Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Alexander Stewart was working on a rubber estate in Malaya when war broke out, and served as a private in the part-time Malay States Volunteer Rifles. When his contract expired in early 1915 he returned to London, and that summer called at the War Office

  with a letter of introduction from my uncle by marriage, Colonel Delavoye CB, one time in the 90th Foot ‘Scottish Rifles’.

  Shortly afterwards I received an official intimation from the War Office saying that I had been granted a commission in the Cameronians, as an officer in the Special Reserve, and had been posted to the 3rd Battalion. I was instructed to report to a school for officers in Glasgow on July 1st, 1915.

  Stewart believed that he had got a commission easily because he had served in his school’s rifle volunteer unit for two years and then in its OTC for a further year. He put in two years with the Territorial City of London Yeomanry, and four with the Malay States Volunteer Rifles. He received about a month’s training – ‘one portion of which consisted of rising early in the morning and running about the streets of Glasgow without hat, coat or waistcoat.’ Stewart later argued that short training was no disadvantage, as

  Successfully leading men in war, like most work in life that does not require any special technical knowledge, depends to a great extent upon common sense and a shrewd judgement of character, coupled with the capability of subverting fear. I think that all the regular officers, anyhow all those I met up to and including the rank of Major, were splendid fellows; but nevertheless I soon came to the very definite opinion that the new ‘war officers’ were infinitely more capable, led their men better and did their job better than the old pre-war regulars with whom I came into contact.16

  He took naturally to the life of an infantry officer on the Western Front, attributing his survival to the facts that he carried a rifle as well as a revolver during attacks and turned up his coat collar so as to look as little as possible like an officer, and was always very careful to see that his pipe was ‘properly alight’ before going over the top: ‘I look upon it in the light of a mascot that must seldom be invoked.’ The citation for his MC, won at Arras in the freezing spring of 1917, tells how ‘He knocked out a hostile machine gun, killing and wounding most of the team, and throughout the attack he handled his company with marked courage and skill.’17

  When war broke out the courses at Sandhurst and Woolwich were shortened to three months and six months respectively, and fees were suspended. The senior terms at both colleges had just been commissioned, the cadets in the next batch were either given immediate commissions or promoted after a burst of top-up training. By the end of the year there were 323 cadets at Woolwich and 960 at Sandhurst, most of them preparing for regular commissions, although some of the Sandhurst contingent were New Army officers under training. It was evident that neither the attenuated courses nor the wholesale commissioning of young men into the New Armies, Territorials or Special Reserve would make good the immediate shortfall caused by casualties incurred on the Western Front, and in October the army began to commission regular warrant officers and senior NCOs. They were discharged from the regular army and promptly given temporary commissions, a procedure that was to cause some grief at the war’s end. RSM Murphy of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers reckoned that he had actually come down in the world by becoming a second lieutenant. ‘There I was,’ he complained, ‘a thousand men at my 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.’18 Commissioned with him in the autumn of 1914 were RQMS P. B. Welton, who won an MC and was commanding a battalion of South Wales Borderers at the end of the war, and CSM W. H. Stanway, who was commanding a Cheshire battalion within two years of being commissioned and earned both DSO and MC. Harry Carter had joined the South Staffordshire Regiment as a private in 1899, fought in the Boer War, and had become signalling sergeant by 1914. He was commissioned early in 1915 and first became a temporary lieutenant colonel the following year. He ended the war decorated with DSO and bar and MC and bar, in command of 7/South Staffordshire. When L Battery Royal Horse Artillery was destroyed at Néry on 1 September 1914 its battery sergeant major, George Dorrell, and one of its sergeants, David Nelson, were awarded VCs, and a third went to Captain Edward Bradbury, who was killed. Dorrell and Nelson were both commissioned: Dorrell survived the war and retired a lieutenant colonel, but Nelson was mortally wounded as a major commanding a field battery in the German offensive of March 1918.

  While ex-warrant officers and senior NCOs could generally become officers without the need for much extra training, it was evident that none of the early stop-gap measures, like the short courses at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and London universities or in the Staff College building at Camberley, or indeed the Inns of Court OTC, producing eighty officers a week by mid 1915, were the real answer to generating a steady supply of officers for a long and bloody war. Not only was training haphazard, but many regular officers were nonplussed at what James Jack, an upwardly-mobile Cameronian (captain in 1914 to brigadier general in 1918), called the ‘unsoldierly appearance and manners’ of many of the new officers. All too often the new entry were judged by superficialities. General Sir Ian Hamilton, sent off to command the Gallipoli expedition, was shocked to discover that some of his staff had their spurs on upside down, and wore the cross-straps of their Sam Browne belts over, rather than under, the tunic’s shoulder-strap. The newly commissioned were bombarded with pamphlets telling them how proper officers behaved. Captain A. H. Trapman’s ‘Straight tips for Subs’, first published in 1915, was full of helpful hints on ‘Commissions, Allowances, Kit, Etiquette, Duties and Correspondence’.

