Tommy (26 page)

James Jack, doyen of tough-minded infantry officers, had seen more of the war's rough edge than most, but resented: ‘unjust, malicious slurs on my old commanders, despite any mistakes they have made'.
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‘Let sleeping dogs lie,' recommended a former sergeant. ‘The generals are all dead now and it is notable how most critics waited until they were dead before taking them to pieces.' H. E. L. Mellersh, a twice-wounded infantry officer, complained that his war was misrepresented on two counts by its critics.

Often a sense of honest incompatibility emerges from contemporary accounts. Some people did jobs and lived lives which were unlikely to endear them to others: generals and their staffs usually slept dry, and the men they commanded, all too often, did not. In order to consider the experiences of Thomas Atkins we need to give some thought to the men who commanded him, and to the machinery in which he found himself a small and often rather muddy cog.

The British Expeditionary Force that went to France in 1914 was expected to consist of six infantry divisions and a cavalry division, although in the event one division (4th) arrived after the fighting had begun, and another (6th), initially retained in Britain to provide a measure of home defence until the Territorial Force was fully mobilised, did not set off for France till early September. During the whole war Britain raised sixty-five infantry divisions; there were four Canadian and five Australian divisions, and one Australian and New Zealand (later exclusively New Zealand) division. Most of them served on the Western Front, and a snapshot at the end of the war shows fifty British, four Canadian, five Australian and one New Zealand division in France and Belgium.
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The most numerous combat arm was the infantry, and its structure was the scaffolding around which everything else was built. The establishment of an infantry division fluctuated as the war went on, but a look at its organisation in early 1916 gives some sense of its structure for the war as a whole. Commanded by a major general with a small staff, a division comprised three infantry brigades, three brigades of field artillery, a howitzer brigade and a heavy battery, and an assortment of administrative services including three field ambulances and a divisional train – actually a horse-drawn transport column. An infantry brigade, commanded by a brigadier general with a tiny staff, had four battalions of infantry, each with a war establishment of thirty officers and 977 men. Battalions of the same regiment did not necessarily serve together: indeed, in the old army it was unusual for them to do so. The infantry strength of a division, twelve battalions, was around 12,000 men.
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This might be reduced by as much as half by battle casualties and sickness, and the losses incurred by a division fell most heavily on its infantry. When the 34th Division (New Army, with a brigade of Tyneside Scottish, a brigade of Tyneside Irish, and a brigade with two Scots and two English battalions) suffered an appalling 6,380 casualties on 1 July 1916 it actually lost well over half of its attacking infantry.

An artillery brigade consisted of three batteries, and was commanded by a lieutenant colonel: it had much more in common with an infantry battalion (also commanded by a lieutenant colonel) than with the much bigger infantry brigade. Batteries of field guns and howitzers had six weapons apiece, but heavy batteries only four. So a division boasted thirty-six 18-pounder field guns, eighteen 4.5-inch howitzers, and four 60-pounder heavies. The whole of the divisional artillery (which included a heavy artillery ammunition column and an ammunition column for each artillery brigade) was commanded by a brigadier general, properly known as the commander Royal Artillery, but CRA in common parlance, and ‘guns' (just as individual artillery liaison officers were often called ‘guns' by the infantry battalion they supported) to a bluff divisional commander.

Field ambulances were also lieutenant colonel's commands, although they were much smaller, with just nine officers and 224 other ranks, than infantry battalions or artillery brigades. They answered to an assistant director of medical services (ADMS) at divisional headquarters. This gentleman, a full colonel, wore distinguishing maroon collar-patches rather than the red of the general staff. Although the division's engineers, two field companies and a signal company, were less numerous than their infantry or gunner comrades, they too were commanded by a full colonel, the commander Royal Engineers (CRE) at divisional headquarters. The sappers recognised his importance by roaring out their trademark song
Hurrah for the CRE!
, redolent of the veldt and pre-war Aldershot, on suitable occasions.

The division was the common currency of all armies on the Western Front, although there were always differences between British, French and German divisions. In the French army, for instance, brigades, two to a division, consisted of two regiments, each with three battalions, and it was the numbered regiment – 66th of the Line, or 3rd Zouaves — that carried the weight of identity borne by single battalions in the British army. The Germans, for their part, removed the brigade (two regiments again) from their divisional structure in 1915 in a successful attempt to speed up tactical response by removing a link which made no unique contribution to the chain of command. The British army maintained only one brigade that did not fit naturally into the divisional structure. In August 1914 the four infantry battalions on lines of communication duties were swept up into the newly-constituted 19th Infantry Brigade, which thereafter enjoyed a peripatetic existence, moving between divisions.

