Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  OTC boys did not automatically get commissions. John William Victor Blazey had been in the 1st Eleven at Reading School in 1911: ‘A greatly improved bat with plenty of defence, but will have to learn to drive. His slow bowling has not been much needed this year. A good and keen field.’ He enlisted in the Royal Berkshires in 1914 and put in for the commission he would have been certain of getting, but, as he wrote from France:

  Seven months training in England was so wearying that I jumped at the idea of coming out here and cancelled the application. And I must say I don’t regret it in the least, for on the whole one couldn’t wish to run across a better lot of fellows.

  It is with deep regret that I heard of the death in action of Lieutenants Hawkins and Giles Ayres, also of Captain Belcher; but it is certain that each one died as an Englishman should, and no greater tribute could be paid to anyone …

  I hope the XI will do really well this season, young though the talent may be. It is a noticeable fact that all the casualties connected with the School, so far as I know, have happened to those who were to the front in sport, and every branch of athletics will be hard hit before this war is over, I fear.

  Please give my kind regard to all those masters whom I know and tell Mr Crook that my OTC training has served me in good stead.

  Blazey was commissioned that summer, and when 1st Royal Berkshires attacked at Loos on 26 September a brother officer ‘saw Lieut. Blazey and a little band of men, surrounded by superior numbers of Germans and … there was little hope of them escaping alive.’ His battalion lost 288 officers and men that day, and he is commemorated on the Loos memorial to the missing.4 Blazey’s schoolfellow Francis Stephen Arthur Forss was turned down for Sandhurst in 1913 because of poor eyesight (which had not stopped him from being the best shot in the school’s shooting VIII) and went out to Australia. He joined the Australian army in February 1915, was made a corporal at once (‘Thanks,’ reported his father, ‘to his training in your excellent OTC’) and was soon a sergeant. He worked as a volunteer stoker to help save the torpedoed transport Southland and then fought on Gallipoli and the Western Front, surviving the war. Between August 1914 and March 1915, 20,577 officers were commissioned from OTCs, and there were still another 12,290 ex-OTC men serving in the ranks.

  For the classic example of an OTC product one need look no further than George Marsden-Smedley, captain of both cricket and football at Harrow and ‘probably the most outstanding sportsman’ of his generation at that school. He had just matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge when he was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade, and on 18 August 1916 his battalion attacked the Somme village of Guillemont. Marsden-Smedley charged the machine gun that was holding up his company and shot one of the gunners with his revolver, but was himself shot by a German officer and fell dead on the parapet of the trench. His body was never found, but a small private memorial still marks the spot where he died: ‘Lovely and pleasant in life, in death serene and unafraid. Most blessed in remembrance.’5 R. C. Sherriff found himself outside the charmed circle. Reporting for a commission in 1914 he told the interviewing officer that he had been at Kingston Grammar School. The officer carefully went through the list of schools that had the War Office’s approval and to Sheriff’s irritation Kingston Grammar, despite its distinction, had no OTC and was not on the list. He joined as a private and earned his officer’s stars the hard way, ending the war as a decorated captain in the East Surreys, and using his experience to write the play Journey’s End, set in a company headquarters dug-out on the eve of the great German offensive of 1918.

  Cambridge University OTC, formed from the university’s Rifle Volunteer Corps (which had sent sufficient volunteers to South Africa with the Suffolk Regiment to obtain a Boer War battle honour) had a cavalry squadron, a two-gun section of field artillery, a company of fortress engineers, an infantry battalion, and a field ambulance section. It produced a flood of officers, with a cruelly high proportion of dead. When I was an undergraduate at Emmanuel College I gave less thought than I should have done to the memorial stone at the north-east corner of Front Court, in the shadow of Christopher Wren’s chapel, headed ‘These sons of this House fell in war’. There are 123 names from this small college. Although he was still a student, Kenneth Ashby answered the War Office’s appeal for men who owned their own motor-bikes to volunteer as dispatch riders, was hastily made a corporal in the Royal Engineers and, stripes still white on his sleeve, was reported missing on 1 September 1914 during the retreat from Mons. Frederick Lillie, a regular major in the Royal Irish, was killed at St Eloi in the Ypres salient in March 1915. Thomas Knott, only four years out of college when war the war started, was a lieutenant colonel, with a DSO and two mentions in dispatches, when he fell commanding 1/6th Gloucesters at Arras in April 1917. Of the six clergymen who died, one, John Pinkerton, had laid aside his clerical collar to die on the Somme as a lance corporal in the Royal Scots. Another, Roger Ingolby, had served as a trooper in the Alberta Dragoons before accepting a commission in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He died when 36th Ulster Division carried the Schwaben Redoubt, in its inimitable style, on the first day of the Somme. There were no less than twelve doctors in the group. One, Wallace Hillbrook, died at Nairobi while serving with the Congo Carrier Corps, and another, Charles Gow, was killed as a regimental medical officer when the Royal Naval Division took Beaucourt on 13 November 1916, just yards away from a fellow ‘Emma’ man, Lieutenant Alfred Maynard of the same division’s Howe Battalion.

