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  The Brigadier was considerably put out when it was announced, at the beginning of February, that Lord Kitchener was to inspect a part of the 34th Division on parade, and that the part selected for this honour was the 101st Brigade. As this Brigade was made up of Royal Scots, Suffolks and Lincolns, it was thought to be a tactful choice which, in view of the well-known rivalry between the two remaining Brigades of the Division – the 102nd Tyneside Scottish and the 103rd Tyneside Irish – would avoid any ructions or accusations of partiality. Brigadier-General Ternan was having none of that! He was acquainted with Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener. He had served under him in two previous wars. They had even shared a billet together, thirty-two years earlier, in the Khedive’s Palace at Alexandria. It was true that, as an officer on the Intelligence Staff, Major Kitchener had been lodged in silk and satin splendour in one of the elaborate state apartments, while Ternan, as a junior subaltern, had shared a scullery with the cockroaches, but time and promotion had put their acquaintanceship on a more intimate footing. The Brigadier had no qualms at all about the propriety of waylaying the Field-Marshal’s car en route to the inspection, and waving it to a halt. Lord Kitchener was delighted to see him, delighted to see his fine Brigade – which just happened to be lined up on either side of the road ahead – and delighted to accept the Brigadier’s invitation to alight and inspect it.

  He walked for almost a mile along its ranks and was cheered to the echo by each company as he passed. He complimented the Brigadier in the warmest terms and, when he finally stepped back into his staff car at the end of the line, the pipers skirled him on his way to the strains of Hielan’ Laddie. All in all, the only people who were not entirely delighted with the events of such a satisfactory afternoon were the Corps and Divisional Commanders, who were left kicking their heels for a full hour in front of the drawn-up ranks of the 101st Brigade, at the official inspection point two miles ahead.

  Now, just four months later, Lord Kitchener was dead. He had been drowned in HMS Hampshire on the way to perform a mission in Russia and his death was to prove to be an irreparable loss to the Army as a whole, particularly with regard to its relations with the French. There was no doubt about the fact that, compared to the Germans, the Allies suffered from their lack of overall command at the highest level. The difficulties involved in working out a joint strategy, of directing independent campaigns in such a way as to contribute effectively to a co-ordinated military effort, and the problems of unanimously deciding who should attack where and when, were never fully resolved. There was too much internecine bickering, both among the French politicians and among the British, and, on both sides, there was too much jockeying for position between the officers of the General Staffs and even between the Commanders of the Armies in the field. In all the joint deliberations there was too much talk, too much time wasted, too much thought given to mutual support in the short-term interest and too little given to the planning of long-term strategy.

  By 1916 the situation cried out to be taken in hand by a man who would have the respect of both sides and who, without self-interest or national partiality, would be able to exercise an effective overall command in the common interest of the Allies. Lord Kitchener had been such a man. As Britain’s Secretary of State for War, he occupied an eminence which automatically claimed the respect of politicians; as an illustrious soldier of the highest rank, he was unquestioningly honoured by the military. There was no other man who could have taken his place at the hub of the wheeling machinations of a dozen different Franco-British interests, flying off at a dozen different tangents, held them together and sent them bowling smoothly towards a common objective. There was no other man who would have been acceptable to both sides. Now, Kitchener was gone and there was no one to replace him.

  In France, and in his dealings with the French, Sir Douglas Haig was left holding the baby. So far as the Somme campaign was concerned, Lord Kitchener’s support would have been neither here nor there. Over the preceding months, the sequence of events which had inexorably shifted the main burden of the attack on to the shoulders of the British, had happened so gradually that there had never been a single clear-cut opportunity which might have been seized to rethink the practicalities of the British role in the offensive or to reconsider if, indeed, it should be launched on the Somme Front at all. Even as far back as April, with the plans well under way, and with half the troops already en route to the Somme, it had been far too late to launch into protracted renegotiations with the French, even if political considerations had not deemed that to be highly inadvisable. The Army was committed to an offensive on the Somme. There was no going back and nothing to be done except to concentrate on training the infantry and to make all possible efforts to rectify their deficiencies before they went into battle.

