T.F.
“The conduct and bearing of these units under fire, and the efficient
manner in which they carried out the various duties assigned to them,
have imbued me with the highest hope as to the value and help of
Territorial troops generally.”--FIELD-MARSHAL SIR JOHN FRENCH.
The first Territorial troops that I saw in the field was the North
Midland Division. Neither they nor I will probably ever forget that
meeting, not because either of us made an unforgettable impression on
the other, but by reason of the circumstances in which it occurred. It
was a wet and cheerless March afternoon, the hour when the greyness of
weeping spring is succumbing to the shades of evening. The Division,
fresh out from England, had just arrived at its first billets in the
field in and about the little village of Merris, which lies a little
off the beaten track between Hazebrouck and Bailleul.
A battalion--from the Midlands--was halted in the village, a dirty
little jumble of white houses straggling along a single main
street with a few feet of sidewalk, a cobbled roadway, a totally
undistinguished church, a weather-stained and sordid-looking _Mairie_.
The rain blew hither and thither in cold, soaking gusts, and pavements
and roadways were slippery with sticky, yellow mud.
The men of the battalion had been allowed to break the ranks. They
overflowed in that squalid village street. They had evidently come a
long way, for most of them were soaked to the skin, and their boots
and puttees were all smeared with clay. They stood about in groups in
the desultory fashion of the Briton in a strange place, or pressed
together outside the village shops and stared through the tiny windows
at the heterogeneous jumble of articles within--loaves of bread, tins
of sardines, bootlaces, pats of butter, picture-postcards, and, as a
reminder that British troops had passed that way before, boxes and
packets of English cigarettes.
It did not need the bronze “T” on collars and shoulder-straps to tell
me that these were not Regular troops. These men were prone to silence,
rather shy, a trifle helpless, as they stood about the rain-swept
street, waiting for their officers to show them their billets, to tell
them what to do. They seemed to be drinking in their impressions of
this, their first experience of life in the field, and I doubt that
they will ever fade from the minds of those men, so cheerless was their
welcome at Merris. Regulars would have made themselves at home on the
instant. They would have found a fire at which they might have dried
their sodden overcoats and brewed themselves a drink of hot tea in
their capacious pannikins. If fire or warm drinks were not forthcoming,
they would have ferreted out for themselves a dry corner under a roof
somewhere, and gone to sleep with that infinite capacity for sleeping
at odd moments and in queer places that is peculiar to the British
soldier.
The officers did not seem to me to be quite sure of themselves. They
had a certain earnestness of mien, a certain formality of manner,
and seemed inclined to hold aloof from their men. It is only the
fire-trench, after all, that teaches the new officer the exact
proportion of familiarity that discipline permits between officers and
men.
Their equipment, too, seemed rather more elaborate than was consonant
with comfort on a long march through the wet. Their caps were
stiff-crowned, they wore heavy overcoats, and over them their web
equipment hung, attached to it a more or less large variety of the
leather-bound articles that people at home present to the departing
warrior, most of which he discards after a week or two in the trenches,
and their puttees were quite impeccably tied. To me, who had grown
accustomed to the _négligé_ of dress and manner of the fire-trench,
these small distinctions were probably more apparent than they would
have been to an ordinary observer.
It was not until months later that I saw the North Midland Division
again. It was a thundery summer day in the trenches, with bursts of
hot sunshine alternating with drenching showers. The trenches were
ankle-deep in mud and water, and had been dug in many places through
the all too shallow burial-places of the dead of former fights. In some
places the British and German lines were very close together, and there
was short shrift for him who should thrust his head, even for a moment,
above the shelter of the parapet.
In these unwholesome surroundings I found my Territorials of Merris
again. But in the sunburnt, calmly deliberate veterans who manned the
parapet I scarcely recognized the young troops with the half-fledged
air that I had seen standing in the rain on that March afternoon. The
conditions in those trenches on that showery morning were, I imagine,
incomparably worse than anything the Division had undergone before.
But the men made the best of things, and woebegone and weather-stained
though they were in appearance, went about their normal round of duties
as though they had been living all their lives in mud and water and in
close proximity to a dangerous foe.
