Tommy (27 page)

In any case it is clear that by no means all Englishmen agreed with Graves and his adjutant. Private Ernest Parker of the 15th Hussars declared how:

Robert Case, a former Wiltshire Yeoman by now commissioned into the Royal Engineers, also had a high regard for the Scots his division relieved in the Vimy Sector in 1916. ‘By heavens, though,' he wrote, ‘these Scotties are the finest fellows I have ever had the pleasure of meeting anywhere. Good luck to them wherever they go.'
²⁸

It was commonly asserted that the Germans kept a list of the fifty most reliable British divisions, and that this always included the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and the Guards, together with other well-regarded formations (9th, 18th, 29th and 51st generally amongst them) and, of course, the speaker's own division. There is no evidence that such a list existed, but the frequency with which it was discussed by contemporaries points to the importance that soldiers attached to their division's reputation. Acceptance of this sort of ranking is now so frequent that serious authorities (some quite properly applauding the achievements of their forebears) often accept at face value the mythology burnished at the time.

The most common belief is that British divisions were uniformly useless and Dominion formations were all first rate. But the evidence of fighting quality is less clear-cut than is suggested by the historian Denis Winter's affirmation that whenever Haig encountered serious opposition: ‘British units were pushed aside and Dominion troops put in charge.'
²⁹
That Dominion troops were generally good, and often very good indeed, is beyond question. But Gary Sheffield's careful study of the Australians at Pozières in 1916 shows that even these doughty fighters had a steep learning-curve to ascend. Sir James Edmonds, the waspish British official historian, warned Dr Charles Bean, his Australian counterpart: ‘Don't try to persuade the Australian public that the 1916 Australian Corps was the fine instrument that it was in 1918.'
³⁰
A scholarly examination of the detailed performance of a sample of fifty divisions in the last Hundred Days of the war concluded that:

This work points to a wide spectrum of achievement, for example with 9th (Scottish) and 19th (Western) Divisions successful in more than go percent of their attacks, seven divisions with a failure rate of 25 percent or more, and only twelve divisions enjoying success in less than 50 percent of their attacks.

Success depended very much on the ability of the division's cadre to convert a flood of reinforcements into useful soldiers. ‘Good infantry,' suggests Peter Simkins, ‘could be created by good divisions within a few months, so long as the formations possessed an experienced cadre around which it could be rebuilt.'
³²
Recovery time was also important: in mid-1917 divisional commanders generally thought that a month would enable their divisions to be properly reconstituted after a gruelling spell in the Passchendaele battle. During the Hundred Days 12th Division had five prolonged episodes in battle or in the line, and lost 6,940 officers and men, 69.5 percent of its total strength and about 75 percent of its infantry. It was consistently successful, and still had plenty of bite left at the end of October. Perhaps surprisingly, longevity in command was not necessarily a conclusive factor. Both 9th and 12th Divisions were good, but while the latter had only two commanders in its entire service the former had nine.

There is certainly no easy congruence between reputation and achievement, and the frequently-derided 19th and 34th Divisions were actually quite good. And although 51st Highland stood high in the army's regard by 1918, it took some time to scale the pinnacle of glory. Walter Nicholson, one of its regular staff officers, thought that sending the division's units to France piecemeal in 1915 was ‘the negation of good organisation' from which it took months to recover. It was commanded in 1915–17 by Major General George ‘Uncle' Harper, and its HD divisional patch was the subject of unkind jests. When the division took Beaumont Hamel in November 1916, at the very end of the Somme, Harper was well forward, chatting to walking wounded as they made their way back. He made the mistake of asking one Highlander how the battle was going. ‘Well, anyhow,' said the man, ‘they canna' ca' us Harper's Duds ony mair.'
³³

Robert Graves, helping train new drafts at the Harfleur ‘bullring' in early 1916, discussed divisional ranking with his fellow instructors. ‘It seemed to be agreed,' he wrote,

