… Chest measurement … mmm … expand … mmm … Blast the Germans anyway … mmm … two-and-a-half inches … elastic lungs … mmm … try the Navy next time … Hmm … Mouth open … wider … mmm … Say aahhh … mmm … ninety-nine … mmmmm … General Service … Next man, Corporal … mmm. I took my shilling and departed.148
I. G. Andrew enlisted in the Glasgow University Company of 6/Cameron Highlanders. He found life in a tented camp near Aldershot ‘almost unendurably hard’, though it ridded him of ‘a certain priggish donnishness’. The bonds of mateship came quickly. He and three comrades ‘marched together, drank together, ate together and at night slept next to each other wherever it might be – tent, hut, billet or under the open air of heaven’. His company sergeant major was no ordinary man, but ‘a Roberston of Struhan, the son of a Colonel, the grandson of a major-general and an undergraduate of Magdalen College, Oxford’. Roberston had been a captain of rifle volunteers, a justice of the peace in India, and gave his profession on enlistment as ‘actor’. Officially too old for the front, Roberston nonetheless managed to engineer his way to France, where he was wounded at Loos. There was initially too little khaki to go round, and most New Army units wore ‘Kitchener Blue’, deeply unpopular because it made them look like bus drivers. 6/Camerons, however, had red tunics with white facings, postmen’s trousers, and, as Andrew found, ‘cap comforters closely resembling tea cosies’. The full majesty of the kilt did not come till 1915.
One night in camp Andrew’s pal John Irish sang ‘that grand old song The Trumpeter’. It is the most poignant of the old army’s tear-jerkers, with the trumpeter urging his comrades to:
… Tread light o’er the dead in the valley
Who are lying around, face down to the groundsheet
And they can’t hear me sounding the Rally …
‘It is a solemn moment,’ he reflected, ‘when a young man first senses his own mortality,’ and many sensed it then. Offered a commission through the good offices of a friendly MP, he turned it down and went to France as a lance corporal. John Irish departed to be a second lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the farewell was painful.
I was never to see him again, and when he met a soldier’s death at Arras a year later, I felt that something quite irreplaceable had gone out of my life. [John Irish stood] with the tears streaming down his face as he sobbed, ‘Good-bye Tubby, and the best of luck.’
Andrew’s battalion was part of the exceptional 9th Scottish Division. Second Lieutenant R. B. Talbot Kelly, a regular gunner in one of the batteries supporting it, remembered how:
Our Scottish infantry created an enormous impression on our minds. Never again was I to see so many thousands of splendid men, the very heart and soul of the nation. These were they who, on the outbreak of war, had rushed to enlist, the best and first of Kitchener’s New Armies. And here we saw them, bronzed and dignified, regiments of young gods.149
The Camerons went into action at Loos 820 strong and emerged with two officers and seventy men: Lance Corporal Andrew, himself wounded, saw Regimental Sergeant Major Peter Scotland standing over the commanding officer and asked if he should fetch stretcher-bearers. ‘It’s no good,’ said the RSM, ‘the old man’s dying.’ Andrew at last felt able to take a commission and, while convalescing, wrote to the commanding officer of 5/Scottish Rifles, who agreed to take him. ‘A man of means’ thanks to his outfit allowance, he went to the best tailor in Glasgow for his uniform, but when he reported for duty at Catterick he discovered that ‘second lieutenants were two a penny’.150
Not all Pals’ battalions broke the old army’s rules quite as dramatically as units such as 23/Royal Fusiliers or 6/Camerons, with their high proportion of educated men serving in the ranks. The 31st Division presented a fairer social cross section, though even here there were far more artisans, students and office workers than ever appeared in the old army. The division’s 92nd Brigade had four battalions of East Yorkshires, known as the Hull Commercials, the Hull Tradesmen, the Hull Sportsmen and, for want of a better name, the Hull T’others. In 92nd Brigade were three West Yorkshire battalions, the Leeds Pals and 1st and 2nd Bradford Pals, as well as 18/Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals. The third brigade, 94th, contained 12/York and Lancaster (The Sheffield City Battalion, with many university students in its ranks), 13/ and 14/York and Lancaster (1st and 2nd Barnsley Pals) and our old friends 11/ East Lancashire (The Accrington Pals).
The divisional pioneer battalion, T’owd Twelfth (one of several northern battalions to use that name), was 12/King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, many of them miners from Charlesworth Pit who had streamed into Leeds to enlist in 1914.151 Its composition underlines another important point about the New Armies. Many volunteers came from working-class areas with a tradition of industrial militancy: these were not the products of a cowed, deferential society. But by mid-1915 over 230,000 miners, about one-quarter of the workforce, had volunteered. ‘The compatibility of class consciousness and patriotism,’ observed J. M. Winter, ‘could have no better illustration. Of course, we should never completely discount the desire of some miners to get out of the mines, but sentiments about nation and empire rather than discontent, were behind mass enlistment in the industry.’152
Wide variations in regional enlistment can barely be summarised here, and so I pass lightly over the rich tapestry of the New Armies. But three specific divisions deserve early mention. In late September 1914 a Welsh National Executive Committee was formed, with the aim of raising a Welsh Army Corps of two divisions for inclusion in the New Armies. David Lloyd George had already given the concept his eloquent support.
I should like to see a Welsh Army in the field. I should like to see the race who faced the Normans for hundreds of years in their struggle for freedom, the race that helped to win the battle of Crecy, the race that fought for a generation under Glendower against the greatest captain in Europe – I should like to see that race give a good taste of its quality in this struggle.153
The committee, along with the numerous individuals and corporations already recruiting in Wales, made a serious attempt to attract Welsh-speaking officers and men. Recruiting posters, in both Welsh and English, bore calls to arms from Prince David, ‘Brother of Llewelyn, the last Prince of Wales’, though there was no historical basis for the words. A short-lived attempt to clothe the troops in Welsh grey homespun cloth called Brethyn Llwyd was marred by a shortage of cloth and the fact that the grey jackets at £1 apiece were more expensive than khaki at 14/7d or Kitchener Blue at 14/2d: and in any event officers and men preferred khaki. There were sharp clashes between Kitchener, who complained that the army could not be ‘a political machine’, and Lloyd George, inflamed by Kitchener’s refusal to allow Welsh to be the language spoken on parade and his reluctance to shift other Welsh units into the new corps to bring it up to strength.
It was soon clear that there would be too few volunteers to raise a full corps, and in December the single division that could be brought to full manning was called 43rd (Welsh), and renumbered 38th (Welsh) in April 1915. Local politics was generally well to the fore when it came to raising the New Armies: indeed, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. But several factors, such as Welsh nationalism, concerns about the impact of Nonconformity with its strong element of pacifism, and the personality of Lloyd George, all played a greater than usual part in colouring the composition of 38th Division. One of Lloyd George’s sons was aide de camp to the divisional commander, and some senior commanders owed their selection more to their political backing than
