Having formally declared the creation of the 2nd New Army on 11 September, the War Office quickly agreed to a 3rd and then a 4th New Army.133 The 5th and final New Army was sanctioned in October: in less than three months Kitchener had laid the foundation for no less than thirty new divisions.134 It was an achievement wholly without precedent in British history.
If Kitchener’s achievement was unprecedented, the army’s radical expansion was wholly unplanned. There were no weapons, uniforms or equipment for most of these men; few experienced officers and NCOs who could train them; no proper living accommodation, cookhouses or medical centres; too few rifle and artillery ranges; no draught animals, harness or vehicles; and no commanders and staff for the new divisions or the brigades that made them up. Raising and training the New Armies represented improvisation on a staggering scale. It is worth contemplating the result of a comparable increase in other professions. School registers would quadruple in size, though accommodation would not, and long-retired teachers would join untrained newcomers in the classroom. Three-men-and-a-truck London building firms would each receive a hundred new workers (many of them fishermen from the Western Isles) and be invited to embark upon complex construction projects for which no materials were yet available. And small-town banks would be invited to take on three dozen new staff, many of them innumerate and a few unreliable, to finance complex local ventures being run by the inexperienced, the overambitious and the idle.
It had never been easier to get a commission in the Special Reserve, New Armies or territorials: a young man simply had to find a commanding officer who was prepared to take him on. When F. P. Roe was at his school’s OTC camp in July 1914 his contingent commander handed out applications for temporary commissions with names already filled out: they simply required signatures. ‘We all of us signed,’ he recalled,
and the forms were dispatched to the War Office the same day. Understandably, in view of the fact that the same sort of procedure was going on all over Britain we heard nothing at all … With determined disregard for the usual channels and with renewed enthusiasm I sent a telegram to the War Office: ‘Have been accepted for a commission in the 6th (Territorial) Battalion The Gloucestershire Regiment.’ I later read in The Times of 1 October a copy of The London Gazette appointing me to a commission as a second lieutenant in that unit. Later on our early applications must have caught up for I was antedated in my rank to 31st July 1914 on my birthday … Much later I received the parchment of my actual commission.135
C. H. Gaskell, with the benefit of OTC experience, simply went to Bulford Camp on his motor bike ‘to see what could be done in the way of getting a commission in the army’. Having failed to strike gold there, he roared on to the Wiltshire Regiment’s depot in Devizes, where he presented himself ‘to Col Stewart who treated me with great kindness and seemed hopeful of getting me a commission right away’. Two days later he was in 3/Wiltshire, the Special Reserve battalion, under the congenial command of Lord Heytesbury. ‘We had a few parades to attend, some trench digging, and an odd lecture or two,’ he wrote, ‘with plenty of time off for bathing and having tea in the town and singsongs in the evening.’ In a month he was in France, commanding a platoon in 1/Wiltshire on the Aisne. As he went into the line for the first time one of his men shouted ‘Are we downhearted?’ and a weary soldier on his way out replied ‘No, but you bloody soon will be.’136
In September 1914 Graham Greenwell, instantly commissioned into the infantry, told his mother that: ‘I am having great fun and enjoying it all immensely.’ The only setback, though, he wrote, was that: ‘I can’t get a sword or a revolver for love or money, though Harrods are getting me one.’137 One fond mother earnestly advertised in The Times for a loan to buy a revolver for her officer son, promising donors that the best possible references supported her application. North Whitehead feared that his mother might not be so supportive. He wrote from Rugby school that he was persuaded, ‘not only by the leader writers but by letters written by officers’, that all able-bodied men really should join. He knew that she would worry about him, but assured her that:
our navy will play the chief part in our share of the war.
A man who has just joined the army is nearly useless at first, although I can handle a service rifle …
Darling Mummy, remember that in all probability I shall never go beyond the drill ground & that if I do I shall in all probability never be more than a reserve.
He was commissioned into the Army Service Corps, Special Reserve and was in France by the month’s end. ‘The officers who have just got their commissions owing to the war are markedly less pleasant than the regular officers who are simply charming,’ he wrote. ‘In active service the relations between officers of different ranks is much easier than in peacetime.’ There were some pleasant surprises. ‘It is almost impossible to pay for anything in the shops, they want to make a gift of everything,’ and: ‘The foreign soldiers all salute one as if their lives depended on it.’138
Family connections were useful. Julian Tyndale-Biscoe was at OTC camp on Cannock Chase when war broke out, and gleefully reported that there was a huge inter-fight to celebrate the news. When the guard charged the offenders in an attempt to restore order, ‘they were soon thrown to the ground and parted from their rifles and hats’. He wired his cousin Victor, commanding King Edward’s Horse, who replied: ‘Regiment full strength – join something.’ His uncle Albert, commanding a brigade of field artillery at Woolwich, suggested that he apply for a regular commission in the gunners. But the war, he thought, might be over by then, so instead he wrote to the War Office. There was a brief interview: ‘When he heard that I had Certificate A and was in the shooting eight, etc, etc, he gave a grunt and told me that he would arrange for me to be gazetted in the next week or so.’139
Tyndale-Biscoe happily went off in his OTC uniform with hasty alterations to the sleeve for his new badges of rank. But he received a rude shock when he joined his battery at Deepcut in Surrey.
Where were the guns and horses? All I could see was a large crowd of men in their civilian clothes marching unendingly to the voice of various sergeants, on a gravel square, much to the detriment of their boots. The Major said, ‘Here is the Battery — I want you to train these men.’ When I told him that I had no artillery training, he said ‘Oh, that does not matter, you just watch the others do it, and do it yourself;
He managed to get posted to Woolwich for some proper training, and the other officers he met typified the young men commissioned by these rough and ready methods. ‘I have met a lot of nice fellows here,’ he told his father. ‘Apart from Paul, there are two from Cambridge – one shared the same staircase at Jesus with Harold [his brother] and the other who is in my battery stroked the Trinity boat.’ Posted back to a battery at Aldershot with some decent training under his belt, he found that he had fallen into the clutches of a battery commander of the horsier persuasion. ‘I don’t believe in all these angles and things,’ he announced. ‘What I say is – “Gallop up to the top of the hill and poop off”.’140
On 1 December 1914 Second Lieutenant Jim Mackie of 2/4th Somerset Light Infantry, himself only commissioned in September that year, told his brother Andrew:
I heard the Colonel saying this morning that he wanted one more subaltern so I at once approached him and said that I had a younger brother who would like to join. He jumped at the idea at once and said that he should be delighted to have a younger brother of mine in the regiment …
I
