The trainers did their best. Men drilled with staves instead of rifles, did small-arms training with Lee-Metford rifles left over from the Boer War and went all over the country on route marches, while artillerymen practised gun drills on lengths of steel piping.
It is sometimes asked why the army, then as now, spent so much time on close-order drill, perfecting the art of turning to the right, left and about, marching up and down a parade square and performing complicated evolutions that appear to be more relevant to facing Napoleon’s Imperial Guard at Waterloo than to taking on German machine guns. The answer is that the difference between an armed rabble and an army is discipline. Soldiers must be trained to react immediately and automatically when under conditions of high stress, and when there may be no one to tell them what to do. Contrary to popular opinion, the army did not, and does not, attempt to stamp out all initiative and ability to think – indeed it prizes those qualities in a soldier – but it does aim to give the man a rock to cling to when all around is chaos. Not for nothing are basic tactical manoeuvres known as battle drills: automatic reactions to certain happenings on the battlefield, reactions that will occur regardless of the physical and psychological influences to which a man is subjected. The basis of that ability to react instantly is drill: square-bashing is not a waste of time.
Until inspected by the War Office and found to be ‘efficient’, when control passed to the army and the original mentors had their expenditure refunded, the raising, training and administration of the new units remained with their sponsors. This led to the phenomenon of the ‘pals’. ‘Join together and serve together’ was the guarantee, and men knew that if they enlisted they would serve alongside their friends, their neighbours and their workmates, rather than being sent off with a lot of people whom they did not know and with whom they might have little in common. Employees of the cloth industry joined what was technically the 21st Battalion the West Yorkshire Regiment, but which was always known as the Wool Textile Pioneers; the University and Public Schools Committee found 5,000 of their friends for the Public Schools Brigade, four battalions of the Royal Fusiliers. The 13th Battalion the Cheshire Regiment was raised by Lord Leverhulme, who made a personal appeal to his employees at Port Sunlight. One thousand men responded. Sports clubs, occupational groups, youth organisations all did their bit.
All this made for tremendous strengths: the men had shared interests, spoke with the same accents, had the same friends, belonged to the same clubs, used the same pubs, ate the same food, walked out with each other’s sisters, and were adamant that their battalion would be better than any other. Once in action a reluctance to let their chums down, and the consequences of misbehaviour being witnessed by those with whom they would have to live once the war was over, reinforced cohesiveness and bred a determination to ‘stick it out’ come what may. It also planted a further seed to grow into a myth. When a New Army ‘pals’ battalion did go into action its casualties – in any case larger than anyone had thought possible – were not distributed evenly across the country, but concentrated in small areas: a few streets, half a dozen villages, three or four factories, a specific sector of employment. The ‘pals’ were largely an urban phenomenon. Men in rural areas joined up too, but while they might end up in their county regiment they would not necessarily all be in the same battalion and therefore not all killed together if the battalion suffered heavily.
The Americans had long ago recognised that perception of casualties is far worse if the dead and maimed are concentrated in small areas, rather than being spread evenly across the country. After the American War of Independence, the new republic adopted the military system that it understood: that of the British. Regiments and battalions recruited as they had had done in the colonial era, territorially. The American Civil War, fought by Americans on both sides and with regiments raised from specific, often very small, areas, produced enormous casualties. The death toll was greater than in any American war before or since, but owing to its concentration the impact was even heavier. After the war the American army took a deliberate policy decision. Henceforth regular army regiments would contain men from all over the nation, and units of the militia (which became the National Guard) would be recruited statewide. It would not be until after the Great War that this lesson was brought home to the British army.
New Army infantry units became battalions of their local regiment, numbered after Territorial Force battalions of that regiment. While subtitles such as Accrington Pals, Post Office Rifles, Hull Sportsmen, Newcastle Railwaymen, and Edinburgh City were unofficial, they were often retained in brackets.