  These are just tiny tesserae that glitter in a huge mosaic, but they hint at the way the war transformed officer recruiting. Young men who would never have thought of military careers, or who might have been deterred by the expense of such a costly profession, answered the call in their thousands. Some joined their local Territorial units, perhaps getting instant commissions on the basis of OTC service or personal recommendation, or serving in the ranks until commissioned into their own units or elsewhere. A few Territorial units, like the ‘class battalions’ of the London Regiment, that had behaved, before the war, as much as gentlemen’s clubs as military units, produced a disproportionate amount of officers. Of the 12,642 other ranks who served in the London Rifle Brigade during the war, 11 per cent of the total at 1,339, were commissioned, a proportion rising to 26 per cent of the original members of 2/London Rifle Brigade. 28th (County of London) Battalion, the London Regiment, better known as the Artists Rifles and numbering the painter Frederic, Lord Leighton amongst its former commanding officers, began the war as a normal Territorial battalion, and went to France early, in October 1914. The following month it was ordered to send fifty selected men as officers to other battalions in the BEF. Some reported for duty wearing their Artists’ private soldier’s uniforms with a second lieutenant’s pip on their shoulder. The battalion was soon converted to an officer-cadet unit, and over the course of the war furnished the army with 10,000 officers. John Lloyd-Jones, who had matriculated at Emmanuel in 1910, began in the Artists Rifles and died in March 1916, of pneumonia and pleurisy, as a captain in the Green Howards. More typically, Siegfried Sassoon, who was to become a distinguished war poet, was a private soldier in the Sussex Yeomanry until a tedious convalescence from an injury incurred when a borrowed horse fell on him and the growing conviction that his unit would never get into the war persuaded him to let an old family friend recommend him for a special reserve commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Like his fellow poet Robert Graves, an officer in the same battalion, Sassoon was pointedly told that his was a permanent commission, albeit in the regiment’s reserve battalion, not one of the temporary commissions awarded to officers in the New Armies.

  The New Armies, formed in response to Lord Kitchener’s urgent demand for troops, were officered from a variety of sources. Long-retired warriors shook the mothballs out of their uniforms and did their best to keep up with boys less than half their age. 6/Cameron Highlanders was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Angus Douglas-Hamilton, a general’s son who had joined t
he Camerons in 1884. At fifty-two he was a little old for the front line, but at Loos, when the units on either side had fallen back, he rallied his battalion and led it forward four times: ‘The last time he led all that remained, consisting of about fifty men, in a most gallant manner and was killed at their head.’6 One of his men recalled how

  Led by our brave old colonel, bareheaded and with no other weapon than his walking stick, we made for the top of ‘Hill 70’ through a murderous rifle and machine-gun fire, while shells crashed all around us … The white-haired old man who led us was shot dead, and shortly afterwards Capt Milne [the adjutant, and an Indian Army officer], cool and unruffled to the last, paid a similar penalty.7

