WILTSHIRE AND THE GREAT WAR E-Book

T. S. Crawford

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 532

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Soon after the start of the Great War, work hastily began on a series of hutted camps in Wiltshire for more than 100,000 men, and during the course of the war it became home to troops from Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as Britain. With soldiers forming a third of the population the effect on the businesses, farms, and indeed the morals of the county was dramatic. Even after the Armistice peace did not return, with mutinies and rioting in the camps because of frustration at delays in demobilization. Wiltshire and the Great War describes this turbulent, fascinating period in depth. It describes pre-war training, showing how inappropriate it was to future warfare, outlines the pioneering of military aviation in the county and describes the role of railways in moving tens of thousands of troops. There are accounts of shirkers, spies, escaped prisoners of war, prostitutes, the 'landship' that clanked across the county and the wireless station that pinpointed the position of Zeppelins. Also described are advances in military technology, the camp-building scandals that led to an inquiry by a Royal Commission, press censorship, and the blighting of the Stonehenge landscape.

Leseprobe

Wiltshire and the Great War

Training the Empire’s Soldiers

T. S. Crawford

First published in 2012 by

The Crowood Press Ltd,

Ramsbury, Marlborough,

Wiltshire, SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book edition first published in 2012

© T. S. Crawford 2012

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 978 1 84797 447 1

The cover illustration, from a photograph taken by T. L. Fuller of Amesbury, shows soldiers believed to be those of the 59th Infantry Brigade, 20th Infantry Division, which comprised the 10th and 11th Rifle Brigade, the 10th and 11th King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the 2nd Cameronians, who were based in the Lark Hill locality from April to June 1915.

Many of the illustrations in this book are taken from postcards in the author’s collection. Some bear a publisher’s name, others do not. In the former case, as with certain documentary material, the author has tried to identify the owners of the copyright, but eighty or ninety years after origination this has not usually proved possible. Copyright holders are invited to contact the author so acknowledgements can be made in any future edition.

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Song of the Dark Ages

PART ONE: The War in Wiltshire: Preparation and Reality

1. Training for a Future War

2. The New Armies

3. Building the Wartime Camps

4. Supporting the Mother Country

5. Rail, Road and Air

6. Spy Scares, Censorship and Prisons

7. Civilians and the Army

8. Welfare and Women

9. Postcards and Postmarks

10. Prose and Poetry

11. A Slow Return to Peace

PART TWO: The Camps

Boyton and Corton

Bulford

Bustard

Chisledon and Draycot

Codford

Corton

Devizes

Devizes Wireless Station

Durrington

Fargo

Fovant

Hamilton

Heytesbury

Hurdcott

Lark Hill

Netheravon

Park House

Perham Down

Pond Farm

Porton

Rollestone

Sand Hill (Longbridge Deverill)

Sherrington

Sling

Sutton Mandeville

Sutton Veny

Tidworth

Tidworth Park

Tidworth Pennings

Trowbridge

West Down

Windmill Hill

Other Military Bases

Appendix: Fovant Military Badges

Selected Bibliography

Index

List of Maps

Bulford, Tidworth and Park House Camp

Codford Camp

Lark Hill

Camps near Warminster

Camps in Wiltshire

Introduction

My interest in ‘military Wiltshire’ began in 1960, when I was at school in the county at the time of the public campaign against the War Office’s continued use of the village of Imber, which had been taken over for military training in 1943. This led to my writing a lengthy project on the Army in Wiltshire that went a little way to compensate for my limited academic achievements.

Thirty-five years later I started to collect and research old postcards on the theme. Despite having written professionally for many years, it was not at first my intention to produce a book on the subject – in any case, in 1987 N. D. G. James had written Plain Soldiering, which followed his Gunners at Larkhill. I was content to continue my own research for its own sake, until I realized there were many camps about which little was known and that no one book covered all those that existed in Wiltshire early in the twentieth century. Plain Soldiering is excellent in its accounts of camps actually on Salisbury Plain, but, reasonably enough given its title, does not do similar justice to those elsewhere. I was accumulating much information on all the camps, and intriguing sub-themes were emerging, notably relating to the Great War period, such as spy hysteria, Devizes Wireless Station and the change in newspapers’ reporting of sexual matters, from coy allusion before 1914 to relatively graphic detail in 1918.