When these battalions went to war, the overall deaths were not spread evenly across the country, nor were they spread evenly chronologically. The effect on friends, relatives and neighbours at home of heavy casualties at the front was exacerbated by the local men all being in the same regiment, often in the same battalion. The citizens of Bradford mourned the death of 5,442 soldiers, of whom 1,779 were in the West Yorkshire Regiment, and 459 in the two Bradford Pals battalions of that regiment. In Leeds 8,264 men were killed, of whom 3,611 were in the West Yorkshire Regiment, and 252 in the 15th Battalion (Leeds Pals). Durham City lost 1,320 of its sons, 655 in the Durham Light Infantry with 61 in the 18th Battalion (Durham Pals). An examination of the total killed in a representative sample of towns and cities compared with the number in the local infantry regiment shows what the impact on those at home must have been:15
In the Second World War the overall death toll of the British army was much lower than it had been in the First. While it is often averred that the generals in the Second War learned their trade in the First and were thus determined to avoid mass casualties, the truth is that the two wars were very different in character, at least as far as the British army was concerned. From beginning to end of the First War, the bulk of the British army was fighting the main enemy in the main theatre of war (the Western Front). Between the evacuation of Europe via Dunkirk and Cherbourg in 1940 and the Normandy invasion of 1944 the British army only fought in peripheral theatres. While those who fought in North Africa, Crete and the Far East in the Second War would object to their efforts being described as peripheral, the fact is that in terms of men deployed, and in the intensity of the fighting, the British army was far less involved in the Second War than it had been in the First. Hence British army casualties between 1939 and 1945 were considerably less than those between 1914 and 1918, and minuscule compared to those of the Russian army, which spent most of the Second War fighting the main enemy on land. While the local regiment was still the major recruiter in the Second World War, the British army had appreciated the inadvisability of filling up its infantry battalions with men drawn from the same small areas. Taking the towns listed in Table 7 above and applying the same exercise to the Second War gives a very different picture: not only are there fewer deaths overall, but, more importantly, a much lower percentage occurred in the local regiment:
The impact of First War casualties was far greater because in a particular area or a particular employment or social group they tended to occur all at once, and those areas or groups were very small. Of the Bradford dead, 345 were killed on one day, 1 July 1916, the opening day of the Somme offensive, and 217 of those were in the two Bradford Pals battalions. In Portadown, little more than a large village, twenty-three men of the 19th Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers, a New Army battalion formed from the Ulster Volunteer Force, were killed on that same day. The 8th Battalion the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles) had 1,434 men killed between 1915 and 1918. While there were men in that battalion from as far away as Kelso and Nottingham, the vast majority were Londoners and had been Post Office workers before the war.
On the other hand, there were a number of ‘thankful villages’ where there were no deaths at all. The hamlet of Knowlton, in rural Kent, had a population of thirty-nine in 1914. Of these, twelve – or what must have been all the males of military age – joined up before March 1915. There was no local
‘pals’ battalion and they were spread between five different regiments. Four joined the Royal East Kent Yeomanry, three the 4th Battalion the Buffs (a Territorial Force battalion), two the 2nd Life Guards, one the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and one the 6th Battalion the Buffs. The response to the call by Knowlton’s menfolk won the Weekly Despatch competition for the bravest village in England, but it brought them more good fortune still, for not one was killed. Statistically one of the twelve should have died, and if he had, Knowlton would not have considered that it had lost a generation.
There was another group, often lost sight of, which after the old regular army, the reservists, the Territorial Force and the New Armies made up the manpower that Britain called upon to fight the war: the conscripts. Historically it was seen as a freeborn Englishman’s right not to be conscripted. Conscription was a foreign practice and thought to give far too much power to the military. Britain had never needed a large army anyway, and although there had been conscription by ballot for the Militia during the Napoleonic Wars, the units thus manned could not serve outside the United Kingdom. As the Great War went on it became increasingly clear to government and army that voluntary recruiting could not sustain the size of the army needed. The initial surge of patriotism that greeted the declaration of war was beginning to recede by the middle of 1915. Those who were attracted by a wage and three square meals a day (a much larger proportion of recruits than is sometimes realised) had already enlisted, and there was now no shortage of civilian employment. Voluntary enlistment was inefficient anyway. Men turned up as it suited them, which was not necessarily when the army wanted them, and no accurate forecasts of available military manpower could be made. There were some recruits, qualified or experienced in specific trades, who would have been of far more use to the war effort if they had stayed at the factory or in the mine.
By 1915 the government was reluctantly examining ways in which manpower as a whole could be directed into areas – industrial as well as military – directly applicable to the prosecution of the war. The average number of men coming into the army each month was 125,000 but it varied widely from month to month, and it was not going to be enough. On 19 May 1915 Lord Kitchener made another appeal to the young men of Britain, asking for 300,000 to enlist. The response was disappointing, for while the figures for May were 10,000 more than the average, those for June were 10,000 below. On 15 July the first step towards compulsion was introduced – the National Registration Act. Under the act the capabilities and occupation of every man in Great Britain – and, interestingly, of every woman too – between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five was recorded. This would allow the authorities to discover exactly how many people were employed in each industry, permitting a calculation as to the number of men needed in munitions work, shipbuilding, agriculture and other activities essential to national survival. It would also show the surplus manpower that would be available to the army and the navy.