Over fires skilfully contrived in dry corners some were cooking
pannikins of savoury soup and steaming tea; others, who had been on
guard all night, slept as peacefully as children, though “whizz-bangs”
burst noisily to and fro about the parapet, and now and again the
thunder rolled imperiously above the sound of the guns. The rain came
down steadily; every trench was a slough of sticky, yellow clay and
foul water; the walls of dug-out and “funk-hole” reeked with damp. But
the sleepers slept on, those who could not find room in a “funk-hole”
lying on the “fire-stand,” completely enveloped in their great-coats or
waterproof sheets.
Active service had transformed the officers. They looked as hard and
as capable and as self-reliant as their men. They had lost much of
their formality of manner; that very scrupulous correctitude of dress
had gone; vanished, too, were many of the natty little articles that,
but a few months since, had jingled melodiously about them as they
marched up from the coast at the head of their platoon or company. Such
of them as wore caps had old soft caps, stained with mud and sweat,
crushed well on to their heads; many were tunicless, and made their
round of the trenches simply attired in grey soldier shirt and old
riding-breeches thrust into trench boots, for all the world like the
old-time “Forty-niners” of the gold-fields.
The link between them and their men was much looser, but much more
intimate. It was not difficult to see that the men leant more than ever
on their officers, and that the officers, on their side, were beginning
to “discover” their men--to discover the soul of the Englishman, as
it has never been unbared between Englishmen before, I think--simple,
brave, devoted, uncomplaining, inspired by an ocean-deep patriotism not
fed from external sources, but springing spontaneous and elemental from
within. Both had found themselves and one another, officers and men.
It was in the rainy days of the first battle of Ypres that our
Territorials first found themselves actually fighting on foreign soil.
Of Yeomanry Cavalry, the Northumberland, the Northamptonshire, the
North Somerset and the Leicestershire Regiments, and the Oxfordshire
Hussars; of Territorial Infantry, the London Scottish, the Honourable
Artillery Company, the Queen’s Westminsters, and the Hertfordshire,
were engaged. General Sir Julian Byng, commanding the cavalry, made
special mention to the Commander-in-Chief of the conduct of the
Yeomanry in the field, while, in the case of the Territorial Infantry,
Sir Douglas Haig spoke in high terms of their gallant behaviour.
On these powerful recommendations Sir John French wrote the sentence
in his despatch on the first battle of Ypres which I have quoted
at the head of this chapter. It must have been with feelings of
peculiar satisfaction that he found himself in a position to pay
this well-merited tribute to the Territorials. For he, more than
any other, was responsible for the creation of the Territorial Army
which was destined to play an invaluable part in the expansion of
the Expeditionary Force into the great national army. It was he whom
Lord Haldane, fresh to the War Office, summoned to bring his wide
experience, his flexible mind, his great knowledge of war, to the task
of carrying the Haldane reforms--first and foremost among them the
creation of the Territorial Force--to fruitful accomplishment.
The material of the Territorials sent out to the front was always good;
often their training and equipment left something to be desired. At
the outset of the war the progress of the Territorials from England
to the firing-line was very gentle. The first Territorial battalions
to come out were given a preliminary stage at a temporary camp
established at General Headquarters, where they went through a further
course of instruction at the hands of men fresh from the trenches,
or, at any rate, in closest touch with the army in the field, and
where any shortcomings in their equipment were rectified. As their
training proceeded they were sent to the trenches in driblets, the
officers going by couples to serve for some time with a battalion in
the front line, the men going first by sections, then by platoons,
then by double companies, until it was judged that the whole battalion
was sufficiently experienced to take over by itself a section of the
trenches, preferably in one of the quieter parts of the line.
The famous Artists’ Rifles have played a unique rôle in this war.
The battalion was originally intended to take its place in the line
the same as the Regulars and the other Territorial troops out here.