I thought that more could be written about the dust and mud of soldiering, showing how inappropriate to the Great War was much of the training that preceded it, when emphasis was too often placed on set-piece, textbook movements of masses of men. The result wasWiltshire and the Great War, which I self-published in 1999. As the centenary of the war approached, I believed that a new edition might be of interest and I was delighted when The Crowood Press agreed.

Since my initial research of the late 1990s much more information has become available, thanks mainly to the Internet. Entering the name of many camps into a search engine instantly produces a wealth of information and images. Thus I have rewritten parts of my original text to incorporate new material. This further work has impressed two points on me: the need to beware of contemporary gossip and hearsay that have come to be regarded as fact and, allied to this, the way that statistics can grow exponentially, particularly for numbers of soldiers in Wiltshire, with references to a million and even two million on Salisbury Plain. The latter figure was advanced for British soldiers alone by an anti-conscriptionist in Australia as an argument for no more of her countrymen being needed in the fighting. Conservatively totalling the capacity of various camps, airfields and barracks in Wiltshire in 1918 produces a figure of some 180,000. With the county having a pre-war population of 290,000 and with the wartime soldiers concentrated in the south of the county, the effect of this number on the civilian community in that area was immense.

The nomenclature and numbering of military units is a complex subject, with many being reorganized and retitled in 1908. The war saw a vast expansion of existing regiments and changes in designations. Specialist training units were also set up, with a sequence of titles. Simplified forms have been used, ‘the 2nd Blankshire Regiment’ referring to the Second Battalion of that regiment, for example.

Modern authors often provide the decimal currency equivalents of pounds, shillings and pence (£ s d), but in this book the sums of money are often too small to be meaningfully translated. Some readers may like to be reminded that one new penny represents 2.4 old ones, of which there were twelve to the shilling and 240 to the pound.

Acknowledgements

Staff and facilities at the following libraries: Aldershot; Devizes; Hampshire Local Studies Unit, Winchester; Oxford University; Prince Consort’s (Aldershot); Reading; Tilehurst; Salisbury Local Studies Library; University of Reading; Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham; and Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes.

Staff and facilities at the Andover Advertiser; Departments of Documents and Printed Books, Imperial War Museum; Department of Printed Books, National Army Museum; National Archives, Kew; and Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

Peter Adcock for information on camps in the Fovant area; J. A. Armstrong, Dauntsey’s School, West Lavington; David Bailey, Chiseldon Local History Group; Mike Barnsley for information on the Midland & South Western Junction Railway; Larry Bennett for a photograph of Devizes Wireless Station; Graham Brown, National Monuments Record, Swindon, for information on farms; Barnard Clarkson for permission to quote from Donald Clarkson’s poem, ‘The Sign Post at Salisbury’; Dr Huub Driessen, Birkbeck College, London, for comments on Devizes Wireless Station; John Frost for comments on military postal services and postmarks; Jim Fuller for consenting to the reproduction of postcards published by his grandfather; Mike Harden for an image of the Fovant Military Badges; Walter Ineson for information on camps and manoeuvres in north-east Wiltshire; Marie Jones, Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment, Porton Down; Ed Kermode for permission to quote from the letters of Thomas Kermode, 8th Reinforcement, 32nd Battalion, Australian Imperial Force; Fred Lake, former librarian, Ministry of Defence, for advice on regimental journals and other sources of information; Mac McKechnie for information on many Wiltshire camps; Margaret McKenzie for information on Fovant and Hurdcott; Jean Morrison for information on the Pedrail Landship; Keith Norris for information on Porton; Ivor Slocombe for information on the alleged spy William Hacker, tribunals and local businesses; Gordon Taylor, archivist, Salvation Army.

Crown copyright material in the National Archives is reproduced by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Access to material deposited in the Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum, was by courtesy of the museum’s trustees.

Access to Australian war diaries was by courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.

Lieutenant F. W. Paish’s comments on Lark Hill are printed with the consent of A. G. C. Paish. (Lieutenant Paish’s memoirs have been published by Sir Alan Peacock for private distribution under the title War as a Temporary Occupation.)

Corporal W. G. Beer’s comments on Bulford are published with the consent of Mrs J. E. Overall.

Extracts from Victor Franklyn Smith’s diary are printed by permission of John Lionel Victor Smith.

