Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  A man’s number also appears on his headstone, and is added to memorials when needed to differentiate those with the same surname and initials – like Jones J, not uncommon in a Welsh unit. When a signaller in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers told Private Morgan Jones that he had a premonition of death, he began: ‘Look here, ’95 …’. And, so Private Jones told Captain Dunn: ‘When HQ Company led the way into the line next day one of the first to be killed was ’91 Davies.’18 Until 1920 these were numbers, issued to a man when he enlisted and then changed if he moved, voluntarily or not, to another regiment. The notion of an army number, attached to a soldier throughout his service, came later. Tracing a man’s enlistment date through his number is a dark art, but some regiments added an ‘S’ prefix to those joining service battalions and ‘TF’ to those signing up for their Territorials. The practice of giving blocks of regimental numbers to particular recruiting offices means that men with adjacent numbers had usually enlisted together. The brothers Privates Ernest and Herbert Philby lie in the same row in Flat Iron Copse Cemetery, in the lee of Mametz Wood on the Somme. Though they died with 1/Middlesex, they both enlisted in 1/8th Middlesex in Ealing, and their regimental numbers, TF5290 and TF5291, tell us that they joined on the same day.

  Yet the logic is not infallible. A few miles to the north two French Canadian soldiers in the Royal Fusiliers, Lance Corporal Charles Guy and Private Pierre Jean Destrubé, lie in the same grave in Serre Road Cemetery No 1. The family inscription on its stone tells that they were united in death as they were in life, for their bodies were found arm in arm – but their numbers, K/24 and 1236, suggest separate enlistment. A hint of the complexities of regimental numbering can be seen from the case of William Bedford. In March 1915 he arrived in France as 91613 Corporal Bedford of 19/Yorkshires. In July 1915 he became 573779 Corporal Bedford of the Labour Corps, posted to 151 Prisoner of War Company. He was demobilised in February 1919 but finding life outside hard, re-enlisted for a year that May. Bedford volunteered for exhumation and burial duties, duly receiving the new Labour Corps number 690692 and retained it till he was released due to ill health in November 1919.19

  This everlasting association of man and regiment veils the fact that the system broke down under war’s pressure, and that many a soldier lies beneath a cap-badge he might scarcely have worn. Even in the first heady flush of recruiting some New Army and Territorial battalions could not find enough local men: 9/Devons had only eighty soldiers from Devon, while the remainder came from London and Birmingham; there were 460 kilted Manchester men in 2/4th Seaforth Highlanders. Private Percy Holmes died of natural causes at home, and the seasons roll over his grave outside the church of St Michael and All Angels in the Hampshire village of Cheriton. His graven badge shows that, though he lies many miles from the county boundary, he was in the Dorsets. Initially, the army strove to send men wounded in action back to their own battalions as soon as they were fit, and to post recently trained recruits to the front in drafts commanded by officers of the regiment. But by the middle of 1916 it had little time for such niceties. Both returning wounded and newly arriving drafts destined for the Western Front arrived at Le Havre or Harfleur – Calais and Boulogne were too close to the line to serve as major logistic bases, and were used largely for leave and liaison traffic. They were then sent to the uncomfortable world of base depots centred on Etaples (inevitably Eat-Apples in soldier slang) in the estuary of the River Canche.

  Between June 1915 and September 1917 over a million officers and men passed through Etaples on their way to the front, receiving training intended to prepare them for battle. It was delivered to rookies and veterans alike, by staff known from their yellow arm-bands as canaries, most of whom were anxious to remain at Etaples rather than go to the front. The place was extremely unpopular. Trained soldiers were posted up to the front in drafts under officers, but soon they were simply sent where they were needed, without much regard for those well-polished badges they had worn on arrival. I. G. Andrew, who had fought at Loos as a corporal in a New Army battalion of the Cameron Highlanders, was commissioned into the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and blew his £50 uniform allowance on a fine khaki doublet and a smart pair of Douglas tartan trews made by the best tailor in Glasgow. After his stint at Etaples he and some fellow Scots were posted to a Staffordshire battalion that had been lacerated on the Somme. They demurred when the colonel ordered them to dress as Englishmen, but agreed to do so when the adjutant asked them politely. Fred Hodges had attended Northampton Grammar School and enthusiastically joined the Northamptons in 1917. But when he arrived in France his draft was lined up and sent to different battalions:

  Friends who stood in line next to one another were parted by a hand and an order, and marched off to different Regimental Base Headquarters. There were bell tents in a long line, where particulars were taken and, to our surprise, new regimental numbers were given to us …

  In this preremptory way, I and about 300 others suddenly became Lancashire Fusiliers, while some of our friends became Manchesters or Duke of Wellington’s or East Yorkshires.20

  He was young and eager, and was well received in 10/Lancashire Fusiliers by Company Sergeant Major Doolan, and was soon delighted to be in a new unit, proudly calling it ‘T’owd Tenth’ and behaving like a proper Lancashire lad.

  Some soldiers coped well enough with rebadging, and simply got on with whatever the army asked them to do, for theirs was an enduring generation. By and large old sweats did not. Sergeant Major Shephard of the Dorsets dreaded the prospect of even changing battalions: ‘I am particularly anxious not to get ill, or slightly wounded,’ he wrote, ‘as nearly all NCOs and men going home now get pushed out to the 5th and 6th Battalions and I want to soldier on with the 1st Battalion.’21 There is good reason for this. A private soldier may stand at the very bottom of the army’s formal hierarchy, but he is not necessarily a man of no consequence. What the army now calls the ‘senior Tom’ had a status all of his own. He may have lost a stripe or refused to accept one, like Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, doyen of the war’s everlasting privates, but he was a known quantity within his company, a useful barometer of opinion, and an invaluable steadier of the young. Sergeant Major Shephard’s diary laments the passing of men like ‘Pte Hoskins No 6591, a good fellow all round’.22 Yet all this status is unofficial. Snatched from his habitat the man is another name on a list, a body to be delivered to sergeant majors for fatigues. Some old soldiers found rebadging so painful that they simply deserted and found their way back to their former battalions, quietly trusting (with a confidence that was rarely misplaced) that a decent adjutant would square the system for them. Second Lieutenant G. F. Maclean joined 1/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in France in 1915:

  The first man I saw wounded was an old soldier called Black Jock, he was carried off and I never expected to see him again. After a month he arrived back in the company. After a few days a note arrived saying that Black Jock had been posted as a deserter. I spoke to him and after some thought he said, ‘Oh! That. They put me in one of those convalescent camps. You never know where they will send you to from there, so I just came back up the line to the battalion.’23

  Sergeant Major Shephard found rebadging exasperating. In August 1916 his battalion, shot to tatters on the first day of the Somme, was in billets near Béthune:

  In the evening a lot of old hands now attached to 2nd Wilts (who are in billets just over the bridge) came to see us. They are terribly upset on account of having to serve with the Wilts … and they went to see our Adjt to ask whether they could not come back to their own regiment. Adjt promised to apply for them, but it will be useless. Why the responsible authorities do these things I cannot imagine. If a certain Regt is required to be reinforced quickly and none of their own available, the matter is explained. But we well know that after our smash on 1 July strong reinforcements were sent for us, and on arrival at the Base they were diverted, some to 2nd Wilts, some to Hampshires, etc. and we received men of
the Hampshires for reinforcements instead of our own. And so the merry game goes on. Some big pot is drawing a large salary for such muddling work as this, ruining the one thing which has kept our army going so well, i.e. ‘Pride of Regiment’.24

  Shephard was in no position to know that the army was now very concerned at the local impact of heavy casualties on the civilian population, and had concluded that there was much merit in spreading the burden of loss more widely.

  A few of the men shot by firing squad had been recently transferred from regiments in which they had enjoyed good reputations, to one where, friendless and under pressure, they failed. In July 1916 Private James Anderson had been in 8/Loyal North Lancashire for just five days when he told the officer commanding a working party ‘I am going out. I can stick it no longer. My nerves have gone.’ An officer who knew him might have cajoled, pressed, or even turned a blind eye. This one did not. Had he known the other men on the working party Anderson might have felt inclined to stay with them. But he went back to his billet and was later found there, fast asleep. When court-martialled Anderson asked for two officers from his old battalion, 12/King’s Liverpool, to speak on his behalf, but one had been killed and the other wounded. The brigade commander, recommending that the death sentence passed by the court should be confirmed, wrote ‘The Commanding Officer has no personal knowledge of this man, but he is of the opinion that the man was so frightened of shell fire that he deliberately preferred to take his chance of the consequences rather than remain under it.’ The fact that Anderson had volunteered in 1914 and fought at Loos, had two brothers killed in France and another wounded in Gallipoli, did not incline the authorities towards clemency, and he was duly shot.25

