Tommy (12 page)

I turned hard left and ran diagonally across the front of the battery at a distance of about 800 yds. Both my guns were able to fire on the battery, in spite of which they got off about eight rounds at me without damage, but sufficiently close to be audible in the cab and I could see the flash of each gun as it fired. By this time I had passed behind a belt of trees running alongside a roadside. I ran down along this belt until nearly level with the battery, when I turned full right and engaged the battery in rear. On observing our appearance from the belt of trees the Germans, some 30 in number, abandoned their guns and tried to get away. Gunner Ribbans and I accounted for the whole lot. I continued forward, making a detour to the east and shot a number of the enemy who appeared to be demoralised, and were running about in our direction.
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The brave [German] machine-gunners, with resolute look in shoulders and face, lay relaxed beside their oiled machines … and beside piles of littered brass, the empty cartridge cases which they had fired before being bayoneted at their posts … On the other hand … one saw how our men, rushing forward in extended formation, each man a good distance from his neighbour, had fallen, one here, another there, one directly he had started forward to the attack, and then the others, one, two, three, four, five all in a sort of sequence, here, here, here, here, here; one poor wretch had got far, but got tangled in the wire had pulled and pulled and at last been shot to rags; another had got near enough to strike the foe and been shot with a revolver.
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I
n one sense there was not really a single British army in the First World War, more a collection of regiments, drawn together in loose association into brigades and divisions which had personalities of their own. As we look at infantry battalions across the best part of a century we might be tempted to assume that the Old Army 1/Grenadier Guards had much in common with the territorial 4/Queen's or the New Army 11/East Lancashire. To be sure, on one level they did look alike. All were commanded by lieutenant colonels, had four companies, and formed part of brigades which had four battalions apiece. But on another they had different histories, traditions, compositions, attitudes and aptitudes. Although the remorseless corrosion of casualties meant that, especially after mid-1916, these characters began to change, this was an army which, start to finish, revelled in an extraordinary diversity.

There were allegedly rurally-recruited regiments which marched past to
A Farmer's Boy
and cultivated close contact with the county's gentry, but actually drew their strength from mean streets and smoky factories. There was a single battery of artillery which shot two of its soldiers for striking a superior, and whole regiments which shot only enemies. One cavalry private always called his troop sergeant ‘Charlie': in another regiment such flippancy might have seen him strung up to a wagon wheel for two hours a day. There were Englishmen who wore the kilt with all the panache of a native-born Highlander; a much-wounded Belgian, Adrian Carton de Wiart, who won the VC as a British officer; and an ex-Boer guerrilla, Denys Reitz, who commanded a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers.

There were some officers who would have fitted comfortably into a Wellingtonian mess: and others who might have sold the great duke his coal. And then there were ex-officers who served as private soldiers because they had no other way of getting to the front. Arthur Arnold Crow resigned his captaincy in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment because of ill-health in 1916. When he recovered he found that he could not regain his commission without giving up hope of foreign service: he enlisted and was killed as a private in the Essex Regiment in 1917. J. B. Osborne, invalided out as a lieutenant, rejoined as a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and was killed in October 1918. And the Hon. M. F. S. Howard, son of the 9th Earl of Carlisle and once a lieutenant in the 18th Hussars, died as a private at Passchendaele, and has no known grave. There were ex-privates who commanded battalions, ex-convicts honoured with His Majesty's commission, sexagenarians who soldiered on and boys, like Private Reginald Giles of 1/Gloucesters, killed on the Somme at the age of fourteen, who died in the trenches when they should have been at school.

Reality sometimes confounded expectation. Some veterans argued that the territorial 5th Scottish Rifles was more reliable than one of the regular battalions of the same regiment. Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, who went to war as a regular lieutenant in the Royal Berkshires in 1914 and commanded a Berkshire battalion at Passchendaele three years later, reckoned that most temporary officers were good as long as their units were well commanded, and ‘many were better than regulars'.
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One officer with the rare combination of Distinguished Conduct Medal (won as a corporal in South Africa) and Military Cross (won as an officer on the Western Front) was never a professional soldier, but fitted both conflicts into a long and successful career as a tea planter in India. Sidney Farmer MM, seventeen times wounded, with a record that many a regular might have been proud of, served only for the duration of the war. After it, like so many others, he returned to the community from which he had sprung, running the Golden Lion in the Herefordshire town of Knighton, though troubled by the occasional appearance of shrapnel which travelled down his body to emerge from his feet.
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Although the casualties of the Somme created a demand for reinforcements which helped blur many old distinctions, British regiments remained resolutely different. The Grenadiers, the senior regiment of foot guards, trace their origins back to the Low Countries in the 1650s, when they were formed to guard Charles II, and in consequence have an enduring rivalry with the Coldstream Guards, who trace their descent from General George Monck's (Parliamentarian) Regiment of Foot. Three regular battalions strong in 1914, the Grenadiers raised a 4th battalion during the war. As one of the regiment's historians observed, ‘they did not have a monopoly of discipline, smartness and professionalism in the BEF, but as an elite they did believe in the highest standards in all three, believe in them, demand them and maintain them whatever might be the circumstances and whatever the cost'.
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A regimental history written forty years before the war had suggested that:

Noblesse
indeed: one of the marked social changes in the army of the nineteenth century was that noblemen, once scattered widely across the army, had tended to concentrate in the Foot Guards and Household Cavalry. Of course there were exceptions. Major Christopher de Sausmarez, a peer's nephew, commanded 108th Heavy Battery Royal Garrison Artillery in 1914, and a baronet led one of his sections of two 60-pounder guns. The RGA had many distinctions but social exclusivity was not one of them, and a heavy battery gun-line was unfamiliar earth for sprigs of nobility. In 1914 the Grenadiers' officers included Lieutenant Colonel Lord Brabazon, Major the Hon. Hubert Crichton, Captain Lord Guernsey, and Captain Lord Francis Montagu-Douglas-Scott. It was as understandable that Raymond Asquith, the prime minister's son who would die on the Somme, should join the Grenadiers as it was that the Prince of Wales should do the same. The officers

These ripples widened across the Household Division as a whole, as Rowland Feilding, then a captain in the Coldstream, discovered when he did his first tour of trench duty in May 1915.

