by Simon Heffer
Men of all ages and ranks flocked to recruiting centres. For many working-class lads it was not merely the excitement of war that appealed, compared with the unskilled jobs many of them did; it was also the appeal of three meals a day, a solid pair of boots, new clothing and their own bed to sleep in. Such was the enthusiasm that a blind eye was turned to those obviously under age, and doctors (paid half a crown for each man passed fit) became used to taking an unduly positive view of the often undernourished and enfeebled human material before them. In some parts of Britain fit men of military age receiving charitable or parish assistance had it cut off, forcing them to enlist.16
The officer class were similarly enthusiastic. For some just out of school – such as Robert Graves – it meant a welcome break from university. For those whose life had seemed flat or disappointing, it promised adventure. Advertisements appeared in the better newspapers from old boys’ associations of public schools offering to help to obtain commissions for their alumni. Those less privileged had more trouble: R. C. Sherriff, who was eighteen and had just left an excellent grammar school where he had been captain of games (and whose play Journey’s End would in 1928 be hailed as one of the great representations of life at the front), was refused a commission because an adjutant told him: ‘our instructions are that all applicants for commissions must be selected from the recognised public schools, and yours is not among them.’17 He eventually secured one in the East Surreys. War would change the Army’s class-ridden nature, with ‘temporary gentlemen’ joining the old officer class.
Others, more worldly or experienced, tempered their enthusiasm with a recognition of reality: the unspoken point was that a proportion would never return. At his farewell dinner on 10 August, before leaving for France, Colonel Jack Seely, Secretary of State for War until the Curragh incident, told Sir George Riddell that ‘the mortality would be terrible.’18 Bertrand Russell, who later claimed to have foreseen slaughter that most others had not, recalled that ‘the prospect filled me with horror, but what filled me with even more horror was the fact that the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. I had to revise my views on human nature.’19
Society cohered around the ideal of the young man doing his duty. When Sir Hubert Parry, as director of the Royal College of Music, welcomed students back for the new term in September 1914, he talked of those – including students such as Jack Moeran and Arthur Bliss, who would survive the war and become renowned composers, and teachers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music would for the rest of his life be coloured by his experience of war – who ‘have been honourably inspired to go and chance the risks of military life.’20 He added: ‘We feel a thrill of regard for them. It gives a comfortable feeling of admiration for our fellow-countrymen when we see them moved by fine and honourable motives to face the awful conditions of modern warfare – to risk their lives, and sometimes even worse, for generous ideals.’ How the bereaved public came to absorb the unprecedented loss of life, and no unrest resulted, remains one of the astonishing facets of the conflict.
Yet Parry hinted at the damage that would be done by the loss of so many young men – in this case of musical talent, but as would become apparent, of many other spheres of excellence too, as the country’s future leaders, teachers, artists and scientists were slaughtered. ‘Our pupils are made of different stuff from the pupils of ordinary schools. They are gifted in a rare and special way. Some of them are so gifted that their loss could hardly be made good. It would be a special loss to the community … The world cannot afford to throw away such lives as if they were of no more account than lives that give no special promise of a rare kind.’ He asked what it would have meant had Wagner been killed in the Dresden disturbances of 1849, before Tristan, Meistersinger, the Ring or Parsifal; but also raised the paradox that ‘the people who offer themselves to such risks are often of the very best quality, and very often such as the world can ill spare; while numbers of those who do not offer themselves are mere loafers and shirkers who would be no loss, and would even be better and happier for being forced to face the guns and learn what a gain some experience of a really strenuous life would be to them.’ That theme permeated the months ahead. As more soldiers were needed, fewer enlisted willingly. Many who wished to were pressured by their families not to, or told by their employers there would be no job when or if they returned.