In the British army the division was the highest formation with which a soldier could reasonably identify. A battalion might stay in a single division for the whole war, though there were sometimes changes, often for good reason. The mauling of the two New Army divisions, 21st and 24th, that attacked so disastrously on the second day of Loos, prompted GHQ to carry out transfers of complete brigades between three recently-raised New Army divisions and three regular divisions in France, to try to ensure that experience was more evenly spread. It was right to do so, for formations like 21st and 24th divisions clearly demonstrated the weakness of the New Armies. Only one of the two divisional commanders, two of the eight brigadiers and one of the twenty-six battalion commanders were serving regulars: the rest were ‘dug-outs' brought back from retirement when war broke out. Just thirty of the regimental officers in the two divisions had regular experience: the rest were wartime volunteers with no more than a year's service, all but a few weeks of that in England.
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The 34th Division required substantial reconstitution after the first day of the Somme and again in the summer of 1918. Lieutenant Guy Chapman, whose brigade was loaned to the division in the first week of July 1916 to compensate for its shocking 1 July losses, recalled his men hooting when they heard that the divisional commander, Major General Ingorville-Williams, had been killed. They did not know him, though he was popular with units in the division from the start. Chapman wrote that ‘it was reported [wrongly] that he had been souvenir hunting. And why not hoot? What was this Hecuba to them?'

In the winter of 1917–18 there was a large-scale reshuffle, and infantry brigades were reduced from four battalions to three. Captain James Dunn reflected on the impact that this change had on his own 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, which moved from 19th Infantry Brigade in 33rd Division to 100th Brigade in 38th (Welsh) Division in January 1918.

Moving a battalion from a division in which it was comfortable caused not only dissatisfaction but also practical inconvenience. Divisional standard operating procedures were all different, and a great deal of the military grammar of periodic reports and returns which units had to submit to brigade and division had to be re-learnt. A unit's status and reputation, carefully polished in one division, might be dulled if it moved to another, as Private Frank Hawkings observed. ‘We have been told that the Q[ueen] V[ictoria] R[ifles] are to be withdrawn from the 5th Division,' he wrote on 28 January 1916. ‘We are most fed up and sick at having to leave the regiments with whom we have been ever since 1914. The regulars too are very sorry that we are going. In 1914 they looked on us as their pet Territorial regiment and we were very popular with them.'
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And personalities played their part. The one benefit of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers' leaving 33rd Division was that its commander, Major General Reginald Pinney, in Haig's view one of his steadiest generals, was ‘a devout, non-smoking teetotaller who banned the rum ration in his division'. An appalled Private Frank Richards thought him, in consequence, ‘a bun-punching crank … more fitted to be in command of a Church Mission hut at the base than a division of troops'.
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Reshuffles were the exception, not the rule, and many divisions retained much of their original composition throughout the war. They built up distinctive identities which embodied an alchemy of differing qualities: regional bonding and the argot that came with it; a blend of regimental friendships and tensions; a pride in past performance (often real but sometimes imagined); a confidence in (or sometimes unifying disdain for) the divisional commander and his staff, and an amalgam of other things besides. Divisions quickly adopted distinguishing patches worn on the sleeves or backs of tunics. These were sometimes ‘tribal', like 16th (Irish) Division's shamrock or 36th (Ulster) Division's red hand; sometimes featured numbers, such as the swastika-like three sevens, joined at the base, for 21st Division; letters, like 51st Division's ‘HD', for Highland Division; or sometimes a symbolism whose origin is now lost, like 11th Division's key of life or 19th Division's butterfly. They meant a good deal to the men that wore them, as the newly-commissioned Second Lieutenant Huntley Gordon RFA reflected when he went up the line with the 25th Division at Ypres in 1917.

Affection for his division rarely expunged the cap-badge pride that Private Atkins felt for his battalion, though it did enable a soldier in a unit that was down on its luck to take comfort from the fact that he belonged to a decent division. This mixture of loyalties had a double-edged effect.

Friction with other divisions helped the process of definition, and there were repeated spats between Scots and English divisions. Ian Hay, writing from the perspective of a New Army officer in 10/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, part of 15th Scottish Division, blamed ‘the flat caps on the left' for letting down his division at Loos.
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Robert Graves of the Royal Welch Fusiliers swiped back in his ‘memoir'
Goodbye to All That,
retorting that his adjutant had told him that: ‘The Jocks are all the same; both the trousered kind and the bare-arsed kind; they're dirty in trenches, they skite [e.g. brag] too much, and they charge like hell – both ways.'
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When he tried to make contact with the Scots New Army battalion on his right at Loos he was not impressed by what he saw. ‘I walked down their trench some time in the morning of the 26th [September 1915] and walked nearly a quarter of a mile without seeing either a sentry or an officer. There were dead men, sleeping men, gassed men, all lying anyhow. The trench had been used as a latrine.'
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He later acknowledged that ‘this was overstating the case', and went on to admit that: