Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
a training and logistical role’. After a training job he would then be likely to return to his old battalion where ‘I would probably become a welfare officer, looking after the families of those going off to fight.’ It was not for him, and he decided to resign. Before his resignation took effect, though, he was posted to Afghanistan, where he won a Military Cross in a burst of desperate fighting alongside the Afghan National Army and police at Garmsir in 2006. Although still determined to leave the army, he was unable to resist the opportunity of helping his own battalion prepare for its Afghanistan tour, and accompanying them when it deployed. ‘Soldiering was what I did and what I knew’, he wrote. ‘It was in my blood.’29 His unhappiness with the sorts of jobs on offer after commissioning is not untypical. It reflects a slow transition, not yet completed, between old army and new.
It is impossible to overemphasise either the importance of quartermasters or their impact on superiors and subordinates alike. Some might indeed have deserved the description given the quartermaster of a cavalry regiment in the Indian Mutiny as ‘old, excessively conceited, disobliging and ungentlemanly …’30 Their passage through the ranks will not have imbued them with profound confidence in human nature; they will be older than most officers of their rank, and, although the selection of mainstream officers from a broader background continues to reduce the social differences between quartermasters and their brother officers, they will certainly not be graduates in a largely graduate officers’ mess. At their best they are sources of wise advice as well as solid professional expertise, and are often remembered long after most other officers are forgotten.
In his Sherston’s Progress trilogy, Siegfried Sassoon modelled that ‘husky-voiced old campaigner’, the gruff but kindly Joe Dottrell, quartermaster of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, on its real quartermaster, Captain Yates. He also appears to no less advantage in The War the Infantry Knew, the battalion’s unofficial history, compiled by Captain James Churchill Dunn, its medical officer for much of the war. Yates met the battalion as it stumbled back from Le Cateau in 1914. ‘The Quartermaster had some stew and tea ready, and we had an issue of rum, and, what was still better, some letters from home.’ He got the men away, a platoon at a time, to have a bath – ‘badly needed’ – when the battalion held autumnal trenches above the Aisne. On St David’s Day 1916 (sacred to the Royal Welch) he secured, though we can only guess how, ‘a leek for everyone’s cap.’ He saved time and trouble by keeping his transport close behind the battalion on the Somme, though everyone else’s was sent further back. When the battalion ran dangerously short of ammunition in the German spring offensive of 1918 ‘Yates has made up, although scrounging is not so easy as formerly.’ When the war ended he not only took home ‘a complete Mobilisation Store for a battalion, down to the last horseshoe and strap,’ but a complete German mortar acquired by the brigadier and ‘innumerable brass shell-cases’ that Yates and the adjutant had collected. And at last, when the battalion paraded through Wrexham on its arrival in Britain, he astonished those who had no notion of there having been a Mrs Yates by spotting her amongst the crowd: ‘forty years of army discipline were forgotten, he dashed from the ranks, and greeted her heartily and unblushingly.’31
The quartermaster’s subordinates were headed by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, from 1913 a warrant officer, and included an assortment of storemen, with cooks, grooms, and transport-men often coming under his command too. He had a particular lien on company quartermaster sergeants who, like him, were known as quarter-blokes. Although his post was not the most martial, RQMS T.W. Fitzpatrick of 2/Royal Irish did more than most to save the BEF on 23 August 1914, assembling a scratch force (including the battalion’s armourer, Sergeant Redmond, with that useful asset, a newly-repaired machine gun) to hold the Bascule crossroads near Mons. He was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal and a commission for the day’s work, and ended the war a lieutenant colonel.
As adjutant generals were to adjutants, so quartermaster generals were to quartermasters. Yet there was one big difference. Although a quartermaster general and his Q staff were responsible for accommodation and quartering, supplies of all sorts, remounts and accounting, neither the army’s quartermaster general, nor the quartermaster general of a deployed force, would ever have been a battalion quartermaster. Wully Robertson, the BEF’s quartermaster general in 1914, had indeed served in the ranks, though he had been commissioned long before he was eligible to be quartermaster. It is a reflection of the army’s relationship with its own logisticians that Lieutenant General Sir Paul Travers, who had spent much of his career in the Royal Corps of Transport, was the first professional logistician to become quartermaster general, in 1982. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the army’s logistic services were militarised, and even then there was more than a little disdain, on the part of what became known as the ‘teeth arms’, for the supporting services.
This did not prevent some quartermaster generals from being very competent. Perhaps the most outstanding of them was General Sir John Cowans, in post for the whole of the First World War and according to Asquith ‘the best quartermaster since Moses’. He combined regimental service in the Rifle Brigade, into which he had been commissioned in 1881, with a series of logistic staff jobs. He was urbane and tireless, and, unusually amongst officers who had grown up in a small army, had the capacity to think big. He got on well with ministers – not always a simple task in that uneasy world of frocks and brass-hats – and his ‘penchant for other men’s wives’ may have endeared him to Lloyd George.32
When Wully Robertson stepped up from being QMG in France to take over as the BEF’s chief of staff in 1915, the post went to Ronald Maxwell. But he was replaced in December 1917 because of political pressure, and against Haig’s wishes, by Travers Clarke. Maxwell had been good but Clarke was even better, an extraordinary administrator who coped with both the haemorrhaging of resources after the slashing cut of the German 1918 offensive and the unprecedented demands of the mobile warfare of the last Hundred Days. It says something of the way that history is written (for we scribblers prefer warriors to logisticians) that few, even amongst the war’s more serious historians, give him the attention he deserves. Major General Hubert Essame likened him to Lazare Carnot, who had done so much to keep the threadbare warriors of revolutionary France in the field, and called him the ‘Carnot of Haig’s armies’.
Clarke’s department worried about the allowances in lieu of billets available to French and Belgian interpreters; the relationship between ammunition parks at corps level and their satellite divisional sub-parks; and the process of compensating landowners for damage to trees and other property. It had a comprehensive policy on the recycling of damaged equipment, advising that ‘any boot which is not badly cut in the uppers can be repaired, and if doubt exists it is better to err on the safe side, and class the boot as repairable.’ When the Machine Gun Corps was formed in 1915, the QMG’s branch had to devise new scales of equipment, so that cavalry machine gun squadrons received, inter alia, two chisels, one plane, one bench vice, and a saddletree-maker (to equip the horses with the packs used to transport ammuntion and the guns themselves). It issued instruction on correspondence, from ordinary letters, through express delivery and on to weekend letter telegrams, which could be sent from France to certain colonies or dependencies provided that they were written in plain English or French and included no code-words.
Rations were a major preoccupation, with a complex shopping list of entitlements and alternatives for man and beast. Men working in arduous conditions could receive extra tea and sugar daily, and two ounces of pea soup or two Oxo cubes twice weekly during the winter months. Indian rations included ghee, ghur, ginger, chillies, and turmeric; and Africans were entitled to a pound and a half of mealie meal per man per day. Transport of all sorts was the responsibility of Q Branch: spares, spark-plugs and speeding all merited entries in routine orders. Finally, the branch even ventured into matters adjutantal, warning that officers had been seen returning from France to the United Kingdom wearing Sam Browne belts from which the braces and frog had been removed. At least one of the braces should be worn at all times, although (generous concession) the frog need only be worn with the sword itself.33
Historically, the quartermaster general of a field army was its commander’s chief staff officer, for military operations were so intimately concerned with supply and movement that it was natural for the QMG’s branch to take the lead. Both Marlborough’s chief of staff, William