Rollo (later Lieutenant Colonel Viscount Feilding) survived the war. Captain Percy Clive MP was killed on 5 April 1918, and Captain the Hon. Henry Feilding died of wounds on 11 October 1917.
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Nor was this sense of identity confined to the officers. There were Grenadier families amongst the rank and file, and the warrant officers' and sergeants' mess was held together by bonds no less powerful than those which linked members of the officers' mess. It might take a guardsman two years to get his first promotion, and he would be lucky to make sergeant in less than ten. A regimental sergeant major's tour of duty was five years, and it was not unknown for Guards RSMs to ask for extensions, arguing that there was still more to be done with the battalion.
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The Grenadiers had a tangible quality, even to
its
rivals. Its soldiers were nicknamed Bill-Browns, as opposed to the Coalies, Jocks, Micks and Taffs of the other foot guards regiments. Private Stephen Graham, an educated man serving in the ranks of the Scots Guards, saw the Grenadiers assault stoutly-held German defences at the very end of the war.

In contrast, 4/Queen's was a territorial battalion of the Queen's Regiment, with a regular adjutant, regimental sergeant major and small permanent staff of regular NCOs: its other members were civilians, who soldiered in their spare time. It originated in a company of rifle volunteers formed at Croydon in 1859 in response to the threat of French invasion which had Tennyson earnestly declaiming ‘Form, riflemen: riflemen, form …'. A second company was added in 1860 to form the 1st Surrey Administrative Battalion; this became the 2nd Surrey Rifle Volunteers seven years later and the 1st Volunteer Battalion the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment in 1881. It sent a company of five officers and 200 men to the Boer War, and in 1908 it was swept up in R. B. Haldane's creation of the Territorial Force to become 4th (Territorial) Battalion The Queen's Regiment, swapping its rifle-green uniforms for the scarlet of the line. Its historian suggested that it was the first territorial battalion to receive colours, presented by Lady Eldridge and Mrs Frank Watney, the wife of the commanding officer – a prominent local brewer when not engaged in his military duties.

Its men trained on weekday drill nights, one weekend each month and at a fortnight's annual camp. There were perennial problems in ensuring that employers gave men time off for camp, and compromises between day job and military identity meant that in the battalion's first year, 22 officers and 418 men attended the first week of camp at Brighton but only 13 officers and 241 men the second. In 1914 it found itself at camp, marching from Bordon to Salisbury Plain as part of a large territorial exercise, when war broke out. Mobilised on 5 August, it was sent to Chattenden, near Chatham. Like other territorial battalions it split, forming a first-line battalion, 1/4th, which rapidly departed for India, where it spent the whole war, seeing active service on the North-West Frontier. A second line, 2/4th, which included some men from the 1st Battalion who had not volunteered for foreign service and some wartime volunteers, eventually fought on the Western Front in 1918.

The third-line, 3/4th Queen's, containing officers and men from the other two battalions as well as wartime recruits, spent much of its war in southern England. In December 1914, D Company was billeted on the premises of Caleys, the court dressmakers, in Windsor High Street when a fire broke out: the lights failed, but men of the company escorted the seamstresses out of the dark and smoke-filled building, earning a fulsome letter of thanks from Mr Hugh Caley, the managing director, and less formal expressions of gratitude from the ladies. The battalion always had an easy style. When it was billeted in Reigate in January 1916 an earnest (though wisely anonymous) well-wisher told his commanding officer that:

Private Richard Whatley persuaded his brother, a driver in the Army Service Corps, to apply to join the battalion, whether because of a genuine desire for life in the infantry or because he was in France and 3/4th was in Reigate it is impossible to say. Driver Whatley's letter was written in pencil and sent in a green official envelope which meant that it was not subject to censorship within his unit – a wise precaution as its contents might not have been regarded as a vote of confidence in his current management.

The battalion at last went to the Western Front in 1917. It fought its one major battle at Zonnebeke in the Ypres salient on 4 October: all the twenty officers who attacked that day were killed or wounded, and so much of the fabric so carefully nurtured over two years was torn apart for ever. The commanding officer's typewritten list of officers and their next of kin bears repeated manuscript annotations showing killed and wounded. The same list reveals that by the time it went to France the battalion was already losing its regional character: only fifteen of its forty-four officers actually had next of kin in Surrey although there was a clear majority from south London and the Home Counties. There were two Irishmen, a Cornishman, and the padre (who already had a MC and was to add a DSO at Zonnebeke) hailed from Newcastle. Most of the Surrey contingent came, like the commanding officer, from Croydon, and 3/4th Queen's enjoyed a warm relationship with the borough, whose citizens ‘continued, as in the past, to take a great interest in the doings of this battalion … and among other benefits given, the receipt each Christmas in England and abroad of puddings and tobacco was much appreciated by the battalion'. Christmas 1917 was the battalion's last. It had turned over in killed, wounded and missing almost as many officers and men as had arrived in France seven months before (a worse casualty rate over such a short time than was sustained by some regular battalions), and was disbanded in February 1918, its soldiers posted off to other battalions.
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