The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

performance. Every Friday night in pre-war drill seasons we had emerged from the seclusion of our training-ground and marched along the two miles of this spacious boulevard to a formal dismissal at Charing Cross. I never cared for this operation for, as senior subaltern of No 1, I had to walk beside the little company OC. The Territorials were always an object of amusement to a section of the community, and ribald youth along the route made the most of the sight of a very tall man in uniform marching by the side of a very little man. But it was different now. We had been playing at soldiers before; now we were soldiers. Status and potentialities recognised.’

      Reith spent ten days at Falkirk before being detached with 60 men to guard two vulnerable points on the railway line south from Perth in the region of Larbert. For four happy weeks he ran his detachment in his own way with no interference from any senior officer. Then came the time to rejoin the battalion, when, soon after 20 September, the main body moved to Larbert as well:

      ‘Next morning, with a heavy heart, I set out to attend an ordinary battalion parade which was to be followed by a route march. A route march! I was met by an orderly room messenger. He handed me a note from the Adjutant instructing me to take over command of Transport. Gosh, what a joy this was; the sun shone in an unclouded sky.

      The Transport Officer was a somebody; an object of mystification, envy and even respect among his brother officers. He was not, as they, subject to parades and orderly duties. He was a power in the land; one with whom it was expedient to be on friendly terms; he could perform or withhold all sorts of services… Transport Officer. Magnificent – like the gold star.

      The major issues of war are in the hands of God, politicians and the general staff. The regimental officer, realising his helplessness, is not greatly concerned about them. Apart from discharging to the best of his ability the particular little task allotted to him he is not exercised with schemes for the rout of the enemy. Beyond satisfying himself that there is an appropriate depth of sand or earth on his dugout roof, and choosing when available a cellar instead of an attic (or at any rate a room before reaching which a shell would have to pass through at least one other) the chances of his own survival and the general progress of the campaign do not figure much in his mind. He has too much else to do, and in the doing of them the Transport Officer is often of determining importance. A horse and cart at the right moment, or a few cubic feet of space in a cart, may make all the difference to his outlook on life. They may make war tolerable and perhaps, for the time being, enjoyable. A mighty and beneficent power to wield. Transport Officer 5th SR.’

      For nearly all the men in the various units of the regiment, the first months of the war involved making many adjustments to military life. This applied to the Regular 1st Battalion, (always known as the Cameronians while the others were called the Scottish Rifles) because it was made up largely of reservists. With the 2nd being always kept up to strength at its overseas station in Malta, the 1st was usually short of men, especially during the summer trooping season when it sent out drafts of newly trained soldiers to its linked battalion. Thus in August 1914 it was ready to absorb all the reservists that came back to the colours, some of whom had been firmly settled in civilian life for many years. Although the men in the TF had a little military experience, their training, in Reith’s words, had been ‘done in odd moments and in a sense unofficially’. Naturally the New Army volunteers had the most adjusting to do, but the Regular reservists and TF men had their share of adapting, or readapting, themselves to military routine as well.

      The problem of adjustment can be discussed under two general headings: physical demands and discipline. Under the first come general fitness, especially condition of feet; hygiene and medical matters; and food and drink. Under the second, obedience to orders and military law; the acceptance of a strict hierarchy of ranks; and loss of freedom.

      Apart from the occasional long journey by train, and the rare trip in a bus or lorry, the infantryman of 1914 travelled everywhere on his feet, the condition of which was more than a matter of purely individual concern. During the retreat from Mons, which came so soon after the start of the war, the Regular reservists of the Cameronians and the other battalions of the British Expeditionary Force became fully aware of their boots not having been well worn in and their unhardened feet, as well as shoulders unused to carrying heavy packs and other accoutrements. However unpopular, long periods of foot drill, physical exercises and route marching were a major part of preparations for joining the army in France.

      As described by R. M. S. Baynes, the volunteers who rushed to join the New Army were a cross-section of the population, ranging from well-educated potential officers to the unemployed only ‘too anxious to join up and get some food and pay’. While members of the former group were normally healthy and kept themselves clean, many of the unfortunate ones at the other end of the scale were underdeveloped and had only rudimentary ideas about hygiene. Medical inspections, foot and skin inspections, inoculations, compulsory showers and other measures were applied to all, being resented by the various groups for different reasons, but accepted as an inevitable part of army life. As reaction to these basic health matters varied according to background, so did the views on army rations. Whether considered dull and inadequate by the better-off, or almost luxurious in comparison to the meagre diet of many of the poor, the basic ration scale was adequate to maintain stamina and fitness among men living unusually strenuous lives, and was more generous than most of the British population was used to.

      Turning to the subject of military discipline, the first point to make is that it came as much less of a shock to most of the 1914 volunteers than it might to their few descendants in the Army almost 90 years later. Not only was British society more rigidly stratified than it is today, but at every level people holding any form of authority were expected to impose it on those below them with rigour, and in general were respected for doing so. It should be remembered that domestic servants, farm labourers and shop-workers constituted between them the major part of the working population of Britain; ‘…her farms employed more labourers than either business or her textile factories; and more men and women were engaged in paid domestic service than in all the metallurgical industries – from pin-making to ship-building – put together.’³ In such employments hours were long and work hard, with graded levels from owner down to youngest farm-boy or kitchen-maid similar to the military hierarchy.

      There were, however, places where hierarchy was not so readily understood. In those areas where the mines and heavy industry were the main employers, attitudes were different. In Glasgow and the surrounding smoke-grimed towns there were hard-faced mine and shipyard owners, with rough foremen to control the workforce, but their power was not so easily accepted. Scottish egalitarianism, supported by increasingly active trades unions, did not produce a type of man to take readily to being chased round a barrack-square. In The First Hundred Thousand ‘K1’, a novel that was a best-seller in the war and long after, the author Ian Hay describes the reactions to military life of a Jock in the fictitious Bruce & Wallace Highlanders. Hay was in fact a captain in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders in 1914, commanding New Army men largely recruited from Glasgow and industrial Clydeside, and very similar to Scottish Riflemen.

      ‘There are other rifts within the military lute. At home we are persons of some consequence, with very definite notions about the dignity of labour. We have employers who tremble at our frown; we have Trades Union officials who are at constant pains to impress upon us our own omnipotence in the industrial world in which we live. We have at our beck and call a Radical MP who, in return for our vote and suffrage, informs us that we are the backbone of the nation, and that we must on no account permit ourselves to be trampled upon by effete and tyrannical upper classes. Finally, we are Scotsmen, with all a Scotsman’s curious reserve and contempt for social airs and graces.

      But in the Army we appear to be nobody. We are expected to stand stiffly at attention when addressed by an officer; even to call him “sir” – an honour to which our previous employer has been a stranger. At home, if we happened to meet the head of the firm in the street, and none of our colleagues was looking, we touched a cap, furtively. Now, we have no option in the matter. We are expected to degrade ourselves by meaningless and humiliating gestures. The NCOs are almost as bad. If you answer a sergeant as you would a foreman, you are impertinent; if you argue with him, as all good Scotsmen must, you are insubordinate; if you endeavour to drive a collective bargain