A History of the First World War in 100 Moments: The call of King and country sees a rush to enlist

Within weeks of war breaking out, it was clear that Britain needed many more fighting men. A series of recruitment initiatives produced an unprecedented surge of volunteers – and some enduring myths. Andy McSmith tries to unpick fact from fiction

ANDY MCSMITH 

 

 

Thursday 10 April 2014

On 3 September 1914, the recruiting sergeants were kept frantically busy from dawn to dusk, coping with a phenomenon never matched before or since. That Thursday, a month after Britain went to war, 33,204 young men volunteered – more in one day than the army normally recruited in a year.

There has never been a rush to volunteer in the UK to compare with the fervour of August and September 1914. We cannot know how many were answering the call out of a genuine sense of patriotic duty, believing their country was under threat. A great many probably thought that soldiering would be an exciting life and a chance to see a bit of the world. Many were certainly induced by peer group pressure to sign up.

The British army was one of the few in 1914 that took volunteers only. The absence of conscripts meant that it was an effective force for its size: the British Expeditionary Force that set sail for France a few days after war was declared to be “incomparably the best trained, best organised and best equipped British army which ever went forth to war”, according to the official historian, Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds. But the Germans had 2.2 million men under arms and the French more than a million, while the total strength of the British army was 450,000, and the BEF, the only force actually doing any fighting, consisted originally of just 100,000 officers and men.

The Liberal government was deeply averse to the idea of conscription. Therefore, men had to be induced or pressured into volunteering – and quickly.

On 6 August, Parliament gave Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener, the newly appointed Secretary of State for War, authority to enlist 500,000 volunteers aged between 18 and 38, with a minimum height of 5ft 3in. To encourage volunteers, the minimum length of service was reduced from seven years to “three years or the duration of the war, whichever the longer”.

At first, there was no great rush. In the week that war was declared, about 15,000 answered the call. One of the best known of the early recruits was Siegfried Sassoon, who would progress during the course of the conflict from war hero to pacifist and anti-war poet. He was so eager to serve that he signed up on 2 August.

In the second week, the numbers were higher. By the end of August, the total had reached 195,000. The army had swollen by more than two-fifths of its previous size in just four weeks, but that 500,000 target was still a long way off. Somebody needed to do some creative thinking to speed up the flow.

General Henry Rawlinson, whose name would later be indissolubly linked with the Battle of the Somme, made the sensible suggestion that men would be more willing to come forward if they could serve alongside those they knew. The idea was taken up by Lord Derby, who put out an appeal in Liverpool on 28 August for local men to serve in the first of what became known as the “Pals battalions”. He had 3,000 recruits within three days. After that success, other towns and cities, including Accrington, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, East Grinstead and London formed their own Pals battalions. On Tyneside, there was a Pals battalion made up entirely of Irishmen.

Showbusiness was also drafted in to boost recruitment. In the book Forgotten Voices of the Great War, compiled by Max Arthur, a mill worker named Kitty Eckersley described the evening that her husband enlisted, after a friend had given them tickets to a live show at the Palace Theatre, in Clayton. “We didn’t know what was on, of course, but it was a great treat for us. So we went. And when we got there, everything was lovely. Vesta Tilley was on stage. She was beautifully dressed in a lovely gown of either silver or gold. But what we didn’t know until we got there was that also on stage were army officers all set out for recruiting.”

Vesta Tilley, wife of the Tory MP Sir Abraham Walter de Frece, was a renowned and highly paid music star. The number she performed on this and similar occasions had been especially composed by a prolific songwriter named Paul Rubens.

The chorus went:

Oh, we don’t want to  lose you but we think you ought to go.

For your King and your country both need you so.

We shall want you and miss you

But with all our might and main

We shall cheer you, thank you, bless you

When you come home again.

To reinforce the message, Tilley left the stage and walked among the audience, gathering starstruck young men in her wake, who enlisted on the spot. To Kitty Eckersley’s horror, her husband joined the queue. He set off for France soon afterwards and she did not see him for six months.

Eventually, at some of these recruiting events, in addition to the stars and the dancing girls, there would be children at the back, primed to hand white feathers to young men who hadn’t signed up.

