Authors: Richard Holmes
Tommy (13 page)
Lastly, 11/East Lancashire, proudly known as the Accrington Pals, was a New Army (properly âService') battalion, raised in late August and early September 1914 as a result of the mayor of Accrington's communication with the War Office, which accepted his offer of a locally-raised battalion. Recruiters set to work in Accrington, Burnley, Blackburn and Chorley, and all the powerful links within these bustling communities accelerated the process. For instance, H. D. Riley of Hawks House, Brierfield, Burnley, mill-owner and justice of the peace, had founded the Burnley Lads' Club for working-class boys in 1905: it had a library and reading room, and offered wide sporting opportunities. On 19 September Riley placed an advertisement in the
Burnley Express,
announcing that a Lads' Club Company was to be formed. Riley and seventy ex-members of the club enlisted the following Wednesday. There were not enough to form a full company, but the club members became part of D (Burnley and Blackburn) Company.
At this stage officers were nominated by the mayor, and Riley (hitherto without military experience) first became a lieutenant and the company's second in command, rising to captain and company commander a few days later. An eyewitness described how the company first formed.
Miners, mill-hands, office-boys, black-coats, bosses, schoolboys and masters, found themselves appearing before Mr Ross and the medical officer. Young men who should have been tied to their mother's apron-strings took home their first service pay â 1/9d in coppers â and nearly broke their mothers' hearts. Men of mature age, patriotic or sensing adventure or to escape from monotony were ready to have a go at anyone who should pull the lion's tail. The thing was done! 350 men of good spirit and willing in body assembled in the Drill Hall to be patiently told how to âform fours'.
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There were few trained officers or NCOs. Colonel Sharpies, the commanding officer, was sixty-four, and had joined the Rifle Volunteers over forty years before. RSM Stanton was sixty years old, had once chased the Sioux with George Custer, fought the Zulus and the Boers, and left the army in 1905; in 1914 this old soldier answered the call for trained men, and he was to die of natural causes the following year. Most of the officers were the sons of prominent citizens, and included one of the mayor of Accrington's grandsons. There was a sprinkling of ex-regulars among the NCOs, but most had no military experience, and many were promoted before they even had uniforms to sew their stripes to.
A. S. Durrant, who joined a New Army battalion of the Durham Light Infantry at just this time, recalled that:
I was sergeant six weeks after I joined up. You see, Kitchener's Army was being built up, anybody with half a brain of common sense could get one stripe in no time. Your 2 stripes, 3 stripes. I tell you I was first a private and then a sergeant and I was put in charge of a hut.
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To the inexperienced young were added the all-too-veteran old, as Lancelot Spicer discovered when he joined a New Army battalion of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He found that:
All the men were in civilian clothes and all we had for training were wooden rifles. Apart from the officers, the only ones in uniform were a few non-commissioned officers who were regulars. The Commanding Officer was Lt. Col. Holland, a retired Indian Army officer â¦Â a pleasant enough old boy, but his soldiering appeared to us young raw recruits to be of the Indian Mutiny â in battalion parades he would ask in a loud voice. âMr Butler [the adjutant], how many white officers on parade?'
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The Accringtons were sent to Carnarvon in early 1915, and Colonel Sharpies was quickly replaced as commanding officer by a regular, Major (temporary Lieutenant Colonel) A. W. Rickman of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. Rickman immediately made a good impression, as Lieutenant Rawcliffe observed:
We were brought up to attention as Colonel Rickman rode up the street towards us. He had to pass a motor-lorry parked outside a shop. This narrowed the street and his horse shied. We all thought it was going through the shop window. Colonel Rickman beat the horse hard with his stick â¦Â to make it pass the motor-lorry. What a real display of strength and will-power. What an entrance! I thought, we're in for it now!
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Private Pollard agreed. âHe was very smart, a true professional,' he declared. âWe were looking at a real soldier for the first time. We knew he would sort us out.'