Members of the Great War Forum (www.1914-1918.invisionzone.com) for much expert guidance on points of detail.

Song of the Dark Ages

by Francis Brett Young

We digged our trenches on the down

Beside old barrows, and the wet

White chalk we shovelled from below;

It lay like drifts of thawing snow

On parados and parapet:

Until a pick neither struck flint

Nor split the yielding chalky soil,

But only calcined human bone:

Poor relic of that Age of Stone

Whose ossuary was our spoil.

Home we marched singing in the rain

And all the while, beneath our song,

I mused how many springs should wane

And still our trenches scar the plain:

The monument of an old wrong.

But then, I thought, the fair green sod

Will wholly cover that white stain,

And soften, as it clothes the face

Of those old barrows, every trace

Of violence to the patient plain.

And careless people, passing by,

Will speak of both in casual tone:

Saying: ‘You see the toil they made:

The age of iron, pick and spade,

Here jostles with the Age of Stone.’

Yet either from that happier race

Will merit but a passing glance;

And they will leave us both alone:

Poor savages who wrought in stone –

Poor savages who fought in France.

After joining the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915, Francis Brett Young was based at Sling Camp, Bulford, and in 1918 became registrar at Tidworth Military Hospital. ‘Song of the Dark Ages’ appeared in his Poems 1916–1918 (Collins, 1919) and is reproduced here by courtesy of David Higham Associates.

PART ONE:

THE WAR IN WILTSHIRE: PREPARATION AND REALITY

1

Training for a Future War

Early Military Activity

Much of this book is about Salisbury Plain, the ‘Great Plain’, that bleak, undulating plateau dominating southern Wiltshire, crossed by few roads and populated only in its valleys. The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey, himself a Wiltshireman, commented that ‘the traveller ... wants here only a variety of objects to make his journey lesse tedious; for here ... is not a tree, or rarely a bush to shelter one from a shower’. On a warm, sunny day the Plain is exhilarating and offers good views, notably from its northern escarpment. On a wet day all of it is as grey as Stonehenge: the sky is ash-grey, the turf is green-grey, the chalk tracks are white-grey. It is wretched. Little wonder that heavily laden soldiers marching over it were wont to overestimate the miles travelled.

Ancient man favoured the Plain for its high ground, drier than the river valleys and providing vantage points from which to detect approaching enemies. (He was more astute than his twentieth-century descendants, who unwisely chose several sites close to rivers for Great War army camps and suffered the consequences during wet weather.) There he built earthwork castles or camps such as those at Bratton, Casterley and Yarnbury, buried his dead, and left the enigmas of Stonehenge and other monuments. The Romans chose the Wiltshire downs for their villages but the valleys for their villas. These were abandoned after they quit Britain, leaving their Saxon successors to establish the lowland villages that exist today. The high Plain was left to nature.

Enclosure acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries facilitated landscape planning and the planting of clumps and shelter-belts of beeches, but the Plain remained one of the largest tracts of desolate, isolated land in an increasingly populated southern England. In the early nineteenth century it was the preserve of sheep, with an estimated 500,000 of the Wiltshire Horn breed alone grazing there. By 1850 most had disappeared, leaving the Plain ready for new occupants – soldiers. In July 1855 the Warminster Miscellany referred to a ‘proposal for a general and permanent military encampment on Salisbury Plain’, but nothing more is recorded. (A correspondent to The Times in 1866 was to suggest ‘a general [military] camp ... once a year for a week or more, on ... say, Salisbury Plain’.) Until two years previously there had been no manoeuvres anywhere in the country, making Britain the only major European power not to have annual large-scale exercises. A temporary camp created at Aldershot during the Crimean War became permanent and evolved into the home of the British Army. This may have been conveniently close to London, but its open areas were not particularly spacious and there were too many nearby towns and villages to allow free movement of large numbers of troops. In fact, manoeuvres of any size were not held there until 1871.

Their success encouraged a repetition the next year but in a wider, less-populated, area in Wiltshire and Dorset bounded by Ringwood, Longbridge Deverill, Little Cheverell, Woodborough, Grateley and Salisbury, with the Plain in its centre. To facilitate the movement of troops over private land a special Act of Parliament was passed, as had been needed for the Aldershot exercises, but permission still had to be sought from owners and farmers. Thirty-two temporary camping-grounds were laid out, including Fighleldean Field, close to the future site of Netheravon Airfield, and at or near Codford, Durrington Field and Bulford, all destined to have large Army camps built on them in the next century. Beacon Hill, near Bulford, was the scene of a concluding review of 30,000 troops by the Prince of Wales.

