The newly selected Service Battalion was formed into complete Companies, which consisted entirely of personnel volunteering for service overseas, and in which the men from each Company were kept as far as practicable together. The remaining Companies were made up from Units, kept together in the same way, provided by the 5th, 7th and 8th Battalions of the West Yorkshire Regiment. After some practice in night-entraining and other exercises, the Battalion moved on August 31st, and marched with 1st Line Transport to take its place in the Brigade: ‘a great change for the better,’ it is added. Next day, the Brigadier-General addressed the Territorial troops of the Brigade on the subject of voluntary active service abroad, and by September 15th the Battalion mustered 800 strong for overseas. Some strenuous weeks of training followed. On November 3rd, when the men were back in York, sounds of heavy firing in the North Sea raised a temporary alarm of German Dreadnoughts and Cruisers working North. ‘In two hours,’ we are told, ‘the Battalion was ready to move off with transport loaded’; so, down South, we might sleep o’ nights. At this date, too, we read of an ‘enormous improvement in the general behaviour of the N.C.O.’s and men. Conduct excellent in the town.’
We come to November 22nd, 1914. Half the Battalion moved to Redcar, complete with transport, ammunition and tools, on trench-digging duty. Their place was taken by five Home Service Companies, who arrived, it is observed, without greatcoats or equipment. On December 2nd, the Machine-Guns with their detachments were ordered to Redcar, and proceeded under Captain R. G. Fell. On the 10th, an exchange was effected between the four Reserve Companies and the half-battalion at Redcar, which returned accordingly to York. A new programme of training was arranged, which lasted through January, 1915, and on February 1st came a welcome leave for twenty per cent. of officers and other ranks. At the end of February, the Battalion moved to Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, to relieve the 4th Battalion K.O.Y.L.I., and were billeted on the inhabitants, four men in each dwellinghouse, ‘a change for the better’, remarks the diarist, ‘after being a platoon in a hired empty house at York’. The Battalion remained at Gainsborough till April 15th, when they proceeded in two trains to Folkestone, reaching Boulogne at 10-45 that night. Their transport and machine-guns, which had left Gainsborough the day before, and which travelled via Southampton and Havre, joined them at Boulogne. There for the present we may leave them to spend the night of the 15th in a Rest Camp, eight months and ten days after the order to mobilize had been received at Bradford.
Take the evidence of a unit in a different arm. Colonel A. E. L. Wear,[20] C.M.G., of the Army Medical Service, was in camp at Scarborough on August 4th, 1914, with the cadre of the 1/1st West Riding Casualty Clearing Station, later the 7th C.C. Station. The unit returned at once to its Headquarters at Leeds, where mobilization to war strength was completed, with the exception of the full complement of officers. Great care was taken to select men for the sake of their skill in special trades: joiners, tailors, boot-repairers, First-Aid experts, and so forth; and the wisdom of this foresight was fully justified by events. Intensive training was started forthwith, in the French language, the duties of cooks and orderlies, field work by means of week-end bivouacs, and other practical departments, with the result that Colonel Wear was able to inform the War Office as early as October that his unit was ready for overseas. Orders were received to proceed to France, and the officers scheduled on a waiting-list were enrolled, clothed and equipped. On November 1st, the passage was made to Boulogne, and on the 6th a detachment was employed in dealing at Poperinghe with the wounded from the first Battle of Ypres.
As this Medical unit from the West Riding preceded the Divisions to France, it will be convenient in this place to follow its fortunes a little further. Towards the end of November, 1914, it took over the Monastery of St. Joseph, which is situated just North of Merville, and which had been used in turn by German, French, English and Indian troops. A Casualty Clearing Station needs quiet and cleanliness, among the major virtues, and a perfect economy of minor details in order to ensure them. Colonel Wear proved equal to these demands. He apportioned the building into wards, stores, operating-theatre, dispensary, offices, etc., cleaned it all up and made it ready, and, after a little discussion with the Church authorities, turned the roomy main chapel of the Monastery into a serious case ward. Members of the unit (observe here the C.O.’s foresight in his selection of personnel) installed the heating-stoves, and concreted the paths, and built a large destructor to hold a 400-gallon iron tank, which supplied hot water to a bath-hut. They also did the washing for some time, but, later, arrangements were made for French female labour, and a regular laundry was fitted up. This feature was novel and successful. The work, seldom light, came in rushes, when day and night shifts (at times, even four-hour shifts) were organized, so as to carry on with the minimum of fatigue by means of a limited personnel. The unit numbered at full strength eight Medical Officers, a Quartermaster, a Dentist, two Chaplains, seven Nurses, eighty-four rank and file, nine A.S.C. and seventeen P.B. men. Perhaps its own simple statement gives its record in the most effective language: ‘No man ever left the station without having his wound examined and dressed, and receiving a meal and a smoke.’ From frost-bite, La Bassée, Neuve Chapelle, Aubers and Festubert, came the first streams of clients to this station.
A CASUALTY CLEARING STATION.
We return to the centre of war activity at the Territorial Headquarters in York.
In a little book, written chiefly for America and published early in 1918, Major Basil Williams, later employed under Colonel Lord Gorell on educational Staff Duties, described in adequate terms the Raising and Training the New Armies[21]. We are not immediately concerned with the decision which called those Armies into being. Lord Kitchener was Secretary of State for War, and on August 8th, 1914, he called for that ‘first hundred thousand’ whose spirit was so brilliantly conveyed in Mr. Ian Hay’s volume of that name. He got them over and over again, and it is no part of our purpose to discuss the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee’s output of speeches, posters and ‘literature,’ by which, partly, under the grace of England’s effort, the result was obtained. Nor shall we examine the evidence on which Mr. Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, based his expression of opinion, already quoted above, that, had the Territorial Force organization ‘been used to build up the War Army, as originally intended and conceived by Lord Haldane, we should have avoided many of the difficulties that confronted us at the outset, and we should have put a larger efficient force in the field at an earlier stage.’ What Lord Haldane intended in 1908 and what Lord Kitchener demanded in 1914 might well be corrected in the light of what Mr. Churchill knew in 1919. But even without the wisdom which is garnered after the event, we are entitled to quote one sentence from Major Williams’ account of the New Armies. Towards the close of his review of ‘the great awakening of the nation by the recruiting campaign,’ 1914-1915, he wrote:
‘All this time the Territorial Force, the original home defence force, nearly the whole of which had originally volunteered for service overseas, had been quietly raising recruits for itself, supplementary to the recruits raised by these different methods’.
‘All this time’ and ‘quietly’ are the mots justes. The ‘time’ as we have observed, dated back through the Volunteer movement of 1859 to the immemorial tradition of shire-loyalty; the ‘quiet’ was that of boroughs and countryside, of mayors’ parlours and manorial halls, of town-marts and village-greens in England—