Tommy (20 page)

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,

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:

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 had stuck steadfastly to the principle that the Territorial Force should contain all arms, and so it did. The fact that it attracted many middle-class men who would have been unlikely to join the ranks of the regular army meant that many of the men who joined specialist units such as the Tyne Electrical Engineers – formed to maintain searchlights and communications in the Tyne defences – already had skills which the army could use. It was harder to create purely military skills in the training time available. Norman Tennant enlisted in 11th Battery, 4th North Riding Howitzer Brigade, in 1913, with several friends from Ilkley Grammar School. In August that year his unit camped at Aberystwyth. ‘To this day,' he mused, ‘the smell of crushed grass, which is always to be found inside marquees, reminds me of the rough and ready meals on the bare trestle tables, slightly flavoured with smoke from the cookhouse fires …'. He found that the experience was useful in more than a military sense.

Horses presented a real challenge, especially his ‘spare wheeler' –

Tennant served in the same battery throughout the war, and recalled ‘the care and devotion to his men by the battery commander, Major P. C. Petrie DSO MC, who helped raise it, train it and commanded it till the end of the war'. Its discipline, he believed, ‘was derived more from a sense of comradeship than from the methods normally employed by the Regular army'.
¹²⁰

Haldane also formalised the Officers' Training Corps (OTC). The forerunners of these had been founded in Victorian times as rifle volunteer corps attached to universities or public schools. Some of the latter took their corps very seriously: the Eton College Rifle Volunteers had a regular adjutant and turned out in a natty shade of the French grey. Enough members of Cambridge University Rifle Volunteers volunteered to fight in the Boer War for the unit to earn a ‘SOUTH AFRICA' battle honour. Haldane established junior divisions of the OTC at public schools and some grammar schools: successful cadets earned Certificate B, a very basic certificate of military knowledge. Senior divisions were at universities, and their cadets could earn Certificate A, which was believed to fit them for a territorial commission. More broadly, the scheme was expected to attract men and boys of ‘the intellectual and moral attainments likely to fit them for the rank of officers', even if they did not immediately put these qualities to use. Between August 1914 and March the following year, 20,577 officers were commissioned from OTCs, and another 12,290 ex-OTC men were serving in the ranks.
¹²¹

T
hat arch-regular Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in the summer of 1914, had a low opinion of the Territorial Force. In part it stemmed from his experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when he had served briefly with Chanzy's Army of the Loire and had been less than impressed by French irregulars. In part it reflected the fact that he had spent most of his career abroad, and had been wholly untouched by Haldane's advocacy of a national army. Indeed, he admitted to the formidable leader of the Ulster Unionists: ‘I don't know Europe; I don't know England; and I don't know the British Army.' And in part it embodied his own instinctive mistrust of the amateur: on the morning that he took over the War Office he declared that ‘he could take no account of anything but regular soldiers'.
¹²²
And to raise a new one he decided to bypass the territorial system altogether.

Kitchener's decision has been widely criticised, but it was not wholly illogical. Many territorials immediately volunteered for foreign service: F. S. Hatton proudly remembered that in his unit ‘the men who did not wish to volunteer for foreign service were asked to take a pace to the rear. The ranks remained unbroken.'
¹²³
The Northumberland Hussars affirmed that all its men had already accepted foreign service as a condition of their enlistment. But the picture was far patchier elsewhere. Walter Nicholson, a regular staff officer in what was to become the very good 51st Highland Division, admitted: ‘We were very far from being a division fit for defence.'
¹²⁴
Some men immediately volunteered for foreign service; some officers automatically assumed that their men would volunteer, and unwisely took this assumption for assent. Others would not serve abroad. ‘It was not cowardice that decided them to say they wouldn't fight,' wrote Nicholson, ‘it was the belief that the Government had broken faith with them … The Territorial had not joined for foreign service, but to defend his country.' One of the division's officers observed that: ‘There must be something wrong if employers go out to fight alongside Regular private soldiers.'
¹²⁵
In the Suffolk Yeomanry the officers of one squadron, an MP amongst them, told their men not to volunteer for foreign service and not to give way to the government's blackmail.