  It was easier said than done.

  If midnight oil had been an essential ingredient of victory, the troops would have romped home, for the conferences, the discussion, the debate went on at Army Headquarters and at GHQ itself, long into the night. If the troops could have been swept into Bapaume on a tidal-wave of paper work, they would have been swirling through its streets in no time, for the various Headquarters were pouring out orders, commands, suggestions, memoranda, operational plans and instructions faster than a legion of clerks and printers could keep up with them. If a battle could have been won by planning, then the result would have been a foregone conclusion, for never, in the history of warfare, had a campaign been more meticulously planned down to the last infinitesimal detail. It was self-evident that the New Army – officers and men alike – was rich in morale and the will to win, but it was woefully lacking in knowledge, skill and experience. It was up to the Staff to fill the gaps, to envisage every possible contingency, to anticipate every move, to lay down the plans for every individual unit, and to lay them down within such a rigid framework that they could not fail to be clearly understood. So long as the men of the New Army adhered strictly to the instructions of the professionals, together they would carry the day.

  Adhering to instructions was not a characteristic for which the independent spirits of Kitchener’s Army were renowned. They had no objection to fighting, which, after all, was what they were here for. Since they had picked up the old soldiers’ trick of rubbing candlegrease inside their socks, they had no great objection to marching. They could put up with the trenches and even with the labour involved in fatigues and working parties, for which there seemed to be some reasonable necessity and, on the whole, to a certain philosophic degree, they were willing to acquiesce with the less immediately comprehensible whims of the Army.

  Many of the Army’s ‘whims’ sprang from the conviction that, in the final analysis, battles were won by discipline, by the unquestioning, automatic response of all ranks to orders. Such traditional discipline, inculcated over long years in the time-serving hierarchy of the peacetime Army, was not so easy to impose on a heterogeneous mass of well-meaning civilians who regarded themselves as very temporary and very private soldiers, with what they considered to be a healthy disrespect for ‘bull’. The Army understood this but, in the months of training for the Big Push, it seemed to certain officers, whose brains were whirling in the effort of trying to assimilate the contents of the reams of orders and instructions that were piling up into mountains on their desks, that certain molehills were receiving undue attention.

  Things which may appear trivial matters to those who have only lately joined the Army are really of great importance, such as saluting, cleanliness, tidiness in dress, manner when speaking to their superiors, strict observance of orders.

  The strictest attention must continue to be paid to the cultivation of the power of command in young officers, also to discipline, dress, saluting, cleanliness and care of billets.

  Men must learn to obey by instinct without thinking.

  Too great stress cannot be laid on developing good morale, a soldierly spirit, and a determination in all ranks to achieve success at all costs.1

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bsp; In order after order, in tones that varied from the hectoring to the plaintive, the Staff never missed an opportunity of pressing the message home.

  The practicalities involved in training some two hundred thousand men to play an effective part in a full-scale battle, was even more of a problem. Brigadiers and Battalion Commanders of long-serving Divisions became sick of complying with insistent demands which reached them almost daily from GHQ, that they should supply immediately: six men fully qualified to act as instructors in signalling… bombing… Lewis-guns… Stokes mortar… bayonet drill… musketry… The demands were never ending. They groaned, grumbled, and, in most cases, seized the opportunity of getting rid of the duds.

  With more than one hundred and fifty thousand men to be trained for the great attack, the Army could have done with a thousand specialist instructors, and they simply did not exist.

  The best that could be done with the few who were available, was to appoint ‘specialist’ officers and NCOs in each of several hundred battalions and send them, by contingents, on intensive training courses at one of the various Army Schools some distance behind the line. Then to depend on them, assisted by voluminous notes and instructions, to pass on their knowledge to junior officers and to train the troops under their command. All the enthusiasm of Kitchener’s Army could not prevent the outlines from becoming blurred as they travelled down the chain of command.

