Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  We have a big match on. We are still unbeaten, and likely to remain so, although we lost a good many of the old boys in this last attack … They are all heroes, every one of them, and we realise it more every day. I saw plenty of men knocked out in this last affair, but I never heard one word of complaint, they were simply glorious.

  As was often the case in Pals’ battalions, discipline in 17/Middlesex owed at least as much to the bonds of mateship in the old world as the letter of the law in the new. In July 1916 Clapton Orient forward, Private William Jonas, was trapped in a trench with his CSM, Richard McFadden. The two were childhood friends and had played for the same club: there was no nonsense about rank:

  Willie turned to me and said, ‘Goodbye Mac. Best of luck, special love to my sweetheart Mary Jane and best regards to the lads at Orient.’ Before I could reply to him he was up and over. No sooner had he jumped out of the trench, my best friend of nearly twenty years was killed before my eyes.

  Sergeant Major McFadden – ‘this fine soldier-player’ – had already received civilian awards for saving two boys from the River Lea and a child from a burning house. He was awarded the Military Medal in October 1916 but was mortally wounded soon afterwards. Sergeant Fred Parker, his club captain, admitted

  It is a terrible blow to all the boys who are left. I could not believe it at first, but it is too true. Mac feared nothing. All the boys are going to visit his grave as soon as they get the chance … We have had a splendid cross made with a football on top of it, but that will not bring him back.6

  CSM Richard McFadden MM lies in Couin British Cemetery, east of the Picardy town of Doullens. Its register records that he was ‘late of Clapton Orient Football Club’.

  In the summer of 1914 recruiting had been so buoyant that mounted policemen had been required to hold the crowd outside the Central London Recruiting Office in check. Latecomers sometimes discovered that, for the moment, there were no vacancies in that most voracious of all arms, the infantry. But not all volunteers had been fired by patriotic motives. There was some moral blackmail. Harry Ogle remembered how ‘young men not in uniform were presented with white feathers by young women (also not in uniform),’ and older men ‘thinking themselves safe behind “important jobs” urged those to enlist who had nothing to lose but their lives.’7

  It was evident that many of the first to sign up had volunteered because they were out of work. Rory Baynes, adjutant of 9/Scottish Rifles, thought that

  the first lot … were a pretty rough crowd. The next lot were rather better. They’d had jobs and given them up and joined the army. Then later a superior class came down. These were all very well dressed, with a couple carrying suitcases, and later on came an even smarter variety.8

  Captain C. E. Jesser-Davis found that his company of 11/Rifle Brigade consisted of ‘three hundred and twenty men and boys in every variety of civilian attire, mostly rather shabby (although one man was in possession of a white collar) waiting in the road with their newspaper parcels under their arms’.9 There was widespread agreement that men filled out with army food and profited from physical training in the open air. The Oldham Pals were soon sent off to Llanfairfechan, and one of them reported on a ‘wonderful … change … they are looking splendid. There are no pale faces as one saw in Chadderton.’10 In sharp contrast to pre-war recruitment patterns, huge quantities of men with steady jobs, many of them in industries with a tradition of militancy, joined the army. By mid-1915 over 230,000 miners, about one-quarter of the entire workforce, had volunteered. A man could be a trade unionist and a patriot too.

  Nevertheless, for many men of 1914, military service represented, as it has since 1660, a real improvement on the lives they left behind. Adrian Gregory is right to observe, in his important study of British society in the war, that ‘No view of the horrors of the First World War can be complete without a sense of the horrors of the pre-war peace.’ The death rate amongst the children of ‘generally sober, thrifty and generally employed’ working-class families was one in four, and this was ‘roughly double the death rate of adult males in the armed forces 1914–1918.’ The mining village of Sengennydd lost 440 men and boys, almost 10 per cent of its population, in a pit disaster in 1913. No British community suffered loss on this scale during the war.11

