Tommy (50 page)

Officers lived and died in the company of brother officers like this, gathered from a wider social group than would have been the case before the war. Although there were no commissioned rankers in No. 1 Company's mess, they were very familiar elsewhere. On 30 October 1914, RSM Murphy, RQMS Welton and CSM Stanway of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were all commissioned as second lieutenants. Murphy used to bemoan his fate: ‘There was I, a thousand men at my personal control, the Commanding Officer was my personal friend, the Adjutant consulted me, the Subalterns feared me, and now I am only a bum-wart and have to hold my tongue in Mess.'
²⁵⁶
The future Labour politician and prime minister Clement Attlee was serving with 5/South Lancashire in 1918, and contrasted the composition of its officers' mess then with that of the battalion he had joined in 1914. In 1914 most officers came from public schools, and many from Oxford or Cambridge University, but in 1918 there was much greater variety, including a miner and an errand boy.
²⁵⁷
From February 1916 most new officers were identified by their units and trained at officer cadet battalions in Britain. Promotion was open to talented men regardless of their background. Ernest Shephard, who has featured prominently in these pages as a company sergeant major, was commissioned in late 1916 and killed commanding a company with characteristic competence two months later. George Ashurst (his real ambition was to be an engine driver) was training with an officer-cadet battalion when the war ended. And Clifford de Boltz, a corporal for so long, was in the line when, on 22 March 1918, his company commander received a scribbled note still preserved amongst de Boltz's papers.

He was trained at No. 5 Officer-Cadet Battalion at Trinity College Cambridge. ‘Our training was very strenuous,' he recalled, ‘with private study up to 9 pm each evening.' There was an exam after three months, and students were returned to their units if they failed. There was a final exam, with both practical and theoretical elements, at the end of the course. The war ended before the course ended – he remembered lying hatless but happy in the fountain in Trinity's Great Court on 11 November – and he was commissioned on 2 February 1919.
²⁵⁸

In 1917 Sergeant Alan Sugden was annoyed not to be put forward for a commission, observing that a man who was recommended ‘was no use in the battery and I was'. But he too was sent to an officer-cadet battalion in 1918, and was commissioned early the following year.
²⁵⁹
Sidney Rogerson's fine company sergeant major, Scott, was commissioned, only to be killed in Ireland, and Charles Douie's CSM, Miller, ‘the most sturdy and reliable of sergeant-majors', would not leave the company as long as Douie commanded it. ‘Not least among the many reasons for regretting the ill-fortune which cut short my command of A Company', lamented Douie, ‘is that Jim Miller applied for and immediately obtained a commission, and died, a subaltern in the South Staffords, north of the Somme, on the darkest day of March 1918.'
²⁶⁰
John Lucy was commissioned, survived the First World War and commanded a training battalion in the Second. He told those who had failed their commissioning boards not to be downhearted for, as his career showed, a man could rise through the ranks.

Some traditionalists found the influx of new officers from diverse backgrounds rather hard to get used to. In September 1915 Captain James Dunn described how a new officer joining 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers fell into a flooded pit on his first visit to the trenches and ‘got out unaided except for an apostrophe in the pure dialect of Birmingham'.
²⁶¹
The same author contrasted two new officers:

Some Old Army attitudes proved to be stubbornly entrenched: Alan Hanbury-Sparrow wrote in 1917 of the ‘somewhat uncouth but very willing officer reinforcements', adding ‘You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but you can make a good leather one.' He insisted on having a ‘properly run officers' mess' when 2/Royal Berkshire was out of the line, so that his youngsters would see how things should be done.
²⁶³
When James Jack took command of 1/Cameronians, going back to the regimental fold after his tour in command of the West Yorkshires, he immediately insisted that the officers dress in regulation uniform, and presented them all with regimental canes.
²⁶⁴

There were indeed some distinctive new members of the mess. One of Cyril Mason's brother officers was Johnny,