  Many New Army units – ‘pals’ battalions’ – were raised by exploiting strong links within urban communities. The mayor of Swansea was amongst the civic leaders offering the War Office a formed battalion of local men, and the Swansea Pals (formally 14th (Service) Battalion The Welsh Regiment) was formed with the powerful support of Sir Alfred Mond of the Mond Nickel Works. H. W. Benson, a regular officer in the East Surreys, but, more to the point, a member of a prominent Swansea family, arrived to take command. Some of his officers had firm local connections. Dyson Brock Williams was a successful solicitor, and had played cricket for both Swansea and Glamorgan: he was appointed major in May 1915. John Stanley Strange of Brynmill, manager of the Old Brewery, volunteered for the battalion immediately and was soon made a lieutenant. The mayor’s eldest son, Francis Llewellyn Corker, had joined the Glamorgan Yeomanry as a private in September 1914 but, wondrous to relate, was commissioned into the Swansea battalion. John Henry England had served in the OTC at King’s College, Taunton, and was working as a clerk. He enlisted into the Territorials in August 1914, but the recommendations of local worthy Colonel William Watts and the Earl of Plymouth, Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan, were quite enough to get him a commission with the Pals.8

  The Oldham Pals (24th Battalion The Manchester Regiment) was commanded by a ‘dug out’ who had joined the army in 1884 and retired before the war. Most of his officers were found by inviting local men with expertise (or plain aspirations) to a public meeting. At least four of the new officers had been pupils at Hulme Grammar School, two were serving in a Public Schools battalion and another two in a Manchester-raised pals’ battalion. One of the latter men, Walter Wall, was a theatrical agent by profession, who turned up to recommend Douglas Marshall, an actor who was then appearing in one of Oldham’s theatres. Not only was Marshall taken on as a second lieutenant, but Wall found himself appointed captain.9 Similar patterns of recruitment applied across most of these units. But perhaps few New Army battalions were quite as distinctive as 16/Royal Scots, raised from players and supporters of Hearts of Midlothian Football Club, with a good leavening of Hibernian, Raith Rovers and Falkirk men. The battalion was raised by Sir George McCrae, Edinburgh hatter and former MP, who proceeded to command it on the Somme, where it struck deep into the German positions on the first day, its penetration commemorated by a fine memorial in Contalmaison. The sergeant major of the company that made best progress was the Tynecastle half-back Annan Ness: the battalion lost ten officers and 566 of its men that day. Some New Army battalions of the Middlesex Regiment and Royal Fusiliers recruited only public school men, and were soon pressed to send their best on for commissioning: 16/Middlesex had lost 900 by July 1915.

  It was all too easy to get a commission early on. When the Territorial 2/4th Somerset Light Infantry left for India in December 1914 it had three Mackie brothers serving as subalterns, the last of them having joined the battalion with days to spare. His elder brother James:

  heard the Colonel saying this morning that he wanted one more subaltern so I at once approached him and said that I had a younger brother who would like to join. He jumped at the idea … I told him that you were not very old and had no experience, but he said that if Father and Mother were willing and Doctor passed you he would take you … As the Colonel has definitely decided to take you, you need not wait till you are gazetted before you get your uniform but can begin at once.10

  All three brothers survived the war. Etonian Herbert Buckmaster had served as a private in the Imperial Light Horse in the Boer War – ‘we had Texas boys, sailors, cowpunchers, Bulawayo “stiffs” and a certain amount of what my friend Jack White termed “younger sons sent out to be shot” – but had left the army before accepting the commission for which he had been recommended. In 1914 he was married to actress Gladys Cooper, made a good living betting on horses, and mixed in guardee circles. Later in life he reflected poignantly on the dining room of the Carlton Hotel on a pre-war evening:

  I can see Percy Wyndham and his wife sitting there. They had just been married. Percy was killed in 1914. I can see Bobs Ashton and Angus Mackintosh both in the Blues and both so soon to die. I can see David Bingham … and Daisy Orr come in and look round. Both David Bingham and Arthur Orr were killed early in the war. I can see Tommy Musgrave of the Irish Guards, who, going over the top, raced a long way ahead of his men and was killed.

  In the summer of 1914 Buckmaster could not, at first, lay hands on a commission. The Inns of Court Regiment had trained officers for London Territorial units and, following an appeal to The Times from its commanding officer, was hard at work with hundreds of men ‘of good education’, and was now full up and had a long waiting list. The War Office told him that ‘being married and not under thirty’ was a fatal objection. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, promised him an RNVR commission, though it was not quite what he was after. Eventually he went to see someone:

  whom I knew slightly at the War Office … He was courtesy itself and within minutes I was given a commission and told to report to the 12th Reserve Regiment of Cavalry at the East Cavalry Barracks, Aldershot, as early as possible, which I did.