  One of the more recent First World War memorials, the Irish Peace Park near Messines, was opened on 11 November 1998. Its tall round tower, looking out towards Ploegsteert Wood and the valley of the little Douvre, is made of stone from a British army barracks at Tipperary and a workhouse near Mullingar. It commemorates all Irishmen who died in the First World War, regardless of political persuasion, and in particular celebrates the three Irish-recruited divisions, 10th Irish, 16th Irish, and 36th Ulster. It is impossible to consider the British army’s history without acknowledging the Irishmen who fought in it – either in Irish regiments or in those that were, at least in theory, recruited elsewhere. With the partition of Ireland in 1922 the regiments from the south were disbanded, their colours laid up in a moving ceremony at Windsor Castle, and the Royal Irish Regiment, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Leinster Regiment, and the South Irish Horse – the latter a Special Reserve cavalry regiment – passed into history. The Royal Irish Rifles were renamed the Royal Ulster Rifles, and the Royal Irish Fusiliers and Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers came together as a single corps with one regular battalion each and a common depot.

  After the war the southern Irish regiments went, but the system itself soldiered on with little change, apart from the disappearance of Special Reserve battalions and some renumbering of battalions when the Territorial Force was revived, this time as the Territorial Army. During the First World War the army had found it hard to cross-post territorials without infringing its commitment that they should serve only in their own units. At the beginning of the Second World War it quickly decided that all recruits, regular or Territorial, must enlist for general service without any guarantee of the cap-badge they might eventually wear. The adjutant general, Sir Ronald Adam, would have gone a step further and created a Corps of Infantry to ‘allow administrative flexibility and economy of personnel, and permit the simplest arrangements to be made for the distribution of reinforcements’.26

  The project foundered for two reasons. First, it aroused much military opposition; second, David Margesson, the Conservative secretary of state for war, was not prepared to risk the political explosion he knew would result. Although Adam failed to create a corps of infantry, the establishment in July 1942 of the General Service Corps enabled all recruits to be given basic training and assessment before they were posted onward to their regiments or corps. Their destinations were determined by four criteria: suitability as demonstrated by assessment tests; the requirements of the various arms; their nationality; and only last ‘the need for fostering the county, TA and regimental spirit’.27 This was wholly in accordance with the recommendation of the Committee on Skilled Men in the Services chaired by Sir William Beveridge.

  Men should be enlisted not for this or that Corps, but into the Army as a single Service. On being received, examined and sorted at centres common to the whole Army, they should be posted from those centres to a definite Corps only when it is clear that they fit the requirements of those Corps and that any scarce skill possessed by them will be turned to full account.28

  The benevolent impact of the new policy was arguably most evident in the case of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Its formation was authorised by a Royal Warrant of 19 May 1942, and it came into being on 1 October that year. By May 1945 the corps was 160,000 strong, and it is hard to overstate its impact on an army proceeding inexorably towards mechanisation. But its reverse effect was scarcely less striking. The infantry found itself at the very bottom of the manpower pile. It was first deprived of recruits with the education or aptitude that would enable them to prosper elsewhere as artificers, mechanics, tank crewmen or clerks. And then it was raided for volunteers for those ‘mobs for jobs’ like commandos (not confined, as they are now, to the Royal Marines), airborne troops, and other special forces.

