With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

The material of the Territorials sent out to the front was always good; often their training and equipment left something to be desired. At the outset of the war the progress of the Territorials from England to the firing-line was very gentle. The first Territorial battalions to come out were given a preliminary stage at a temporary camp established at General Headquarters, where they went through a further course of instruction at the hands of men fresh from the trenches, or, at any rate, in closest touch with the army in the field, and where any shortcomings in their equipment were rectified. As their training proceeded they were sent to the trenches in driblets, the officers going by couples to serve for some time with a battalion in the front line, the men going first by sections, then by platoons, then by double companies, until it was judged that the whole battalion was sufficiently experienced to take over by itself a section of the trenches, preferably in one of the quieter parts of the line.

The famous Artists’ Rifles have played a unique rôle in this war. The battalion was originally intended to take its place in the line the same as the Regulars and the other Territorial troops out here. But their fine esprit de corps, together with the high standard of intelligence and the good social standing of their men, pointed to this distinguished battalion as an ideal Officers’ Training Corps in the field. The experiment was tried. The battalion, as a homogeneous unit, was not sent to the front line, but retained in the rear, and used for furnishing sentries and doing other duties, while likely candidates were selected from the ranks and sent to a Cadet School to be trained for commissions. At the Cadet School, which, from very modest beginnings, has now developed into a large and flourishing institution—a veritable Sandhurst in Flanders—they are given a thoroughly practical course of instruction, which includes trench modelling in clay and weekly visits of forty-eight hours’ duration to the trenches. So successful has the experiment proved that the Commander-in-Chief is said to have stated that the Artists’ Rifles have been worth a Division to him. Altogether the Artists have supplied more than a thousand officers to the army in the field—a truly magnificent achievement.

When the Territorials first came to France, a Regular might yet safely ruffle his nose at them and get a laugh. “T.F.” stood for Saturday afternoon soldiering and tubby Colonels and bespectacled privates. But the Territorials were used to being made fun of. In peace-time kicks and no ha’pence were their lot, and in war they did not care very much whether they got either as long as they might “have a smack at the Germans.” So they grinned and bore the chaff, and settled down in uncomfortable billets in dreary towns and dirty villages to learn what they had not learnt about war—and at first it was a good deal—in their camps at home, chafing desperately at the waiting, but doing all manner of useful jobs behind the line against the time that their services might be required for the work they had volunteered to do.

Their chance came at last, as it comes to every man in the field. At a critical stage in the first battle of Ypres (if you can speak of a critical stage in a battle that was one long crisis), the Territorials I have already mentioned, horse and foot, went into action and bore themselves well. The London Scottish, particularly, fought like veterans at Messines, though I fear that the injudicious “booming” of their spirited charge in the newspapers called down on their heads a good deal of unmerited ill-will on the part of other battalions out here.

Winter came and went. In March the first Territorial Division arrived in France. Others followed, and Territorial Divisions began to be employed, with due circumspection, as homogeneous units to do their share of holding our lengthening line. Even as the Territorial Divisions began to arrive, individual battalions were undergoing their baptism of fire on the bloody field of Neuve Chapelle. There were many Territorials in that hard-fought fight, and none did better than the 6th Gordons and the 3rd London Regiment, the latter executing a splendid charge that so electrified the Regulars who witnessed it, that they stood up on the parapet of their trenches and cheered as the “Terriers” swung past.

The second battle of Ypres saw the début of a Territorial Division, fighting as a homogeneous unit, in the shape of the Northumberland Division, which, as I have described elsewhere in this book, though only a few days out from England, went straight into action and played its part unflinchingly. Indeed, the fight for the Ypres Salient was a Territorials’ as it was a Regulars’ battle from the inferno of Hill 60, where the Queen Victoria Rifles—“the Q. Vics,” as they are affectionately called in the Brigade—and the 6th King’s Liverpool Regiment earned the unstinted admiration of their fellow-Regulars, to the horror of the closing stages of the battle on May 13, when the North Somerset, the Leicestershire and the Essex Yeomanry showed the Lifeguards and the Blues and the Bays, the flower of our cavalry, that Yeomanry also know how to die.

Right round the arc of the salient, throughout those weeks of bloody fighting, Territorials fought side by side with the Regulars. After the battle General Prowse, commanding the Brigade to which the London Rifle Brigade, that fine London Territorial Regiment, was attached, said to me: “If you see the L.R.B.’s, tell them from me we want them back. We all look on them as Regulars now.”

The old Territorial joke died at Ypres. It lies buried in the salient in the graves where Territorials from nearly every shire in the United Kingdom are sleeping their last sleep. Our fathers who laughed at Punch’s gibes at the old Volunteers, with their “sham-fights” and “field-days” on Wimbledon Common, little thought that those rotund Colonels and bewhiskered Majors and slow-moving privates were creating the tradition that was to bear our gallant Territorials with heads uplifted unflinchingly through the inferno of the Flanders plain.

Do you remember Saturday afternoons in London before the war? and the processions of young fellows in odd-looking uniforms of grey and blue and bottle-green, rifles slung across their shoulders, hastening to the railway-stations for their afternoon drills? Some of us scoffed, maybe, at the “earnest” young men whose pleasure it was to “play at soldiers” ... but the shame of it came back to me in a hot flush as I stood by their graves in the salient of Ypres.

The attack on the Fromelles ridge on May 9, the fighting at Festubert in May and June, the capture, loss, and recapture of the trenches at Hooge in June, July, and August, found the Territorials in action every time. Their behaviour under fire only confirmed the good impression which their début at Ypres in November had produced on the army. Its verdict was, “The ‘Terriers’ are all right.”