With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

It did not need the bronze “T” on collars and shoulder-straps to tell me that these were not Regular troops. These men were prone to silence, rather shy, a trifle helpless, as they stood about the rain-swept street, waiting for their officers to show them their billets, to tell them what to do. They seemed to be drinking in their impressions of this, their first experience of life in the field, and I doubt that they will ever fade from the minds of those men, so cheerless was their welcome at Merris. Regulars would have made themselves at home on the instant. They would have found a fire at which they might have dried their sodden overcoats and brewed themselves a drink of hot tea in their capacious pannikins. If fire or warm drinks were not forthcoming, they would have ferreted out for themselves a dry corner under a roof somewhere, and gone to sleep with that infinite capacity for sleeping at odd moments and in queer places that is peculiar to the British soldier.

The officers did not seem to me to be quite sure of themselves. They had a certain earnestness of mien, a certain formality of manner, and seemed inclined to hold aloof from their men. It is only the fire-trench, after all, that teaches the new officer the exact proportion of familiarity that discipline permits between officers and men.

Their equipment, too, seemed rather more elaborate than was consonant with comfort on a long march through the wet. Their caps were stiff-crowned, they wore heavy overcoats, and over them their web equipment hung, attached to it a more or less large variety of the leather-bound articles that people at home present to the departing warrior, most of which he discards after a week or two in the trenches, and their puttees were quite impeccably tied. To me, who had grown accustomed to the négligé of dress and manner of the fire-trench, these small distinctions were probably more apparent than they would have been to an ordinary observer.

It was not until months later that I saw the North Midland Division again. It was a thundery summer day in the trenches, with bursts of hot sunshine alternating with drenching showers. The trenches were ankle-deep in mud and water, and had been dug in many places through the all too shallow burial-places of the dead of former fights. In some places the British and German lines were very close together, and there was short shrift for him who should thrust his head, even for a moment, above the shelter of the parapet.

In these unwholesome surroundings I found my Territorials of Merris again. But in the sunburnt, calmly deliberate veterans who manned the parapet I scarcely recognized the young troops with the half-fledged air that I had seen standing in the rain on that March afternoon. The conditions in those trenches on that showery morning were, I imagine, incomparably worse than anything the Division had undergone before. But the men made the best of things, and woebegone and weather-stained though they were in appearance, went about their normal round of duties as though they had been living all their lives in mud and water and in close proximity to a dangerous foe.

Over fires skilfully contrived in dry corners some were cooking pannikins of savoury soup and steaming tea; others, who had been on guard all night, slept as peacefully as children, though “whizz-bangs” burst noisily to and fro about the parapet, and now and again the thunder rolled imperiously above the sound of the guns. The rain came down steadily; every trench was a slough of sticky, yellow clay and foul water; the walls of dug-out and “funk-hole” reeked with damp. But the sleepers slept on, those who could not find room in a “funk-hole” lying on the “fire-stand,” completely enveloped in their great-coats or waterproof sheets.

Active service had transformed the officers. They looked as hard and as capable and as self-reliant as their men. They had lost much of their formality of manner; that very scrupulous correctitude of dress had gone; vanished, too, were many of the natty little articles that, but a few months since, had jingled melodiously about them as they marched up from the coast at the head of their platoon or company. Such of them as wore caps had old soft caps, stained with mud and sweat, crushed well on to their heads; many were tunicless, and made their round of the trenches simply attired in grey soldier shirt and old riding-breeches thrust into trench boots, for all the world like the old-time “Forty-niners” of the gold-fields.

The link between them and their men was much looser, but much more intimate. It was not difficult to see that the men leant more than ever on their officers, and that the officers, on their side, were beginning to “discover” their men—to discover the soul of the Englishman, as it has never been unbared between Englishmen before, I think—simple, brave, devoted, uncomplaining, inspired by an ocean-deep patriotism not fed from external sources, but springing spontaneous and elemental from within. Both had found themselves and one another, officers and men.

It was in the rainy days of the first battle of Ypres that our Territorials first found themselves actually fighting on foreign soil. Of Yeomanry Cavalry, the Northumberland, the Northamptonshire, the North Somerset and the Leicestershire Regiments, and the Oxfordshire Hussars; of Territorial Infantry, the London Scottish, the Honourable Artillery Company, the Queen’s Westminsters, and the Hertfordshire, were engaged. General Sir Julian Byng, commanding the cavalry, made special mention to the Commander-in-Chief of the conduct of the Yeomanry in the field, while, in the case of the Territorial Infantry, Sir Douglas Haig spoke in high terms of their gallant behaviour.

On these powerful recommendations Sir John French wrote the sentence in his despatch on the first battle of Ypres which I have quoted at the head of this chapter. It must have been with feelings of peculiar satisfaction that he found himself in a position to pay this well-merited tribute to the Territorials. For he, more than any other, was responsible for the creation of the Territorial Army which was destined to play an invaluable part in the expansion of the Expeditionary Force into the great national army. It was he whom Lord Haldane, fresh to the War Office, summoned to bring his wide experience, his flexible mind, his great knowledge of war, to the task of carrying the Haldane reforms—first and foremost among them the creation of the Territorial Force—to fruitful accomplishment.