  Yet there was a sense that, thanks to improvements in food, housing and sanitation, this was better than what had gone before, and perhaps it was, after all, worth fighting for. Moreover, officers and men in the battle zone often wrote of their horror at the destruction they witnessed, and the importance of preserving their own country from a similar fate. ‘Great Britain is fortunate’, wrote a Sengennydd man in France. ‘It pains one to note the havoc in this country. This was an industrious place and now the work of ages lies wrecked around us.’12 At the other end of the social scale Captain John Norwood told his wife

  I have a very fond spot for the Germans whom I regard as our natural allies and I dislike the French … I must say the way the Germans have burnt whole villages and turned out the women has made me quite sick. I have time after time stayed in a perfect little village, with good hospitable souls … and before the day was over seen the whole valley and plain burning for miles.13

  In 1914 the Manchester Guardian journalist C. E. Montague dyed his hair black to enlist, to hide his 47 years. He later accepted a commission, but his Disenchantment marks an important point of departure in criticism of the war. Nevertheless, even he affirmed

  The war had to be won: that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties.14

  Early in 1915 the government recognised that it needed a manpower strategy to help meet the demands of the army and war industry. So it introduced a National Registration Bill in June, requiring men and women aged 15–65 to register details of employment and skills. Lord Derby, director of recruiting, asked all men of between 18 and 40 to register voluntarily: they would then be called up by age batches, single men first. Thousands of men, who could see the way things were going, decided to jump before they were pushed. Many 1915 volunteers used the opportunity to slip into the cavalry or garrison artillery, hoping that by doing so they would escape disappearing into the infantry’s maw. K. J. Fenton, an 18-year-old living in Watford with his widowed mother, could not get his employer to release him for service, but as more and more friends joined up ‘I felt left entirely in the cold.’ He decided to attest once the Derby scheme came into force:

  So one evening in November when I was on my way home from the station, I suddenly decided to call in at the Clarendon Hall recruiting station and present myself for enrolment. I was medically examined and passed as fit. Having taken the oath together with a few other men, I was handed a shilling and a khaki armlet …

  For six months I heard nothing, then on Monday May 6th 1916 the expected notice came, I was ordered to report to the Queen’s Road Recruiting Office the next day. Although it was more or less expected, the summons came as a bit of a blow, this sudden order, breaking off home ties, however such things were common occurrences in those days.

  He was sent to Bedford by train, and on arrival told that ‘any of us who were under nineteen could go home and wait for another calling up notice.’ Although he had five months to go before his birthday he reported: ‘I did not avail myself of the offer, for, having taken the plunge, I decided to go through with it.’ He knew one or two other Watford men by sight, and ‘we contrived to keep together as much as possible. In this manner I kept the close companionship of three Watford fellows, Oatley, Randall and Dean throughout our period of training. Of the three, Oatley was killed, Dean missing, Randall got through alright.’15

  Overall, though, the results of the Derby scheme were disappointing, for almost half the single and rather less than half the married men failed to register, persuading the government that it had no alternative to consc
ription, and the first of the Military Service Acts became law in January 1916. Thereafter, legislation bit ever harder by extending age limits, and as enlistment standards were progressively lowered, medical boards came under increasing pressure to send men to the front. In March 1918 one platoon commander admitted that ‘in one of my sections the lance corporal was the only fit man – of the three privates one was deaf, one was almost blind and one mentally sub-normal.’16 In 1917 James Dunn’s 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers received a man who had been torpedoed four times and was so badly shocked by the experience that he had been invalided out of the navy.