But their fine _esprit de corps_, together with the high standard of
intelligence and the good social standing of their men, pointed to
this distinguished battalion as an ideal Officers’ Training Corps in
the field. The experiment was tried. The battalion, as a homogeneous
unit, was not sent to the front line, but retained in the rear, and
used for furnishing sentries and doing other duties, while likely
candidates were selected from the ranks and sent to a Cadet School
to be trained for commissions. At the Cadet School, which, from very
modest beginnings, has now developed into a large and flourishing
institution--a veritable Sandhurst in Flanders--they are given a
thoroughly practical course of instruction, which includes trench
modelling in clay and weekly visits of forty-eight hours’ duration
to the trenches. So successful has the experiment proved that the
Commander-in-Chief is said to have stated that the Artists’ Rifles have
been worth a Division to him. Altogether the Artists have supplied more
than a thousand officers to the army in the field--a truly magnificent
achievement.
When the Territorials first came to France, a Regular might yet safely
ruffle his nose at them and get a laugh. “T.F.” stood for Saturday
afternoon soldiering and tubby Colonels and bespectacled privates. But
the Territorials were used to being made fun of. In peace-time kicks
and no ha’pence were their lot, and in war they did not care very
much whether they got either as long as they might “have a smack at
the Germans.” So they grinned and bore the chaff, and settled down in
uncomfortable billets in dreary towns and dirty villages to learn what
they had not learnt about war--and at first it was a good deal--in
their camps at home, chafing desperately at the waiting, but doing
all manner of useful jobs behind the line against the time that their
services might be required for the work they had volunteered to do.
Their chance came at last, as it comes to every man in the field. At
a critical stage in the first battle of Ypres (if you can speak of a
critical stage in a battle that was one long crisis), the Territorials
I have already mentioned, horse and foot, went into action and bore
themselves well. The London Scottish, particularly, fought like
veterans at Messines, though I fear that the injudicious “booming” of
their spirited charge in the newspapers called down on their heads a
good deal of unmerited ill-will on the part of other battalions out
here.
Winter came and went. In March the first Territorial Division arrived
in France. Others followed, and Territorial Divisions began to be
employed, with due circumspection, as homogeneous units to do their
share of holding our lengthening line. Even as the Territorial
Divisions began to arrive, individual battalions were undergoing their
baptism of fire on the bloody field of Neuve Chapelle. There were
many Territorials in that hard-fought fight, and none did better than
the 6th Gordons and the 3rd London Regiment, the latter executing a
splendid charge that so electrified the Regulars who witnessed it,
that they stood up on the parapet of their trenches and cheered as the
“Terriers” swung past.
The second battle of Ypres saw the début of a Territorial Division,
fighting as a homogeneous unit, in the shape of the Northumberland
Division, which, as I have described elsewhere in this book, though
only a few days out from England, went straight into action and played
its part unflinchingly. Indeed, the fight for the Ypres Salient was
a Territorials’ as it was a Regulars’ battle from the inferno of
Hill 60, where the Queen Victoria Rifles--“the Q. Vics,” as they are
affectionately called in the Brigade--and the 6th King’s Liverpool
Regiment earned the unstinted admiration of their fellow-Regulars, to
the horror of the closing stages of the battle on May 13, when the
North Somerset, the Leicestershire and the Essex Yeomanry showed the
Lifeguards and the Blues and the Bays, the flower of our cavalry, that
Yeomanry also know how to die.
Right round the arc of the salient, throughout those weeks of bloody
fighting, Territorials fought side by side with the Regulars. After
the battle General Prowse, commanding the Brigade to which the London
Rifle Brigade, that fine London Territorial Regiment, was attached,
said to me: “_If you see the L.R.B.’s, tell them from me we want them
back. We all look on them as Regulars now._”
The old Territorial joke died at Ypres. It lies buried in the salient
in the graves where Territorials from nearly every shire in the United
Kingdom are sleeping their last sleep. Our fathers who laughed at
_Punch’s_ gibes at the old Volunteers, with their “sham-fights” and
“field-days” on Wimbledon Common, little thought that those rotund
Colonels and bewhiskered Majors and slow-moving privates were creating
the tradition that was to bear our gallant Territorials with heads
uplifted unflinchingly through the inferno of the Flanders plain.
