Breakdown Read online

  All this adds up to an extraordinary phenomenon that swept much of Britain in the late summer and early autumn of 1914. Recruitment began to decline in late 1914 and by February 1915 had dropped to around 90,000 per month. There were several reasons for this. Stories of chaos in the recruiting offices and bottlenecks in the training camps did not help. But the principal reason was that as requirements for supplies and ordnance from the military created an industrial boom, so the extra demand for labour outmatched the supply. As a consequence wage rates went up. Once the initial patriotic appeal had worn off, many skilled workers who found that for the first time in their life they could earn £2 10s a week in a munitions factory were reluctant to accept barely half of that (with allowances) by taking the King’s Shilling. But even so, by the end of 1915 some two million men had volunteered to fight for Kitchener, King, Country and Empire. No other country experienced a frenzy of volunteering on this scale. It has been called the story ‘of a spontaneous and genuinely popular mass movement which has no counterpart in the modern English-speaking world’.30

  In addition, tens of thousands of young women also volunteered and in a demonstration in July 1915, 30,000 women marched past Parliament carrying banners demanding the right to serve. Initially, most women volunteered as nurses, but increasingly they went into a host of other duties ranging from farm work (the Women’s Land Army was formed in 1915) to clerical roles in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (formed in December 1916) and to the Women’s Royal Naval Service (formed in 1917). Some women, like Vera Brittain, gave up the university courses that they had struggled to start out on, to contribute to the war effort just as their brothers had done. Brittain became a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, known as a VAD, and summed up her motivation for volunteering very clearly when she wrote, ‘Not being a man and able to go to the front, I wanted to do the next best thing.’31

  It is a great tribute to this generation that so many millions of young men and women willingly came forward. It was the first and last time that it would happen on such a scale. Most of the innocent volunteers of 1914 were ignorant of the horrors they would face. The shock, disillusionment and trauma of modern industrial war, the dreadful losses that scarred a generation, the memory of the trenches, would all have a lasting effect. Britain in 1939 was probably no less patriotic than in 1914. But there would be no rush to join up en masse as there had been in the first weeks and months of the Great War.

  But for those eager volunteers who responded to Kitchener’s call in September 1914, the progress through Basic Training into army life would be neither smooth nor rapid. On arrival at many military establishments scattered across the country, most recruits found not the welcome they expected but scenes of utter chaos. It would take many months yet to build up even the foundations of a Citizen Army.

  2

  Training a Citizen Army

  Ralph Mottram, like so many Britons, was deeply shocked by German ‘treachery’ in attacking ‘gallant little Belgium’. He had a good job with the promise of an excellent career ahead of him at Barclays Bank and ageing parents whom he felt he should care for. But in a flush of patriotic fervour he decided to follow Kitchener’s call and enlist for three years, or for the ‘duration of the war’, whichever came sooner. Barclays agreed to hold his job pending his return. Mottram had to struggle to join up, waiting for several days because of the crowds at the recruitment office in London. Having finally enlisted, like most recruits he had to attest and take the oath of allegiance and was then given one silver shilling ‘to serve the king’. Having been given a date to report to his regimental depot, he began drilling at an assembly ground in Lowestoft, without uniforms or weapons.1

  The British army was totally unprepared for the avalanche of new recruits that began to arrive at camps across the country in the autumn of 1914. Barracks intended to house 300 men soon had to accommodate five times that number. Thousands were forced to sleep out in the open. Beds and sometimes even blankets were not available. Basic equipment and clothing was non-existent. Sometimes there was no food or rations for men who were forced to find a local pub or café to eat in. Even when food was provided there might be no knives, plates or mugs. In Preston, Fulwood Barracks was the depot for several Lancashire regiments. It had accommodation for about one thousand men but twice that number arrived almost every day. Locals offered recruits bed and breakfast in their own homes to help cope with the overflow, while the loft of the local Tramway power station was turned into a dormitory where hundreds slept every night.

  Charles Jones worked in a London solicitor’s office, joined up in early September and was sent to the Chichester depot of the Royal Sussex Regiment. He described in a letter to his wife conditions in the barracks, designed for 500 men but now packed with 1,200 raw recruits ‘consisting mainly of London roughs and country yokels of the worst description’. After an exhausting first day he was told to sleep in the depot’s library, but to his horror the place was ‘packed like sardines with one of the noisiest and obscene collections of human beings it has ever been my misfortune to meet, and the smell of them packed into a small building after a hot day was truly sickening.’ Men from the middle and lower middle classes were shocked both at the lack of provisions and at the foul language they heard. Jones said the recruits introduced ‘Damns and Bloodys etc etc’ into every sentence.2 Men from smart middle-class homes complained at the lack of basic sanitary arrangements. Buckets pressed into use as toilets were soon overflowing. Sometimes several hundred men had to wash in the same basin. Of the first recruits to join up in August and September 1914, the transition from civilian to army life was chaotic, subject to much petty bureaucracy and extremely arduous. It would strain the patriotism of even the most ardent recruit.

