Soldiers

  The War Office’s survey of the 144,000 officers demobilised between the end of the war and 12 May 1920 found that almost 60 per cent came from middle-class occupational groups like ‘commercial and clerical’, ‘students and teachers’, and ‘professional men’. What is more surprising is to find that 1,016 officers had been coal or shale miners, 7,739 railway workers, 266 warehousemen and porters, 213 bootmakers, and 168 navvies. Indeed, not a single one of the industrial groups analysed failed to produce at least a handful of officers, down to the 20 who had been slate miners and quarrymen.25 Personal accounts confirm the growing social breadth of the officer corps. Robert Bridgeman returned to 3/Rifle Brigade in late 1916 and was delighted to be given command of C Company. He was ‘more than lucky’ with his officers, for there was ‘Percivale Northcroft, an old acquaintance from [6/Rifle Brigade on] Sheppey … Later Percy Goodson joined, and so did Dixie Read, as did two first-class men, who had been NCOs in the battalion, Tom Fenner and Les Layton.’26

  Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hermon, an ex-regular cavalry officer, had begun the war commanding a squadron of King Edward’s Horse, a Special Reserve cavalry regiment packed with ‘gentleman troopers’, but in November 1916 was CO of 27th Battalion the Northumberland Fusiliers, badly knocked about on the Somme. He told his wife that his officers were ‘very like the curate’s egg’, they included ‘a funny little man called Crichton, a Weslyan minister, who is a good bloke but nothing very much socially’. When Hermon was interviewing candidates for commissions one man told him that he was a ‘ladies & gents hairdresser’ in civilian life.27 Hubert Essame, a regular subaltern in the Northamptons, who was to become a major general in the Second World War, described an officer corps ‘based on mutual loyalty and trust from which distinctions of class had long vanished’, though temporary officers were still expected to display the paternalistic style of leadership which had characterised regulars.28

  Lieutenant Colonel Graham Seton Hutchison observed that the company commanders in his machine gun battalion were the son of a Scottish miner, an ex-regular sergeant, a wool salesman, and a medical student, while his adjutant had been a land agent. None of them had been to public school. Sidney Rogerson had been commissioned into the West Yorkshires in 1914, leaving Cambridge without completing his degree. In Twelve Days he describes a battalion’s tour of duty on the Somme in November 1916, and tells of his battalion’s senior officers, just before going up the line, being briefed by the CO, James Jack, who

  had come to us from the Cameronians, but so completely identified himself with us and incidentally endeared himself to us that his alien origin had been completely and quickly forgotten … MacLaren is there, the second in command, an officer on the reserve wrenched by the war from the comfortable home in Ontario which he will never see again. A Company is represented by Palmes, a militia captain, who has left a Rhodesian Farm and is destined to die on the same day as MacLaren … and by his senior subaltern, Arthur Skrett, just joined from Sandhurst. I answer for B Company. Hawley, a senior captain of the regiment, plunged into this grim winter campaign after years of service in the steam-heat of West Africa, has C; and Sankey, a 2nd Lieutenant just promoted from the ranks of the Canadians, is temporarily in command of D Company. Matheson, another promoted Canadian, is acting adjutant.29

  The same sort of social mixture encountered amongst the officers of a single battalion was replicated at brigade level. Frank Crozier had been a regular officer, but was forced to resign his commission in 1908 after bouncing cheques. The outbreak of war found him helping train the Ulster Volunteer Force, and he went to France as second in command of a battalion of Royal Irish Rifles, succeeding to command in late 1915 and leading it on the Somme. Promoted brigadier general in November 1916 he headed an infantry brigade for the rest of the war. His accounts of his wartime service are, like the man himself, flamboyant and unreliable, and are not a little coloured by the fact that he needed to make money. His snapshot of the commanding officers of the four battalions of his brigade in 1917 goes to the heart of this war-seasoned army. Lieutenant Colonel Freddy Plunkett, RSM of 2/Royal Irish in 1914, had won a DCM at Le Cateau and an MC the following year. After being commissioned he won a DSO and two bars, and would probably have commanded a brigade had heart trouble not prevented it. Lieutenant Colonel Benzie had been a subaltern in the Ceylon Tea Planters’ Rifles in 1914, and he too would have become a brigadier had he not been severely wounded in March 1918. Lieutenant Colonel Andrews had run away from school in 1900 to serve as a trooper in the yeomanry in South Africa and had been involved in several revolutions in South America, and Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics.

