swung county hierarchies solidly behind the new force. Lords Lieutenant were ex-officio presidents of their associations, and The Territorial Year Book for 1909 shows just how successful Haldane had been in linking landed wealth, local military experience and big employers in his associations.

      But the experiment was not wholly successful. The Territorial Force peaked at 270,041 officers and men in 1909, and was only 245,779 strong by September 1913. Wastage ran at 12.4 percent per annum compared with the regular army’s 6 percent, and while the old unreformed auxiliary forces had represented 3.6 percent of the male population in 1903 the Territorial Force represented only 0.63 percent of it ten years later.¹¹⁴ Its equipment was obsolescent: infantry had early marks of the Lee-Enfield rifle, not the Short Magazine of the regulars, and artillery, organised in four rather than the six-gun batteries of the regular army, had 15-pounder guns and 5-inch howitzers. When the regular infantry restructured from eight companies to four in 1913, the territorials did not follow suit. Many employers were no more helpful about releasing men for service with the Territorial Force than they had been with the volunteers. While some regiments took their territorial battalions to their hearts, others did not. There was a long-running dispute about the wisdom of giving territorials artillery at all, and eventually territorial gunners wore the Royal Artillery cap badge with a blank scroll where regulars bore their battle honour ‘UBIQUE’.¹¹⁵

      The territorials had their own marked differences. ‘I was commissioned into the 5th Scottish Rifles in February 1911,’ recalled John Reith. ‘The social class of the man in the ranks was higher than that of any other Regiment in Glasgow.’¹¹⁶ The London Regiment, which consisted of twenty-eight battalions, all territorial, ranged from the very smart 28/London (Artists’ Rifles) which had been commanded by Frederick, Lord Leighton and had been formed for men with artistic leanings, to the rather less smart 11/ London, the Finsbury Rifles according to the Army List but known, from the location of its drill hall at the top of Penton Street and the alleged propensities of its members, as the Pentonville Pissers. When young Alan Harding, a post-office clerk, decided to join the territorials he chose 11/London precisely because he was able to get a commission: he would have had little chance in, say, the 13/London (Kensington) or 14/London (London Scottish). He was a lieutenant colonel with a Military Cross in 1918, joined the regular army and died Field Marshal the Lord Harding of Petherton.¹¹⁷

      Bryan Latham agreed about the difference between battalions. ‘Amongst foremost London clubs before the war,’ he wrote,

      could be numbered the headquarters of half a dozen of the leading Territorial battalions. Such regiments as the Artists’ Rifles, Civil Service Rifles, the HAC, the London Rifle Brigade, London Scottish and the Kensingtons … Friends would join the same battalion, almost on leaving school; I was in my nineteenth year when I enlisted in 1913, my brother Russell 18, and my cousin, John Chappell, the same age.¹¹⁸

      Latham joined 5/London, the London Rifle Brigade, whose headquarters in Bunhill Row included offices, stores, a large drill hall (also equipped as ‘a first-class gym’), messes, canteens and a billiard room. The athletic club met there once a week. There were shooting matches at Bisley, and an annual marching competition, with a thirteen-mile route through the outer suburbs. Men wore full equipment, and had to complete the march in under three hours to have any chance of winning. For weekend training the eight companies would parade on Saturday afternoon at Waterloo station and travel by train to Weybridge. They marched to the local drill hall, and had supper at a restaurant, followed by a singsong: ‘at such affairs every member of the LRB, whatever his rank, met on the basis of comradeship; on parade army discipline and routine took over again’. There was an early reveille, breakfast, and then manoeuvres on Weybridge Common. ‘These took the form of long lines of skirmishers extending to three yards, instantly advancing by short rushes, one half of the company giving covering fire while the other half moved forward,’ recalled Rifleman Latham. ‘The whole culminated in fixing bayonets and charging a hill.’ The battalion returned to Waterloo at about 8.00 on a Sunday evening:

      Everybody was brown and felt fit; it had been, of course, a lovely sunny weekend, but then all weekends before the war seemed to be sunny, or perhaps it is merely the thought of them in golden retrospect.¹¹⁹

      The London Regiment was unique: territorial infantry battalions were generally part of regiments which included regular battalions too. Most followed the pattern of the Queen’s Royal Regiment. In 1914 both regular battalions were in England, 1/Queen’s at Bordon in Hampshire and 2/Queen’s at Lyndhurst in the New Forest. The Special Reserve battalion, 3/Queen’s, was based at the regimental depot, Stoughton barracks in Guildford, and there were two territorial battalions, 4/Queen’s, with its headquarters at Croydon, and 5/Queen’s at Guildford. Most of the half-dozen or so regular permanent staff instructors attached to each of the territorial battalions were regular Queensmen, although the adjutant of 4/Queen’s, unusually, was Captain P. H. C. Groves of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Battalions of the London regiment had regular affiliations, the London Rifle Brigade with its regular homonym, for instance. The Queen’s was associated with 22/London and 24/ London (The Queen’s), based in Bermondsey and Kennington respectively, which wore its cap badge and had many Queensmen on its permanent staff.

      There were inevitably exceptions to this pattern. Some counties, such as Cambridgeshire and Herefordshire, were too small to have their own regiments. Regular recruits went to a nearby regiment – the Suffolks for Cambridgeshire, and the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry for Herefordshire. Larger counties, such as Surrey, could maintain two regiments, in this case the Queen’s and the East Surreys. And three regiments with exceptionally good recruiting areas, the Royal Fusiliers (City of London), Middlesex Regiment and Worcestershire Regiment, had three regular battalions, which skewed subsequent battalion numbering. New Army battalions, as we shall soon see, numbered after the territorial battalions of the same regiment. The foot guards had only regular battalions, three each for the Grenadiers and Coldstream, two for the Scots and one for the Irish. There was, as yet, no Welsh Guards: the regiment would not be formed until 1915, mounting its first guard on Buckingham Palace on 1 March, St David’s Day, that year.

      Haldane