  The army was faced with two distinct but intimately related problems: giving its new officers sufficient training to enable them to lead soldiers effectively, and socialising them into the ways of the tribe. The War Office decided, in February 1916, that nobody would be accepted for a commission without serving in the ranks, although time in an OTC service would count instead. Officer-cadet battalions were formed in Britain, one of them using the Inns of Court OTC as its nucleus, and a GHQ Cadet School was established in France. These units took men of all ranks who had been recommended for commissions while serving at the front or in Britain. To start with there were wide variations in the quality of training. Norman Collins, who had enlisted in 1915 and become a lance sergeant in the Seaforth Highlanders, had nothing good to say of No 8 Officer Cadet Battalion at Lichfield.

  We are always scrubbing floors, forming fours, etc. doing 160 paces per minute on the square, brushing boots every hour from 5 a.m. until 7.30 p.m. when we are free to write up our notes till 9.30 p.m. [We] are called miscellaneous names by our sergeants, etc. who know nothing, it’s a dog’s life and several cadets from the firing line want to go back.19

  Ernest Shephard, a regular company sergeant major in the Dorsets, was sent to the GHQ Cadet School at Blendecques near St Omer in mid-September 1916. All students removed their badges of rank – ‘so that a Pte or RSM are on the same footing’ – and were issued with brassards marked CSIC for ‘Cadet School Infantry Company’. Training included a stint in a quiet sector of the front line near Béthune. ‘I felt very glad we came to this part of the line,’ wrote Shephard, ever the enthusiast, ‘as it is so interesting.’ At the end of the course, in mid-November, he was commissioned into the Dorsets and posted, not to his beloved 1st Battalion, but to the 5th. ‘Have seen the last of some jolly good pals,’ he wrote. ‘Certainly of short duration, but in such places as this gather splendid fellows, privates up to RSM in rank, no distinction, none required. The man who passes through the ranks to a commissioned rank is the better for his experience.’ When he joined his battalion he found that it been burnt out by the Somme, and so heavily topped up with officers and men as to be ‘practically a new Bn.’ Captain Ritson, his company commander, had never been under fire before, but ‘is a very decent man and anything I say is worked on’. O
n 30 December Shephard was told to take temporary command of D Company, and was at its head when it took part in a diversionary attack near Beaucourt on 11 January 1917. His company took its objective but, in filthy weather, was sharply counter-attacked. Shephard sent a message warning a flanking company to fall back, because his position was untenable; he was killed when it was overrun.20 Until the late summer of 1918 it was still possible for an NCO or warrant officer to receive a direct commission into his own unit. John Lucy was a pre-war regular in the Royal Irish Rifles, who had lost his brother Denis, a corporal in the same battalion, in the war’s opening campaign. He was commissioned in June 1917 after a brief interview with a general, and was delighted by the way his brother officers welcomed him to their mess:

  My reception was openly warm. Men who had officered me in peace and war rose to meet me and bring me in. My late title of sergeant evaporated in the first breath of an atmosphere easier and more congenial, though not perhaps as openly intimate as that of the troops. ‘Come on, old John here you are at last. The first one’s on me.’ Someone said: ‘No, on the mess.’ They drank my health in sherry. They each recommended their own tailors – good tailors, who would let you run a long account. I was given the choice of four good batmen and the offer of the loan of any article of kit or equipment I temporarily lacked.21

  At the beginning of the war the army needed officers both to replace those who had been killed or too badly wounded to serve on, and to create a force of a genuinely world-class standard. From the summer of 1916 it became evident that the real problem would be in maintaining the army at the size it had reached, and from the winter of 1917 it had become no less clear that, even though conscription bit down ever harder, the army was bound to decline in size. This process was matched by the army’s growing preparedness to commission men who seemed to have the right abilities, wholly regardless of education or social background. George Ashurst had signed on as a special reservist when he lost his job in a mine office in 1913, and then found work cleaning engines in a locomotive depot. He was mobilised in August 1914 and fought with the Lancashire Fusiliers in France, Belgium and Gallipoli, and by the summer of 1918 was an experienced sergeant:

  While in the reserve trenches I was sent for by the colonel. When I presented myself before him the first question was, ‘Sergeant, how would you like to go in for a commission?’ For a moment I stared at him to make sure he wasn’t joking. Then, thinking quickly I said, ‘Oh, I can’t be an officer, Sir, I haven’t got any money.’ ‘Nonsense, sergeant,’ said my CO, ‘we don’t want men of means as officers these days; we want men of experience like yourself – men who know this job and can lead others the way to go. Don’t think about expenses, the government will see to it that you have all you require. I shall send your name forward to the general.’ And, as though to show me that that was final, he started to write on some paper in front of him.

  Ashurst’s men persuaded him that this would be a fine opportunity, for while he was away from the front the war might finish. He was interviewed by his brigade commander shortly afterwards, and told that ‘it would be absolutely my own fault’ if he did not enjoy his time in officer training. After two weeks’ leave he reported at the Officer Cadet Battalion at Ripon. ‘Wounded officers, unfit for further service abroad, were in charge of the camp, and gentlemen they were,’ he wrote.

