Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ in the RFA. I write in the Main Railway Station Sheffield having got my ticket for Newhaven and am proceeding there. I am afraid with all the excitement my hand is somewhat shaky.’¹⁶⁷ On arrival he found that:

      Everything is rough. The camp is like a quagmire, and no floor boards in the tent … Had a shave with difficulty and cold water. Truly last night I wished I was dead.

      Sardines and bread for breakfast and we had to fight for it. The food is very roughly served. The other fellows have to eat their meat with their fingers which I would most certainly have to do was it not for my little darling’s knife and fork.¹⁶⁸

      Soon he was reporting that: ‘The life is harder than an outsider would believe,’ with incessant rain, wet blankets, and fatigues like peeling potatoes and emptying urinal buckets, ‘a rotten filthy job’. Press reports of German conduct in Belgium, though, filled him with anger and determination. ‘The outrages on women and children in Belgium have been terrible,’ he wrote. ‘Fancy if Amy had to fall into their hands … I only hope I shall have the chance to have a smash in return for the way our men have been treated, hands cut off and wounded shot.’¹⁶⁹ Training seemed both pointless and brutal. ‘Our sergeant major is an absolute pig,’ he declared.

      He swears and strikes the men … It is a cowardly thing to do as he knows the men dare not strike back … It makes my blood boil when I see it, and if he ever kicks or strikes me I shall go for him whatever the consequences and half kill him before they get me off … They seem to forget we have all given up our jobs to do our best for the country, and do not expect to be treated like a lot of rifraf.¹⁷⁰

      In November he wondered ‘why this Army is without system. If the names of 2 or 3 have to be called out they will have the whole regiment on parade for 2 hours. We are always waiting. Wait, wait, wait and always in the rain.’¹⁷¹ ‘All the men are keen to get on with their duty and it seems a dispiriting thing to me the way we are held back by silly fools of officers,’ he wrote on 1 December. ‘These men have bought their commissions. They are wealthy, brainless fools.’¹⁷² Things picked up when he was sent to Tynemouth for gun training, and when 21st Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery formed there he was already a trained signaller: ‘It’s quite a classy job and the best educated men are naturally picked out for it.’ He was promoted steadily, and in early 1917 announced from France that he was now ‘the only New Army man in the battery who has risen to the rank of sergeant … We have many regulars and I have been promoted over their heads.’¹⁷³ Eventually selected for officer training, he was commissioned in April 1919.

      Other private soldiers echoed Bill Sugden’s chief complaints: bad living conditions and poor food, and training and discipline that seemed inappropriate for citizen soldiers eager to learn a new trade. And experienced officers admitted that it was difficult to make bricks without straw. Captain Rory Baynes, just back from the Royal West African Frontier Force, was sent off to train a New Army Cameronian battalion. His men were an odd mixture, with an early batch of ‘pretty rough’ unemployed, then a batch who had just given up their jobs, and then a good sprinkling of ex-NCOs. They had no rifles and drilled with broomsticks. ‘You’d see a man for instance in a rifle tunic and tartan trews, wearing a straw hat,’ he wrote, ‘next to someone else in a red coat and some civilian trousers.’ He thought that the battalion had reached a reasonable standard by early 1915 when he was passed on the march by two companies of the regular 1/Cameronians and ‘saw immediately that our standard of NCOs and everything else was far below what it really should be’.¹⁷⁴

      J. B. Priestley was never altogether sure why he enlisted in 10/Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. ‘I was not hot with patriotic feeling,’ he admitted, and:

      I did not believe that Britain was in any real danger. I was sorry for ‘gallant little Belgium’ but did not feel as if she was waiting for me to rescue her. The legend of Kitchener, who pointed out at us from every hoarding, had never captured me. I was not under any pressure from public opinion; the white feathers came later. I was not carried to the recruiting office in a herd of chums, nobody thinking, everybody half-plastered. I went alone.¹⁷⁵

      He shared the familiar misery of tented camps, ‘sleeping twelve to a bell-tent, kneeling after Lights Out to piss in our boots and then emptying them under the flap. The old soldiers told us that this was good for our boots, making them easier for route-marches’.¹⁷⁶ And like so many New Army men he resented his Kitchener Blue, ‘a doleful convict-style blue outfit with a ridiculous little forage cap and a civilian overcoat’. But as khaki uniforms arrived, the weather improved and the battalion knitted together, he too felt the pride of arms which coursed through the New Armies in the spring of 1915. ‘We looked like soldiers now,’ he wrote.

      All four battalions had a band; and along all the route we were waved at and cheered, not foolishly either, for an infantry brigade marching in full equipment with its bands booming and clashing is an impressive spectacle. This was my idea of soldiering – constant movement, unknown destinations, fluttering handkerchiefs and cheers – and I enjoyed it hugely, sore feet and bully beef and trips on hard ground and all.¹⁷⁷

      Although he would later blame his sense of class consciousness on the war, Priestley still spoke up warmly for the New Armies in their prime: they were emphatically not ‘a kind of brave rabble’. But it was not until the summer of 1916 that this promising amalgam of diverse humanity was ready to take the field, and even then inherent weaknesses caused by its rapid growth were too ready to make themselves evident.

      Not all the flesh and blood required by the burgeoning army was human, however. The army needed huge quantities of horses. In 1914 it sent a strong cavalry division to France, with almost 10,000 horses, and each of the infantry divisions required nearly 6,000 to pull its guns and wagons and to mount its senior officers. There were 25,000 horses on the army’s strength in August 1914, and at least another 120,000 were required to meet immediate demands. Because the army’s peacetime requirement for horses was so small, Britain had no state breeding programme, but bought about a thousand horses a year from the trade. Most cavalry horses were ‘of hunter stamp. Height 15.2 hands, cost £40 in Ireland, a black gelding’. The Household Cavalry needed something bigger, ‘A real nice-looking heavyweight horse with plenty of bone,’ which was likely to cost £65 as a four year old.¹⁷⁸

      The Boer War had already shown that the army could not hope to rely on normal commercial channels to obtain horses on mobilisation, and in 1914 its purchasing officers were equipped with justice’s warrants which entitled them to obtain horses by compulsory purchase. Most tried to pay sensible sums (£70 was the guideline for an officer’s charger), neither overspending nor robbing the sellers. B. E. Todhunter mounted B Squadron of the Essex Yeomanry, travelling over 900 miles to get all the horses he required. ‘Essex has been pretty well skinned of her horses,’ he told the remount officer in Brentwood on 14 August, ‘and I had to go poaching in Suffolk before I could get the six I sent you yesterday.’¹⁷⁹ But not all purchasing officers were as astute. Irish dealers unloaded some questionable stock, 12 percent of which had to be sold on immediately as unsuitable.

      Many private individuals, hunt stables and corporations gave up their horses voluntarily. The historian of 11th Hussars СКАЧАТЬ