By the early 1890s the British Army was finding the area around Aldershot too limited, with any extension being inhibited by housing development that was also pushing up the price of land. In 1892 the Military Lands Act enabled the Government to acquire ground for military purposes. The following year manoeuvres were held in Berkshire and a small part of Wiltshire to the east of the Chisledon–Ogbourne road, with a water supply for the troops being arranged near Manor House, Liddington. Three years later the War Department considered purchasing much of the Marlborough and western Berkshire Downs.* Then in January 1897 the Government announced that it intended to spend £450,000 on acquiring 40,000 acres of Salisbury Plain for manoeuvres, though at that time there were no plans to build permanent barracks. The first purchase was made on 3 August 1897 when land near West Lavington was acquired, and by the end of the year more than 13,600 acres had been bought. Though there was a need for cavalry to manoeuvre on open grassland, the area was also judged suitable for deploying large bodies of infantry and horse-drawn artillery. Its spaciousness would enable the creation of ranges, both for artillery and rifles; in 1897 there was none in England long enough to provide effective practice in firing the Lee-Enfield rifle introduced two years earlier.

By March 1900, 42,000 acres of the Plain had been bought for £560,000. Owners of some 26,000 acres sold their land voluntarily but others did so under compulsory purchase regulations. The area consisted of the Plain’s central and eastern sections, divided by the Avon Valley and its various villages. Initially the area north of Amesbury was allocated for artillery practice, with a site for a tented camp laid down at Lark Hill,* but the range area itself was progressively enlarged. The eastern section was used mainly for manoeuvres, cavalry exercises and rifle ranges. Over the years other land was bought, including in 1910–12 areas that extended the West Down artillery ranges westward, and in 1927 much of the western Plain. This portion, between Westbury, Warminster, Heytesbury, Tilshead and Lavington, was sometimes used by the Army before then, notably in 1910 and during the Great War.

A Military Manoeuvres Act passed in August 1897 allowed for the closure of roads (subject to notice and the consent of Justices of the Peace), compensation for damage to property and crops, and penalties for wilful and unlawful obstruction of manoeuvres. The Military Works Act of 1898 authorized £1.6 million to be spent on accommodating seven infantry and six field artillery battalions in barracks to be erected at Bulford and Tidworth.

The barracks were duly built and a number of sites established for tented camps in summer, where the only permanent structures might be a derelict farm building, an open-sided cookhouse or a water-pumping station. The garrisons of the two new barracks provided a permanent military presence, but each year dozens of regiments of Regular and part-time soldiers descended on the Plain, usually by train, for summer camps, exercises and manoeuvres. There would be little accurate anticipation of the sort of soldiering that was to be experienced in the Great War, but many of the technological developments of the new century would be tested on the Plain for their military usefulness.

Yearly Manoeuvres

The 1897 military exercises on Salisbury Plain were modest and not facilitated by the fact that as yet the Army had manoeuvring rights over only a small portion of land. The first arrivals on the Plain were a Royal Engineers company, which marked out a camping-ground near Bulford and arranged a water supply pumped through an iron pipe from Nine Mile Stream into troughs and tanks. Early in July the 4th Cavalry Brigade appeared, with the 1st Dragoon Guards riding from Norwich, followed by the Scots Greys from Hounslow and the 3rd Dragoon Guards from Woolwich.

The Morning Post thought the War Office had been ‘unbusinesslike’ in not approaching landowners beforehand about using their land – negotiations appeared to be still going on during the exercises – noting that tenant farmers and sheep-grazers could not be dispossessed at a moment’s notice. Shortly after the exercises started, one report said the area designated for them was 5 miles long by 1 mile wide, narrowing at one point to 300yd where a Mr Knowles refused to allow troops on his land. The many rabbit holes on Bulford Down made it impractical for horses and filling in these was to become a tiresome but necessary chore. Nevertheless, the cavalry was able to drill 3 miles to the north, on Haxton Down, and some at least of the last-minute negotiations with landowners appear to have succeeded, for exercises took place either side of the Amesbury–Andover road, with ‘invaders’ from Bulford attempting to collect imaginary supplies from Andover.