Above the division, the next link in the chain of command was the corps, formally (though rarely in practice) termed the army corps, and with its number correctly written in roman numerals. The corps was a level of command with which the British army was almost wholly unfamiliar, and given its ‘small-war' tradition and aptitude this is not surprising. Although Wellington's army had been divided into three corps for the Waterloo campaign of 1815, the duke allowed his corps commanders little initiative. The British did not interpose corps headquarters between general headquarters and the fighting divisions in either the Crimean or the Boer Wars, its largest campaigns in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although autumn manoeuvres in 1912 and 1913 embodied extemporised corps, Sir James Edmonds maintained that:

By the war's end there were twenty-four British, one ANZAC (its initials, now so emotive, standing for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and one Canadian Corps. However, not all British corps served on the Western Front; in November 1918, for instance, there were then eighteen corps and the cavalry corps in France and Belgium.

The corps was initially little more than a very small headquarters (just eighteen officers) under a lieutenant general, that controlled the divisions under its command. As the war went on, however, corps headquarters grew steadily bigger, to twenty-three officers in mid-1916 and thirty-seven by November 1918. This did not simply reflect a tendency for headquarters at all levels to increase in size, partly to reflect the need, not identified by pre-war planners, to run headquarters on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it also marked the fact that corps steadily gained more muscle as the war went on, and saw it become an important battle-fighting formation in its own right, with an added weight of combat power that made it more than simply the sum of its divisions.

By the end of the war the corps had its own heavy artillery, quite apart from that allocated to divisions, as well as a heavy trench-mortar battery and a wide range of transport columns and workshops. Its senior artillery officers, now with separate headquarters for corps artillery and corps heavy artillery, were no longer artillery advisers but artillery commanders, able to make full use of the range and flexibility of what was increasingly regarded as the battle-winning weapon: the gun. The growth in status of the senior gunner at corps headquarters was gradual. In 1914 he was the brigadier general Royal Artillery (BGRA), simply an adviser, but by 1917 had become the artillery commander, general officer commanding Royal Artillery (GOC RA) with full authority over his corps artillery and its fire planning. Structural and personal problems remained, however. Perhaps the most notorious came in VI Corps in late 1916 when the Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett arrived to take up the new post of corps counter-battery colonel. He immediately declared that he was not in the least interested in the innovative work being done on the detection of German guns by flash-spotting and sound ranging. His corps counter-battery intelligence officer was invited to ‘go away and stay away'. The only counter-battery shots which he would allow, he declared, were those against targets clearly visible from British lines, or those he had personally detected on his ouija board.
³⁶
One brother officer described him as ‘probably the nastiest man I have ever met in this world', and there must have been wry smiles when he disappeared on an expedition to the Mato Grosso in 1925.

Unlike the division and the brigade, the British corps had no permanent establishment. For instance, in November 1918 there was one corps headquarters with no divisions at all, waiting in reserve; three corps with two divisions; four corps with three divisions; eight corps with four divisions, and two corps with five divisions, in addition to the three-division Cavalry Corps. Divisions shifted between corps on an irregular and apparently unplanned basis: an extreme example of the practice was the move of 51st Highland Division between three corps in a single week in 1918. The Canadian Corps and ANZAC, however, retained their corps integrity throughout, which is one reason for the consistently high achievement of their divisions. It is hard to overstate the damaging effect of shuffling divisions between corps for, just as divisional standard operating procedures were all different, so too were those of corps, and divisional staffs had to master new procedures every time their divisions moved, with the shock wave of changes in reports and returns reverberating all the way down to companies in the line.

‘Reports and returns': how little this expression would have meant to anyone who had not been compelled to wring them out of tired men spread about company's trench frontage. In May 1915 Captain Rowland Feilding, then commanding a Coldstream company in the line, sent his wife a humorous example of how they fitted into a day of trench life. The messages would have been in the argot known as ‘signalese', signaller's English, taken down by the company's duty telephone operator and written in indelible pencil on a message pad (Army Form C.2121), with aaa standing for a full stop.