In 1917 they visited another battalion's headquarters dugout during an attack, both dressed as private soldiers. Mason was invited in for a drink but Johnny was mistaken for a private and left outside: Mason had to explain that he was an officer too. When the battalion was in Bonn at the end of the war, Johnny admitted, during a conversation in the mess, to leading a pre-war strike in a Lancashire colliery, adding that he would not have told the story had any officers of the North Lancashires been present, for he had rioted against that battalion. ‘Oh I've longed to meet one of you fellows for years,' said a visiting colonel. ‘I was a subaltern in the North Lanes in those days and transferred to my present regiment later.'
²⁶⁵

One of the most obvious social clashes between new officers and old was that while both had servants, only those officers from traditional backgrounds felt comfortable with and knew how they were expected to behave towards their servants. The army's provision of servants for its officers was not wholly a reflection of the pre-war army's social structure, for warrant officers (universally promoted from the ranks) had them too. Strictly speaking officers had servants and warrant officers ‘batmen' (the term derived from the French
bât
for pack saddle, or packhorse), but the words became interchangeable. Batmen cleaned an officer's kit, lugged about his valise (canvas and sausage-shaped part sleeping bag, part suitcase), sometimes cooked his food in the line, and often acted as bodyguard and confidential runner. A good servant could free his master's energies for the task of command, and servants make frequent appearances in officers' accounts.

Siegfried Sassoon's batman was Private Flook. ‘Flook and I were very good friends,' he wrote, ‘and his vigilance for my personal comfort was such that I could more easily imagine him using his rifle in defence of my valise than against the Germans.'
²⁶⁶
Bernard Adams agreed that: ‘Our servants were good friends to have behind us, and Dixon was a man in his element.'
²⁶⁷
James Agate's servant was ‘Of the surly tyrannical sort, half childhood's nurse and half golf-caddy. I go in dread and fear of him. I eat when he thinks I should be hungry and sleep when he thinks I should be tired.' He was horrified when Agate disappeared improperly dressed: ‘You do me no credit, Sorr,' he declared, ‘rushing off in all your swarth and sweat.'
²⁶⁸
Adrian Carton de Wiart enjoyed the services of Private Holmes, ‘a delightful scoundrel' who took him from the field when he had suffered one of his many wounds, materialised aboard the hospital ship, despite having been turned away by the embarkation officer, and then appeared at the officers' hospital in Park Lane. ‘I never enquired into his methods,' wrote Carton de Wiart.
²⁶⁹

After Harry Ogle was commissioned and posted to 1/King's Own he entered his billet, where:

When Lieutenant Burgon Bickersteth's servant was badly wounded he regretted that he did not know what hospital he was at, ‘so I cannot write to him, which troubles me very much'. Edwin Vaughan's batman Private Dunham was indomitable. They were in a captured German pillbox near Langemarck after a hard day's fighting when Vaughan noticed that Dunham was carrying a sack. When asked what was in it he replied stoutly that it was a rabbit that Vaughan had sworn to eat on Langemarck Ridge. However, it was then rather past its best and was jettisoned into the filthy water covering the pillbox floor. Graham Seton-Hutchison lost his batman, remembered simply as Peter, and lamented that: ‘The loss of his devotion smote me sorely.' He was ‘a faithful servant, a friend and counsellor, an ever-present companion to give me confidence in the darkness of a dangerous night, and good cheer, when fortune favoured a visit to battalion headquarters, and a quick run along the disused tramway from Houplines to Armentières to refresh the company mess-box.' He spoke for many officers when he declared: ‘Let us now, who received their ready services, praise batmen.'
²⁷¹

Many batmen reciprocated this regard. When Lieutenant Neville Woodroffe was killed at Ypres in 1914 his servant wrote to his mother: ‘But there is one I can never forget that is my late Master I shall never forget him. If it had been my own brother I would not feel so sorry as he was more like a brother to me than an officer i[n] c[harge] of me.' Lieutenant Tom Kettle, an Irish nationalist MP, was killed with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Somme, and his batman, an eighteen-year-old Belfast lad called Robert Bingham, wrote to his widow.

George Coppard joined 6/Queen's in 1914 and was not naturally close to officers there, commenting that the commanding officer ‘might have been the Shah of Persia for all that I knew of him'. But in 1915, after his transfer to the Machine Gun Corps, he became servant to Lieutenant Wilkie. ‘I soon found out to my pleasure that Mr Wilkie regarded me as a comrade and I grew very attached to him,' he wrote.