Do you remember Saturday afternoons in London before the war? and the
processions of young fellows in odd-looking uniforms of grey and blue
and bottle-green, rifles slung across their shoulders, hastening to the
railway-stations for their afternoon drills? Some of us scoffed, maybe,
at the “earnest” young men whose pleasure it was to “play at soldiers”
... but the shame of it came back to me in a hot flush as I stood by
their graves in the salient of Ypres.
The attack on the Fromelles ridge on May 9, the fighting at Festubert
in May and June, the capture, loss, and recapture of the trenches at
Hooge in June, July, and August, found the Territorials in action every
time. Their behaviour under fire only confirmed the good impression
which their début at Ypres in November had produced on the army. Its
verdict was, “The ‘Terriers’ are all right.”
Thus, the Regular came to admire--nay, to love the Territorial. He
admitted him into the inner circle of his esteem and affection, where
hitherto only the navy and the Royal Flying Corps, of our combatants
in this war, have had a place. If the New Army prove themselves hardy
fighters, imbued with those soldierly qualities which are the sole
criterion by which the army in the field judges men, then they, too,
shall find ingress into that jealously guarded preserve, the heart of
the Regular.
When he gives you his friendship, the British soldier is a good
friend. Between some Regular and Territorial battalions bonds of the
closest affection have been formed in the field. Thus, the gallant
Hertfordshire Territorials, who wear the Hart badge of the Bedfordshire
Regiment, are sworn brothers to the Guards, by reason of their being
brigaded with the Guards in the famous Guards Brigade--the only
non-Guards battalion in the Brigade--for many months. The army calls
them “The Herts Guards,” and right proud the Hertfordshires are of the
title.
War has rounded off many edges in the Territorials, yet, to the
inexperienced eye, there is still a marked difference between the
Regular and even the most seasoned Territorial. A Territorial battalion
is far more of a family gathering than a Regular battalion. Your
Territorial regiment recruits, as a rule, from one more or less
restricted area, so that there are all kinds of bonds of family,
business, and speech between its men. To the Regulars of our old
standing army war has ever been a business: to the Territorial it is
much more of a prolonged foreign holiday--“the most glorious change of
air and scene I have ever had,” is how a member of the H.A.C. referred
to his service at the front.
This homogeneity of interests in a Territorial battalion also applies
to trades. Thus, you will find, in the case of Territorials from the
North, whole battalions of miners, of cotton operatives, of gillies. I
heard of an entire company of a certain Territorial regiment formed out
of hands from a well-known brewery, who had joined _en masse_.
I imagine that our Territorial regiments resemble more closely than
any other formations we have in the field to-day the bands of archers
who, in the Middle Ages, as Froissart tells, followed their feudal
Barons to France and fought over the very fields where the war is being
waged to-day. Like our Territorials, these bands must have been united
within themselves by countless home associations, led, as they were,
by their home leaders, speaking their home speech, swearing by their
home shrines. The tie that welds Regulars together is the spirit of the
regiment; home is the uniting bond of the Territorials.
The Regular generally marches in silence. If he sings it is as often
as not one of those soldier songs of obscure origin like “The Song of
Shame,” which I have often heard sung but have never seen in print. It
deals with the misfortunes of a lass that loved not wisely, but too
well, and beginning,
“She wuz pore but she wuz honest,”
continues through any number of more or less unprintable strophes.
The Territorial, on the other hand, hates to march in silence. If he is
not singing, he is whistling. His range of songs is extensive. He will
sing anything, from doggerel set to hymn tunes to Grand Opera. He will
carol from Poperinghe to Ypres, from Lillers to Béthune, that familiar
marching ditty which goes to the tune of “Here we go gathering nuts and
may”:
“Nobody knows how dry we are,
Nobody knows how dry we are,
Nobody knows how dry we are,
And nobody seems to care-oh!”
and when one song stops, another is started.
