Production of shells was centred on the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. Here too, production was only small in scale to meet the relatively low pre-war demand. Shell production expanded by 90 per cent but the British army, like those of all the protagonists, soon found itself desperately short of shells. The production of rifles, guns, shells and other components was eventually contracted out to several other companies. Big arms companies in Britain, like Vickers and Armstrong, were keener on large-scale shipbuilding for the navy. There was more profit in building one dreadnought battleship than in manufacturing hundreds of separate artillery pieces and rifles. All this would change in May 1915 when the shells crisis brought about the creation of the Ministry of Munitions. But that was in the future, and the problem in the first months of war in creating a mass army was far more the supply of materiel and munitions than finding manpower.29
If there were problems in feeding, equipping and arming Kitchener’s New Army, finding sufficient officers to lead it presented another immense challenge. It was estimated that 30,000 new officers were needed. Each battalion that went to France in August 1914 was told to leave a few officers and NCOs behind. While their fellow officers went into battle with the Germans, those left in Britain chafed at having to run depots and manage the hordes of new recruits. But they played a vital role in organising the New Army and were sometimes the only regular soldiers available to begin training the volunteers.
In addition, officers who had retired in the years before the war were recalled into active service. They were known as ‘dug-outs’, having been dug out of retirement. Some did an excellent job. Many, however, were too old or too unfit to take command of units that were completely different in nature from those they had led many years before. It was reported that every time one large and elderly ‘dug-out’ went on a route march, he became so exhausted that he would hail a passing motor car with a shout of ‘On His Majesty’s service’ and demand to be driven back to camp.30 In addition to the ‘dug-outs’, several officers who had served in armies around the empire were called upon to lead the new Pals battalions. Kitchener ordered 500 officers who were home on leave from service in India not to return, and made a direct appeal to the Commander-in-Chief in India: ‘We want officers badly. Let me know privately if you can spare any.’31
The lack of trained and experienced officers affected every level of the army. As the new divisions of Kitchener’s army were formed, so brigadiers received promotion to the rank of major-general. Many rose successfully to their new responsibilities, like Brigadier Ivor Maxse, Commander of the 1st (Guards) Brigade, who was recalled from France to lead the newly created 18th Division. He went on to bring new ideas to the thinking of the high command on the Western Front for the rest of the war. Other promotions were not so successful; men experienced in commanding brigades of about 4,000 were not necessarily up to the challenge of commanding a division of around 20,000. Several would be removed later.
However, the huge number of volunteers that came forward from the industrial heartlands of the country revealed another facet of the nation’s economy. Although hundreds of thousands of workers and clerks willingly volunteered, there was a marked lack of the middling sort who would have made up a managerial class. So, when it came to finding junior officers, an appeal went out to Officer Training Corps around the country. All universities had OTCs, although they were of doubtful military value. Recruits spent a great deal of time on shooting, horse riding and drill, very little on tactical training. Nevertheless, thousands of men with some limited experience gave up their university education to join the army. Most public schools and some grammar schools also had OTCs, and many of the older boys from the major public schools came forward to join up. In the first eight months of the war, 506 junior officers volunteered from Marlborough, 411 from Charterhouse, 403 from Wellington and 350 from Eton.32 This recruitment process was clearly elitist. Any boy from a top public school was automatically offered a commission. Pupils from less well known schools were not. R.C. Sherriff, just 18 years old, later recalled his attempt to obtain a commission in August 1914. ‘“School?” inquired the adjutant. I told him and his face fell. He took up a printed list from his desk and searched through it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid it isn’t a public school.”’ Mystified, Sherriff explained that he had been to a top grammar school founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1567. ‘I’m sorry,’ the adjutant responded. ‘But our instructions are that all applicants for commissions must be selected from the recognised public schools, and yours is not among them.’33
It was two years before Sherriff got his commission in the 9th East Surreys; he would serve with distinction at Vimy Ridge and at Ypres, where he won an MC. However, by March 1915 at least 20,000 volunteers had come forward from the universities’ and schools’ OTCs.34 The army could be sure that the special education these public school boys had received would give them a sense of superiority that would be invaluable in commanding men and equip them well for leadership. And for the first years of the war, at least, by selecting its subalterns from this limited and privileged pool the army could preserve its tradition that an officer would also be a gentleman.
However, at first, the problems were immense. The 7th Royal Scots started its training with only one officer in command of 900 men. The 15th (Scottish) Division had only five regular officers per brigade. The 36th (Ulster) Division, having been drawn from the working-class districts around Belfast and the Ulster countryside, was not able to find public school OTC boys from its recruitment area, so officers were drafted in from across Britain. Commanding officers of the new battalions and divisions were often able to select the names of men they wished to commission. But the commanding officer of the 16th (Irish) Division, formed by recruiting many Irish nationalists who had been part of the National Volunteers before the war, rejected every officer nomination from anyone who had been in the nationalist militia. He preferred Englishmen with more conventional and privileged backgrounds. John Kipling, the son of the author, had tried many times to join up but had been turned down by the medical boards because of his very poor eyesight. When his father helped him finally to wangle a commission it was to the 2nd Battalion The Irish Guards that he was assigned, although he had no connections with Ireland or the Irish.
