Before leaving this subject it should be noted that the Englishmen who were drafted to the Division in this manner became imbued with the utmost loyalty to their battalions, and wore the shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day with much greater enthusiasm than the born Irishmen. They would have been the first to resent the statement that the regiments they were so proud to belong to had no right to claim their share in the glory which they achieved.
At first, however, they created a somewhat difficult problem for their officers. They had enlisted purely from patriotic motives, and were inclined to dislike the delay in getting to grips with the Germans; and being, for the most part, strong Trades Unionists, with acute suspicion of any non-elected authority, they were disposed to resent the restraints of discipline, and found it hard to place complete confidence in their officers. They also felt the alteration in their incomes very keenly. Many of them, before enlistment, had been miners earning from two to three pounds a week, and the drop from this to seven shillings, or in the case of married men 3s. 6d., came very hard. The deduction for their wives was particularly unwelcome, not because they grudged the money, but because when they enlisted they had not been told that this stoppage was compulsory, and so they considered that they had been taken advantage of. However, they had plenty of sense, and soon began to realise the necessity of discipline, and understood that their officers, instead of being mercenary tyrants, spent hours in the Company Office at the end of a long day’s work trying to rectify such grievances as non-payment of separation allowance. Regimental games helped them to feel at home. Some of them soon became lance-corporals, and before Christmas they had all settled down into smart, intelligent and willing soldiers. One English habit, however, never deserted them: they were unable to break themselves of grumbling about their food.
The Division contained one other element to which allusion must be made. In the middle of August, Mr. F. H. Browning, President of the Irish Rugby Football Union, issued an appeal to the young professional men of Dublin, which resulted in the formation of “D” Company of the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. This was what is known as a “Pals” Company, consisting of young men of the upper and middle classes, including among them barristers, solicitors, and engineers. Many of them obtained commissions, but the tone of the company remained, and I know of at least one barrister who had served with the Imperial Yeomanry in South Africa, who for over eighteen months refused to take a commission because it would involve leaving his friends. The preservation of rigid military discipline among men who were the equals of their officers in social position was not easy, but the breeding and education of the “Pals” justified the high hopes that had been formed of them when their Regiment was bitterly tested at Suvla.
The Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, Army Service Corps, and the Royal Army Medical Corps recruits who came to the Division were, for the most part, English or Scotch, since no distinctively Irish units of those branches of the service exist. Generally speaking, they were men of a similar class to the English recruits who were drafted into the infantry.
A detailed description of the training of the Division would be monotonous and uninteresting even to those who took part in it, but a brief summary may be given. The points of concentration first selected were Dublin and the Curragh, the 30th Brigade being at the latter place. At the beginning of September, the 29th Brigade were transferred to Fermoy and Kilworth, but the barracks in the South of Ireland being required for the 16th (Irish) Division, two battalions returned to Dublin, the 6th Leinsters went to Birr, and the 5th Royal Irish to Longford. The latter Battalion soon became Pioneers and were replaced by the 10th Hampshires, who were stationed at Mullingar. The 54th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, were at Dundalk, and the remainder of the Artillery at Newbridge and Kildare. The Engineers, Cyclists, and Army Service Corps trained at the Curragh, the Signal Company at Carlow, and the Royal Army Medical Corps at Limerick.
Naturally, the War Office were not prepared for the improvisation of units on such a large scale, and at first there was a considerable deficiency in arms, uniform, and equipment. Irish depôts, however, were not quite so overwhelmed as the English ones, and most recruits arrived from them in khaki, although minor articles of kit, such as combs and tooth-brushes were often missing. The English recruits on the other hand, joined their battalions in civilian clothes, and were not properly fitted out till the middle of October. The Royal Army Medical Corps at Limerick also had to wait some time for their uniform.
The Infantry soon obtained rifles (of different marks, it is true) and bayonets, but the gunners were greatly handicapped by the fact that the bulk of their preliminary training had to be done with very few horses and hardly any guns. Deficiencies were supplied by models, dummies, and good will; and considering the drawbacks, wonderful progress was made. Another article of which there was a shortage was great-coats, and in the inclement days of November and December their absence would have been severely felt. Fortunately, the War Office cast aside convention and bought and issued large quantities of ready-made civilian overcoats of the type generally described as “Gents’ Fancy Cheviots.” Remarkable though they were in appearance, these garments were much better than nothing at all, and in January the warmer and more durable regulation garments were issued. The men also suffered a good deal of hardship at first from having only one suit of khaki apiece, for when wet through they were unable to change, but they recognised that this discomfort could not be instantly remedied, and accepted it cheerfully.
Until the end of 1914, the bulk of the work done by the Infantry consisted of elementary drill, platoon and company training and lectures, with a route march once or twice a week. A recruits’ musketry course was also fired. Plenty of night operations were carried out, two evenings a week as a rule being devoted to this form of work. The six battalions in Dublin were somewhat handicapped by lack of training ground, as the Phœnix Park became very congested. This deficiency was later remedied to a certain extent by certain landowners who allowed troops to manœuvre in their demesnes; but considerations of distance and lack of transport made this concession less valuable than it would have been had it been possible to disregard the men’s dinner hour.
Side by side with this strenuous work the education of the officers and N.C.O.’s was carried on. The juniors had everything to learn, and little by little the news that filtered through from France convinced the seniors that many long-cherished theories would have to be reconsidered. It gradually became clear that the experience of South Africa and Manchuria had not fully enlightened us as to the power of modern heavy artillery and high explosives, and that many established tactical methods would have to be varied. We learnt to dig trenches behind the crest of a hill instead of on the top of it; to seek for cover from observation rather than a good field of fire; to dread damp trenches more than hostile bullets. We began, too, to hear rumours of a return to mediæval methods of warfare and became curious as to steel helmets and hand grenades.
Had these been the only rumours that we heard, we should have counted ourselves fortunate. Unhappily, however, in modern war there is nothing so persistent as the absolutely unfounded rumour, and in K.1 they raged like a pestilence. We were all eager to get the training finished and settle to real work, and our hopes gave rise to the most fantastic collection of legends. The most prevalent one, of course, was that we were going to France in ten days’ time, usually assisted by the corroborative detail that our billets had already been prepared, but this was run close by the equally confident assertion on the authority of a clerk in the Brigade Office, “that we were destined for Egypt in a week.” It is to be hoped that after the War, some folk-lore expert will investigate legends of the New Armies. If he does so, he will be interested to find that France and Egypt were almost the only two seats of War which the Division as a whole never visited.