I have no hesitation in setting down the fine qualities of pluck and
endurance which the Territorials have displayed in this war to the
educational influence of games. The best type of Territorial--the young
city-dweller, the shop-assistant and clerk class--is nearly always an
athlete, and I make no doubt that the healthy spirit of the cricket,
football and hockey field, and of the boxing-ring, is responsible not
only for his fine capacity for delivering blows, but also for standing
knocks without repining, without losing his temper. Our games are
the product of our English minds, no doubt, and you find these same
qualities in the Regular soldier. But in the latter this little seed is
cultivated and developed by the force of regimental tradition, while in
the Territorial, who comes out to the front practically as an outsider
to the army, it is by the physical and mental training he has received
from the games he has played in times of peace.
Months of active service do not seem to eradicate altogether a
certain aloofness which generally exists between the Regular and the
Territorial, save in the case of those units which have been brought
into close touch in the field. The officers seem to slip more slowly
into the groove than the men. The Territorial officer is new to the
game. Under our Territorial system he has had but scant opportunities
in times of peace of knowing his men, and little or no chance of
familiarizing himself with the spirit of the army. Until he has found
his feet, therefore, he is inclined to grapple himself desperately to
the regulations, thereby acquiring, not only towards his men, but also
towards his brother officers in the Regulars, a certain formality of
manner which those brought up in that perfect school of easy manners,
the British Army, are inclined to resent.
When I have been in trenches held by Territorials, I have sometimes
noticed that the officers have been more concerned with the making
of reports, etc., than more practical and immediate cares, such as
the comfort of their men, the cleanliness of their trench (of great
importance from the standpoint of hygiene), and the movements of the
enemy. A good regimental officer of Regulars, in similar circumstances,
would have let the paper business go hang, and would have set the whole
company hustling, baling out the water in the trenches, improving the
dug-outs and mending the flooring, whilst he himself would have had a
prowl round looking out for German snipers and for any likely corners
from which his men might “draw a bead” on the enemy.
The Territorial officer is lacking in experience, but that is a fault
that remedies itself with every day that he spends in the front line.
It is here that a good Staff tells. An active Brigadier who constantly
visits the trenches can get the very best results out of the real
good-will of the Territorial officer.
I have been round the trenches once or twice with the Brigade Major
of one of the brigades of a Territorial Division, and I have been
astonished to see the number of small points which his quick and
experienced eye has detected, which he has pointed out, always in a
tactful, suggesting way, to the officers in charge of the front-line
companies--here a German loophole left open, offering a chance for
a good shot (in which these Territorial battalions abound); there a
line of fresh earth behind the German trench, suggesting underground
activity of some sort; there, again, a weak parapet in our fire-trench,
or a man whom the careful eye has seen exposing himself recklessly. The
Brigade Major, who had fought at Mons, had experience: the Territorial
officers were getting it. The courteous, eager way in which they
accepted his hints was as charming as the suave fashion in which they
were proffered.
The army in the field has not been slow to learn that a profusion of
talent in the arts and crafts is lying dormant in the Territorial
battalions. If an expert in any branch is wanted, application is
always made to the nearest Territorial battalion, seldom, if ever,
without success. A friend of mine, a company commander in the Ypres
region, having procured a piano for his company’s rest billets behind
the line, found the instrument so much out of tune as to be useless.
Forthwith word was sent round for a piano-tuner. A search through the
battalion drew a blank. A note to an adjacent Territorial regiment
produced a finished piano-tuner who had been driving a lorry in the
Mechanical Transport. Naturally, he had none of his piano-tuning tools
with him, but he made excellent shift with a couple of spanners from
the travelling workshop. In the same way a Brigade wanted a plumber and
a clerk, and got both from its Territorial battalion. The clerk was a
bookmaker’s clerk, it is true, but he proved himself a treasure--“...
Besides,” as the Staff Captain said, “if one ever wants to make a book
on a race at home, why, there he is, don’t you know!”
Territorial battalions have supplied the army with chemists and doctors
and fly experts, with map-drawers and photographers and electricians,
and with an extraordinary variety of dramatic and musical talent for
concerts at the front. At the fortnightly “smokers” of the Machine Gun
School, which are by far the best in the field, territorial battalions
supply a good proportion of the contributors to the programme.
