Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
as a basis for military expansion. He would bypass the Territorial Force, with its different terms of service and County Associations, and raise troops through the adjutant general’s branch in the War Office.129 In August 1914, therefore, a young man wishing to join the army had three choices. He could become a regular on pre-war terms of service: the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and Royal Military College Sandhurst, for instance, continued to train regular officers throughout the war. Or he could become a territorial, accepting or declining foreign service. Lastly, he could become a regular for the duration of the war by joining the New Armies, so intimately linked to their instigator as to be called Kitchener’s Armies.
His decision would be influenced by a number of factors. Many (but by no means all) local authorities, as we have seen in Accrington, threw their weight behind the New Armies. There was a widely-held belief – so marked that New Army recruiting meetings were occasionally disrupted by jealous serving territorials – that the New Armies would get abroad first, and the young and bold often chose to join them for that reason. But on the other hand, some of the cautious and far-sighted deduced that by enlisting in the Territorial Force but (crucially) not accepting liability for foreign service they were more likely to survive the war. That this was likely to produce an avoidable muddle is beyond question. Rather than joining in the rush to blame Kitchener, autocratic, opinionated and obdurate though he was, we might more reasonably criticise a government which had not put in place a mechanism for raising troops to meet the demands of the continental war in which its foreign policy was likely to involve it.
It was Kitchener’s achievement to give Britain an army capable of meeting the demands of war on an unprecedented scale. Just over 5,700,000 men served in the army during the war, almost two million more than in the Second World War, and the army of 1914–18 was ‘the most complex single organisation created by the British nation up to that time’. Just under half its men were volunteers: by the end of 1915, 2,466,719 had voluntarily enlisted, more than the nation was able to obtain by conscription in 1916 and 1917 combined, and the number of conscripts enlisted in 1918 was only 30,000 more than the number of volunteers enlisting in September 1914 alone.130
On 6 August 1914 Kitchener sought parliamentary approval for increasing the size of the army by 500,000 men, and the following day newspapers carried appeals for ‘an addition of 100,000 men to His Majesty’s Regular Army …’. Volunteers were to be between nineteen and thirty years old, and were to sign on for three years or the duration of the war. Five days later the War Office gave details of the ‘First New Army’, or K1, which was to comprise six complete divisions: the infantry component, by far the bulk of the force, was, as we have seen, to form ‘service’ battalions of existing regiments.131 On the first day of the appeal, 7 August, The Times reported that the press of men outside the Central London Recruiting Office in Great Scotland Yard was so big that mounted police had to hold it in check. Although there was no wild cheering or excitement there was, perhaps more tellingly in the British context, an ‘undercurrent of enthusiasm’, and those who failed their medical examination were obviously disappointed. One former officer in the Rifle Brigade was so mortified at being found unfit for service that he shot himself.
Extra recruiting offices were opened to make the process quicker, and extra clerks and doctors were found to speed up the bureaucracy of attestation and medical examination. The campaign gained momentum in its second week, and Tuesday 19 August set the record, thus far, for a single day with 9,699 enlistments. News from the front, where the BEF had just fought the battle of Mons, coupled with steadily-improving procedures brought in more than 63,000 men in the week beginning 25 August. On 28 August Kitchener appealed for another 100,000 men. Although he initially intended to use these troops to reinforce the rapidly-forming divisions of K1, it was soon decided to form another New Army, K2.132 There had already been a flurry of complaints in the press about fit men excluded by the previous limits (Admiral Sir William Kennedy gruffly told The Times that his butler, a fine shot, had been rejected because he was thirty-two), and so the upper age limit was increased to thirty-five for men without prior service, forty-five for ex-soldiers and fifty for ex-senior NCOs.
The widening of age limits, improved procedures, and the establishment of a Parliamentary Recruiting Committee to help the government bring together all the agencies involved, all helped. The alarmist ‘Amiens dispatch’ which appeared in The Times on 30 August – greatly overstating the damage incurred by the BEF on the retreat from Mons – persuaded many that there was a very real need, and numerous firms generously agreed to supplement the army pay of men who enlisted. Recruits flooded in, establishing records which were not to be broken for the rest of the war: on Thursday 3 September 1914, a staggering 33,204 men (equivalent to almost one-third the strength of the BEF in France) joined the army. Having formally declared the creation of the 2nd New Army on 11 September, the War Office quickly agreed to a 3rd and then a 4th New Army.133 The 5th and final New Army was sanctioned in October: in less than three months Kitchener had laid the foundation for no less than thirty new divisions.134 It was an achievement wholly without precedent in British history.
If Kitchener’s achievement was unprecedented, the army’s radical expansion was wholly unplanned. There were no weapons, uniforms or equipment for most of these men; few experienced officers and NCOs who could train them; no proper living accommodation, cookhouses or medical centres; too few rifle and artillery ranges; no draught animals, harness or vehicles; and no commanders and staff for the new divisions or the brigades that made them up. Raising and training the New Armies represented improvisation on a staggering scale. It is worth contemplating the result of a comparable increase in other professions. School registers would quadruple in size, though accommodation would not, and long-retired teachers would join untrained newcomers in the classroom. Three-men-and-a-truck London building firms would each receive a hundred new workers (many of them fishermen from the Western Isles) and be invited to embark upon complex construction projects for which no materials were yet available. And small-town banks would be invited to take on three dozen new staff, many of them innumerate and a few unreliable, to finance complex local ventures being run by the inexperienced, the overambitious and the idle.
It had never been easier to get a commission in the Special Reserve, New Armies or territorials: a young man simply had to find a commanding officer who was prepared to take him on. When F. P. Roe was at his school’s OTC camp in July 1914 his contingent commander handed out applications for temporary commissions with names already filled out: they simply required signatures. ‘We all of us signed,’ he recalled,
and the forms were dispatched to the War Office the same day. Understandably, in view of the fact that the same sort of procedure was going on all over Britain we heard nothing at all … With determined disregard for the usual channels and with renewed enthusiasm I sent a telegram to the War Office: ‘Have been accepted for a commission in the 6th (Territorial) Battalion The Gloucestershire Regiment.’ I later read in The Times of 1 October a copy of The London Gazette appointing me to a commission as a second lieutenant in that unit. Later on our early applications must have caught up for I was antedated in my rank to 31st July 1914 on my birthday … Much later I received the parchment of my actual commission.135
C. H. Gaskell, with the benefit of OTC experience, simply went to Bulford Camp on his motor bike ‘to see what could be done in the way of getting a commission in the army’. Having failed to strike gold there, he roared on to the Wiltshire Regiment’s depot in Devizes, where he presented himself ‘to Col Stewart who treated me with great kindness and seemed hopeful of getting me a commission right away’. Two days later he was in 3/Wiltshire, the Special Reserve battalion, under the congenial command of Lord Heytesbury. ‘We had a few parades to attend, some trench digging, and an odd lecture or two,’ he wrote, ‘with plenty of time off for bathing and having tea in the town and singsongs in the evening.’ In a month he was in France, commanding a platoon in 1/Wiltshire on the Aisne. As he went