Colonel is sending to the War Office to-morrow & if your certificates are sent up you will get gazetted more quickly … As the Colonel has definitely decided to take you, you need not wait till you are gazetted before you get your uniform but can begin at once.141
When the battalion sailed for India there were three Mackie brothers in its officers mess.
In August 1914, Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister, enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and was speedily commissioned into a New Army battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Sir Thomas Pilkington, his CO,
with his white hair, rubicund complexion, and aquiline nose … was a figure from the past. He treated us with kindness, but seemed somewhat surprised at the strange collection of officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of which he was the Chief … I can see him now, with well-cut uniform, smart polished boots, and spurs, gazing mournfully at a number of men – some of whom had tunics but civilian trousers, others with khaki trousers but civilian coats – all constituting a formation of troops which must have struck him as extremely unlikely ever to become soldiers.142
It struck young Harold that he could get to France quicker with a better regiment, and after an interview with the regimental lieutenant colonel found himself translated to 3/Grenadier Guards, whose legacy never left him. ‘I have preserved the habit of being five minutes early for appointments,’ he acknowledged in later life.
This spate of commissioning went on into 1915. Bernard Martin, still at school, was summoned by his headmaster to be told:
‘You, and some of your friends, will be interested in a War Office pronouncement that I’ve just received. The regular Army has a Special Reserve of Officers; something to do with filling unexpected vacancies in the Indian Army … Applications for commissions in this reserve are now invited from school cadet corps members. It is not like Kitchener’s Army volunteers, serving for the duration. These special reserve commissions are permanent …’. He picked up a paper from his desk. ‘Applicants must be recommended by someone of good standing who has known the applicants personally for at least three years. The age limit is eighteen.’
‘Nineteen, sir,’ I murmured in polite concern.
‘Nineteen for Kitchener’s Army,’ he explained. ‘The Special Reserve for Officers is eighteen …’ So a miracle came to pass. On the 25th April 1915, one day after my eighteenth birthday, I was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the reserve battalion of the 64th Regiment of Foot in the regular army, an infantry regiment which boasted a long list of battle honours …143
A public school boy who wanted a commission could scarcely fail to get one. But when R. C. Sherriff was being interviewed he gave the name of his school, only to discover that it was not on the approved list: the fact that it was a grammar school with a long and distinguished history did not help. His interviewer regretted that there was nothing that could be done, and Sherriff duly signed on as a private, to gain his commission the hard way.
Not all public school boys, students or graduates wanted commissions. Sometimes this was a matter of principle. Frederick Keeling (‘Siberian Joe’) was twenty-eight in 1914, a Cambridge graduate and a member of the Independent Labour Party. He enlisted in 6/Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, and refused a commission, though he rose steadily through the ranks to become a company sergeant major in 1916. That summer he wrote to his mother-in-law:
I may be knocked out in the next few days. If so, this is just a line to you, dear. I don’t contemplate death, but it is all a bloody chance out here. If there is any sort of survival of consciousness, death can hardly fail to be interesting, and if there is anything doing on the other side, I will stir something up. Nirvana be damned!
He was killed at Delville Wood on 18 August, and never knew that he had won the Military Medal, gazetted the following February.144
Richard Henry Tawney, a devout Christian, socialist and distinguished economic historian, enlisted in a New Army battalion of the Manchesters at the age of thirty-four, also declined a commission and was wounded as a sergeant on the Somme. A general visited him while he was in hospital and warned the sister in charge of his ward that she was looking after a national treasure. Shocked, she asked Tawney why he had not told her that he was a gentleman. Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of the Morning Post, joined 2/2nd London in 1914, refusing to apply for a commission. ‘No, I will do the thing fairly,’ he declared. ‘I will take my place on the ranks.’145 He fought in Gallipoli, and was then transferred to 12/London. By now a sergeant, and recommended for the commission he felt he had to earn, he was killed when 56th Division assaulted Leuze Wood on 7 October 1916. By then he had established himself as a poet of some distinction and, like so many poets, expressed a rage in his writing that was absent from his military persona.
Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?
Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes? Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards? Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?
Even more volunteers wanted to stay in the ranks because that was where their friends were. Some units, like many of the London battalions constituting 33rd Division, were filled with men who might more naturally have been officers. The division included five public school battalions, 18/ to 21/Royal Fusiliers and 16/Middlesex; an ‘Empire’ and a Kensington battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; a West Ham battalion (13/Essex); the 1st Football Battalion (properly 17/Middlesex); and the Church Lads’ Battalion (16/King’s Royal Rifle Corps). Even the divisional pioneer battalion, best, if bluntly, described as military navvies, was 1st Public Works (18/Middlesex).146 The Sportsmen’s Battalion (23/Royal Fusiliers) included in its ranks two England cricketers, the country’s lightweight boxing champion and the former lord mayor of Exeter. A member of the unit described his hut in the battalion’s camp at Hornchurch:
In this hut the first bed was occupied by the brother of a peer. In the second the man who formerly drove his motor-car. Both had enlisted at the same time at the Hotel Cecil … Other beds in the hut were occupied by a mechanical engineer, an old Blundell School boy, planters, a mine overseer from Scotland, … a photographer, a poultry farmer, an old sea dog who had rounded Cape Horn on no fewer than nine occasions, a man who had hunted seals, a bank clerk, and so on. It must not be thought that this hut was an exceptional one. Every hut was practically the same, and every hut was jealous of its reputation.147
Many of these men subsequently did earn commissions – some 3,000 from 33rd Division alone – but many more were killed or crippled before they did so.
Even getting into the ranks could prove tricky. Stuart Dolden was ‘absolutely shattered’ when he was turned down at his enlistment medical because his chest measurement was two inches under requirement. He immediately went to a ‘physical culture centre’ in Dover Street, whose proprietor told him that his course, of ten half-hourly sessions, would cost 30 guineas, and had been taken by many famous people including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Field Marshal Sir John French. Dolden riposted that ‘I was not concerned with these gentlemen since it was my father who would have to foot the bill’, and managed to get it reduced to 6 guineas. The exercises worked, and Dolden joined the London Scottish, paying a pound for the privilege of doing so. It was a good deal easier for Anthony French, signing on at Somerset House, with a grunted monologue from the medical officer:
Hmm … Shirt