  Chapter 3

  Had it not been for the fact that the Army Schools needed soldiers to ‘practise on’, the 13 th Battalion of The Rifle Brigade would not have received the unexpected bonus of what amounted to a month’s holiday. You had to be good to be a demonstration battalion, and Colonel Pretor-Pinney had seen to it that his Battalion was good and, as he constantly dinned into them, not so much a Kitchener’s Battalion as a Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. He had been an officer of the Regiment for more than thirty years – long enough to have retired twice and twice returned to the Active List to serve in two wars. It was a stroke of luck that he had soldiered in South Africa with Colonel Edward Gordon, for Colonel Gordon was now Assistant Adjutant General of the 37th Division and he regarded the battalion commanded by his old friend with a benevolent eye. He was impressed by its performance and he had chosen it, out of all the battalions in his division, to go to the Army School of Instruction at Auxi-le-Châeau to show them how things ought to be done. It was a signal honour and a blessed change from a succession of miserable stints in the trenches at le Gastineau.

  But Auxi-le-Château, in the spring of 1916, was pure and simple bliss, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it was also hard work. At Auxi perfection was the order of the day, and nothing short of perfection would do. The turnout of the demonstration squads had to, be so immaculate that even the handles of entrenching tools were required to glisten in the early sunshine of morning parades. Their drilling had to be carried out with the precision of a regular battalion on the Regimental Parade Ground at Winchester. Squad by squad, company by company, they were drilled twenty times a day by a succession of self-conscious young subalterns, who squeaked their commands in nervous falsetto under the critical eye of a drill-sergeant to whom mere second-lieutenants were objects of ill-concealed scorn, rather than ‘objects of respect’. The appellation ‘object of respect’ had been a favourite phrase of Corporal Lucas, whose unhappy task it had been to impart to B Company something of the requirements of the Army when they had first joined it nineteen months before, and Corporal Lucas, who was still pursuing the same thankless vocation at Regimental Headquarters, would have been amazed – if not gratified – had he known how often his words were remembered and quoted. Certain of his expressions had become catch-phrases in the Battalion.

  Sergeant Howard Rowlands, B Coy., 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  We often remembered old Corporal Lucas during the time we were at Auxi, particularly when it came to company drill and saluting. This was all for the education of the officers in training, and we had to do this saluting over and over and over again, until the lads were weary and sick and tired of it. But it just needed one fellow to say, ‘About this serluting…’ and everybody smiled and saw the joke. Old Lucas used to say, ‘About this serluting, what I says is yer don’t take it serious enough. Look at me, for example. I always chucks one up every time I meets an object of respect. Don’t matter if it’s a pretty girl, a Solomon in all his glory – meaning a ruddy general! – or a glass of beer!’ We referred to officers as ‘Objects of Respect’ for a long time. He was a real Cockney. He took us for rifle drill too and, in explaining the aperture of a rifle, he always asked us, ‘What is a naperture?’ At first he used to give the answer himself. ‘Why, a naperture’s a nole!’ After a while, we decided to convince him that we really understood so, whenever he enquired, ‘What is a naperture?’ the whole squad would yell back in delight, ‘A naperture’s a nole.’ What agonies we went through trying to hide our amusement, for it was a serious crime to be insolent to a superior officer. But we caught on to these expressions of his and they went right round the Battalion.

  The only members of B Company who never saw the point of the joke were the men of No. 5 Platoon who all hailed from Bermondsey.