But it appears that the biggest single spur to recruitment was news from the front. The BEF first saw action at Mons on 23 August and Le Cateau on 26 August. That men were dying in action set off the biggest rush to recruitment yet. In a single week, beginning Monday 31 August, 191,000 men signed up, almost as many as in the whole of August. However, by the end of September, they were back to where they were in the first week of the war.

The figures cast an unexpected light on the single most famous image from the great war – that poster of Kitchener, his finger pointing at the viewer, over the slogan: “Your Country Needs You”.

Superbly designed by a graphic artist named Alfred Leete and based on a more widely circulated poster with Kitchener’s image above a  30-word extract from one of his speeches, it has stayed in the public consciousness for a century when other propaganda images from that time have faded away. The myth is that Kitchener’s finger inspired or shamed vast numbers into joining up. In fact, the image first appeared on the cover of a magazine called London Opinion, on 5 September – just when recruitment started to fall away. The historian James Taylor, who wrote an entire book about this one poster, came to the surprising conclusion that very few of the men who set off to war even saw it.

Certainly, the huge effort put into recruitment failed to supply the numbers needed to feed the war machine. By Christmas 1914, 85,000 British servicemen had already died.

Eventually, in July 1915, the Liberal government, driven to the conclusion that it would never enlist sufficient volunteers, would reluctantly introduce conscription.

Tomorrow: The taxis of Marne

‘Moments’ that have already been published can be seen at:independent.co.uk/greatwar

Source: independent.co.uk/greatwar

A History of the First World War in 100 Moments: The defeat that turned into a rallying legend

The Battle of Mons was a shocking setback for the British Expeditionary Force. Yet somehow, like Dunkirk 26 years later, the defeat and subsequent retreat became a cherished symbol of heroism and hope. John Lichfield examines the making of a military myth

JOHN LICHFIELD 

 

 

Wednesday 09 April 2014

Mons was the Dunkirk of 1914. In both cases, British defeat and retreat has entered national mythology as moral, or strategic, victory. In both cases, there is some truth to the myth-making. In both cases, the narrative of heroic failure has camouflaged much that was unheroic or incompetent or ill-prepared.

According to the received version, the outnumbered British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of about 80,000 men fought valiantly in its first battle with a much larger German force around the Belgian town of Mons on 22-23 August 1914. (According to legend, they were reinforced by an army of phantom longbowmen from Agincourt – the “Angels of Mons”. More of that later.)

Having inflicted, and received, severe casualties, the BEF retreated southwards for 10 days, fighting several rearguard actions, some large and many small, to keep the German juggernaut at bay.  Reinforced by two divisions originally left behind in Britain (following a German invasion scare) the BEF turned to help the French to defeat the invaders on the River Marne just north of Paris in early September.

Recent historical work – notably Challenge of Battle by Adrian Gilbert – gives a different picture. The behaviour of British troops and their commanders, who were fighting in western Europe for the first time since Waterloo almost a century before, ranged from the stalwart to the feeble; from the clear-sighted to the muddled and defeatist.

Gilbert quotes an officer who observed one incident during the BEF’s retreat: “It was an awful sight, a perfect rabble of men of all ranks and corps abandoning their equipment and in some cases their rifles in order to get into safety in rear.”

One of the most detailed eye-witness accounts was written by Corporal Bernard Denmore of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment. His illegally kept diary, published in the 1930s, portrays the “Great Retreat” as a rout at times.

August 27: “The marching was getting quite disorderly; numbers of men from other regiments were mixed up with us… During the night a man near me quite suddenly started squealing like a pig… ran straight down the hill towards the town and shot himself in the foot.”

August 28: “The men were discarding their equipment in a wholesale fashion, in spite of orders to the contrary; also many of them fell out and rejoined again after dusk.”

The BEF was the British regular army, rebuilt and reformed after the calamities of the Boer War. It was claimed to be the best-trained and best-equipped force that Britain had ever sent abroad. Such claims are mocked by Corporal Denmore’s account.

On the other hand, his diary also describes countless small engagements in which the British troops, starving and their boots in tatters, turned to fight off their pursuers. The Battle of Le Cateau, just south of Mons on 26 August, was – at least in part – a model defensive action that saved the whole BEF from calamity.

