Tommy (28 page)

Walter Nicholson, who served on divisional and corps staffs and at GHQ, argued that until the very end of the war there was no generally understood definition of the difference between ‘Trench Strength Returns', ‘Daily Fighting Strength Returns', and ‘Ration Strength Returns'. The precise information required in situation reports varied from formation to formation, making the adjutant, the battalion commander's principal staff officer, the meat in a bureaucratic sandwich. General headquarters certainly did its unyielding best to say what it wanted, and, unlike the Feilding account above, the following was not written in jest.

We can deduce from this that an ‘Effective Strength Return', since it includes sick and wounded, is not the same either as a ‘Fighting Strength Return' which excludes these men, or a ‘Trench Strength Return' which excludes the quartermaster and transport officer and their myrmidons, the varying percentage of men deliberately left out of the line as a nucleus for reconstitution, as well as assorted ‘base details'. However, a hard-pressed adjutant, working in the stale air of a dugout under shellfire, his Army Form B.213 barely visible in the guttering flame of the oil lamp, might appreciate the differences less easily. And there were many refinements. For instance, Army Service Corps units were sternly enjoined that in any rolls or returns concerning personnel ‘care should be taken to insert with the regimental number the index letter which, in all cases, precedes the number: The letters are:- S., T., M., S.S., TS., A.S.R., A.S.E., S.R.M.T., S.E., C.M.T., M.S., C.H.T., and B.B.'
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An infantry company in the line might be expected to produce five separate returns in a twenty-four-hour period, all requiring different information subject to a definition which was not only precise but liable to variation according to the whim of brigade, division and corps.

Nicholson went further, suggesting that there was a real break between division and corps. ‘The battles fought with a division were personal affairs,' he believed.

He argued that this brought a sense of detachment which was hard to overcome. ‘We might have expected some measure of good repute,' he wrote of his time on a corps staff,

Corps were under the command of armies. The original BEF effectively constituted a single army with two corps, but as more troops arrived a new level of command was introduced, with 1st and 2nd Armies coming into being on 25 December 1914. Third Army followed in July 1915, as the BEF extended its line south, and 4th Army in January 1916 as planning for the Somme began. Exploitation of the hoped-for breakthrough on the Somme was to be entrusted to the reserve army, but this was committed to command the fighting north of the Albert-Bapaume road in the first week of the battle, although it was not formally renamed 5th Army till the autumn, by which time, coincidentally, any chance of it exercising the function originally envisaged by Haig had long since disappeared.

Fourth Army was radically scaled down in May 1917, much to the irritation of its commander, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who had been hoping to be entrusted with the main attack at Ypres that summer. ‘This is rather a blow for I had been looking forward to that northern attack even though it is a difficult one,' he admitted in his diary. ‘D.H. said nothing about it to me direct nor did [Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot] Kiggell [Haig's chief of staff] so I only heard of it by accident in discussing matters with Tavish [Davidson, head of the General Staff's Operations Section] afterwards.'
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In March 1918 Rawlinson was sent south to take over 5th Army, then reeling under the impact of the German offensive. Fifth Army effectively disappeared for a time, but was soon reconstituted and by the war's end there were again five British armies in France, each with three or four corps.

Like corps, armies had no fixed establishment: in the summer of 1917, 4th Army had so few troops to command that Rawlinson found it hard to occupy himself, and though he managed ‘to do a bit of reading' he admitted that: ‘I find it rather hard to get through the day and generally have to organise an expedition somewhere to kill time.'
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At the same time 5th Army, attacking at Ypres, had four full corps in the line, another weak corps in reserve and a corps in GHQ reserve poised behind that, with over 2,000 guns, 216 tanks and 406 aircraft. Just as corps expanded from being little more than post-boxes for the divisions they commanded, so armies grew from a collection of corps to structures with powerful artillery assets of their own which they could shift about the front so as support the main efforts of their corps. Of particular importance was the establishment of a major general Royal Artillery (MGRA) at army headquarters. However, because the general staff insisted that artillery officers could only issue orders to units directly under their command, MGRAs never enjoyed the authority over the gunners in their army that corps artillery commanders did for those in their own corps. Major General Budworth, MGRA of 4th Army, had the chagrin of seeing his plan for 1 July 1916 followed by only one of the four attacking corps: XIII Corps followed his advice ‘almost to the letter and with success'.
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Finally, general headquarters controlled the entire British military effort in France. In accordance with the practice of the period, still identifiable in a modern British headquarters, it consisted of three branches, under the control of the chief of the general staff.
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This post was held at the outset of the war by the pleasant but somewhat ineffectual Major General Archibald Murray, who had made a bad recovery from a stomach wound received in South Africa. Lieutenant Edward Spears, then a liaison officer between GHQ and the French 5th Army, reported to him in the Hôtel Lion d'Or at Rheims in the scorching heat of August 1914. Murray:

In January 1915 Murray, who had suffered a breakdown during the retreat from Mons, was replaced by Major General Sir William Robertson, a hard-headed ex-ranker who had served as commandant of the staff college and did much to tighten up procedures at GHQ. That December he departed for London to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff and handed over to Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell. Kiggell has had an almost consistently bad press. It is, however, clear that he provided the commander in chief with what was generally very sound advice. His main fault lay in his reluctance to stand up to Haig, who had little notion of the concept of loyal opposition. This was in part owing to Kiggell's belief that a chief of staff's function, as prescribed by regulations, depended ‘on power delegated by the Commander', and in part owing to persistent ill-health. Lieutenant Colonel Lord Stanhope, who knew him well, thought him:

Kiggell was discredited by the failure of Third Ypres to fulfil expectations, and, as part of a general clearing-out of GHQ, was replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Herbert Lawrence. He had left the army as a major after the Boer War, made a fortune in business, and rejoined in 1914. Possession of what soldiers called ‘fuck-off money' (officers, more politely, murmured that he ‘had a good position to return to after the war') meant that he was far more robust with Haig than Kiggell had ever been. He brought much new talent to GHQ, worked well with the French, and was rewarded in Haig's final dispatch with a tribute to his: ‘unfailing insight, calm resolution and level judgement which neither ill fortune nor good were able to disturb'.
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The chief of staff was most concerned with the general staff (G) branch at GHQ,
primus inter pares
as far as staff branches were concerned, and responsible for all matters relating to military operations. In contrast, the adjutant general's (A) branch dealt with discipline, military law, the implementation of appointments and promotions, pay and personal services, casualties and ceremonial. The quartermaster general's (Q) branch was concerned with the distribution of quarters and billets, supplies of food, ammunition and most stores (perversely, medical equipment was the responsibility of A branch), remounts and postal services. Subordinate to the staff were the armies themselves, the service directors (signals, supply, transport and so on) and the substantial staff of the inspector-general, lines of communication, responsible for the burgeoning world of the rear running back to ‘the base'.

The base was in practice a huge area stretching from Le Havre, the BEF's main port of entry, to Rouen and Etaples, and up to the Channel ports of Boulogne and Calais. Although the rear area had a growing appetite for men, the non-combatant proportion of the army, rising from 16.3 percent on 1 September 1914 to 33.45 percent on 1 July 1918, remained small by modern standards.
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The ‘teeth to tail ratio' of the BEF was consistently better than that of the British army of the Second World War. The latter required 84,000 men to maintain one division, while in 1914–18 the figure fluctuated between 44,600 in February 1917 and 64,100 in May 1918.
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The military secretary's department (MS) worked directly for the commander in chief, and originated in the days when the military secretary was the commander in chief's confidential penman. It was much more influential than its name suggests, for it was responsible for recommending those appointments, promotions and dismissals which the adjutant general's branch formally promulgated. By the war's end the department was headed by Major General H. G. Ruggles-Brise, and its twenty-two officers included five peers or peers' sons and a high proportion of cavalry or yeomanry officers, probably because its work required self-confident men who could resist external influence. The destruction of the records of the military secretary's department by German bombing in the Second World War makes it hard to discern just how the department actually worked, although correspondence surviving elsewhere gives many clues. The department maintained lists of officers recommended for battalion, brigade and divisional command, and officers in search of jobs often corresponded with contacts in the department (Sandhurst or staff college chums were always a good start) to see what was about.

Captain Reginald Tompson, a regular gunner with a Boer War DSO, found himself on the lines of communication staff in 1915. He was torn between his desire to stay there – ‘I had a £550 a year job, safety and Bridgy [his wife] very large on the credit side' – and his wish to get a job on the staff of a fighting formation and play a more useful part in the war. He explained his dilemma to a friend at headquarters lines of communication and the fixing process began. After some difficult manoeuvres, briefly losing his staff pay altogether, he duly got onto the staff, where he: ‘Felt an awful swell in my new red hat and tabs.' When he was posted to the staff of 7th Division he wrote: ‘Such a relief I have never felt in my life.'
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Thomas Hutton, commissioned into the artillery in 1910 and a temporary captain in 1915, narrowly missed a staff appointment as aide de camp to Major General George Milne, just appointed to command 27th Division. ‘I … have been trying to get you as ADC,' wrote Milne, ‘but I am afraid there is no chance of the appointment being approved. They say that you are too senior and that not even temporary Captains can be allowed to take up these appointments as they cannot be spared.' However, the following year he heard from a friend in the military secretary's department, who cheerfully signed himself ‘Watty': ‘Do you want General Staff or to be a B[rigade] M[ajor]? Either is open to you as I understand you were recommended for the former & you are within reasonable distance of the latter.' Hutton ended the war brigade major (chief of staff) of 115th Infantry Brigade.
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Just before Haig handed over command of the BEF he arranged that Winston Churchill, who had recently resigned from the government and come out to France as a major, should be given command of a battalion. ‘I next saw the military secretary,' he wrote, ‘and arranged for W. to be posted to the 9th K[ing's] R[oyal] R[ifles] in the 14th Divn.'
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