Tommy (83 page)

Guy Chapman's comrades in the Royal Fusiliers accepted the armistice with a shrug.

Lancelot Spicer (Cambridge undergraduate four years before, and now a brigade major with DSO and MC and Bar) was overcome by sheer bewilderment. He was:

Heavy casualties in the recent fighting of the Hundred Days were uppermost in many minds. James Jack noted that his brigade had lost two-thirds of its strength in a month, and all too many officers and men knew of a comrade killed at the very end. Let one individual tragedy stand for so many others. Eddie Giffard had not followed his two elder brothers into the army, but went off from Marlborough to help manage a sheep station in New South Wales. One brother was badly wounded on the retreat from Mons and another was killed at First Ypres. Eddie returned to England in 1914, joined the Royal Artillery, and by 1918 was commanding a field battery. His last diary entry, on 8 November, reports ‘rumours of Armistice', but he never lived to see it. He was killed shortly afterwards by one of the last shells fired at his battery.
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The mood at GHQ was more upbeat: Reginald Tompson tells of ‘a very cheery evening, but it was spoilt by the idiocy of the Administrator of the WAACS who refused to let them dance. A very boisterous evening.' Perhaps unsurprisingly, his diary for 12 November reports: ‘Rode early, with an awful head.'
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Some units celebrated with due formality. Burgon Bickersteth was in Leuze when the hour struck, and: ‘the trumpeters played “cease fire” and then the band crashed out “God Save the King”. The infantry presented arms, and every cavalryman sat on his horse at attention, the officers saluting. Then followed the
Marseillaise,
and after that the Belgian National Anthem.'
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The officers of William Carr's battery of Field Artillery rode into Maubeuge and were royally entertained by the population.

After drinking a good deal they enjoyed a final sing-song, concluding with
Scots Wha Hae,
upon which they jumped on the only English officer present. ‘The French were scared,' he remembered, ‘I believe they feared we would kill him.'
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Major Martin Littlewood was invited to celebrate with some Irish sappers, who had taken over a newly-liberated house. He had just enjoyed ‘an excellent curry' when: ‘A distraught lady in deep mourning burst into her home. She inspected our plates, and then hurried into the back garden. She came back even more upset, demanding: “But where is Henri, the children's friend?” Where indeed was the Belgian hare?'
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There was also ambivalence amongst those in England. H. E. L. Mellersh was on leave in London, and dropped in to see a comrade in Millbank Hospital before embarking for France. As he walked up Whitehall towards the West End, he felt strangely dissatisfied.

But there was certainly great rejoicing too. Captain Harry Ogle, on a course in Blackpool while recovering from a wound, was at once dismissed from his lecture, and he and his fellow students ‘gave one yell and rushed out to join the others, and a surging throng of all ranks mingled with civilians to converge on the Town Hall square just when the Mayor of Blackpool announced the armistice. The town went wild with relief and joy.'
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But many soldiers felt uneasy about entering into the spirit of it all. Lieutenant Ernest Parker drifted towards Trafalgar Square just in time for the official announcement.

The news found Robert Graves on leave in North Wales, and sent him ‘out walking alone along the dyke above the marches of Rhuddlan, cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead'.
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The overwhelming majority of the 1,859,000 troops in France and Belgium when the armistice came into effect were wartime volunteers or conscripts: about half of them were eighteen years old, and had known no real life before the war. As Sergeant Will Fisher observed in his diary on 12 November, there was: ‘One topic of conversation now: demobilisation.'
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A few soldiers took the view that they had automatically become civilians with the conclusion of hostilities, but were swiftly disabused. Brian Lathan, private in 1914 and now a captain lugging his baggage onto a boat for England, recalled that: ‘The rank and file made it quite plain that in their opinion they had already done with the army, and demobilisation was only a formality.'
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There were noisier rumblings of discontent, provoked by the slowness of the demobilisation process and fears that all the jobs would have been snapped up by the first men to return, and in the winter of 1918–19 and beyond there were real fears amongst the army's high command of the spread of what it termed ‘Bolshevism' in its ranks. Harold Macmillan admitted that: ‘Even the high state of discipline of the Brigade of Guards was threatened, though it never yielded, by the genuine indignation which was felt.'
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James Jack testified to ‘serious insubordination in the back areas – none at the front – by the unfair way in which demobilisation is being conducted ‘.
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While Charles Carrington's company remained ‘soldiers, and good for any military duty, many of them were trade unionists, with a strong sense of solidarity, even if this meant a sympathetic strike'.
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On balance, though, the ‘soldiers' strikes' and other disturbances that winter were less an explosion of working-class consciousness than a firmly-expressed wish for citizen-soldiers to become civilians again.