However, in the early days of the war, a spirit of adventure prevailed: youths borrowed motorbikes so they could offer their services as dispatch riders; some who did not join up tried to become war correspondents, a vocation hampered by France’s refusal to allow such people on its soil. Older men abandoned retirement so younger ones could leave their office jobs and fight. Many volunteered as special constables once enrolment began on 17 August; within months a Volunteer Corps – later formalised as the National Volunteer Force for Home Defence – would absorb older men, along lines similar to the Home Guard in Hitler’s war. Boy Scouts were enlisted in volunteer duties, such as guarding telephone lines, railway bridges and reservoirs, acting as messengers and, later, working on the land. Girl Guides assisted nurses, worked in hospitals, but also learned signalling.
Despite the harvest proving a problem for many landowners, and volunteers unsuitable for military service being asked to help, patriotic employers urged their staff to go: one, Lady Knox, of Sherborne St John’s near Basingstoke, advertised for ‘chauffeur, gardener and groom-gardener … to replace men who have joined the colours. No able-bodied man who can handle a rifle need apply.’21 The rich were exhorted to sacrifice personal comforts and encourage their staff to join up; many followed Lady Knox’s precedent. The Earl of Wemyss, with a large establishment at Stanway in Gloucestershire, ‘issued an abrupt ultimatum to all his employees servants etc – to join the Army or leave his service,’ noted Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, who was staying with the family.22 Wemyss went to London, leaving his wife, whom he had not consulted, to handle the resultant chaos.
The Duke of Sutherland provided his Scottish seat, Dunrobin Castle, as a hospital and convalescent home for the wounded. He established a committee of grandees to register houses for such purposes, and to arrange their equipping. The figurehead was Princess Christian, Queen Victoria’s third daughter and the King’s aunt. As well as Sutherland, the committee included two other dukes, Marlborough and Portland: and social titans such as Kitchener, Esher and Lord Charles Beresford. Within ten days Sutherland had received two hundred and fifty offers of houses, mainly near the south and east coasts, and including Glamis Castle (home of the future Queen Elizabeth), Cowdray Park, Walmer Castle and the North Hampshire Golf Club. The directrice of the Berkendael Medical Institute in Brussels, Edith Cavell, appealed for funds for what she expected to be the extensive treatment of British wounded in Brussels: Nurse Cavell did not expect Brussels would soon be in German hands.
When the grouse season started – on the day on which four British divisions left for France – Lord Knutsford wrote to The Times to urge the birds be distributed ‘and eaten instead of butcher’s meat’, with large quantities put into cold storage; and that when the partridge and pheasant seasons began the same should be done with them.23 He urged ground game – rabbits and hares – to be harvested too, saying that ‘the hospitals would be very grateful for some stags.’ The call was widely taken up, with the proviso that, once the season’s game had been killed, gamekeepers should join the colours. Grand society weddings meticulously planned for the autumn were hurriedly brought forward, with couples marrying in small private ceremonies before the groom left for active service: many did not live to celebrate an anniversary.
The older well-to-do, and women of all ages, took a leading role in raising funds and supplies for charities, notably hospitals. Queen Mary (German by ancestry, but born and bred in London and a great-granddaughter of George III, her family of Teck a morganatic branch of the House of Württemberg) established a national Needlew
ork Guild – whose council included Mrs Asquith, Lady Northcliffe and Lady Lansdowne – and commanded the presidents of local guilds to have their ladies boost collection and manufacture of garments for the troops. The Queen urged organisers to find paid work in clothes manufacture for jobless women, and clothes for indigent women and children whose breadwinner was away fighting. Almost the whole country was mobilised in some way. Beatrice Webb, who had longed for such a manifestation of solidarity, felt disturbed as a ‘collectivist who is also a believer in love as the bond between races as well as between individuals.’24
The government encouraged local landowners, grandees and Members of Parliament to take the lead in encouraging men in their areas to enlist. Although the initial target for new soldiers was 100,000 men, Asquith announced directly after the Battle of Mons – the British Expeditionary Force’s first engagement of the war – that there would be no limit: ‘We want all the recruits we can get.’25 There was an emphasis on volunteering; the government was adamant that, in keeping with the ethos of liberalism it sought to practise, it would not, and would not need to, introduce conscription: though the well-connected Morning Post surmised that that was because there was no organisation to cope with it. C. P. Scott, once more the voice of traditional liberalism, told his former colleague Leonard Hobhouse with regret that ‘if the war goes on long no doubt some form of compulsory training will be proposed and whatever is proposed by the Government would, under existing conditions, be adopted.’26 He was right, as in a further prediction that such a move would energise the labour movement and make it the ideal home for radicals. Scott, though, expressed the patriotism of many Liberals who had opposed the war when writing to a Manchester trades unionist who had wanted him to address a protest meeting: ‘I am strongly of [the] opinion that the war ought not to have taken place and that we ought not to have become parties to it, but once in it the whole future of our nation is at stake and we have no choice but do the utmost we can to secure success.’27 This contrasted with the general view of leftist intellectuals such as the members of the Bloomsbury group, who affected not to care less about the nation, and to see the war as a tiresome irrelevance. Of the many things that the war would destroy, liberalism would be chief among them.
