With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

One who is in a position to judge adumbrated to me the theory that the men of the later classes of the New Armies—men who joined for “conscience’ sake,” after taking a month or two to settle up their affairs—would be more “intelligent” soldiers, more to be trusted individually and in a sudden emergency, but less good with the bayonet and the spade than the earlier classes.

I believe this to be the veriest hair-splitting. Experience has shown, I think, that war, or at any rate this war, gives a uniform mentality to all men who are drawn into it, and they become good or bad soldiers as the case may be. I am convinced that there is not a pin to choose between a good Regular battalion and a good Territorial battalion, even if the latter, like so many of the London Territorial regiments, for example, is in the main composed of men from the educated classes.

The entrance of the New Army upon the stage of the theatre of war marks the passing of the old soldier, the man who put the battle honours on the regimental colours. He has left his magnificent spirit of courage, devotion, and endurance behind, but he is taking away with him many of his whimsical ways as expressed in his mysterious army slang, his curious army games, his love of sentimental ditties of the “Just before the Battle, Mother” order, or of doggerel like “Cock Robin” and “The Song of Shame.”

Already you may find trenches at the front where an allusion to the Motherland as “Old Blighty,” to bread as “roti,” and jam as “pozzy,” will meet eyebrows lifted in haughty amazement, where “Crown and Anchor”[1] is never played, where that cry, so familiar to army ears, of “’Ouse!”[2] is never heard.

You remember the apoplectic horror of the old Colonel in the story because a private of Regulars on parade blew his nose on his handkerchief, “like any damned militiaman.” What would the old gentle man say, I wonder, to privates who go into action with a pocket edition of Ruskin in their haversacks and a couple of Times Broadsheets in their breast-pockets?

However, the long-service man is by no means wholly extinct in the army in the field, and in many battalions his influence lingers strong. In battalions of the New Army it is maintained by old soldiers who have re-enlisted for the duration of the war, and upon whom, with their tales of service in Malta, Gibraltar, Aden, Egypt, and India, their comrades, fresh from civil life, seek to mould themselves. But for all that, the soldier of Kipling’s stories is disappearing from the army as the fighting unit, mainly because his numbers are gradually becoming extinct through wastage of war, but also because the character of the army is changing.

Under the influence of the introduction of so much new blood, the army has ceased to be the close corporation it was, the kind of exclusive association that, by its terms of service and its small numbers, was able to select its material and shape it to its own form. It has become more universal in character, more identified with the nation at large. I believe that the change is only temporary, and that, as far as one may look into the future at the present juncture, our military traditions are strong enough to mould any amount of new material into the old form: moreover, the men of the Expeditionary Force, now prisoners in Germany, will alone suffice to furnish the backbone of a new army on the old lines after the war. The introduction of conscription would, of course, sound the knell of the army as we knew it in the past.

The regimental officer of the type that Sandhurst and Woolwich turned out is gradually being replaced by the subaltern from civil life. In the new conditions, it will be impossible, I imagine, to maintain to the full the old atmosphere of our officers’ corps, in which patriotism and pride of regiment were rivals in the affections. The subaltern of the New Army no longer talks of his regiment by its old army number, nor does he recognize in the men around him those little symbols that express our great military past, the red beckle of the Black Watch, the Sussex plume, the eagle of the Scots Greys, nor could he tell you why the officers of the Royal West Kents drink the King’s health sitting, and the Grenadier Guards not at all.

We are here confronted with the introduction of an entirely new type into the army. In the boys fresh from a Public School and in the ’Varsity graduates the army draws on a class that has always supplied a large proportion of officers, but in addition to these there is found in the New Army the vague young man—le petit jeune homme that Tristan Bernard writes of so delightfully—who has never done anything particular until his response to the call of duty pitched him into a period of intensive training among men to whom the army and its great traditions meant as little as to himself.

Service in the field will make or mar this type of officer which is found so largely in the New Army. In his training-camp at home he has probably already dimly discerned that upon him, as an officer, devolves the enormous responsibility of “mothering” a large number of men, all of whom are older and more experienced in life than he. But he will scarcely realize how much he is on his trial, that he must “make good” or go under, until he comes out to the front. In the field he will learn that his neat uniform and his Sam Browne belt are something more than mere sartorial embellishments which are de rigueur in England this year. He will soon find out that the honour attaching not to him but to the coat he wears carries with it obligations which he must meet unflinchingly or be crushed.