Training in earnest started on Salisbury Plain on 1 July 1898 with cavalry manoeuvres. The new military area was generally well liked, though some thought it unfortunate that it was divided by the Avon Valley, whose string of villages and hamlets restricted the movement of troops from one part to the other. In gaps in this string the Army established three river crossings; these were between Netheravon and Figheldean (pronounced ‘Filedean’), near Syrencot House and at Fifield. Though the Government was now the major landlord, the original tenants preserved rights until the following year, further limiting troop movements. One tale, perhaps apocryphal, was of a brigade commander who guarded his front with an out-of-bounds field of crops and his left flank with an untouchable barbed-wire fence! (By 1901 this problem had eased with the introduction of three schedules of Army land leased to farmers. Tenants of Schedule I land were allowed to farm it, with the Army paying compensation for any damage; Schedule II land had to be maintained as grassland; and Schedule III land could be farmed, but with no compensation for damage by military activities.)

The Military Manoeuvres Act did not come into force until 15 August 1898, leaving little time to prepare for exercises due to start in Dorset and south Wiltshire on 1 September and ironically being held mostly away from the land purchased by the War Department. So the Army was not able to use its new compulsory powers and had to hire areas for camps through negotiation. The Royal Engineers spent several weeks laying miles of 4in steel pipe, digging wells and installing waterproof sheets to contain water, as well as installing 240 miles of telegraph wire between the camping-grounds. A Red Army mustered 25,000 men at Salisbury, its intention being to intercept the invading Blue Army, which was deemed to have ‘landed’ at Poole (in fact having assembled at Wareham) and was trying to link up with a force from the Bristol area. Successive days’ exercises took the armies to the Fovant and Dinton areas, into Dorset then to the Wylye Valley and the Woodford locality. The 50,000 combatants fought the ‘battles’ of Melbury Down and Stonehenge, the latter being more focused on the ancient earthworks of Yarnbury Castle (which lent themselves to defence and attack) than Stonehenge itself, almost 6 miles away. As a finale, 50,000 troops, 211 guns and 1,000 horses assembled at Porton Down and marched to Boscombe Down to be reviewed; it took two and a half hours for them to pass the saluting base, in front of 80,000 spectators.

There were many assessments of the new training area. Though its value was recognized, not least being large enough to allow Militia, Yeomanry and Volunteers to join with Regular troops, there was a feeling that the Army had been too ambitious with the scale of the manoeuvres.* The local rail network, designed only for civilian traffic, had yet to be improved. The roads were too poorly surfaced for military traffic (damage to them causing complaints from local councils), the Army had had to rely on civilians for extra vehicles, drivers and supplies, and there was insufficient water. The manoeuvres themselves were judged unrealistic because they were planned so that the opposing armies would find themselves at predetermined camping-grounds each night, there were ceasefires for lunch at 1pm, and supplies were provided at convenient spots (civilian drivers permitting), where they were sometimes shared by both forces. Some units, notably Militia, merely marched and never fired their rifles. All troops had to avoid woodland, sometimes diverting a mile around a 60yd strip of timber; this lent a particular artificiality in well-wooded areas where troops would have massed in actual warfare. It was also pointed out that during their manoeuvres the Germans could be billeted in private houses, whereas British soldiers had to make do with tents, which not only were not so comfortable but had to be transported from place to place.

In 1899, though much was being done to improve the Plain’s roads and water supplies, the Army still had a problem with transport, lacking sufficient vehicles of its own to supply very large troop concentrations and with most improvements to the railways still at the planning stage. Therefore the authorities decided that until the infrastructure had been improved the Plain would be used to train small forces that could be mobilized fully equipped. The demands of the Boer War also inhibited large-scale deployments at home. But Militia, Yeomanry and Volunteers took their annual training on the Plain, living under canvas on camping-grounds such as Park House, Perham Down and East and West Down. The Times was certain about the Plain’s value to Militia, noting that fifteen battalions had greatly benefited from spending a month brigaded with Regular troops.