Even though in August 1914 there was no question of conscription, the men enlisting and the massive new army they formed required careful overall management. If Grey was right, and Asquith had intended to leave Haldane at the War Office, he may have been swayed by public opinion not to do so: Haldane’s misfortune in not being an intimate of Repington, The Times’s military correspondent, counted against him. ‘He is not the best man available’ was how the newspaper put it.28 That man, it was widely felt, was Kitchener; and ironically, Haldane had told Asquith that ‘in my opinion you should make Kitchener your War Minister. He commands a degree of public confidence which no-one else would bring to the post.’29 The argument that he lacked parliamentary experience, The Times continued, ‘may be instantly swept aside.’ He had sat on the Viceroy’s Council in India (no mention was made of intrigues and problems he had caused).30 What was needed was not someone versed in the subtleties of debate, but who could direct forces in the field – the job of a commander-in-chief, not a cabinet minister, as the paper should have known.
Kitchener had told Asquith late on 4 August that he would serve his country in the War Office only in the post of Secretary of State: Asquith felt he had no choice, and began persuading his colleagues. Whether his qualities were sufficient to override his defects was less clear. Haldane later told Mrs Asquith that Kitchener was ‘a man of great authority, and considerable ignorance’. He added: ‘He will improve.’31 Rudyard Kipling, who had met him in Cairo in 1913, felt he was ‘a fatted pharaoh in spurs … garrulously intoxicated with power.’32 Within a couple of months Mrs Asquith would write of Kitchener that ‘telling the truth is not his strong point’ and ‘he is a man of good judgement and bad manners; a man brutal by nature and by pose; a man of no imagination but not without ideas … he has been the despair of the War Office ever since he succeeded Henry.’33 However, she conceded that ‘the British public and Tory party think him a god!’ The country was indeed in raptures at his new post: Blanche Lloyd noted the appointment had ‘the whole weight of public enthusiasm behind it.’34
And indeed for all Kitchener’s faults – those of a career soldier used to giving orders, moved to a deliberative body as one of many equals – he had virtues too. He was a realist, who knew the war would not end quickly: an insight not then shared by Asquith or most of his colleagues, who saw it as a temporary difficulty. (Asquith confirmed as much when he told Venetia Stanley, his confidante and the woman he longed to have as his mistress, that Kitchener was ‘an emergency man’, until the war ended.35 His job in Cairo was kept open for him.) The new Secretary of State, who understood the Germans’ capabilities, shocked colleagues at his first cabinet meeting by warning that ‘we must be prepared to put armies of millions into the field and to maintain them for several years.’36 Had Kitchener not realised that a huge, more professional and better-trained army would be needed to win the war, with a massive supply of replacements after the BEF sustained heavy casualties, the outcome could have been disastrous for Britain. Yet one paradox of Kitchener’s grip on his responsibilities was that although he realised the Army would need huge numbers of men, he had not grasped how much extra ordnance would be needed to keep them fighting. Munitions factories were put on twenty-four-hour working, and extra plant laid down as quickly as possible: but that would be nowhere near enough: what was actually required was the industrialisation of munitions production on a vast scale to cope with the mechanisation of war.