  Many recruits thought they would be given a rifle and would be over in France fighting the Germans in no time. In fact what they faced was endless drilling, marching and what a later generation would call ‘square bashing’. Not only were there no uniforms but although their instructors told them that an infantryman’s rifle was his best friend, there were precious few such weapons to be had. Men trained with wooden sticks. Occasionally, some obsolete Lee-Metford rifles would arrive. But even then there were never enough and it was necessary to pass them around, one company or platoon training with them one day, and another the next. And when there were rifles, there was no ammunition. It was back to drilling, marching with straight backs and square shoulders up and down for hours on end, forming fours, and learning to obey commands without thinking from loud, barking NCOs.

  In contrast, for many volunteers from working-class slums, the army would eventually offer a warm overcoat, decent boots, respectable clothing and three hot meals a day. Used as they were to hard physical graft in the mines or dull monotonous jobs for long hours in a factory or workshop, the army seemed to such men to be a marked improvement. Even some middle-class men found that once settled into army routine, they had less to worry about than in civilian life. C.E. Montague, writing after the war, observed that for the average soldier, ‘All was fixed from above, down to the time of his going to bed and the way he must lace up his shoes.’3

  However, such was the spirit of these first eager volunteers that there was little protest at the conditions they had to bear. Mostly, they accepted the difficulties as part of the process of doing their bit for King and Empire. Everywhere men were encouraged by the fantastic public support they received. As they marched through towns, people would come out to cheer them, often giving the recruits tobacco or chocolate as they passed by. For many recruits their biggest concern was that the ‘show’ would all be over by the time they got to France. Harold Macmillan, who after Eton and two years at Oxford had joined the Artists’ Rifles and began drilling at the Inns of Court in central London, wrote, ‘Our major anxiety was by hook or by crook not to miss it.’4

  Some of those who had joined the Pals battalions had a slightly easier time of it. If they were training locally, many of them were allowed
to sleep at home for the first few weeks or even months. In Salford, for instance, the local Tramway Committee laid on free trams for men living outside town to get in to barracks for morning parade at 8 a.m. The Baths Committee provided free baths and the Parks Committee offered open spaces for drilling and training. Such arrangements were in line with the idea that these were local battalions supported by local charity and municipal funds. In Sheffield, the City Pals were offered free passes to travel from home to their training ground. With so many men scattered across the city and its suburbs, communication was always going to be difficult, so daily orders were printed in the local papers. The battalion started its training at Bramall Lane football ground. Photographs show the volunteers training in their civilian clothes, often in shirtsleeves during what proved to be a hot summer. Soon the men moved on from Bramall Lane, as the turf had to be prepared for the new season. Drilling continued in local parks. An ex-Guardsman remarked that the bright, enthusiastic recruits had learned more in three weeks than most recruits would pick up in three months. This comment was reported in the local paper and many thought that meant the battalion would soon be in France. Great was the disappointment when it was realised this was not the case.5

  The Lonsdales, recruited in the north-west, had started their training at the Blackhall racecourse outside Carlisle, given over for this purpose by the Earl of Lonsdale himself. The local men went home at night, but with volunteers coming in from all over the hills and dales of Cumberland and Westmorland, the grandstand was converted for use as a temporary dormitory. In addition, huts were urgently needed as barracks. Carpenters were brought in, wood supplied and construction began, again much of it funded by the noble earl. He also provided basic outfits for the men to train in, some in his estate colours, some in grey, the colour of the old Cumberland Volunteers. The battalion history noted: ‘From early morning to dusk physical training, preliminary manual drill and movements were practised. The training was handicapped, however, by the lack of rifles, even of those for drill purposes only.’ As the autumn weather got cooler and the War Office had still not provided greatcoats or blankets, Lonsdale personally bought one thousand of each in London for the men to use. He also supplied an ambulance wagon, a water cart, two pairs of black horses and thirty mules for transport. The training of the battalion brought together the feudal concept of the local lord raising his own troop of soldiers with the new idea of locally raised and funded Pals battalions.6

  What sort of army did the hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the summer and autumn of 1914 find themselves joining? In the first decade of the twentieth century the army was an organisation going through a period of dramatic and sometimes difficult change. The Victorian army had been tiny, a volunteer army geared to fighting colonial wars, mostly against tribal forces with little modern technology. It was an army that put great emphasis upon tradition and the regular repetition of the same practices. The Boer War had revealed dreadful failings as the army of the world’s most powerful imperial nation struggled for three years to defeat a group of Boer irregulars. Changes were clearly necessary.

