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

day’s subsistence money and pay rattling in my pocket, and holding in my hand a railway warrant to carry me to Warley Barracks on the morrow.¹⁶³

      The Rain brothers, trying to enlist in a regiment of their choice before conscription overwhelmed them in early 1917, found it even harder. They were too short for the Royal Marine Artillery. Rejected by a Territorial Royal Field Artillery battery at Islington, they went on to try RFA units at Moorgate and Camberwell ‘besides several others’. They managed to pass the medical at Woolwich and then ‘by means of tips’ secured a promise to be enlisted into the Royal Horse Artillery. But they turned out to be too young for that: and the Field Artillery there was full too. Eventually they struck lucky with the Queen’s Westminsters, even if the stew they were served for dinner was ‘so unwholesome that we were unable to eat it’. It was a happy choice, for their training battalion was still sending men to its 1st Battalion in France, and there was a real sense of family feeling and, by this stage in the war, no shortages of weapons or accommodation. Their company commander, Captain Gordon, ‘was an officer of exceptional popularity’, soon to be killed at Cambrai.¹⁶⁴

      Young Harry Ogle, still undecided about his future (which was in fact to see him go to the front as a private and return as a decorated captain), thought that:

      A wave of fear seemed to have spread over the country and young men not in uniform were presented with white feathers by young women (also not in uniform). Men over forty, thinking themselves safe behind ‘important’ jobs, urged those to enlist who were too young to have anything to lose but their lives. The elderly and painfully religious couple whose lodger I was were cold to me, loudly praising Ted Pullen who, as the newspapers had it, had gallantly ‘placed his young life at the service of the Nation’. My fellow lodger, no less liable to military service than I was, openly asked me why I didn’t enlist. I answered nobody, for my own thoughts were forming.¹⁶⁵

      In September 1914 Clifford de Boltz was ‘accosted by a young lady in Great Portland Street’ and presented with a white feather. ‘I felt quite embarrassed,’ he admitted, ‘and threw the feather away in great disgust.’ But he enlisted in 2/6th Norfolk, a territorial cyclist battalion, soon afterwards. The battalion was already straining its resources, and he spent his first night in the army on a pub billiard table, and regretted that: ‘it went on like this for days and nobody seemed to know what to do next’. As his was a territorial battalion there was at least some uniform, but ‘whether it fitted or not did not seem to matter to them but we all felt very uncomfortable. Boots – asked for size 5. CQMS “we haven’t got any bloody boy’s boots, take these size 7 and wear three pairs of socks and you will be alright”.’¹⁶⁶

      Much depended on what men joined, and falling into the dark maw of a freshly-raised New Army unit, with few trained officers or NCOs, no proper accommodation, no clear sense of regional identity and pre-war kinship, was probably the worst fate. Bill Sugden told his future wife Amy on 28 October 1914: ‘Well, I’ve done it now and am a regular soldier in the RFA. I write in the Main Railway Station Sheffield having got my ticket for Newhaven and am proceeding there. I am afraid with all the excitement my hand is somewhat shaky.’¹⁶⁷ On arrival he found that:

      Everything is rough. The camp is like a quagmire, and no floor boards in the tent … Had a shave with difficulty and cold water. Truly last night I wished I was dead.

      Sardines and bread for breakfast and we had to fight for it. The food is very roughly served. The other fellows have to eat their meat with their fingers which I would most certainly have to do was it not for my little darling’s knife and fork.¹⁶⁸

      Soon he was reporting that: ‘The life is harder than an outsider would believe,’ with incessant rain, wet blankets, and fatigues like peeling potatoes and emptying urinal buckets, ‘a rotten filthy job’. Press reports of German conduct in Belgium, though, filled him with anger and determination. ‘The outrages on women and children in Belgium have been terrible,’ he wrote. ‘Fancy if Amy had to fall into their hands … I only hope I shall have the chance to have a smash in return for the way our men have been treated, hands cut off and wounded shot.’¹⁶⁹ Training seemed both pointless and brutal. ‘Our sergeant major is an absolute pig,’ he declared.

      He swears and strikes the men … It is a cowardly thing to do as he knows the men dare not strike back … It makes my blood boil when I see it, and if he ever kicks or strikes me I shall go for him whatever the consequences and half kill him before they get me off … They seem to forget we have all given up our jobs to do our best for the country, and do not expect to be treated like a lot of rifraf.¹⁷⁰

      In November he wondered ‘why this Army is without system. If the names of 2 or 3 have to be called out they will have the whole regiment on parade for 2 hours. We are always waiting. Wait, wait, wait and always in the rain.’¹⁷¹ ‘All the men are keen to get on with their duty and it seems a dispiriting thing to me the way we are held back by silly fools of officers,’ he wrote on 1 December. ‘These men have bought their commissions. They are wealthy, brainless fools.’¹⁷² Things picked up when he was sent to Tynemouth for gun training, and when 21st Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery formed there he was already a trained signaller: ‘It’s quite a classy job and the best educated men are naturally picked out for it.’ He was promoted steadily, and in early 1917 announced from France that he was now ‘the only New Army man in the battery who has risen to the rank of sergeant … We have many regulars and I have been promoted over their heads.’¹⁷³ Eventually selected for officer training, he was commissioned in April 1919.

      Other private soldiers echoed Bill Sugden’s chief complaints: bad living conditions and poor food, and training and discipline that seemed inappropriate for citizen soldiers eager to learn a new trade. And experienced officers admitted that it was difficult to make bricks without straw. Captain Rory Baynes, just back from the Royal West African Frontier Force, was sent off to train a New Army Cameronian battalion. His men were an odd mixture, with an early batch of ‘pretty rough’ unemployed, then a batch who had just given up their jobs, and then a good sprinkling of ex-NCOs. They had no rifles and drilled with broomsticks. ‘You’d see a man for instance in a rifle tunic and tartan trews, wearing a straw hat,’ he wrote, ‘next to someone else in a red coat and some civilian trousers.’ He thought that the battalion had reached a reasonable standard by early 1915 when he was passed on the march by two companies of the regular 1/Cameronians and ‘saw immediately that our standard of NCOs and everything else was far below what it really should be’.¹⁷⁴

      J. B. Priestley was never altogether sure why he enlisted in 10/Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. ‘I was not hot with patriotic feeling,’ he admitted, and:

      I did not believe that Britain was in any real danger. I was sorry for ‘gallant little Belgium’ but did not feel as if she was waiting for me to rescue her. The legend of Kitchener, who pointed out at us from every hoarding, had never captured me. I was not under any pressure from public opinion; the white feathers came later. I was not carried to the recruiting office in a herd of chums, nobody thinking, everybody half-plastered. I went alone.¹⁷⁵

      He shared the familiar misery of tented camps, ‘sleeping twelve to a bell-tent, kneeling after Lights Out to piss in our boots and then emptying them under the flap. The old soldiers told us that this was good for our boots, making them easier for route-marches’.¹⁷⁶ And like so many New Army men he resented his Kitchener Blue, ‘a doleful convict-style