Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
up in a very long single line. We were then counted off into groups destined for 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 peremptory 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 …
He was posted to 10/Lancashire Fusiliers, where he was well received by the fiercely Irish Company Sergeant Major Doolan, ‘a regular soldier, one of the very few of the original British Expeditionary Force who had survived to this stage of the war’. He was soon calling his battalion ‘T’owd Tenth’, and was anxious to get his new cap badge.
Hodges finished the war a corporal, and proudly returned home to Northampton in full fig.
My khaki uniform was stained and worn, but my belt shone, my buttons gleamed, and my khaki tunic bore the colourful insignia of my regiment, brigade and division. On my epaulettes I wore the green and black tabs of battalion gas NCO with the brass fusilier bomb and the brass letters LF.
On my upper arms above my Corporal’s stripes, the Battalion sign, an oblong yellow flash and the 52nd Brigade sign, a green square 52, and above these and just below my epaulettes, the 17th Divisional sign, a white dot and dash on a red background. My mother said it was quite colourful.45
In his assessment of the reasons for the Allied victory, Frederick Hodges suggested that ‘the dogged courage and will to win at whatever the cost’ was more important than ‘superior military arts and skills’. He identified ‘unquenchable spirit, the sticky and the earthy wit of the infantryman at war, who, though he was a mere pawn in the plans of generals, yet remained an individual who served ideals; and for those ideals, faced death daily at some chance or mischance of war with courage in the line of duty’. Hodges may have been more idealistic than many, but he came close to identifying the qualities which helped keep what was now a national army together in the last year of a long war.
‘Then the “Dead March”, and what a nightmare,’ wrote Will Fisher.
We draw on leather gloves, lift a body onto a sheet of brattice cloth, wrap it up, then tie it to a stretcher. ‘Off with it, boys’, and what a journey, even to us … And the stupefying heat and bad air, causing the sweat to pour down one in streams, and to add to the romance the sickening stench, rising all the time to the face of the man behind. In one place, wading to our knees in water, one man fell with the stretcher. Some bodies are heavy too, our wrists giving out before the two miles are covered … ‘Who is it?’ ‘Don’t know, indeed’, on we go … Twenty have so far been buried unidentified, owing to melting …
The pity of it all, that flesh should be so cheap.46
This could so easily be a scene from the Western Front, perhaps in a flooded trench at Festubert in the spring of 1915, or on the northern slopes of Longueval Ridge at the end of the Somme, but it is not. Will Fisher is describing the Senghenydd mining disaster of 1913, in the heart of the South Wales coalfields, in which 439 men died. Fisher had just come off shift, but immediately went underground again to help with the rescue operations. We will meet him again, lifelong socialist but successful and committed soldier: there was less inconsistency in that than some would have us believe. For the moment, though, let him usher us into the cramped and sweaty basement of what Barbara Tuchman called ‘The Proud Tower’, the world that went to war in 1914.
It is easy to romanticise Edwardian England as just one long afternoon where it was always strawberries and cream at Henley, shooting parties at Sandringham, dinner at Quaglino’s and a breathless hush in the close as young Corinthians laid willow to leather. A gentleman could travel from London to Paris and on to Berlin and St Petersburg in the comfort of his Pullman carriage with the minimum of formalities and little risk. Churches were well attended, though earlier talk of a national religious revival now seemed misplaced. Sensible chaps like Alfred Hale could live quiet but comfortable lives on investment income. There might be a morning in the library, lunch in the club in St James’, then a first-class carriage on the ever-reliable 4.48 from Waterloo to Petersfield, and a cab from the station to find a glass of nut-brown Amontillado and one of Mrs Ling’s pies, in all its savoury splendour, waiting at home.
Even a little further down the social scale a satisfying and predictable routine could be found. J. B. Priestley left school to become a junior clerk in the wool trade, working for Helm and Co. in Swan Lane, Bradford. His day began at 9.00 and ended at 6.00, 6.30 or even 7.00 pm, though if he stayed that late there was an extra 6d in the pay packet for ‘tea away’. He smoked Cut Black Cavendish in his pipe, 3½d an ounce from Salmon and Gluckstein’s, and wrote prose and poetry at home, enjoying the ‘irregular rhythm of effort and relaxation’. Looking back on his youth he could not disguise his affection for the old world. ‘I belong at heart to the pre-1914 North Country …’ he wrote; ‘something at the core of me is still in Market Street hearing the Town Hall chimes’.47
But we do not need to look very much harder to see the cracks in the masonry. The labour movement was growing stronger by the year: there were 422 strikes in 1909, 834 in 1912, and 1,459 in 1913: there would have been a General Strike in 1914 had war not intervened. Class divisions within Britain were still accepted by many, though there was growing rancour. On 23 January 1917 Corporal Will Fisher, already feeling the symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him, wrote:
Want to go through to the end, feel fit enough. Anniversary of enlisting two years ago. DEATH OF MY BOY GEORGE. The lad is better off; he is free from wage slavery and the insults of class rule.48
John Simpson Kirkpatrick, one of the heroes of the Australian fight for Gallipoli, was a merchant seaman from Tyneside who jumped ship in Sydney in 1909. In 1912 he told his mother:
I wonder when the work men of England will wake up and see things as other people see them. What they want in England is a good revolution and that will clear out some of the Millionaires and lords and Dukes out of it and then with a Labour Government they will be almost able to make their own conditions.49
And if the Bradford community described by J. B. Priestley was ‘closer to a classless society than anyone born in southern England can ever understand’, there was a desperate underclass which even junior clerks seldom saw. John Cusack’s mother brought up five children in two ground-floor rooms in a Glasgow tenement. There was no bathroom, and just a cold water tap and grate in the kitchen. His father and mother slept in the bed, and the children on the floor of a room eight feet square. The family went to a public wash house once a week. After his father emigrated to America the family was barely able to survive.
For dinner at midday we’d probably have some broken biscuits which you could buy for a ha’penny a packet or we might have a ha’penny worth of hot chips from the fish and chip shop. A portion of fish cost tuppence, which was too dear for dinner …
I hardly ever wore any shoes. I used to wear short pants made of corduroy for a Sunday otherwise of flannel. They were never new, unless you were the eldest child. You simply fell into your brother’s clothes. I would wear a little flannel shirt of a dark colour, a jacket and what we’d call a bonnet or hookerdon, a cap which I pulled down well over one eye.50
Underwear was uncommon – John Cusack’s comrades found their army issue vests and drawers items ‘previously unknown to us’. In working-class households where it did exist it had to last a full week between washes. It is small wonder that wartime