  The routine was simple and the parades very easy. The most severe penalty for doing wrong was RTU – Returned to Unit – which meant, of course, being sent back to one’s regiment in France. Any man who could not behave like a gentleman and conform to the simple rules of the camp certainly deserved RTU.

  Ashurst had passed his first exams comfortably and was preparing to ‘go down to Cambridge to have the final polish put on me’ when the war ended. He could not get too excited about it, because ‘the war had been over for me three months before.’22

  An experience that was enjoyable for a man who had been at war for three years was a good deal less pleasant to a man from a more sheltered background. Alfred Duff Cooper, whose father was a successful London surgeon, had been educated at Eton and Oxford (where, as he recalled, the OTC was known as ‘the dog-potters’) before going into the Foreign Office in 1913 and remaining there till he was called up in 1917. He reflected, later in life, that this was excellent timing: had he joined up earlier (when he could have obtained a commission without any difficulty) he would probably have been killed, but had he left it much later he would have missed the war altogether. His mother wanted him to join the cavalry, but he declined the suggestion because ‘I have always had such a horror of horses.’ Cooper had an interview with the regimental lieutenant colonel of the Grenadier Guards, who was ‘a Guardsman of the old school. He spoke to me of my mother, whom he had known years ago, and said that he would put down my name and consider my request to join the regiment.’ As he was leaving, the regimental adjutant told him that he could consider the matter as ‘practically settled.’

  Practically settled, that is, without the necessary rite of passage, in this case the Household Brigade Officer Cadet Battalion at Bushey Park. Cooper had rather thought that he would enjoy a little light officer training, but

  My feelings may then be imagined when I found that I was to live the life of a private soldier, clean my own boots and equipment, make my own bed, sleep between blankets and take part with my comrades in scrubbing the floor of the barrack room … I have seldom been more utterly wretched than during the first few days of my sojourn at Bushey Hall.

  He was saved by a short weekend leave – mid-Saturday to 10 p.m. on Sunday – with dinner at a club. It was not his own, but ‘one of those great station-halls of clubs’. However, an imperial pint of champagne and Alice Through the Looking Glass to read over dinner lifted his spirits. This was a contrast to life in his seven-man hut:

  They are all rankers except one who is a bank clerk and who has somehow escaped military service hitherto. They are as follows. Clay, a shoemaker from Nottingham, a very nice friendly fellow who helps me a lot with my equipment and in other ways. All the men are really nice and helpful. Schofield, a boy of nineteen who speaks broad Yorkshire and knows the whole of the drill-book by heart. He seldom talks on any other subject. Harris, a tall thin dark fellow, who before the war was a window-dresser in Sheffield. He is quite nice. Catley, a common fellow with waxed moustaches, who talks a lot, fancies himself, refers to the ‘fair sex’, insinuates that he is one of their conquerors, and smokes Virginia cigarettes last thing at night and first thing in the morning. There is no harm in him. Durgan – not a bad fellow, uninteresting and sleeps in his shirt. Jones, a bank clerk, with a splendid cockney accent and a fund of filthy stories which sometimes shock the others but always amuse me.

  The course lasted four months, with four days leave in the middle. Cooper spent his leave with the Horner family at Mells in Somerset. He had been at Oxford with Edward Horner, who had joined the North Somerset Yeomanry at the start of the war, transferred to the 18th Hussars in 1915, returned to the front after being severely wounded that year and had been killed in November 1917:

  Edward meant so much in my life. I loved no man better. His high courage and fine independence had so splendidly resisted the effects of the war that already he had begun to seem a glorious record of the glorious past. By his death our little society loses one of the last assets that gave it distinction. And I think we have paid more than our share.

  Reflecting on his time in the ranks, he thought that

  Class is an inevitable adjunct of human nature. The aim of the lawgiver should be to render the relation between classes happy and to facilitate the passage from one class to another. When class, which is natural, degenerates into caste which is against nature, then it becomes an evil.23

  The officer corps had never been wholly class-based, although, paradoxically, it had actually become more so after the abolition of purchase and the close links between public schools and Sandhurst. Its social structure was transformed d
uring the war. During the whole of the conflict the army granted just over 229,000 commissions, excluding those given to chaplains and medical officers, and commissions granted for ‘special duties’. Of this total, nearly 108,000 went to men who had passed out of officer cadet training units, and another 36,700 to those commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps (RAF from 1 April 1918) from its own cadet battalions.24 It is impossible to be sure how many commissions had been given to serving NCOs and men before training through officer cadet battalions became the norm, but it is already evident that well over half the officers who fought in the war were ex-rankers of some species. Some were genuine pre-war regulars like John Lucy or Ernest Shephard, others were wartime-joined soldiers from traditional ‘other-rank’ backgrounds, like Duff Cooper’s comrades Clay and Catley, and others, like Cooper himself, came from a conventional officer background and served in the ranks as a means to an end.