The West Riding Territorials in the Great War

by Laurie Magnus

The West Riding Territorial Force Association had by now settled down to its stride. We left its members in 1915[66] struggling, perhaps a little breathlessly, with difficulties of accountancy in their Separation Allowance Department, with the organization of Auxiliary Hospitals, the equipment of 2nd and 3rd Line units, the formation of a National Reserve, and the constant perplexities of the recruiting problem. We find them at the close of the next year with one Division crowned with honour in the field, with another Division straining at the leash, and with a certain reduction in their commitments, owing partly to National Service legislation, partly to firmer methods at Whitehall, and partly to other causes. Necessity had nationalized the war; and, though more than 52,000 accounts of soldiers’ wives and dependants were now on the Paymaster’s books, though more than 3,000 beds in 53 Auxiliary Hospitals were now available in the Riding, and more than 21,000 pairs of socks and 45,000 other comforts had been despatched to the troops during the winter, the Association had thoroughly mastered the technique of war administration when the original triumvirate of Lord Harewood, Lord Scarbrough and General Mends, as President, Chairman and Secretary respectively, was broken up in February, 1917, by Lord Scarbrough’s transfer to the War Office as Director-General of the Territorial and Volunteer Forces.[67]

The appearance of the words ‘and Volunteer’ requires a brief note of explanation. The Chairman informed his Association in January, 1917, that the local administration of the Volunteer Force had, at the request of the Army Council, been undertaken by County Associations. ‘Generally speaking,’ ran the writ,[68] ‘the division of functions between the local military authorities and T.F. Associations in regard to the Volunteer Force will correspond to that obtaining in the case of the Territorial Force in times of peace.’ It was not, perhaps, the best precedent to select, but it was the best available in the circumstances, and an historian will surely arise to tell the story of the part-time soldier in the Great War, what he did and what he might have been used to do. Such historian will be endowed with imagination to sympathise with the buffeted patriot in the early days of the war, and he will possess sufficient knowledge of the facts to follow his tangled skein of fortune through the maze of legislative enactments and contracting-out tribunals, which cast him up on the lap of his tired country, in November, 1918, half a volunteer and half a conscript and the most melancholy mongrel of the Army Council. This, happily, is not our present business. We are simply concerned to show how the Volunteer Act of 1916, which had become law late in December, brought the Volunteer Force into the orbit of the County Associations on the one part and of the Director-General of the Territorial Force on the other. That Act made provision for Volunteers to enter into an agreement with His Majesty for the performance of certain duties of home defence ‘for a period not exceeding the duration of the present war.’ The time-clause was the essence of the contract. Till then, under the Act of 1863, a Volunteer, prior to mobilization, which could only ensue in case of imminent invasion, and which never ensued during the late war, had the right to quit his Corps at his own option on giving a fortnight’s notice to his Commanding Officer. Under these conditions he was plainly no soldier, however elastic the terms of his employment. He could neither be clothed nor trained at the public expense, for the public would have no value for their money if the Force, or any part of it, walked out at fourteen days’ notice. Permanence of service was then first obtained when the Volunteer Force was reconstituted out of personnel bound by agreements entered into under the new Act of 1916; and thus it happened at the beginning of the next year that the work of Associations was increased by responsibility for the local administration of the Volunteer units raised in their respective counties, and that these duties were tacked on to the machinery of the Territorial Force organization. How heavy the duties became may be measured by a single item of statistics: as many as 217 Army Council Instructions referring exclusively to the Volunteer Force were promulgated before the date of the Armistice.