  Reform came in the Edwardian era, when the radical Secretary of War, Richard Burton Haldane, gave the army a thorough shaking up. Haldane was a passionate believer in the primacy of science. He tried to apply scientific principles to the organisation of the army and to the defining of its strategic objectives. From this, he believed, all else would follow. At the heart of the reforms he implemented was the decision to send a mobile expeditionary force to continental Europe to support Britain’s ally, France, in the event of that country’s invasion by a hostile Germany. The ancient local militias and county yeomanry forces were disbanded and regrouped into the Territorial Force. As we have seen, the Territorials’ principal purpose was to provide home defence when the regular army travelled to fight on the continent.

  Haldane also appointed a new Imperial General Staff to co-ordinate the strategic direction not only of the British army but also of the armies of the Dominions, to ensure that the Empire would act as a coherent, unified entity. The professional head of the army would be the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), effectively the Empire’s senior army commander. Haldane encouraged the introduction of a more technical, professional approach. This coincided with the development of various new items of military technology, for instance the short Lee Enfield rifle, heavier quick-firing artillery, the Vickers-Maxim machine gun and the aeroplane.7 Each of these new technologies unleashed a debate within the senior echelons of the army as to its value and effectiveness. This not only created tensions but also tended to produce something of a division between officers who embraced change and the new technologies on offer, and those who were happy with the traditional methods of fighting a war. Many senior figures were deeply suspicious of change and of anyone who tried to apply new ideas or new learning to the traditional craft of soldiering. Field Marshal Lord Wolseley had summed up this Victorian point of view when he wrote in 1897, ‘I hope the officers of Her Majesty’s Army may never degenerate into bookworms. There is happily at present no tendency in that direction, for I am glad to say that this generation is as fond of danger, adventure and all manly out-of-door sports as its forefathers were.’8

  The army, like most other national institutions in Edwardian Britain, reflected the society out of which it came. The officer class was drawn from the gentry and upper landed classes and had been almost entirely educated at the public schools. This educational system put much more emphasis on learning Latin and Greek than it did on understanding physics or chemistry. As a consequence most senior figures in Edwardian Britain knew a lot about classical history and literature but were almost entirely ignorant of scientific method or of new developments in physics, chemistry or engineering. At a conference in May 1916, several leading figures in British science lamented the bias in the educational system. Pointing out that the headmasters of thirty-four of the top thirty-five public schools were classicists and that not a single college at Oxford University had at its head anyone with scientific training, they described the hostility towards science in the British public schools as ‘truly deplorable’.9

  Senior figures in the army shared the outlook and assumptions of other leading figures in the Edwardian establishment, including most politicians, City bankers and senior civil servants. So while the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, where most senior officers had begun their army careers, taught military history and specific skills such as ballistics, it did not have a single course on science.10 In evidence to an enquiry into the education and training of officers in 1902, senior figures within the army lined up to stress the value of sports like hunting and polo to the building of character. Lieutenant-Colonel Murray, Assistant Commandant at Woolwich, went on record to say, ‘We would rather have a classically educated boy than one who has given up his mind very much to Electricity and Physics and those kind of subjects. We want them to be leaders in the field first … Power of command and habits of leadership are not learned in the laboratory … Our great point is character; we care more about that than subjects.’11

  The public schools were particularly strong on trying to develop ‘character’. They emphasised values like group loyalty, obedience to the existing hierarchy, hostility to intellectual debate and a preference for healthy, outdoor team sports. Gentlemanly virtues did not usually include a vigorous enthusiasm for new ideas and technologies. Socially, meanwhile, the army was deeply conservative, and for officers army life revolved around a pleasant set of fixed rituals based on loyalty to a battalion or regiment. Officers had servants to look after them, just as they would in civilian life. In the higher echelons of the army most senior officers felt they were professional soldiers who knew what they were doing, had been doing it for some time and saw no good reason to change. Moreover, there was an embedded hostility to the idea of imposing a prescriptive doctrine across army activities. Emphasis was put on the individual taking his own decisions on a pragmatic basis, not relyin
g on a pre-existing theory. In many ways this made a virtue out of a belief in ‘muddling through’.

  Within this framework of thinking, those who were trying to encourage a more technical frame of mind were always going to struggle. But society was being transformed by new technology and the applications of new scientific ideas. The changes were evident for every Edwardian to see. Electricity lit up the streets of every town and city and enabled the introduction of a range of new domestic and commercial products, from the telephone to the vacuum cleaner. Chemical industries transformed many industrial processes, enabling the mass production of such items as paint, cement and agricultural fertilisers along with the development of new cleaning compounds, drugs and pharmaceuticals, as well as explosives. Inventions like the internal combustion engine, radio, cinema and powered flight all provided challenging alternatives to traditional military technology. The army simply could not ignore these changes and senior figures were aware that other nations’ armies were changing the way they made war. The Japanese army and navy had achieved victory over the Imperial Russian forces in their war of 1904–5 in part by the effective use of new technologies like the machine gun and the torpedo. Some senior officers were certainly keen to embrace new military technologies. But old values died slowly.