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The battalion, in khaki uniforms which had replaced its original blue melton, spent much of 1915 on the move, from Rugely to Ripon, from Ripon to Larkhill and then, in December, to Devonport for the voyage to Egypt. It spent three undemanding months guarding the Suez canal before being sent to Marseilles for its railway journey to the Western Front. Part of 31st Division, it was allocated a leading role on the first day of the Somme, assaulting the village of Serre at the northern end of 4th Army's line.
What happened to the Accringtons that morning was to be matched in so many other places further down the front. The men went over the top, after shaking hands and wishing each other good luck, to find uncut wire, intact machine guns and a creeping barrage which they could never catch. Lance Corporal Marshall watched the destruction of his battalion and the changing of his world:
I saw many men fall back into the trench as they attempted to climb out. Those of us who managed had to walk two yards apart, very slowly, then stop, then walk again, and so on. We all had to keep in a line. Machine-gun bullets were sweeping backwards and forwards and hitting the ground around our feet. Shells were bursting everywhere. I had no special feeling of fear and I knew that we must all go forward until wounded or killed. There was no going back. Captain Riley fell after thirty yards â¦Â the message passed down the line, from man to man â âCaptain Riley has been killed.'
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The Official History, its prose rising nobly to meet the occasion, reported that the attackers in this sector, pals' battalions from Hull, Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley, Durham and Sheffield, continued to advance even after the German SOS barrage crashed down.
There was no wavering or attempting to come back. The men fell in their ranks, mostly before the first hundred yards of No Man's Land had been crossed. The magnificent gallantry, discipline and determination shown by all ranks of this North Country division were of no avail against the concentrated fire effect of the enemy's unshaken infantry and artillery, whose barrage has been described as so consistent and severe that the cones of the explosions gave the impression of a thick belt of poplar trees.
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The German defensive barrage briefly switched to Serre itself. This may have been because the gunners knew some of the attackers had actually got that far. Skeletons in khaki rags were found there when the Germans pulled back from the village in 1917: some bore tarnished brass shoulder titles which read âEAST LANCASHIRE'. The Accringtons lost 7 officers and 139 men killed, 2 officers and 88 men missing, believed killed, and 12 officers and 336 men wounded.
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The battalion remained on the Western Front for the rest of the war, and while avoiding the disbandments of early 1918, and the fate which befell 3/4th Queen's, it was never the same as it had been at 7.30 on the morning of 1 July 1916. And neither, for that matter, was Accrington, which had lost too many of its dearest and its best that day.
These three battalions were not simply different in origin, tradition and composition. They behaved differently, in the line and out of it. The relations between their officers and men were different, and their approach to the war was different too. Second Lieutenant P. J. Campbell was appointed artillery liaison officer to a Grenadier battalion in 1917 and joined it in the trenches. Its commanding officer asked whether he had been to Eton and whether he was a regular: on receiving a negative answer to both questions:
He appeared to take no further interest in me as a person, but I was impressed by him and what I saw that night. The discipline of the Guards was very strict and their behaviour even in the line very formal â¦Â The Grenadier Guards went out, an English county regiment came in, and the difference was perceptible immediately. There was an atmosphere of warm-hearted banter, cheerful inefficiency; packs and gas-masks, revolvers and field-glasses were thrown about anyhow. Now we were all civilians who hated war, but knew that it had to be fought and would go on fighting until it was won.
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Major Charles Ward Jackson, an Etonian and Yeomanry officer serving on the staff, made the same point in a letter to his wife in June 1916. Some battalions seemed good enough.
But we had not seen the Guards. You never saw such a difference. In the first place the officers all looked like gentlemen, and the men twice the size, and in the second their discipline is extraordinary. Different altogether from other regulars. Not a man sits down as you pass, no matter how far off you may be.