  Their experience of military service had a profound impact on many officers. Sidney Rogerson, an educated man from a comfortable background, spoke for many when he described the men he served with, who, in the normal run of things, he would never have met in civilian life:

  In spite of all differences in rank, we were comrades, brothers, dwelling together in unity. We were privileged to see in each other that inner, ennobled self which in the grim struggle of peace-time is too frequently atrophied for lack of opportunity of expression. We could note the intense affection of soldiers for certain officers, their absolute trust in them. We saw the love passing the love of women of one ‘pal’ for his ‘half’ section. We saw in his letters home which came to us for censoring, the filial devotion of the ‘toughest’, drunkenest private for his aged mother back in the slums by the Tyne at North Shields. We saw the indomitable kindliness of the British character expressing itself towards the French children, the wretched mangy French dogs and yes, even to the German wounded and prisoners … Despite all the propaganda for Christian fellowship and international peace, there is more animosity, uncharitableness, and lack of fellowship in one business office now than in a brigade of infantry in France then. Otherwise we could never have stood the strain.30

  Lieutenant Colonel Hermon told his wife that ‘the British soldier is a most wonderful person,’ adding

  if you had told me that you could lay hands on every man you met in the street, clap a uniform on him and that he would behave like a stoic and not only in crowds but in small parties, I should have said that the whole thing was absolutely idiotic … Anyhow we have done it and one is proud that one is a member of a country that produces men like the men out here.

  Hermon was killed just over a week later, shot through the chest while taking his battalion over the top near Arras: he ordered his adjutant ‘to go on and not wait for him’. Private Gordon Offord ‘Freddie’ Buxton, manservant in civilian life and batman in war, told his own wife that:

  I feel I have lost a good master and friend. My heart is broken and I feel I can’t write about it. I want to come home and try to comfort Mrs Hermon. I can’t rest. I am thinking about her day and night … We buried him on Wednesday afternoon in the cemetery amongst the ruined village close to the trenches where he was killed, nobody touched him but me. I did him up in two groundsheets and made him look as nice as possible. I buried him in his uniform just as he died … I lingered by his grave after everybody had gone and prayed that God would comfort his dear wife and children and make me as good and brave as my dear master … I had to have a good cry Marie love, I couldn’t help it.31

  Both Lieutenant Colonel Hermon’s sons fought in the Second World War, and one of Private Buxton’s – given a bursary by King Edward’s Horse – went to the Imperial Service College and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery.

  I had always thought of Desmond Young as Rommel’s first biographer, and knew that he had been a brigadier in the Second World War. It transpired that he had been commissioned into the 60th Rifles in 1914, and badly wounded as a company commander outside Ypres in 1915, when his battalion lost 17 of its officers and 333 men. He always remembered that he owed his life to a Welsh miner Lance Corporal Williams who, with another man, had carried him to a dressing station and then turned down his sugge
stion that they should spend the night with the transport and go back in the morning. ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said Williams. ‘I think we’d better be getting back up the line to the company.’32 Young wrote this account in 1961, but his memory had not failed him: it was indeed Lance Corporal Williams, who was killed in action in late 1916.

