Tommy (77 page)

P. J. Campbell saw how a good battery could be ruined by a bad commander. One was with his battery for only seventeen days, ‘and in that time the morale of the battery had sunk to a lower level than ever before, far lower than after months of fighting and heavy casualties at Ypres'. But another battery commander, though reserved and unfriendly, was respected because ‘we knew that he knew what to do'.
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The efficiency of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers had fallen off by July 1918, but a new CO soon put a spring back into its step: ‘There was to be company training: parades before breakfast were to be revived… and servants, cooks and details used to having a slack time had to parade and furbish up their drill against a day when they might be wanted.' The regimental sergeant major, late on parade because he had ‘over-slept', got ‘a good choking-off'. And then the commanding officer organised a trench raid, allowing companies ‘a large latitude in making their dispositions, but he supervised everything, and by a tactful gentle gingering-up soon made everyone feel that a long-absent efficient authority had been restored to the Battalion'. When the raid took place, he met the leading company as it crossed No Man's Land, and said: ‘You'll have to go into the village for your prisoners; I've been down to have a look, and there aren't any outside the wire.' The whole business was ‘a magnificent tonic'.
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Popularity was helpful, though not if too clearly courted. Brave and thoughtful young officers often knew just how to get it right. Guy Chapman heard his company servants discussing the merits of their ‘blokes' in 1918.

Some soldiers who hated the ‘boss class' as a matter of political principle were content to make an exception for their own officers. Private Mason of 2/Scottish Rifles was ‘a great gaunt Clydesider' who had been recalled to the army as a reservist after spending several years as a miner.

But there was much more to success as a leader than simple popularity. Soldiers generally preferred a hard man who knew what he was doing to a genial incompetent. In Campbell's artillery unit, Major John of D Battery was ‘the man most disliked and most feared in the whole brigade' because he expected others to live up to his own high standards of courage. After John was killed, fighting an ammunition fire characteristically single-handed, Campbell wrote:

James Jack was also not an easy man: it was typical of his self-discipline that he maintained such a rigid diet to keep himself in fighting trim that he consumed too few calories and was always cold. Rogerson wrote of how: ‘In all ways he set us an example, but if asked to name his peculiar characteristic, I would say it was his determination, from which I never saw him relax, to keep up at all times and at all costs the proprieties of the old life of peace.'
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Frank Crozier also insisted on ‘proprieties', but his were rather different. In a railway carriage he ordered two subalterns to ‘show kit' and open up their packs.

There were few hard-and-fast rules about styles of command. What worked for Crozier's Ulstermen might not have done so elsewhere. P.J. Campbell though that the commander of his Yorkshire territorial battery, Major Eric, was successful because he was a Sheffield man:

Relations between officers within the same unit battalion, and more particularly the same sub-unit, were often fraternal, and accounts often testify to the same sort of family atmosphere that was achieved in good infantry sections. Herbert Asquith, the second son of H. H. Asquith, served as an artillery officer for most of the war, and described life in his battery in 1917:

What was fraternal amongst officers was often paternal from officer to man. R. B. Talbot Kelly took it a step further. As he walked round his gun-pits under heavy shelling one evening:

One of the most moving First World War poems, Ewart Alan Mackintosh's
In Memoriam, Private D. Sutherland,
catches the full responsibility of a relationship which, in Mackintosh's view, went even beyond paternalism.

As is often the case with family life, paternalism cut two ways: sometimes an officer's need to look brave in the eyes of the group kept him going. Vaughan was very frightened indeed before his battalion attacked at Langemarck, and had slipped into a dugout to dispel terrible images with a whisky. When the attack began:

But with the support he gained from his men came the responsibility to share their last moments. He was following Corporal Breeze when a shell burst at his feet: ‘As I was blown backwards I saw him thrown into the air to land at my feet, a crumpled heap of torn flesh.' Minutes later it was clear that Breeze was not dead, for:

An officer might expect the same from his men. At Loos a Highland private carried his wounded officer out of the line, stood with him in the British front-line trench while the man clutched his ankles in his death-agony, then shook himself free, collected another bag of hand grenades, and returned, in fighting fury, to be killed in the German position.