Battalion commanders devoted much time and energy to trying to find the right officers with military experience. Again, the story of the Lonsdales battalion, the 11th Borders, is revealing. The officer appointed by Earl Lonsdale to command the battalion was highly qualified. Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Wilfred Machell was a ‘dug-out’, having come out of retirement, aged fifty-two, to take command. Much of his service had been with the Egyptian army; he had fought in several campaigns through the 1890s and had raised and commanded a Sudanese battalion. In 1898 he was appointed military adviser to the Ministry of the Interior in Egypt, a senior position in what was effectively a British colony. He received many Egyptian decorations and had excellent connections through his wife, Lady Valda, the daughter of one of Queen Victoria’s nephews, Admiral Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Machell was not only an experienced military commander but also a fine administrator and a whirlwind of energy as he sought to bring his newly raised battalion into fighting order. When he took command in October 1914, there were no officers from the regular army in the battalion and for two months he had no adjutant to carry out day-to-day administrative duties. None of the officers appointed had any regular military experience.
The battalion history notes that ‘Every detail had to be taught by him [Lt-Col. Machell], for the officers, with very few exceptions, knew no more than the men, and had to be taught themselves before they could teach … He organised the feeding of the men … he arranged for the hutting, the clothing, the water supply, the lighting and conservancy of the Camp … These things alone would have occupied the activities of six ordinary men, but in addition to all this the C.O. was constantly on parade, training and smartening up both officers and men, dra
wing up the programmes of work and seeing that they were carried out.’ Machell himself added, ‘I have to act drill-sergeant and buck and bark vociferously to get up a high standard … Men take the talking very well. It is much better than punishing … Far better to make a man than break him.’35
In addition, Machell clearly spent a great deal of time trying to appoint the right men as officers. When he heard that the son of one of his friends, a Mr Whitehead, was returning from Burma and had come up from the ranks to become an officer he tried to persuade him to join the battalion. He wrote to the boy’s father on 2 November, ‘I am not anxious about the numbers [of volunteers], but I have scarcely any officers, and do not see where they are to come from. The men are of excellent class and are all very keen, besides being of fine physique.’ Machell was clearly revelling in his new task and concluded the letter by adding, ‘I hope all is well with you – I was never better myself, and I have not found my years to put me at any disadvantage so far.’
Later that same month he wrote to young Whitehead himself to encourage him to join the battalion. ‘Your father is a great friend of mine … It is a difficult job to get any officers and I have no adjutant. It’s lucky I like work and know how to run my own show but I shall be glad of a little help … I have nothing but OTC boys [as officers].’36 It seems that young Whitehead did join the battalion, although only temporarily. But the exchange is illuminating in showing how difficult it was to find suitable officers and how hard commanding officers of the Pals battalions had to work to train up their volunteers into fighting units.
The result of putting so many gentlemen-officers in charge of hundreds of men from the working or lower middle classes was something of a surprise. In many instances it seems that ‘nicely raised young men from West Country vicarages or South Coast watering-places came face to face with forty Durham miners, Yorkshire furnace-men, Clydeside riveters, and the two sides found that they could scarcely understand each other’s speech.’37 But, contrary to expectations, a firm bond slowly began to grow between these social groups brought together almost for the first time in 1914 and 1915. Sharing the comradeship of the trenches created a further mixing of dialects and cultures. Many new swear words became almost respectable in upper-class language.38 Thousands of young officers grew to admire and respect men from massively disadvantaged backgrounds who still showed great courage and humanity under the pressures of war. Siegfried Sassoon, for instance, described how his life was changed by the trust he felt the men he commanded had put in him.39 Harold Macmillan gained an insight into the lives of his men that contributed to his lifelong sympathy for working-class people.40 The result of this mingling was one of the least expected social revolutions of the twentieth century.