  Many of the men conscripted in the last eighteen months of the war would, in normal times, have had nothing whatever to do with the army. Alfred M. Hale, living a gentlemanly existence on investment income was called up in 1917 at the age of 41, and found himself as an officer’s servant in the Royal Flying Corps. He was deeply resentful that he was carrying out, for others, tasks that had once been done on his behalf, and constantly terrified that a medical board would propel him into the infantry. Frank Gray was 37 and a successful solicitor conscripted into the infantry in 1917. His chauffeur drove him to the recruiting office, and thereafter he endured the ‘terribly hard’ life of an infantry private in the year of Passchendaele. He had no use whatever for the army’s ironbound old ways, but found his anguish redeemed by the bravery and generosity of his officers. At the other extreme, young Fred Hodges, called up at 18, was anxious to do his bit, and at the war’s end was proud to return home with the badges of a good battalion and two stripes on his sleeve.

  There was something distinctively British about manpower policies in the First World War. Before the war, the government had slipped into an informal agreement that would, in the event of a Franco-German clash, be likely to involve Britain in a large-scale continental war. And yet her army was not a mass force designed for such a conflict. Lord Kitchener’s formal instructions to Field Marshal Sir John French at the very start of the war warned him

  The numerical strength of the British force and its contingent reinforcement is strictly limited, and with this consideration kept steadily in view it will be obvious that the greatest care must be exercised towards a minimum of loss and wastage …

  The high courage and discipline of your troops should, and certainly will, have fair and full opportunity of display during the campaign, but officers may well be reminded that in this their first experience of European warfare, a greater measure of caution must be employed than under former conditions of hostilities against an untrained adversary.17

  Within a matter of weeks it was evident that it was simply impossible to fight an industrialised war at the beginning of the twentieth century without incurring ‘loss and wastage’ on an enormous scale. For all the urgings of the compulsory service lobby, no British government could hope to introduce conscription until the voluntary principle could be shown to have run its course. Thereafter, sustained by its conviction that this was indeed a war fought to avenge unprovoked aggression and to achieve a lasting peace, it applied a ‘terrifying single-mindedness’ that was eventually to smash all those barriers that had for long stood between British men and compulsory military service.18

  CHAPTER 15

  FOREIGN FRIENDS

  THE ARMY HAS used foreigners for centuries in an effort to reduce its demands on native-born manpower. The rules for the enlistment of foreigners, like their motives for joining, have varied widely across three centuries. At one end of the scale there have been mercenaries in the most literal sense of the term, joining primarily to make money, while at the other, there have been those motivated by genuine enthusiasm for the British cause or, more often, hatred of a common enemy. Foreigners fought on both sides of the Civil War, sometimes because of deeply held political or religious conviction, but as often because there was money to be made. The Croatian Captain Carlo Fantom, ‘very quarrelsome and a great ravisher’, according to John Aubrey, announced ‘I care not for your cause … I fight for your half-crowns and your handsome women.’ No sooner was there a British army than it enlisted foreigners, chiefly Dutchmen and Germans, like Melkar Gold who was trumpeter to the King’s Troop of Life Guards throughout the reign of Charles II.1

  In addition to formally enlisting foreigners into her own army, Britain contracted with friendly states in order to lay hands on more ever-elusive manpower. Sometimes these arrangements comprised the direct subordination of foreign units to British command, as was the case with the so-called ‘Hessian’ battalions in the American War of Independence. In fact, of the 30,000-plus German soldiers in North America (about one-quarter of the entire British force) just under 13,000 actually came from Hesse-Kassell; states like Anhalt-Zerbst, Anspach-Beyreuth, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Hesse-Hanau, and Waldeck providing the remainder.

  John Peebles rather admired them, despite their occasional weakness for marauding. Their officers were ‘jovial companions’ at dinner, and in November 1779 he attended a multinational parade where ‘The Highlanders looked very well and in good clean order, the Hessian grenadiers dressed up and powdered, the Anspachers the finest looking troops and tallest I ever saw, and in high discipline.’2 The perceptive Captain Johann Ewald of the Hesse-Kassell Feldjäger corps thought that British officers, like his own countrymen, travelled rather too heavily with hair powder, playing cards, and light reading. He believed that his young soldiers, who did not yet understand the dangers of war, did better than veterans who knew them too well and decamped in his hour of need.3 In contrast, Private Johann Döhla of the Bayreuth Regiment thought that his British comrades travelled commendably light, though he was shocked by their behaviour: they ‘have only the vices of cussing, swearing, drinking, whoring, and stealing, and these more so than almost all other peoples’. Not that his own mates were perfect, for in August 1782 ‘Private Fichtel, of Quesnoy’s Company, was put in jail because, while drunk, he punched a hole in Private Klügel’s head.’4