But officers could exasperate as well as inspire. Some battalions insisted that subalterns marched with rifle and pack like the men, as Rowland Feilding discovered when he marched from Winchester to Southampton to embark: ‘it was the first time I ever carried a pack, and it felt as if it was filled with lead before we reached Harfleur'.
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Junior officers generally marched lightly laden, with their valises carried on the battalion's transport wagons, and commanding officers, seconds in command, adjutants and company commanders were mounted – a source of much ribaldry to the files immediately behind them on the march. ‘I'm sorry about that, boys,' was the natural response of an unwise officer when his horse relieved itself, for the inevitable response was: ‘Never mind, sir, we thought it was the horse.' Sensible officers recognised that horses could be a communal asset on difficult marches, and during the retreat from Mons their chargers were often festooned with exhausted men and their kit. Alan Hanbury Sparrow saw his commanding officer lead 1/Royal Berkshires on foot: ‘the old man is so weary that only his courage gets him along'.
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However, the CO of 11/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers did not make himself popular by chivvying tired men from the saddle: Norman Gladden heard ‘“Come off that bloody horse… you bastard…”, muttered by men as the colonel's well-groomed horse found the hill no obstacle'.
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W. H. A. Groom, who served in the ranks of the infantry, writing in the early 1970s in angry reaction to the beginnings of revisionist approaches to the war, maintained that ‘the objective accounts written by commissioned officers from generals to subalterns show little knowledge of the real feelings of the men', and wrote with admiration of ‘the practically classless Commonwealth forces'. He thought that inspection by Haig was ‘a most boring day… he did not even look at us, let alone inspect us'. And he vigorously challenged James Jack's assertion that ‘there was little grumbling and never a whine', arguing that things would not have gone well for whiners. But he admitted that one of his company commanders was well regarded: ‘he was one of the original peace-time battalion privates who had won the DCM in 1915. He had an excellent parade voice, was good looking and popular with the rankers because he always seemed to know what he was about.'
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Because of the growing number of officers commissioned from the ranks – the likes of John Lucy and Ernest Shephard, formerly regular NCOs – officers
were
increasingly aware of the lives of the men they commanded. From 1916 most newly-commissioned officers had served in the ranks before attending an officer cadet battalion: the granting of direct commissions had ‘practically ceased' from February that year. About 229,000 new commissions were granted during the war, and 107,929 of their holders had passed through officer cadet battalions after serving in the ranks.
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By 1918, the officer corps had become remarkably heterogeneous. It is beyond question that many newly-commissioned officers faced pressure to adopt traditional styles of officer leadership. However, many pre-war regulars would still have readily agreed with Alan Hanbury Sparrow that the ‘somewhat uncouth but very willing officer reinforcements' were capable of doing a very good job, and although: ‘You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you can make a good leather one.'
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Bravery, indeed, was the
sine qua non.
An officer could slurp his soup or even wear light-coloured shirts but his bravery atoned for much. Frank Richards went straight to the point. ‘We always judged a new officer by the way he conducted himself in a trench,' he wrote, ‘and if he had guts we always respected him.'
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George Coppard agreed that: ‘We took particular notice of the behaviour of officers under fire and compared our conduct with theirs. All soldiers look for and admire a brave and intelligent leader and will even put up with abuse from him providing that at a critical moment he displays courage and leadership.' One of his officers in particular was ‘courageous steady and companionable, and we thought a lot of him'.
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Although John Lucy was another who believed that regular officers were often out of touch with their men, he thought that they were ‘extraordinarily gallant, and their displays of valour, often uncalled for, though thought necessary by them, coupled with the respect engendered in the old army for its corps of officers, won the greatest devotion, and very often the affection of the men'.
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Edward Vaughan's spirits, already lifted by the bravery of his men, were stiffened by the courage of his company commander, who ‘stood, eyeglass firmly fixed in his ashen face, while bullets chipped splinters from the beam beside his head'.
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