If the junior officers grew to admire the men whose welfare they were now responsible for, this was certainly not the case with the senior officers of the regular army. They had a very different view of the New Army that by the end of 1914 was busily drilling and training up and down the land. The senior officers reflected the attitudes of their class and many felt a level of contempt for the urban working classes. They thought they were generally unpatriotic, out to pursue their own interests, and that they could not be trusted. Some officers had expressed the view before the war that the working classes would be the first to crack under the pressure of war or the threat of invasion. The Boer War had revealed the scandal of the lack of physical fitness of recruits from the industrial slums of Britain, many of whom did not measure up to the basic physical requirements needed to join the army. The proportion of recruits who attained the height requirement of 5 foot 6 inches was lower in 1900 than it had been in 1845, giving rise to much talk about the ‘degeneration’ of the race. In 1914, on the eve of war, Major-General Sir Walter Knox picked up on this theme and wrote of the ‘physically deteriorated race of town-bred humanity’ that he believed was ‘the flaw in our armour’ as a nation.41
Not everyone, then, was impressed with the tremendous response to Kitchener’s appeal. When Kitchener created an entirely new army from volunteers, most of whom had no military experience coming from families without any military background, some of the most senior figures in the army dismissed the whole venture. General Sir Henry Wilson, pre-war Director of Military Operations at the War Office, was in August 1914 appointed deputy chief of staff to the commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force, Sir John French. Some months after the declaration of war, Wilson said of Kitchener’s New Army, ‘Under no circumstances can these mobs … take the field for two years.’ He described the New Army as ‘ridiculous and preposterous’ and ‘the laughing stock of every soldier in Europe’.42 Another senior officer wrote to his wife describing them as ‘a roughish lot with hardly a gentleman among the officers’.43 Even for a young subaltern already serving in France in the spring of 1915, rumours about general inadequacies were rife. Lieutenant Robert Graves wrote in a letter home, ‘The general impression here is that the new army divisions can’t be of much military use.’44
While Kitchener was establishing the New Army in Britain, the BEF began fighting its first battles in France. The stories of these battles are well known. The four divisions of the BEF were positioned on the French left (according to pre-war planning the BEF was supposed to consist of six infantry divisions and one of cavalry, but Kitchener was persuaded in August 1914 to keep two divisions back in England as he had little faith in the Territorial Force to defend the homeland and fears of an imminent German invasion were rife). The BEF was up against troops of the German First Army led by General von Kluck. This army was advancing at the rate of ten miles per day, an extraordinary achievement for an infantry force that largely marched on foot, supported by 84,000 horses that needed two million pounds of fodder every day.
The first engagements with the BEF took place around the Belgian mining town of Mons on 22 and 23 August when the advancing Germans walked straight into the British line. The BEF performed well. The infantry had been trained to fire their Lee Enfields at the rate of fifteen aimed rounds per minute and this they did, inflicting three times as many casualties on the Germans as they suffered themselves. The rapid German advance came to a temporary halt, but their howitzers were soon deployed and rained down a withering fire on the British positions. The French Fifth Army on the British right started to withdraw under the relentless momentum of the German advance. When Sir John French, the commander-in-chief, realised that the troops on his flank were pulling back he ordered the BEF to withdraw. What followed became known as the ‘Retreat from Mons’. The British army alongside the French retreated continuously for thirteen days, covering a distance of 200 miles in the summer heat. There was only a single, temporary delaying action fought at Le Cateau on 26 August. As the Germans approached the French capital, the government withdrew from Paris to Bordeaux. Finally, with some of his forces only twenty-five miles from Paris, the French commander-in-chief, General Joseph ‘Papa’ Joffre, ordered both armies to stand and fight. The resulting Battle of the Marne was one of the turning points of the war.
The German commander, General Helmuth von Moltke, constantly varied the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan laid down by the General Staff before the war. Having marched through Belgium, rather than encircling Paris from the north, he decided to wheel south to the east of the city. Joffre spotted that this was the moment to counter-attack and began to create an additional army, the Sixth, on the British left. But Sir John French wanted time for the BEF to rest and recuperate after its long withdrawal. Kitchener himself rushed to France and, wearing his full field marshal’s uniform, ordered the French to stay in line with Joffre. After a fierce battle along the Marne, the situation was still undecided when on 9 September the Germans themselves began to withdraw to the north. Paris had been saved, at least for now.
The German plan to destroy the French army in the west before the Russians had fully mobilised in the east had failed. When the Russians attacked around Königsberg and Tannenberg in the forests and lakes
of East Prussia in late August and early September, the Germans were faced with what they most feared, a war on two fronts.
In the west there began what was misleadingly called the ‘race to the sea’. Neither side particularly wanted to reach the sea; each wanted simply to outflank the other. The French army confronted the Germans first on the river Oise, then around Albert and subsequently at Arras. When neither side succeeded in breaking through, the armies moved further north into Flanders. The BEF was ordered to stop the German advance at the medieval Belgian cloth town of Ypres in late October. Haig’s I Corps bore the brunt of the fighting. Both sides fought an intense and bitter engagement and the British line nearly broke at the Messines ridge to the south of the town. But more and more British troops were rushed in to plug the gaps. At one point there were no reserves left. Around Ypres, the professional British army experienced some of the most severe fighting it had ever engaged in.
As it looked as though they could not turn the allied flank, the Germans began a process their engineers had trained for many times for on manoeuvres, digging in and protecting their trenches with thick lines of barbed wire. Exhausted, the Allied armies quickly followed suit. The two sides dug a network of trenches, the Germans seeing them as a permanent feature. Wherever they could, the Germans took the higher ground and began entrenching deeply, building fortified positions defended by nests of heavy machine guns. The devastated villages of France and Belgium provided strongpoints in the German lines as the remains of houses and cellars could be well fortified. The British and the French on the other hand took the view that their lines were only temporary defences and the German army would soon be expelled from the land it had occupied in Belgium and France. The new German Chief of the War Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, realised that the battle to outflank the Allies was lost and reported to the Kaiser on 9 November that it was no longer possible to maintain the offensive in Flanders because ‘the barbed wire cannot be crossed.’45 Further digging in produced a line of trenches extending from the English Channel to the Swiss border.
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