Lastly, reference is due to German action during this lull, or to what we know or may infer about it. Plainly, their moral had been badly shaken. Sir Douglas Haig was resolute on this point, and the extraordinary ‘all but’ luck which dogged their campaign on the Western front from the beginning to the end of the war, and of which the full military explanation must await the evidence from their side, was as characteristic at Verdun as anywhere. They all but got home to their objective: so nearly that the German Emperor’s telegrams, which he used to compose after the model of his grandfather’s in the 1870-71 campaign, just missed being accurate by a few yards; and this ‘little less, and what worlds apart,’ which separated the Crown Prince from victory, however cleverly wrapped up in the language of public despatches, must have caused more than common chagrin. For actually it was Verdun which was wanted, the right breast of the mother of men, and not the outposts of its defences, nor even the serried rows of French dead. These might serve in less vital regions to dazzle the eyes of the world; at Verdun, they drew attention to the defeat. Nor was consolation to be derived from the results of that attempt to relieve Verdun which we have followed in the battles of the Somme. The higher ground, or ridges, still remained in German possession, but it was a precarious hold, as we shall see, and, while the mere configuration of the ground was soon to tell in favour of the Allies, other factors, which cannot be mapped except in an atlas of psychology, were beginning already to count. The repeated losses of fortified positions, culminating in the Wonder Work and Redoubts which had resisted the assaults of July 1st, were disastrous not only on their own account but also as indicating a weakness which might conceivably spread to the Rhine. If the theory of defence proved unsound, no degree of valour in practice would ever avail to put it right. We must not prejudge this question. We are not writing the German history of the war. But it is legitimate to say that, apart from the general retirement which the Germans ordered in March, 1917, and which reached a rate of ten miles a day, our troops gradually discovered a change in the enemy’s system of defences. He began, first on the British and afterwards on the French front, to abandon the formal lines of trenches, and to employ the natural features of the soil, when and where these might occur, as the basis of his defences. The crater, or shell-hole cavity, was brought into use in this way, and no outward mark was allowed to distinguish a fortified group of craters, subterraneously connected with one another and otherwise rendered formidable, from harmless groups in its immediate neighbourhood. Thus, the cession by the Germans of ‘only our foremost crater-positions,’ or of a ‘craterfield’ tout court, began to figure in their reports for the edification or delusion of German readers. An integral part of the crater-system, as worked out more elaborately at a later date, was the ‘pill-box,’ or sunk blockhouse, which was strengthened towards the foe and left more thinly built on the home side, so as to render it useless as a weapon should its fire be directed by its captors. We may conclude that the blows which had been dealt at the continuous lines of trenches in the battles of the Ancre and the Somme had alarmed the German High Command; and that a part of the motive for the retirement (and a very effective part it proved) was to prepare those fortified groups and concrete nests of deadly machine-gun fire at all kinds of irregular distances. The intention was partly to deceive the airman’s eye, and to stop that preparation of exact trench-maps to which the Germans had borne testimony on the Somme. But partly, too, the modification of the defence-system implied that our offensive had not been vain. Its immediate effect, accordingly, however serious and impeding it was to prove, was not without good hope. The vaunted theory of ‘impregnability’ had been shaken, and, though the end of the war was still out of sight, yet Thiepval, like Jutland, bore a message which the rest of the war was to expound.

Full information on these problems is still lacking from the German side, and without it, as indicated above, our conclusions must be indicated hypothetically. But all the evidence now available makes it clear that they are reasonably correct. Thus, Ludendorff, writing after a tour of the Western Front in December, 1916, laid stress on the urgent need of re-organizing the fighting power of the German Infantry. The machine-gun had become the chief fire-arm, and ‘our existing machine-guns’, he declared, ‘were too heavy for the purpose.... In order to strengthen our fire, at least in the most important parts of the chief theatre of war, it was necessary to create special Machine-gun Companies—so to speak, Machine-gun Sharp-shooters.’ Attention is also called in the German Commander’s authoritative Memoirs to the need of hand-mines, grenades, and all quick-loading weapons, and to the formation of storm troops. ‘The course of the Somme Battle,’ continues the General, ‘had also supplied important lessons with respect to the construction and plan of our lines. The very deep underground forts in the front trenches had to be replaced by shallower constructions. Concrete “pill-boxes,” which, however, unfortunately took long to build, had acquired an increasing value. The conspicuous lines of trenches, which appeared as sharp lines on every aerial photograph, supplied far too good a target for the enemy Artillery. The system of defence had to be made broader and looser and better adapted to the ground. The large, thick barriers of wire, pleasant as they were when there was little doing, were no longer a protection. They withered under the enemy barrage’; and an angry tribute is paid in his chapter to the equipment of the Entente Armies with war material, which ‘had been developed to an extent hitherto undreamed of,’ and to ‘the resolution of the Entente, their strangling starvation blockade, and their propaganda of lies and hate which was so dangerous to us.’

It is good to see ourselves as our enemy saw us after the Battle of the Somme. And, perhaps, though we are anticipating a month or two, we may conclude this chapter by a quotation from a German Army Order, hitherto unpublished, of April 4th, 1917. It illustrates from another angle the effects of those ‘Entente Armies’ and ‘their propaganda’ to which Ludendorff alludes in such embittered terms. The Order ran:

‘A National Day has been decreed at home for April 12th, in the sense that members of the large Trade Unions and Associations give up that day’s income, salary or wage for the benefit of the Fatherland.

‘The wish has been expressed that this programme may be supported as follows: viz., that Officers and other Ranks may volunteer to give up their pay for one day.

‘All Officers and other Ranks who are willing to abandon for one day the amount of pay due to them will apply to,’ etc.

The captured papers do not disclose the extent of the response to this appeal, but, plainly, at the beginning of 1917, all was not well with the Fatherland.