Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
there is anything doing on the other side, I will stir something up. Nirvana be damned!
He was killed at Delville Wood on 18 August, and never knew that he had won the Military Medal, gazetted the following February.144
Richard Henry Tawney, a devout Christian, socialist and distinguished economic historian, enlisted in a New Army battalion of the Manchesters at the age of thirty-four, also declined a commission and was wounded as a sergeant on the Somme. A general visited him while he was in hospital and warned the sister in charge of his ward that she was looking after a national treasure. Shocked, she asked Tawney why he had not told her that he was a gentleman. Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of the Morning Post, joined 2/2nd London in 1914, refusing to apply for a commission. ‘No, I will do the thing fairly,’ he declared. ‘I will take my place on the ranks.’145 He fought in Gallipoli, and was then transferred to 12/London. By now a sergeant, and recommended for the commission he felt he had to earn, he was killed when 56th Division assaulted Leuze Wood on 7 October 1916. By then he had established himself as a poet of some distinction and, like so many poets, expressed a rage in his writing that was absent from his military persona.
Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?
Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes? Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards? Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?
Even more volunteers wanted to stay in the ranks because that was where their friends were. Some units, like many of the London battalions constituting 33rd Division, were filled with men who might more naturally have been officers. The division included five public school battalions, 18/ to 21/Royal Fusiliers and 16/Middlesex; an ‘Empire’ and a Kensington battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; a West Ham battalion (13/Essex); the 1st Football Battalion (properly 17/Middlesex); and the Church Lads’ Battalion (16/King’s Royal Rifle Corps). Even the divisional pioneer battalion, best, if bluntly, described as military navvies, was 1st Public Works (18/Middlesex).146 The Sportsmen’s Battalion (23/Royal Fusiliers) included in its ranks two England cricketers, the country’s lightweight boxing champion and the former lord mayor of Exeter. A member of the unit described his hut in the battalion’s camp at Hornchurch:
In this hut the first bed was occupied by the brother of a peer. In the second the man who formerly drove his motor-car. Both had enlisted at the same time at the Hotel Cecil … Other beds in the hut were occupied by a mechanical engineer, an old Blundell School boy, planters, a mine overseer from Scotland, … a photographer, a poultry farmer, an old sea dog who had rounded Cape Horn on no fewer than nine occasions, a man who had hunted seals, a bank clerk, and so on. It must not be thought that this hut was an exceptional one. Every hut was practically the same, and every hut was jealous of its reputation.147
Many of these men subsequently did earn commissions – some 3,000 from 33rd Division alone – but many more were killed or crippled before they did so.
Even getting into the ranks could prove tricky. Stuart Dolden was ‘absolutely shattered’ when he was turned down at his enlistment medical because his chest measurement was two inches under requirement. He immediately went to a ‘physical culture centre’ in Dover Street, whose proprietor told him that his course, of ten half-hourly sessions, would cost 30 guineas, and had been taken by many famous people including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Field Marshal Sir John French. Dolden riposted that ‘I was not concerned with these gentlemen since it was my father who would have to foot the bill’, and managed to get it reduced to 6 guineas. The exercises worked, and Dolden joined the London Scottish, paying a pound for the privilege of doing so. It was a good deal easier for Anthony French, signing on at Somerset House, with a grunted monologue from the medical officer:
Hmm … Shirt off, trousers down … mmm … Cough … mmm … Not very tall … mmm … Scales over there … mmm … Silly business war … mmm … Just ten stone … shouldn’t have thought it … Hmm … Chest measurement … mmm … expand … mmm … Blast the Germans anyway … mmm … two-and-a-half inches … elastic lungs … mmm … try the Navy next time … Hmm … Mouth open … wider … mmm … Say aahhh … mmm … ninety-nine … mmmmm … General Service … Next man, Corporal … mmm. I took my shilling and departed.148
I. G. Andrew enlisted in the Glasgow University Company of 6/Cameron Highlanders. He found life in a tented camp near Aldershot ‘almost unendurably hard’, though it ridded him of ‘a certain priggish donnishness’. The bonds of mateship came quickly. He and three comrades ‘marched together, drank together, ate together and at night slept next to each other wherever it might be – tent, hut, billet or under the open air of heaven’. His company sergeant major was no ordinary man, but ‘a Roberston of Struhan, the son of a Colonel, the grandson of a major-general and an undergraduate of Magdalen College, Oxford’. Roberston had been a captain of rifle volunteers, a justice of the peace in India, and gave his profession on enlistment as ‘actor’. Officially too old for the front, Roberston nonetheless managed to engineer his way to France, where he was wounded at Loos. There was initially too little khaki to go round, and most New Army units wore ‘Kitchener Blue’, deeply unpopular because it made them look like bus drivers. 6/Camerons, however, had red tunics with white facings, postmen’s trousers, and, as Andrew found, ‘cap comforters closely resembling tea cosies’. The full majesty of the kilt did not come till 1915.
One night in camp Andrew’s pal John Irish sang ‘that grand old song The Trumpeter’. It is the most poignant of the old army’s tear-jerkers, with the trumpeter urging his comrades to:
… Tread light o’er the dead in the valley
Who are lying around, face down to the groundsheet
And they can’t hear me sounding the Rally …
‘It is a solemn moment,’ he reflected, ‘when a young man first senses his own mortality,’ and many sensed it then. Offered a commission through the good offices of a friendly MP, he turned it down and went to France as a lance corporal. John Irish departed to be a second lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the farewell was painful.
I was never to see him again, and when he met a soldier’s death at Arras a year later, I felt that something quite irreplaceable had gone out of my life. [John Irish stood] with the tears streaming down his face as he sobbed, ‘Good-bye Tubby, and the best of luck.’
Andrew’s battalion was part of the exceptional 9th Scottish Division. Second Lieutenant R. B. Talbot Kelly, a regular gunner in one of the batteries supporting it, remembered how:
Our Scottish infantry created an enormous impression on our minds. Never again was I to see so many thousands of splendid men, the very heart and soul of the nation. These were they who, on the outbreak of war, had rushed to enlist, the best and first of Kitchener’s New Armies. And here we saw them, bronzed and dignified, regiments of young gods.149
The Camerons went into action at Loos 820 strong and emerged with two officers and seventy men: Lance Corporal Andrew, himself wounded, saw Regimental Sergeant Major Peter Scotland standing over the commanding officer and asked if he should fetch stretcher-bearers. ‘It’s no good,’ said the RSM, ‘the old man’s dying.’ Andrew at last felt able to take a commission and, while convalescing, wrote to the commanding officer of 5/Scottish Rifles, who agreed to take him. ‘A man of means’ thanks to his outfit allowance, he went to the best tailor in Glasgow for his uniform, but when he reported for duty at Catterick he discovered that ‘second lieutenants were two a penny’.150
Not all Pals’ battalions broke the old army’s rules quite as dramatically as units such as 23/Royal Fusiliers or 6/Camerons, with their high proportion of educated men serving in the ranks. The 31st Division presented a fairer