Registration duly took place. Men considered essential to their existing civilian occupations were recorded (‘starred’) as being in ‘reserved occupations’ and ineligible for military service. Initially there were 1,605,629 men starred, and this rose to 2,574,800 by the end of the war. All those shown to be available were then approached by recruiters, seeking to discover their intentions and to persuade them to enlist, now or later. On 11 October 1915 Lord Derby was appointed Director General of Recruiting, and on 16 October the ‘Derby Scheme’ was announced. Under this, men not starred as being in reserved occupations essential to the war effort could enlist now, or attest – that is, take the oath of allegiance required by every recruit – with an obligation to report for military service later if required. The attested men would be divided into forty-six groups by age, from eighteen to forty-one, with single and married men in separate groups. Asquith, the Prime Minister, announced that if single men did not come forward voluntarily, then they would be conscripted before attested married men. Concurrent with registration was the introduction of the War Pensions Act which introduced pensions not just for married men, (as had been the case up to then), but for all soldiers who had dependants.
From the outbreak of war until the end of 1914 a total of 1,186,337 men had joined the regular army or the Territorial Force. In 1915 a further 1,280,362 volunteered. Registration had produced 2,184,979 who had attested by the end of that year, but around 650,000 men had avoided both enlisting and attesting. It was now obvious that compulsion would have to be introduced. On 4 January 1916 the Military Service Act was introduced in the House by the Prime Minister. It became law on 27 January and from that date all voluntary enlistment in Great Britain stopped. Ireland was unaffected; it had never been the intention to introduce conscription or registration there, partly because of the unsettled state of the country and partly because the Unionists objected to Catholics being given military training.16 All men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one in Great Britain who were unmarried and had no dependants were now liable to be conscripted into any branch of the forces, with no choice as to service or arm of it. The exception was that if a man was a volunteer for the navy, then the Admiralty had first call on his services. There were provisions to exempt those found to be medically unfit and conscientious objectors. Initially the number of men obtained was lower than expected, and so on 25 May 1916 compulsion was applied to all single and married men. By July 1916 a mere 43,000 men had been obtained by conscription, while 93,000 failed to turn up when summoned; 748,587 claimed exemption for one reason or another and were under investigation, and 1,433,827 were now starred. Things did get better. Evaders realised that they would have to go eventually, frivolous claims for exemption were dismissed, and further age groups were called up. By the end of the war 2,500,000 men had been conscripted, nearly all for the army. Conscripts were drafted to where they were needed, and as far as possible went to their local regular or Territorial Force regiments. It is not possible, short of examining each man’s record individually, to differentiate conscripts and volunteers in the casualty lists. The government, and the army, did their best to avoid making a distinction between those who had come of their own free will and those who were compelled. All had fought, all had done their bit, and to separate them would have been invidious. The soldiers themselves do not seem to have distinguished between the two classes of their comrades, and after the halting of all voluntary enlistment men could claim, often with justification, that they would have volunteered had that avenue been open to them. After the war old soldiers did not advertise the fact that they had been conscripted, and this large body of military manpower has not been researched in any great detail. As men arrived in their units the exigencies of war, shared by all, volunteer and conscript alike, soon welded men together into one battalion family, and origins were soon forgotten or ignored. Because conscripts from a given area were not all placed in the same battalion, their deaths would have been spread more evenly across the country than those of the ‘pals’ battalions. Conscription was universal, and individual. The men made a vital contribution to the war, particularly on the Western Front, where the BEF was seriously under strength from late 1916 onwards until drafts of conscripts began to arrive to fill up the ranks.
Had conscription and direction and control of manpower been introduced in 1914 – which for very good reasons it could not have been – and had the British infantry been structured in a different way, then death and disablement would have been spread much more evenly across the nation, and any one locality’s perception of the toll would have been less shocking than it was. The British nation had never been so involved in a war before, and never had it suffered as it did between 1914 and 1918, but its sufferings were less by far than those of the other combatants. Britain did not lose a generation to the war.
NOTES
1 Figures for the average size of the army are taken from, Major T. J. Mitchell and Miss G. M. Smith, Official History of the War, Casualties and Medical Statistics, Imperial War Museum (reprint), London, 1997.
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2 A dreadnought, with a crew of twenty-two officers and 1,000 sailors, could fire eight of her ten guns at once, delivering 10,560 lbs’ weight of explosive per salvo. A division’s artillery (field, howitzers and heavy guns), manned by 4,000 men, produced 1,742 lbs per salvo.
3 French and German figures have been obtained from L’Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France. British figures are from Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, War Office, London, 1922.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 8