Tommy (25 page)

Newly-purchased horses went to remount depots where officers entitled to a charger could take their pick. James Pennycuik of the Royal Engineers tells how:

Henry Owens, a hunting doctor instantly commissioned into the RAMC, collected ‘a nice horse, a long-tailed bay, well bred, nice mouth and manners and nice paces'.
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And Major Tom Bridges of the 4th Dragoon Guards secured ‘one Umslopagaas, a powerful weight-carrying hunter with a wall eye, who could jump railway gates'.
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The unlucky Private Garrod, however, lost his favourite horse, who had to be destroyed when she broke a leg, and was allocated the worst horse in the troop, ‘who was such a bastard that he was known as Syphilis' because nobody wanted to catch him. He kicked out and broke the farrier sergeant major's arm when the horses were being embarked at Southampton, and then reared back ‘over the dock into the water and was never seen again'.

By June 1915, long before it began to conscript men, the army had taken 8 percent of the heavy horses in use on the land, and 25 percent of saddle horses had gone from farms. At one point in 1917 the army had nearly a million animals on its strength, with 436,000 of them in France. It is small wonder that fodder was, by a narrow margin, the heaviest single item shipped to France, heavier even than ammunition. The pressing need to supply and feed horses helped break down the barriers that had hitherto kept women, apart from nurses, out of uniform. The Women's Forage Corps, which had 6,000 members by 1918, worked at baling and transporting hay, and the Women's Remount Depot played a valuable part in breaking in newly-bought horses. There were the inevitable suggestions that women would not be up to the heavy work, but, in the event, they did it very well, freeing men for military service. Edith Maudslay, a farmer's daughter, joined the Women's Remount Depot in 1915, worried about her gunner brother (reported missing in March 1918 after returning alone to his battery's gun-line to try to amend the day's fortunes with his revolver), and lived on to drive an ambulance in the London Blitz in the Second World War.
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The sheer weight of fodder shipped to France must not be used as evidence of the logistic burden imposed by the cavalry. By 1917 only about 27,000 of the British horses on the Western Front (falling to some 16,000 by early 1918) mounted the remaining cavalry. The overwhelming majority pulled guns or wagons, just as they did in the French, German and United States armies at that time. In December 1918 the BEF fed a total of 394,443 animals. Of these just 25,414, riding and draught horses, were in the Cavalry Corps, and 48,822 served on the lines of communication. The number of motor vehicles on the Western Front grew enormously: in August 1914 the Army Service Corps had just 507 motor vehicles at its disposal, and in January 1918 it had almost 22,000 trucks in France alone. However, for the average infantry soldier ‘transport' invariably meant
horse
transport, usually the 30-cwt General Service wagon, drawn by two horses, whose load might comprise 100 blankets, twenty double tents, four hospital marquees, forty-five boxes of small arms ammunition or 900 groundsheets.

Nobody who has had much to do with the horse can deny the beast's extraordinary perversity. Lieutenant Alan Lascelles of the Bedfordshire Yeomanry admitted that:

Yet men grew very fond of their horses, and it was a commonplace for men, inured to the passing of their human friends, to record their grief at the death of horses. An unnamed poet in 156th Heavy Battery RGA lamented the loss of the battery's ‘pet', ‘Billy the Stallion, killed by Hostile Aircraft, 5 July 1917.'

Third Ypres was in full swing, and the army was losing thousands of men every day, but 156th Battery remembered a long-faced chum. In a base hospital the Reverend Charles Doudney talked to a young Canadian who had lost ‘his nose, one eye, all one cheek, upper jaw on one side'. Despite these terrible wounds, he had not left his horse, hit by the same shell: ‘His fore leg was smashed, so I could not leave him. Had him all the time since we left Canada.'
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Only with the horse mercifully shot did he deliver his urgent demand for more ammunition. And only then did he seek medical aid. Captain Sidney Rogerson, gratefully out of the line on the Somme in 1916, saw his battalion HQ wagon, ‘drawn by the two beautiful chestnuts which were the apple of the driver's eye and which I am last to see side by side in death as in life beside the bridge at Pontavert in May 1918'.
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Old army or New, it never lost this tug of sentiment, and is none the worse for that.