  The Germans who fought in North America have had a bad press, written off by historians who ought to know better as ‘mercenaries’. Individual soldiers had nothing more to gain from their service than men who enlisted into other armies of the period: financial arrangements concerned their sovereigns and not them. They were, properly speaking, auxiliaries, and the use of foreign auxiliary units was commonplace in Europe. Here lies part of the problem. Americans regarded Britain’s use of foreign troops as wholly inappropriate, and the mere presence of the Hessians ratcheted up the hostility with which the war was fought. This did not, however, prevent the patriots from trying to induce Germans to desert and serve in the Continental Army. Private Döhla’s account of his time as a prisoner of war (he went into captivity after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown) is punctuated by the frequent departure of comrades who had concluded that service with former enemies was better than captivity. Just over 17,000 Germans returned home at the end of the war. Over a thousand had been killed in action and more than 6,000 had died of illness or in accidents. Almost 5,000, many of whom had served with the patriots, settled in North America.

  The German impact on the British army in North America is more complex than the story of the Hessians. During the Revolutionary War most German units fought in line with musket and bayonet, differing little from their redcoated allies. But there were some, like Ewald’s Feldjäger, who carried rifles and specialised in the skirmishing tactics that played such an important part in the conflict. From the 1740s European armies had begun to use small numbers of foresters and gamekeepers, dressed in sombre, practical uniforms and armed with hunting rifles, to protect reconnaissance parties and guide regular troops through difficult terrain.5 Armies that expected to find themselves facing the cunning and resourceful Croatian light infantry used by the Hapsburgs needed to take jäger seriously. It was typical of the way that military fashion aped that of the dominant practitioners of a particular style of warfare that jäger soon began to resemble Croats, with moustaches and lovelocks, and a fondness for tigh
t trousers and fur caps. In the British case the prime impulsion for light troops came from North America, and Major General Edward Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela River in July 1755 was a graphic demonstration of what could go wrong when volley-firing regulars met light troops in the woods.

  At the start of the Seven Years War the British army had taken its first steps towards the creation of light troops intended for use in wooded and broken countryside. In 1755 the Swiss James Prevost proposed that a regular regiment should be raised in North America, manned largely by German and Swiss settlers, with both British and foreign officers. The result was the 62nd or Royal American Regiment of Foot (soon renumbered the 60th). Its two battalions were commanded by Henry Bouquet and Frederick Haldimand, both Swiss, with some of its officers and soldiers recruited in Switzerland or Germany, and others volunteering from other British regiments. At first the 60th dressed in red, and its only visible concession to bush warfare was the absence of lace on its uniforms, although from the very start some officers and men carried rifles rather than muskets. The 60th fought in North America during the Seven Years War and the War of Independence, and by the 1790s part of the regiment dressed in dark ‘rifle’ green and was armed with rifles. During the Napoleonic wars it had a substantial foreign component. In 1804, for instance, the 5th Battalion mustered 585 foreigners and a lone Irishman, and the 7th Battalion was raised in Guernsey in 1813 from German prisoners of war. In 1814 the whole regiment, which had by then served with distinction in Spain, Portugal, and North America, was directed to wear green uniforms with red facings. The regiment’s wholesale conversion into a rifle corps saw it formally renamed ‘The 60th; The King’s Royal Rifle Corps’ and it soldiered on as the KRRC until its 1966 amalgamation into the Royal Green Jackets.6