Like all the early fighting of the 1914-18 war – on both western and eastern fronts – the Battle of Mons and its aftermath was a rapid and terrifying introduction to the crushing power of modern artillery, machine-guns and powerful magazine rifles.  The retreat was not pretty. It was not well-organised. The BEF’s commander, Sir John French, was plunged into depression at times.

Yet simply by remaining in being, the BEF helped to prevent an early German triumph. Without the help of the newly extended British force, the French might not have defeated the Germans on the Marne. The 1914 campaign might have ended like the 1940 campaign, but with no Dunkirk available through which the BEF could escape to fight another day.

By preventing an early German victory, most of the BEF signed their own death warrants. Other than the staff officers and the wounded, little of the original force survived the first Battle of Ypres in late 1914 and the early fighting of 1915. And what of the Angels of Mons? It has sometimes been suggested that they were a hallucination, experienced by exhausted and terrified men. In truth, their existence was even less substantial than that.

The phantom longbowmen were invented by the writer Arthur Machen for a fictional story published by the London Evening News on 29 September 1914. Months later, they made a second apparition in a parish magazine as a “true account”. Their legend spread through the febrile Britain of 1915. Anyone who challenged the existence of the Angels of Mons – even their inventor, Arthur Machen – was vilified as unpatriotic. That could not happen in the rational days of the internet. Could it?

Tomorrow: The call of King and country

‘Moments’ that have already been published can be seen at:independent.co.uk/greatwar

source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments/a-history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments-the-defeat-that-turned-into-a-rallying-legend-9249340.html?origin=internalSearch

Warrior, the horse the Germans could not kill, posthumously awarded the 'Victoria Cross for animals'

First World War veteran survived four years on the Western Front

JONATHAN BROWN 

 

 

Tuesday 02 September 2014

He was the real-life War Horse who survived the slaughter of the Somme and Ypres to beat the deadly odds and return to a green English field to live out his days in clover.

Warrior – dubbed “the horse the Germans could not kill” – was last night posthumously awarded the so-called animals Victoria Cross, the PDSA Dickin Medal, in recognition of the gallant role played by non-human combatants during the First World War during which more than eight million equines were killed.

But the bay gelding, dispatched to the Western Front in August 1914, survived repeated perils during four years of brutal conflict becoming an inspiration of the men that served alongside him.

Among those to pay tribute was Steven Spielberg, director of the Oscar-nominated film War Horse which was based on the 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo and which has become a smash hit stage play.

“Warrior is an extraordinary example of the resilience, strength, and profound contribution that horses made to the Great War. Recognising him with an Honorary PDSA Dickin Medal is a fitting and poignant tribute not only to this remarkable animal, but to all animals that served,” he said.

The medal was accepted by author and broadcaster Brough Scott grandson of Warrior's owner and rider General Jack Seely, a close friend of Sir Winston Churchill, at a special ceremony compered by Kate Adie OBE at the Imperial War Museum London.

During four years of fighting Warrior survived repeated cavalry charges against the enemy into a blizzard of falling shells and machine gun fire.  He was dug out of the mud of Passchendaele and twice trapped under the burning beams of his stables.

Despite suffering several injuries, Warrior returned home to the Isle of Wight in 1918, where he lived with the Seely family until his death in 1941 aged 33.

Mr Scott said he had grown up hearing the story of the horse which unlike the fictional farm horse Joey created by Morpurgo lived a privileged life looked after by grooms and batmen and ridden by the country’s military and legal elite in point-to-point races.

“My family and I are more than honoured that Warrior has been given this award on behalf of all animals that also served; we are truly humbled. I only wish Jack Seely were here today to witness Warrior receiving the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross,” he added.

16m animals were pressed into service during the war predominantly for transport and sending messages but also for companionship.

A total of 65 Dickin Medals have been awarded since they were instituted by the charity’s founder Maria Dickin in 1943. The recipients include 29 dogs, 32 Second World War messenger pigeons, three horses (not including Warrior) and one cat.

The last recipient was Military Working Dog Sasha, who died while on patrol in Afghanistan, who was given the award posthumously in May this year.

PDSA director general Jan McLoughlin said: "Warrior's gallantry and devotion to duty throughout World War One reflects the bravery shown by the millions of horses, dogs, pigeons and other animals engaged in the war.” 

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/warrior-the-horse-the-germans-could-not-kill-posthumously-awarded-the-victoria-cross-for-animals-9707142.html