With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

and when one song stops, another is started.

I have no hesitation in setting down the fine qualities of pluck and endurance which the Territorials have displayed in this war to the educational influence of games. The best type of Territorial—the young city-dweller, the shop-assistant and clerk class—is nearly always an athlete, and I make no doubt that the healthy spirit of the cricket, football and hockey field, and of the boxing-ring, is responsible not only for his fine capacity for delivering blows, but also for standing knocks without repining, without losing his temper. Our games are the product of our English minds, no doubt, and you find these same qualities in the Regular soldier. But in the latter this little seed is cultivated and developed by the force of regimental tradition, while in the Territorial, who comes out to the front practically as an outsider to the army, it is by the physical and mental training he has received from the games he has played in times of peace.

Months of active service do not seem to eradicate altogether a certain aloofness which generally exists between the Regular and the Territorial, save in the case of those units which have been brought into close touch in the field. The officers seem to slip more slowly into the groove than the men. The Territorial officer is new to the game. Under our Territorial system he has had but scant opportunities in times of peace of knowing his men, and little or no chance of familiarizing himself with the spirit of the army. Until he has found his feet, therefore, he is inclined to grapple himself desperately to the regulations, thereby acquiring, not only towards his men, but also towards his brother officers in the Regulars, a certain formality of manner which those brought up in that perfect school of easy manners, the British Army, are inclined to resent.

When I have been in trenches held by Territorials, I have sometimes noticed that the officers have been more concerned with the making of reports, etc., than more practical and immediate cares, such as the comfort of their men, the cleanliness of their trench (of great importance from the standpoint of hygiene), and the movements of the enemy. A good regimental officer of Regulars, in similar circumstances, would have let the paper business go hang, and would have set the whole company hustling, baling out the water in the trenches, improving the dug-outs and mending the flooring, whilst he himself would have had a prowl round looking out for German snipers and for any likely corners from which his men might “draw a bead” on the enemy.

The Territorial officer is lacking in experience, but that is a fault that remedies itself with every day that he spends in the front line. It is here that a good Staff tells. An active Brigadier who constantly visits the trenches can get the very best results out of the real good-will of the Territorial officer.

I have been round the trenches once or twice with the Brigade Major of one of the brigades of a Territorial Division, and I have been astonished to see the number of small points which his quick and experienced eye has detected, which he has pointed out, always in a tactful, suggesting way, to the officers in charge of the front-line companies—here a German loophole left open, offering a chance for a good shot (in which these Territorial battalions abound); there a line of fresh earth behind the German trench, suggesting underground activity of some sort; there, again, a weak parapet in our fire-trench, or a man whom the careful eye has seen exposing himself recklessly. The Brigade Major, who had fought at Mons, had experience: the Territorial officers were getting it. The courteous, eager way in which they accepted his hints was as charming as the suave fashion in which they were proffered.

The army in the field has not been slow to learn that a profusion of talent in the arts and crafts is lying dormant in the Territorial battalions. If an expert in any branch is wanted, application is always made to the nearest Territorial battalion, seldom, if ever, without success. A friend of mine, a company commander in the Ypres region, having procured a piano for his company’s rest billets behind the line, found the instrument so much out of tune as to be useless. Forthwith word was sent round for a piano-tuner. A search through the battalion drew a blank. A note to an adjacent Territorial regiment produced a finished piano-tuner who had been driving a lorry in the Mechanical Transport. Naturally, he had none of his piano-tuning tools with him, but he made excellent shift with a couple of spanners from the travelling workshop. In the same way a Brigade wanted a plumber and a clerk, and got both from its Territorial battalion. The clerk was a bookmaker’s clerk, it is true, but he proved himself a treasure—“... Besides,” as the Staff Captain said, “if one ever wants to make a book on a race at home, why, there he is, don’t you know!”

Territorial battalions have supplied the army with chemists and doctors and fly experts, with map-drawers and photographers and electricians, and with an extraordinary variety of dramatic and musical talent for concerts at the front. At the fortnightly “smokers” of the Machine Gun School, which are by far the best in the field, territorial battalions supply a good proportion of the contributors to the programme. The Artists’ Rifles are particularly prolific in platform talent. They possess three much sought after performers, in the person of a lance-corporal (in private life a broker in the rubber market, I believe), who is a most amusing “drawing-room entertainer” after the style of the late George Grossmith; a transport sergeant (he forsook the law for the war), who has an extensive repertory of Kipling recitations; and a sergeant-instructor of machine-guns, who is the perfect accompanist and a really first-class musician to boot.

These Territorial battalions are full of experts. The beautifully finished sign-posts in Plug Street Wood are the work of Territorials, and a familiar landmark in this historic part of the line is the exquisite little cemetery laid out by a famous Southern Territorial battalion in a pretty little wooded glade, where the gallant Lieutenant Poulton Palmer, the international Rugby footballer, lies. The Adjutant of a certain Territorial battalion of the Leicesters is a quarry manager in civil life. When last I saw him, at tea in a Flemish farm-house, he was proposing to utilize his expert knowledge of pumps for the benefit of his battalion’s section of trenches.

In the field I have seen Territorials from England, Scotland and Wales—raw troops fresh from home and hardened veterans of half a dozen fights, bank clerks from Cornhill, miners from Cardiff, gillies from Inverness shire, ploughboys from the Mendips. I have seen them in rain and shine, in the fire-trenches and behind the lines. And seeing them I have marvelled at the equalizing influence of war that has moulded all these men, torn from their civilian callings—as widely differing as the poles are asunder—to the same stamp of cool, courageous fighters who will endure to the end.