  It was not a comfortable mess because it still adhered to ‘the pre-war custom of completely ignoring a newly joined subaltern, even when he was a man of thirty and obviously a man of the world’. When news arrived that the Blues had been ‘badly cut up’ in May 1915 he jumped at the chance to join them, and was amongst friends immediately: on his first night in the trenches he ‘dined in a dug out in the trenches of the Hohenzollern Redoubt’ with four cronies. In February 1918, after a good deal of front-line service, he was at last gazetted a lieutenant in the Blues Special Reserve, and was delighted to report that he ‘was no longer a temporary gentleman’. He used the captaincy that arrived later that year for the rest of his life.11 The administrative confusion that inevitably accompanied the hasty commissioning of so many men produced the occasional difficulty. Buckmaster’s RNVR commission was gazetted on the same day as his army commission. Cecil Moorhouse Slack (‘a junior clerk in Reckitt and Sons Ltd’) joined the New Army Hull Pals as a private in August 1914 and, at the same time, applied for a Territorial commission. He reported to 4/East Yorks when he was gazetted, only to be told by his father that ‘a squad of soldiers had called at my home to arrest me for desertion.’ The matter was eventually sorted out and he received back pay for his period of ‘desertion’.12

  There were many who might easily have been given commissions but decided to serve in the ranks. Lieutenant Robert Bridgeman, son of a Conservative politician (instantly commissioned from Eton in the summer of 1914), lay ill in bed at a Casualty Clearing Station, and was rather surprised when Lance Corporal Crawford, ‘a tall and rather forbidding figure’ told him that

  I know your father very well and would like to write and tell him about you.’ He was none other than the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, chief Tory whip until he succeeded to the peerage who, at the age of 45, had decided on this form of war work … Even if I had been fit it would have been hard to take being saluted by him and called ‘Sir.’13

  Leslie Coulson, a journalist’s son, was assistant editor of the Morning Post in 1914, and, feeling obliged to follow the patriotic line promoted by his newspaper, enlisted in 2/2 Londons in September 1914,
refusing to apply for a commission. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I will do the thing fairly. I will take my place in the ranks.’ He later transferred to 12/London, was promoted to sergeant and recommended for a commission, but was mortally wounded when they took Leuze (‘Lousy’) Wood on the Somme in October 1916. The furious poem ‘Who made the Law?’ was found on his body.

  Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?

  Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?

  Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?

  Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?14

  It became progressively harder for enterprising young men to gain direct commissions, although even in 1915 the right contacts worked wonders. Carlos Paton (‘Pip’) Blacker was at Eton when war broke out and failed the eye-test on his first attempt to join the army. He went up to Oxford in the autumn of 1914 but could not settle down, failed the army’s eye test twice more, and went off to work in the civilian British Field Hospital in Belgium. His younger brother Robin, a naval cadet until his eyesight weakened, had obtained a commission in the Rifle Brigade, by way of an Eton master who was commanding one of its companies. But his battalion seemed unlikely to go to France fast enough, and he negotiated a transfer to the Coldstream Guards, suggesting that Pip should approach the Coldstream too. Pip duly found a ‘broad-minded’ doctor so as to pass the eye test (a process eased by being left in the room containing the eye-chart for fifteen minutes so that he could memorise the letters), had a short interview with Colonel Richardson Drummond Hay at Regimental Headquarters in Birdcage Walk on 4 July and was posted to the Coldstream on the 15th. Although ‘I had passed Certificate A and been a sergeant in the Eton OTC’, Blacker found himself on the drill square three times a day, though the ‘extraordinarily easy hours’ enabled him to spend a good deal of time rowing. He survived the First World War, winning an MC. Having trained as a doctor between the wars he found himself medical officer of his old battalion in the Second World War, when he earned the George Medal. Robin Blacker, ‘beside himself’ at the news that his old battalion of the Rifle Brigade had been cut to pieces, pressed to be sent to join 1/Coldstream in France. Pip saw him off from Windsor station, and wrote in his diary ‘I put the chances at 4 in 10 that I never see him again.’ Like Rudyard Kipling’s only son Jack, Robin Blacker was reported missing, believed killed, after the Guards Division attacked at Loos.15