  Although General Adam was well aware of the problem, he was unable to solve it. In 1943 a War Office observer of the fighting in Sicily reported:

  Every platoon can be analysed as follows: six gutful men who will go anywhere and do anything, twelve ‘sheep’ who will follow a short distance behind if they are well led, and from four to six ineffective men who have not got what it takes in them ever to be really effective soldiers.29

  It was inevitably the ‘gutful men’ that incurred the heaviest casualties. Martin Lindsay’s account of the infantry battle in North-West Europe emphasises how the ‘lions of the desert’ in his own 2/Gordons were progressively killed or wounded, and the battalion’s line of advance was charted by the graves of the bravest and the best. The platoon of 4/King’s Own Scottish Borderers commanded by Peter White on the Dutch–German border in the winter of 1944–5 included Private Jones ‘a really extraordinary chap’. This ‘tall, keen-faced’ ex-paratrooper was known within the company as ‘the one man army,’ and he had ‘the closest approach to complete immunity from fear or nerves that I had so far met’. The description continued: ‘The rest of the Platoon looked on in amazement at the appetite, efficiency and system shown in his soldiering.’ Jones was killed by a direct hit on his truck, and it emerged that he was a skilled looter as well as a valiant warrior. White found the ravaged vehicle strewn with ‘valuables reminiscent of a jeweller’s shop. Among this collection was Sgt Godfrey’s GS watch which had been “lifted” off him when he was killed at Ibbenburen.’ The loss of Corporal Parry and Private Byles soon afterwards left ‘the very heart and dynamo of the Platoon gone’.30

  Geoffrey Picot, had commanded a mortar platoon with 1/Hampshires in Normandy, and became an infantry platoon commander with 7/Hampshires after his old battalion was broken up for reinforcements. He was pleased to find that a few of his men

  were really tough chaps! One or two were regular soldiers who knew they were in the army to fight and made no bones about it. Some conscripts, too, had plenty of battle fury. The majority would follow a strong lead, whether it came from me, from the NCOs or from their pals. A few would be weak sisters. The rest of us would have to carry them.

  (This can be regarded as the normal make-up of most platoons. A few strong toughies influenced a lot of others. The formation of airborne forces and commandos took a great many toughies away from the infantry of the line, who were thereby seriously weakened. It must have been judged b
y the War Office that what a handful of all-tough soldiers could accomplish together outweighed the consequent weakening everywhere else).

  He reflected that 1/Hampshires, one of the original D-Day battalions, whose fighting strength was usually between 500 and 600, had lost 231 killed and about 1,050 wounded between June and October 1944. It was ‘effectively twice wiped out’ with a casualty rate exceeding that of many battalions on the Somme a generation before.31 A. P. Herbert had served in the Royal Naval Division – part of the ‘Poor Bloody Infantry’ – in the First World War and, just before D-Day, wrote feelingly of how

  New men, new weapons, bear the brunt;

  New slogans gild the ancient game:

  The infantry are still in front,

  And mud and dust are much the same.

  Hail, humble footmen, poised to fly

  Across the West, or any, Wall!

  Proud, plodding, peerless PBI –

  The foulest, finest job of all.

  Poor indeed: doing what was proverbially the hardest job in battle with men selected primarily by their unsuitability for employment elsewhere.

  The War Office policy on recruit selection meant that even fewer men served in their local regiment in the Second World War than had in the First, and both wars saw ‘a waning local connection’ as they went on. In 1/Hampshire (recruiting heavily from the great, if mutually hostile, conurbations of Southampton and Portsmouth), some 78 per cent of 1914 fatalities came from the county, but only 34.5 per cent by 1918. Of 8,304 men killed in seven different regiments in the Second World War, only 43 per cent were in a unit with which they had ‘a close territorial connection’; by January 1944 only 34 per cent of the dead had a close link to their regiment. Rebadging was rife. In 1940 a brigade consisting entirely of Highland Light Infantry was told to expect a draft of 200 Royal Irish Fusiliers for one of its units. ‘Jocks and Irish tend not to mix,’ recalled its brigade major, ‘but when these men arrived they all spoke with Yorkshire accents.’32 By October 1943 battalions on overseas operations could expect that only twenty reinforcements a month would come from their own regiment, and the rest would be drafted in from across the infantry.33 In Italy, a battalion of 56th London Division received reinforcements from fourteen different regiments just before it went into the attack. Its commanding officer urgently asked for a supply of cap-badges, ‘so that at least the men could have with them the badge of the regiment in which they had to be prepared to die’.34 As the war neared its end, the infantry found itself reinforced with redundant anti-aircraft gunners, while a large and resentful RAF contingent became Scots Guardsmen by the stroke of an unforgiving pen. In late 1944 Jim Bellows was a platoon sergeant in a Hampshire battalion, brought up to strength by drafts from all three services.