A substantial force – over 32,000 men by August 1919 – was required to garrison the Rhineland territory relinquished under the terms of the armistice. Some units marched straight there, bands and regimental colours sent out from Britain to permit impressive entries into German cities. The army's peacetime standards of smartness were reimposed: the commanding officer of the Welsh Guards was reproved by his brigadier who had seen ‘Two men going about like poets!' with long hair. Older soldiers from the Army of Occupation were demobilised individually over the months that followed, to be replaced by drafts of youngsters from England. Other units were disbanded in France, collapsing, like a deflated balloon, as officers and men were sent home for demobilisation. Units destined to be retained in the post-war army lost their wartime soldiers on demobilisation and were topped up with regulars from elsewhere. Although the men of Stephen Graham's Scots Guards battalion roared with laughter when an officer suggested that some might want to sign on as regulars, a couple of the six hundred in Guy Chapman's battalion were tempted:

Officers and men destined to return to civilian life were divided into demobilisation groups and each group subdivided into a range of demobilisation numbers, with different priorities for release. The first group, generally pre-war civil servants, were the demobilisers who would administer the system in Britain. The second group comprised ‘pivotal men' who would, the government believed, create jobs for others. In the third category came the ‘slip men' who had a slip filled out by an employer promising a job. Two remaining categories comprised men expected to find work rapidly, and those for whom the process was expected to be more difficult. All soldiers would report to one of twenty-six ‘dispersal stations', where they would be given a ration book, pay for twenty-eight days' terminal leave, and a baggy civilian ‘demob suit'. They could either keep their army greatcoat, give it in at the centre, or hand it in to any station master subsequently and receive £1 in return.

The system was sensible enough, but it had one serious flaw. It favoured men who had recently joined the army, because they were far more likely to be able to produce slips from potential employers or demonstrate their usefulness to the post-war economy. Men who had served longest were disadvantaged, and the dissatisfaction nerved some of the most serious disturbances, with soldiers in uniform taking part in protest marches with banners declaring: ‘We Won the War, Give Us Our Tickets', and ‘We Want Civvie Suits'. And there were many who agreed with Graham Greenwell that the system of numbering was decidedly odd. ‘I wrote to Carew Hunt the other day and asked him to find out what was the position at Oxford,' he wrote. ‘Students are “Class 43” on the demobilisation list – the last but one, whereas “Gentlemen” are in “Class 37". So it would seem better to be a mere gentleman.'
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After the general election of 1918 the plan was effectively scrapped, and demobilisation went on at a faster pace, with 56 percent of officers and 78 percent of men eligible for release discharged in ten weeks: 14,000 men were demobilised daily at the height of the process.

Some found the business of discharge a brief punctuation in the longed-for transformation from soldier to civilian. Alfred Hale, demobilised at Fovant camp, ‘a mass of corrugated iron and wooden huts' just west of Salisbury, could never again look at the branch line that took him home on the South-West Railway to Wimbledon ‘without recollecting what it meant to me that afternoon'.
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Ginger Byrne, on leave in London, fed up with the army, and well aware that ‘firing machine guns and looking after them' had limited attraction to civilian employers, procured a slip from a friend of his sister's promising a job (which, like many such, never materialised). He was sent to the Machine Gun Corps pay office in Chelsea, and thence to the demobilisation centre at Crystal Place.

It took Frank Dunham, another slip man, three visits to the London Records Office, but eventually his unit wired ‘Release Approved' and off he went to ‘Purfleet Demobilisation Camp, where I handed in all my kit and left for home'.
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George Coppard was convalescing at Alnwick, where he received his Military Medal from General Sir John Maxwell of Northern Command (‘an exciting experience') when the war ended. ‘I have always regretted that I was not in at the finish of the fighting,' he wrote. ‘To have celebrated survival with those left of my old company would have been a privilege indeed.' He was demobilised just after his twenty-first birthday, with four and a half years' service, picking up a £28 gratuity and handing in his greatcoat for the £1. And then:

Like so many other ex-soldiers he was bitter at the lavish grants for Field Marshal Haig and Admiral Beatty (£100,000 plus earldoms) and the £30,000 and viscountcies for the army commanders. It was the last act in the unlucky tactlessness which had so tainted the relationship between the red tabs and the rest.

For others, that swing of the hinge, as one life opened into another, grated painfully. ‘My demobilisation papers came through in March [1919],' wrote William Carr. ‘When it was time to go, I slipped quietly away unable to face the gunners, for the memories of all that had happened had come surging back in a great wave of emotion. The tears were streaming down my face.'
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‘Looking back on those firm ranks as they marched into billets, to the Fusiliers' march,' wrote Guy Chapman, ‘I found that this body of men had become so much part of me that its disintegration would tear away something I cared for more dearly than I could have believed. I was it, and it was I …'.
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Charles Douie thought that battalions should have been demobilised decently as formed bodies, not whittled away. He remembered his own last parade, in the pre-dawn chill.