Tommy (24 page)

Father Willie Doyle of 8/Royal Dublin Fusiliers, killed soon afterwards, enjoyed a reputation which went far beyond those who shared his faith. ‘Father Doyle was a good deal amongst us,' wrote an Ulsterman.

The stone tower that now stands in the Irish Peace Park on the southern end of Messines, heavy with Celtic symbolism, gives Protestant and Catholic soldiers the recognition they deserve: a recognition mired too long in politics.

The period between the raising of the 1st New Army in August 1914 and the departure of the first of the New Army divisions to France a year later was marked by shortages of weapons, equipment, accommodation and ammunition, and men remembered the sharp contrast between enthusiastic enlistment and the confusion and boredom that often followed. Even joining was not always easy, as Percy Croney discovered when he reported to the recruiting office in December 1914. ‘I took my place in the queue outside,' he recalled.

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.
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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:

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”.'
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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.'
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On arrival he found that:

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.'
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Training seemed both pointless and brutal. ‘Our sergeant major is an absolute pig,' he declared.

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.'
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‘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.'
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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.'
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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'.
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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:

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'.
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And like so many New Army men he resented his Kitchener Blue, ‘a doleful convict-style blue outfit with a ridiculous little forage cap and a civilian overcoat'. But as khaki uniforms arrived, the weather improved and the battalion knitted together, he too felt the pride of arms which coursed through the New Armies in the spring of 1915. ‘We looked like soldiers now,' he wrote.

Although he would later blame his sense of class consciousness on the war, Priestley still spoke up warmly for the New Armies in their prime: they were emphatically not ‘a kind of brave rabble'. But it was not until the summer of 1916 that this promising amalgam of diverse humanity was ready to take the field, and even then inherent weaknesses caused by its rapid growth were too ready to make themselves evident.

Not all the flesh and blood required by the burgeoning army was human, however. The army needed huge quantities of horses. In 1914 it sent a strong cavalry division to France, with almost 10,000 horses, and each of the infantry divisions required nearly 6,000 to pull its guns and wagons and to mount its senior officers. There were 25,000 horses on the army's strength in August 1914, and at least another 120,000 were required to meet immediate demands. Because the army's peacetime requirement for horses was so small, Britain had no state breeding programme, but bought about a thousand horses a year from the trade. Most cavalry horses were ‘of hunter stamp. Height 15.2 hands, cost £40 in Ireland, a black gelding'. The Household Cavalry needed something bigger, ‘A real nice-looking heavyweight horse with plenty of bone,' which was likely to cost £65 as a four year old.
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The Boer War had already shown that the army could not hope to rely on normal commercial channels to obtain horses on mobilisation, and in 1914 its purchasing officers were equipped with justice's warrants which entitled them to obtain horses by compulsory purchase. Most tried to pay sensible sums (£70 was the guideline for an officer's charger), neither overspending nor robbing the sellers. B. E. Todhunter mounted B Squadron of the Essex Yeomanry, travelling over 900 miles to get all the horses he required. ‘Essex has been pretty well skinned of her horses,' he told the remount officer in Brentwood on 14 August, ‘and I had to go poaching in Suffolk before I could get the six I sent you yesterday.'
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But not all purchasing officers were as astute. Irish dealers unloaded some questionable stock, 12 percent of which had to be sold on immediately as unsuitable.

Many private individuals, hunt stables and corporations gave up their horses voluntarily. The historian of 11th Hussars recorded that: ‘Colonel Pitman's brother sent eight hunters all of which came through the war successfully. The master of the Meynell Hunt sent a number of hunt horses, and others came from Mr Fernie's and the Pytchley.' Weymouth Corporation was so generous with its omnibus horses that there were too few left to pull the buses. But most horses were compulsorily purchased. Captain James Jack of the Cameronians had already been mobilised when he heard that his two remaining hunters, ‘Ardskull Boy and Home Park, have been taken for the army – the first war wrench'. When remount sergeants visited the Buckinghamshire village of Tysoe in August: ‘Every farmhouse … had some shock and grief that day.' Kathleen Ashby's family lost their much-loved aged carthorse Captain, who was still useful ‘if you humoured him and knocked off promptly after his stint of work, but under new men and at hard tasks he must break down'.
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The disappearance of Sammy and Rob Roy, Titan and Jupiter, cast an early shadow over a land still unused to loss, and some families, proud that their boys should go, could not bear to lose their animals. Three Lancashire children, ‘troubled little Britishers', wrote to ‘Dear good Lord Kitchener' with a picture of their pony and begged that she might be spared. Two others had already gone, and three of the family were ‘now fighting for you in the Navy. Mother and I will do anything for you, but
do, do please
let us keep old Betty.' Kitchener's private secretary, no less, immediately replied that he had spoken to Kitchener and ‘if you show the enclosed note to anyone who asks about your pony he thinks it will be left to you quite safely'.
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