Kitchener’s appointment distressed the radical wing of the Liberal Party, with Scott saying it signalled the end of a Liberal government, replaced by what ‘to all intents and purposes [was] a coalition’.37 Kitchener was a better administrator than an organiser. He did not know how to delegate. He had also lost the best staff officers from the War Office, as they were summoned to the front. He treated civil servants and ministerial colleagues as subordinates, acting as a field marshal unused to being questioned or criticised would. Until mid-September he attended cabinet in civilian clothes; then, as the situation became graver, he reverted to his field marshal’s uniform.
With the surge of volunteering there came a growing demand for men to be allowed to serve with their friends and colleagues from civilian life. Some battalions were formed according to the men’s role in peacetime, or shared backgrounds. The Lord Mayor of London formed a Stockbrokers’ Battalion on 21 August, and on 11 September four Public Schools’ Battalions were formed. Others brought together men from the same neighbourhoods or towns – the pals’ battalions. On 29 August the Liverpool Pals were formed as part of King’s (Liverpool) Regiment by the Earl of Derby. Known as ‘The King of Lancashire’, bosom friend of George V, chairman of the West Lancashire Territorial Association and a man who devoted himself to recruitment of the volunteer Army, Derby annoyed the labour movement in his standard recruiting speech, which included this promise: ‘When the war is over I intend, as far as I possibly can, to employ nobody except men who have taken their duty at the front. I go further than that, and say that, all things being equal, if two men come to me for a farm and one has been at the front there is no doubt who will get the farm.’38 Many towns formed pals’ battalions, their names carved on memorials across Britain and, metaphorically, in legend. The mayor of the town formed the Accrington Pals on 2 September, and within days the Bradford Pals and the Leeds Pals had been created. The Northumberland Fusiliers raised twelve pals’ battalions, the Royal Fusiliers ten and the Middlesex, Manchester and Welch Regiments, and the Royal Irish Rifles, nine each.
So keen were men to serve with their neighbours that it caused great distress when volunteers from Essex were told that the Essex Regiment could not recruit because it was ‘full’.39 It was subsequently allowed to recruit 1,000 men, which it did within
days, but was then told it could recruit no more: any men who tried to sign up in Essex would have to join a regiment with which they had no local connection, which deterred some. The War Office was implored to add extra battalions to county regiments, which it soon did: but it had been slow to recognise the emotional pull of fighting units linking their soldiers with their homes. Effective though the localisation of battalions may have been in aiding recruitment, the concentration of men in fighting units raised on a geographical basis would cut swaths through communities when their regiments were in particularly bloody battles, notably from the Somme onwards.
The large numbers flocking to join the colours even before the famous entreaty featuring the poster of Kitchener (published on 5 September) caused financial difficulties for many families. For those in the skilled working class and above, service would entail a financial sacrifice. Aware of this, the Prince of Wales – aged twenty and in the Grenadier Guards, but forbidden by Kitchener to fight lest he be taken prisoner – launched a relief fund on 6 August. It raised £1 million within the first week. The Queen made a special appeal to women; and Queen Alexandra headed an appeal for the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association, with which she had been closely identified during the Boer War: she enlisted lords lieutenant of counties, and the lord mayors and provosts of great cities, to act as local representatives. Within a week the appeals merged and issued a statement of intent in relieving all hardship, especially that caused by the death, capture or wounding of a serviceman. The public response was spontaneously generous: the King led with £5,000 but, as a mark of where financial clout now lay in Britain, George Coats, a Paisley cotton manufacturer, gave £50,000. In 1916 he was raised to the peerage as Lord Glentanar. By the end of March 1915 the appeal had raised £4,907,000, of which £1,960,000 had been disbursed.40