  Drilling on the barrack-square at Winchester, garbed in every form of civilian attire from city suits to boating blazers, shod in civilian shoes, whose thin soles were rapidly giving way under the strain, adorned with headgear that represented every facet of the hatter’s trade from bowlers to straw boaters, the infant battalion had looked a motley crew. Behind the uniform khaki front they now presented to the world, they still were. There was The Welsh Mob, of No. 6 Platoon, B Company, actually a group of civil servants from Cardiff who had joined up together. There was the Boys Brigade, who made up all of No. 13 Platoon and half of No. 14. There were the gamekeepers, eight of them, who had left the pheasants on the Wynyard Park Estate to look after themselves for the duration of the war. The Brewery Boys had all worked together at Bass Rutley. There were twelve pairs of brothers in the battalion. Jack Knotman had been an acrobat on the music halls. Jack Cross, now a sergeant in C Company, had been a footman and valet to Sir Eric Barrington and kept his platoon comfortably supplied with the gloves, socks, scarves and balaclava helmets that must have been knitted non-stop below stairs at 62 Cadogan Place, so regularly did they arrive by every other post. Rifleman Adams, on the other hand, prevailed upon his comrades to carry his rifle on long marches and in return regaled them with the quails in aspic, tinned pineapple, ham galantine and, occasionally, caviare, contained in his parcels from Fortnum and Mason. There was Rifleman Arthur Wright, one of the Bermondsey Boys, who made no bones about having been a professional burglar and who had seen service in one of His Majesty’s Prisons before joining His Majesty’s Forces. There was Duggie Jones, the baby of the Battalion, burly enough to have got away with enlisting at the age of fifteen and who, in a post-war incarnation, was to become Aubrey Dexter, a successful actor. Rifleman Phipps, known as Old Chelsea, was the oldest member and admitted to having a son in the trenches. Partial to kippers, which his wife despatched to France with faithful regularity, he was still living down the episode when he had caused the entire battalion to ‘Stand to’ for a gas attack as a result of frying a little supper for himself in the trenches.

  The Battalion was proud of its ‘characters’, but most of all it was proud of its sportsmen. It had The Golfers, seventeen professionals and assistants who had joined up as a body. There were the Stockton Boys, all semiprofessional footballers, now, to the fury of the rest of the Brigade, forming a team that made the result of every inter-battalion match a foregone conclusion. There was the youthful Captain Arnold Strode Jackson, a formidable runner, who, as an undergraduate, had won a gold medal at Stockholm in the 1912 Olympic Games. There was Ernie Lowe, the Battalion’s boxing champion and, since the South Africans had joined them in October, the 13th Rifle Brigade had been well-nigh invincible on the rugby field.

  The ‘South African Mob’ had banded t
ogether and sailed from Port Elizabeth under their own steam and at their own expense, under the aegis of Captain Bill Nothard. It had been his idea. It would have been perfectly possible to join up in South Africa and a South African Brigade was already serving in France. But there were other theatres of war and there was no guarantee that locally recruited troops might not be sent to the Middle East or to fight in German West Africa. The only way to avoid this, to get a sniff at the ‘real’ war, was to take passage for London and join up on the spot.

  Rifleman Percy Eaton, No. 13873, 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  We all paid our own passages, and we could afford it because none of us were badly off and sea passages were cheap in those days. There were still passenger ships running and we had a very pleasant voyage. We were quite the heroes on board! There was myself and George Murrell and about twenty others ‘recruited’ by Nothard. We docked at Southampton, after about three weeks, took the boat train to Waterloo and went straight from the station to the recruiting office in Whitehall. I have a half idea they were expecting us. Nothard had got to know Colonel Gordon when he had been a soldier in South Africa and he must have been in touch with him. Anyway, we were attested, had very sketchy medicals and within half an hour we were given railway warrants for Winchester. So back we went to the station and it really was priceless, because, as we left the recruiting office, there happened to be a Guards’ band coming out of Horseguards’ Parade and marching down Whitehall, so we joined on behind and we marched behind them all the way to Westminster Bridge. We had no idea of marching and it was very difficult trying to keep time and carrying suitcases and all our gear, but we were as pleased as Punch! We did some very basic training at Winchester and we were soon on our way to France. We joined the 13th at Gommecourt in October 1915 and we were told that this was on the recommendation of Colonel Gordon and that they were the best battalion in the 37th Division. Perhaps because a good few of us had had experience of shooting in South Africa we nearly all became Lewis-Gunners.