W
hatever segment of the army Thomas Atkins joined, his world was defined by his unit. And this, for the majority of soldiers, meant the infantry battalion, a lieutenant colonel's command of something under 1,000 men. Atkins's life in the line and out of it, his chances of promotion and leave, the tautness of the discipline that bound him, his day-to-day relationships on and off duty, and even the way he wore his uniform, all reflected his unit's culture. But battalions themselves, however huge they seemed to the men in them, were small parts of a huge and complex machine. They were combined into formations – in ascending order: brigades, divisions, corps and armies. These were commanded by generals, assisted by staff officers, collectively known, from their distinguishing collar-patches, as ‘red tabs'.

Formation headquarters – just four officers and twenty-three other ranks for an infantry brigade in 1914 to the 3,000 souls that constituted general headquarters by the war's end – needed offices, living accommodation and stabling. In the early months of the war large schools provided good temporary headquarters (though there were complaints about the size of desks), but soon big houses of one sort or another accommodated entire brigade or divisional headquarters, or parts of corps or army headquarters. These residences were often called châteaux, though the word covers a multitude of buildings from stately homes, through large country houses and modest farmhouses, to suburban residences with lofty titles but poky rooms. Although the First World War initiated the expression ‘château generalship', commanders of previous centuries had usually lived in just such buildings, and even in 1944–45 Allied generals in France and Belgium were often housed in châteaux for perfectly good reasons. However, Field Marshal Montgomery, anxious not to attract the damaging publicity aroused by tales of comfortable life in well-appointed houses in an earlier war, initially lived in a caravan in the garden of a Normandy château, though eventually the autumn weather drove even the ascetic Monty inside.

The generals of the war remain one of the most controversial groups in the whole of British history, and some memoirs and diaries certainly seethe with criticism of them. Gerald Burgoyne, a regular officer in the Royal Irish Rifles, wrote from Belgium in early 1915 that:

He later reported of an incident where one British battalion fired on another that it was:

Lieutenant Lancelot Spicer told his mother that Loos was ‘rather chaotic. In fact the chief thing to be gathered is that our men fought pretty well (64th Infantry Brigade, 21st Division) … but that the Divisional and Brigade Staffs were absolute washouts.'
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In March 1915 Lord Stanhope, commanding a company of Grenadier Guards – but shortly to become a brass hat himself – declared that: ‘These
Brass Hats
(as the regimental officer calls the staff) know very little about the other end.'
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Postwar assessments grew increasingly vitriolic. Brigadier General Frank Crozier, in an account written in 1937 when resentment was at its height, his funds were low, and the generals he criticised by name were dead, declared that senior officers were:

And Eric Hiscock, writing in the 1970s, gives us what has become enshrined as the private soldier's view of it all.

But it is equally true that what officers and men wrote during the war was far less critical that the views attributed to them subsequently. Gestures that seemed theatrical fifty years on were appreciated at the time. Private Frank Hawkings recalled that on 22 April 1915 his exhausted battalion began to recover from Second Ypres.

Lieutenant F. P. Roe always retained an affectionate memory of Rawlinson issuing orders: ‘He was the very epitome of a distinguished soldier.
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Ernest Parker, a platoon commander in a Royal Fusiliers battalion inspected by Haig, thought that his ‘kindly eyes looked into my own as he passed along the ranks …'.
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Bernard Martin, a survivor of the Somme, no longer had any illusions about official plans or reports, but was delighted to salute Haig as his battalion came out of the line.

The Reverend Julian Bickersteth, an experienced army chaplain who had lost a brother in the Leeds Pals on 1 July 1916, quietly observed that there was an inevitable tension between the two sides of battle's equation. ‘Returning from the battlefield to this atmosphere always makes me unhappy,' he wrote from a headquarters on 30 August 1918,