  Soldiers were sometimes unenthusiastic about ranker officers because they knew too much. Lieutenant Alan Thomas thought that those in 6/Royal West Kents were disliked because ‘they knew their job and there was no chance of swinging it over them.’33 R. K. R. Thornton, a ‘gentleman ranker’ in 2/5 Glosters, thought that

  A bad officer, that is, a bully, is a ———! A good officer, that is a considerate [one], is ‘a toff’. ‘I’d follow him anywhere.’ ‘The men’s friend’; or simply, but in significant tone, a ‘gentleman’.34

  Men expected bravery: when an officer of 1/13 London ducked on hearing shells explode the RSM told him to keep his head up, and a subaltern of 22/London, cowering in the bottom of a trench before an attack, was shoved over the parapet by his platoon sergeant. They also expected officers, whatever their origins, to behave in a gentlemanly manner. Private Eric Linklater, a former medical student serving in 4/5 Black Watch was in an estaminet when a noisy, drunken officer pursued the hostess, his evident enthusiasm for the task unconcealed by his kilt. Although the sergeants were slum-dwellers in civilian life, they were ‘incensed by such behaviour in an officer of their regiment’.35 An anonymous former soldier, trying to recall the officers he had served under, produced a composite figure: ‘Boyish and middle-aged, cool and reckless; a martinet lapsing into an indulgent father; a thwarter becoming an aider and abetter; an enemy melting into a friend.’36

  Siegfried Sassoon, second in command of a company of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers in April 1917, found his sense of obligation to his men wholly absorbing. Years later he recalled foot-inspection after a long march, and when he thought of ‘those men showing their sore feet, sitting on the straw in a sun-chinked barn and staring up at me with their stupid, trustful eyes, I can still feel angry with profiteers and society people who guzzled their way through the war.’ His company’s mess

  contained a typical war contrast in Casson and Evans. Casson, aged 23, had been at Winchester and Christ Church; he was a sensitive, refined youth and an amusing gossip. Evans was about the same age, but had not ‘enjoyed the same social advantages’. He was very noisy and garrulous, always licked his thumb when dealing cards, and invariably answered ‘Pardon?’ when any remark was made to him. That ‘pardon’ became a little trying at times. Equally good when tested, the two merged their social incompatibilities in the end; both were killed on September 26th.37

  Second Lieutenant Randal Alexander Casson, of Bron-y-Garth, Porthmadoc, is buried in Poelcapelle military cemetery. The body of Second Lieutenant Hywl Llewelyn Evans of the terraced 22 Llandough Street, Cardiff, was never found, and he is commemorated, with 34,924 comrades who died in the Ypres salient after 16 August 1917 but have no known graves, on the Tyne Cot memorial to the missing.

  No sooner had the war’s last shots echoed away into silence than the army reverted to type. Many temporary officers who sought to stay on were denied regular commissions, and some who had cleared the initial hurdle in 1918–19 found themselves out of a job when the ‘Geddes Axe’ fell in the mid-1920s. Lieutenant F. G. S. Thomas immediately enlisted as a gunner in No 8 Mountain Battery on the North West Frontier of India, and made an impressive right marker with his splendid physique and the purple and white ribbon of his MC. He was re-commissioned in 1932, and badly wounded as a battery commander in the Western Desert in 1941, winning a DSO in the process. Sandhurst and Woolwich became fee-paying once again, and their connection with public schools was as strong as ever. There was a decline in the percentage of cadets entering Sandhurst who gave their father’s occupation as ‘gentleman’ from 20.5 per cent in 1910 to 9.1 per cent in 1930, but over the same period the percentage of the sons of military professionals rose from 43.8 to 50.8 per cent. The cost of uniforms and equipment, which an officer was expected to meet, added to mess bills, once again made it difficult for an officer without private means to live on his pay. Lieutenant General Sir John Keir warned that the army was automatically shutting itself off from young men who, as the war had so recently shown, could make admirable officers. He cited the case of

  a young man, well-educated, of good physique, a typical leader of men, with the further recommendation that his father has fallen fighting for his country. He is anxious to become an officer. He has everything to recommend him but money. His only means of entering the army is passing through the ranks and possibly wasting some of the most valuable years of his life in sterile routine.