The Artists’ Rifles are particularly prolific in platform talent.
They possess three much sought after performers, in the person of
a lance-corporal (in private life a broker in the rubber market, I
believe), who is a most amusing “drawing-room entertainer” after the
style of the late George Grossmith; a transport sergeant (he forsook
the law for the war), who has an extensive repertory of Kipling
recitations; and a sergeant-instructor of machine-guns, who is the
perfect accompanist and a really first-class musician to boot.
These Territorial battalions are full of experts. The beautifully
finished sign-posts in Plug Street Wood are the work of Territorials,
and a familiar landmark in this historic part of the line is the
exquisite little cemetery laid out by a famous Southern Territorial
battalion in a pretty little wooded glade, where the gallant Lieutenant
Poulton Palmer, the international Rugby footballer, lies. The Adjutant
of a certain Territorial battalion of the Leicesters is a quarry
manager in civil life. When last I saw him, at tea in a Flemish
farm-house, he was proposing to utilize his expert knowledge of pumps
for the benefit of his battalion’s section of trenches.
In the field I have seen Territorials from England, Scotland and
Wales--raw troops fresh from home and hardened veterans of half a dozen
fights, bank clerks from Cornhill, miners from Cardiff, gillies from
Inverness shire, ploughboys from the Mendips. I have seen them in rain
and shine, in the fire-trenches and behind the lines. And seeing them I
have marvelled at the equalizing influence of war that has moulded all
these men, torn from their civilian callings--as widely differing as
the poles are asunder--to the same stamp of cool, courageous fighters
who will endure to the end.
The homogeneity of these Territorial battalions, even of the Divisions,
is remarkable. One day I met the whole of the London Division together
on the occasion of Divisional sports. The big field in which the
meeting was held was the microcosm of London life. It was London in
Picardy. Every London accent was heard in that crowd--the whole gamut
of dialects--from the mannered speech of Berkeley Square through all
the intonations and inflexions of the suburbs from Highbury to Brixton,
and from Shepherd’s Bush to Streatham, down to the strident tones of
the New Cut and the Old Kent Road. It was strange to think that but
a short year since all these men had travelled together in ’bus and
tube, had rubbed elbows in Oxford Street or the Strand, strangers all,
leading the jealously guarded individual existence of the average
Londoner--to think that they were now thrown together into almost the
closest relationship it is possible to conceive, the life of troops
fighting side by side in the field.
With the Scottish battalions the family spirit is even more marked.
The Scotsman is a far more clannish creature than the Southerner, and
these Scottish battalions hang together with a fierce _esprit de corps_
in which the Englishman feels positively lost. This is especially true
of the kilted battalions, which have in their bonnets and kilts a
perpetual reminder of their origin.
I have been in the trenches with Highland battalions in which hardly a
man born south of the Tweed was serving, and in which all, officers as
well as men, spoke in the broadest Scottish vernacular. The chaplains
of some of these Scottish Territorial regiments are delightful
characters, fine types of “meenister” and “verra’ godly men,” but,
for all that, stout, great-hearted fellows who are continually with
the men in the front line. The fine, practical spirit in which these
Scottish _padres_ carry out their mission is expressed in the saying
of one of their number, Chaplain to the 5th Gordon Highlanders, whose
continual exhortation to the men is: “Keep your hearts up and your
heads doon!”
With these brave words, which might well serve as a motto for the
Territorial on active service, we will leave the Territorials at
the post of duty. When the country’s need of men was sorest, they
volunteered for foreign service and came to France and did their part.
Now that the first great transports have crossed the Channel with the
men of the New Army, the original mission of the Territorials may be
regarded as accomplished, though, doubtless, many fights still await
them. They gave their help at a time when every man was wanted to hold
our fragile line. Now they have become absorbed into the framework of
our army in the field, which the legions of the New Army are expanding
into the great Continental host to decide the ultimate issue with the
hordes of Germany.