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Soldiers from other regiments who failed to salute properly as the Guards Division passed on the march were arrested and taken with it. At the day's end they were interviewed, had the error of their ways pointed out, and were invited to return whence they had come. Saluting improved for miles around. The Old Army's discipline could survive stern shocks. In the chaos following the battle of Le Cateau in August 1914, Lieutenant Roland Brice Miller, a regular officer in 123rd Battery Royal Field Artillery, described how:
A private soldier of the Bedfordshire Regiment, grey with fatigue, approached me, came smartly to the slope [-arms] and slapped the butt of his rifle in salute. âCan you tell me a good position to retire to?' he asked. One man!
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A battalion like 3/4th Queen's or the Accrington Pals was perfectly capable of laying on a smart formal parade, and there was a latent dandyism in many soldiers that found military ritual perversely satisfying. But guardee smartness was not their concern, and their discipline continued to reflect pre-war relationships. Private Bewsher of the Accringtons remembered that his company sergeant major, revolver in hand, had checked the shelters in the front-line trench for laggards before the attack on 1 July. âHe had no need to do that,' complained Bewsher. âAll the lads were ready to go.'
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And while the regulars accepted robust discipline as a matter of course, territorials and New Army men, far more conscious of what they had once been, and, God willing, would be once again, were far less prepared to tolerate its more extreme manifestations such as Field Punishment No. 1.
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Sergeant Jock Chrystal of the Northumberland Hussars, a Yeomanry (territorial cavalry) regiment, reproved by his RSM, told his officer that he resented the rebuke. âNow, Sor, did ye ivvor hear such cheek?' he asked. âHim, Halliday, a Sergeant-Major jaist, an' me, the Duke's Forester, talkin' to me that way?'
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It was not a remark which would have gone down well in the Grenadiers.
The different identities of regular, territorial and New Army units were blurred, though rarely wholly obscured, but casualties and the sheer caprice of battle meant that some units survived the war with their identity intact while others lost it relatively quickly. Captain James Dunn, that âdoctor with a DSO, and much unmedalled merit' who compiled the history of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, recorded his unit's evolution as its regular content steadily diminished. In early 1915 there were still enough old sweats about to delight the corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking, when he inspected the battalion: âHe chatted and chaffed, pinched their arms and ears, asked how many children they had, asked if they could be doing with leave to get another â¦Â When it was over he said to the GOC, “That's been a treat. That's the sort we've known for thirty years.”'
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Dunn reckoned that the battalion then had about 250 originals left, mainly in transport, drums, signals and amongst the NCOs. But by the summer of 1918 he admitted âwe were a regular battalion in name only'.
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This is scarcely surprising, for the battalion suffered 1,107 killed, and four times as many wounded, amongst its non-commissioned personnel during its four years on the Western Front, getting through the whole of its 1914 establishment strength five times over. It was actually luckier than the New Army 10/Royal Welch Fusiliers, which lost 756 soldiers
killed
in only two and a half years at the front.
The Royal Welch Fusilier regimental depot at Litherland held officers and men from the regular, territorial and New Army battalions of the regiment, who had come from hospitals, long courses or recruiting offices. As Second Lieutenant Lloyd Evans discovered in 1916:
They would be sifted and trained, and detailed singly or in batches to all fronts where Battalions of the Regiment were serving. In the huge mess were officers who had served with one or more of these battalions. There were âreturned heroes', so I thought of them, from the First and Second. Some struck me as being really heroic. Others were the talkative sort who worked to impress on âthese Service Battalion fellows' that âof course it was somewhat different in the Regular Battalions'.
He had mixed feelings about being posted to the 2nd Battalion because âit used up subalterns by the dozen', but found himself very happy in it.
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During the process of drafting the Welsh content of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers seems to have increased. There had been a substantial Birmingham contingent in the pre-war battalion which led to outsiders, careless of their dentistry, calling it âThe Brummagem Fusiliers', and Captain Robert Graves recalled his CSM, a Birmingham man, giving a stern talking-to to a German prisoner caught with pornographic postcards in his pack. Dunn observed that a July 1917 draft comprising largely young South Wales Miners was âmuch the best that has come to us of two years'. Nonetheless, only 37 percent of the battalion was Welsh-born.
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