  He suggested that expenses could be much reduced if officers were delivered from ‘the thraldom of the military tailor’ by the establishment of an officers’ branch of the Army Clothing Department. Messes should be simplified so that an officer ‘has not a six-course dinner forced upon him, nor is he obliged to pay for it whether he partake of it or not’. Instead of regimental bands being supported by officers’ subscriptions, there should be ‘a good local brigade band’, for battalions could get along perfectly well with their drums and pipes, paid for by the government. Finally, he quoted a question asked by an anxious parent: ‘I am going to put my boy into the army. He is very keen to get on, and wants to make a real profession of it. What branch of the service should he join?’ Happily the young man had a private income of £300–400 a year. ‘In that case,’ replied Keir, ‘it is quite easy to answer your question. Put him into the cavalry every time.’38

  The Haldane Committee of 1923 maintained that ‘it is neither necessary nor desirable to confine the selection of officers to any one class of the community.’ However, instead of lowering the fees at Woolwich at Sandhust, or even acknowledging Sir John Keir’s recommendations (some of which remain desiderata to this day), the War Office simply asked county councils to provide scholarships to the two academies, just as they did to universities. Both cost £200 a year, about the same as Oxford and rather less than Cambridge, though very much more than, say, St Andrews or Aberdeen. A suggestion that it might be possible to use suitable Territorial officers to serve as regulars was swiped, with predictable vigour, into the long grass, because ‘the door might prove inconveniently wide’. The Y Cadet programme was intended to ensure that 13.5 per cent of the officer corps was drawn from the ranks, and between 1922 and 1930, 189 rankers did indeed receive commissions under this scheme. But the high cost of living in the combat arms meant that so many of them joined the Royal Army Service Corps, that the corps had to give up direct recruitment from Sandhurst because its junior officer ranks were fast becoming filled with impecunious ex-rankers. By the mid-1930s the average Sandhurst intake contained only 5 per cent of ex-rankers. University graduates were, rather like militia officers before 1914, able to sidestep Sandhurst altogether. Charles Farrell left Ampleforth in 1937 and went to Christ Church, Oxford, as a university candidate for a regular commission in the Scots Guards. His military training included a month’s attachment to 1/Scots Guards, when ‘our time was mainly spent at drill on the square as part of a squad under the tuition of a drill sergeant.’ He was surprised at ‘the Olympian calm and utter military inactivity’ that prevailed and, having just returned from visiting Germany, thought that ‘the SS regiments I had seen goose-stepping in the stadium at Nuremberg that spring were unlikely to be in a state of summer torpor, but rather on manoeuvres close to the Czech border.’39

  There was much truth in this. Writing in 1935, J. R. Kennedy, whose views doubtless reflect the fact that he had left the army as a captain in the Royal Artillery, argued that the army had regressed to the Edwardian era. Officers of his own arm were often unable to become adjutants of Territorial regiments unless they had substantial private means, for the allowances were inadequate. Mounted officers in India – including staff officers who rarely appeared mounted – wer
e required to purchase a charger. He cherished the ‘vain hope’ that ‘officers may no longer be required to make themselves ridiculous by putting on spurs to dine, to dance, or to attend mechanised parades.’ He argued that the artillery, such a battle-winner in the war, had been subjected to a ‘quite incomprehensible’ 45 per cent cut when compared with its 1910 establishment, as opposed to the 17 per cent cut across the whole army. Restrictions on publishing amounted to ‘suppression of free thought and free expression’, and it was still taboo to talk shop in the mess. Promotions to lieutenant colonel in 1933–34 suggested that the Guards did best, with an average age on promotion of 40 years and 5 months, then the cavalry, at 43.6, the engineers at 44.1, followed by the gunners at 48.5 and then the rest of the army:

  There are infantry subalterns who are older than Guards commanding officers; there is a difference of ten years between the service required for promotion to captain in the Scots Guards and the Prince of Wales Volunteers; captains of artillery are promoted to major at the age that majors of the guards are promoted lieutenant colonel, and it is more than ten years before artillery officers are promoted lieutenant colonel.