The death of a soldier in Hampshire during a heatwave in the early summer of 1900 led to instructions being issued for the health and safety of troops on Salisbury Plain. (There would be continuing concern about part-time soldiers, who were not much used to the open air, spending two weeks out of doors at summer camp.) It was stipulated that, in hot weather, parades and musketry practice should take place in the early morning and evening; that tea, coffee or cocoa be issued to all ranks early in the day; and that men in the field for a considerable time should take with them bread, cheese and full water bottles. At West Down Camp the daily drinking allowance was one and a half gallons of water per man. Water carts and ambulances also had to accompany the troops, who were not allowed to wear serge tunics on hot mornings but paraded in their grey flannel shirts. The slouch hat was also introduced from overseas as a cooler alternative to traditional Home Service headgear, which was often heavy and hot.

Inevitably there was a criminal element among the soldiers, with petty theft, burglary and setting hayricks on fire being the sorts of cases heard by local magistrates. To reduce the problem, troops needed special passes to go into villages, which were patrolled by pickets. Nevertheless, one July weekend, eighteen Militia members ended up in Andover Police Station for ‘various breaches of discipline’. And inter-regimental rivalry sometimes turned nasty, as at Bulford in early July, when several men were badly injured after jeering and chaffing between the Royal Irish and Gloucestershire regiments progressed to blows.

Men of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry on manoeuvres near Park House Camp in 1902.

It was announced in May 1903 that all troops based on Salisbury Plain would take part in weekly tactical exercises to practise positioning for assaults. Particular attention was to be paid to concealment of guns and men, whether in defence or attack, with, wherever possible, Royal Engineers detachments with entrenching tools being attached to either side. In reality there were restrictions on cutting into the Plain’s turf, and not until the Great War was much practice given in constructing military earthworks.

The Daily Express of 13 August noted that the Plain ‘is an ideal country for cavalry and artillery but not so good for infantry, for there is little cover, and foot soldiers are here invariably exposed to long-distance firing’. It quoted an officer as saying ‘True, we could lose Aldershot on Salisbury Plain, and still have a wide field for manoeuvring purposes, but we could do so much more if we had more land.’

Perhaps it was this realization that led to the holding of manoeuvres in September in the much wider area of northern Wiltshire, western Hampshire, southern Oxfordshire and western Berkshire. At one time the exercises were threatened by a late harvest (though it was suggested that farmers, who were anticipating a poor yield, might have welcomed troops showing ‘more than ordinary disregard for standing crops’ because of the compensation available). A special system of wireless telegraphy was employed, with low receiver poles and a very short spark to limit the range of transmissions and prevent interference from ‘enemy’ transmitters. Balloons were used to direct the different phases of the ‘battles’ – one ball hung from the balloon meant a temporary cessation, two balls a continuation and three termination for the day.

Searchlights, which it was thought would be useful in night operations, notably in defensive situations, had excited the enthusiasm of the Royal Engineers for several years but they were cumbersome, being mounted on wheels 5ft in diameter. They also required a powerful and heavy generator and their reflectors were vulnerable to enemy bullets. (Wiltshire councillors were concerned they would frighten sheep.)

At this time military thinking revolved very much around an invasion of England, public nervousness of which was reflected in – and increased by – such popular books as Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903), in which two yachtsmen discover German preparations to invade England, and William Le Queux’s predictive The Invasion of 1910, which was serialized in the Daily Mail in 1906. In 1903 The Times argued that there was an unreality about using large, open spaces such as Salisbury Plain and the Berkshire Downs to practise counter-invasion measures. Manoeuvres there did not simulate attempts to repel an invasion force on the coast and the troops were unable to use ‘the close country of England [which] ... is a natural defence’.

Writing in the United Service Magazine in 1905, ‘Foresight’ was dubious about the value of special manoeuvre areas, pointing out that at Aldershot ‘still we go with the same old training year after year, day after day ... and which the taught soon know by heart, and of which the teacher knows every bush’. He asked if the errors were going to be continued and accentuated by doing the same thing over again on Salisbury Plain.

Reporting on the 1906 training on the Plain, Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton criticized the ‘partial, desultory, and disappointing’ use of machine guns at a time when they were assuming more importance, as in the recent Russo-Japanese war, where Japanese infantry suffered from the Russian guns. A few years later, the weapon’s potency would be fully utilized on the battlefields of France (and to a lesser extent in the Gallipoli campaign, for whose failure Sir Ian was made the scapegoat). The intervening period was to see increasing international tensions, notably between Germany and France. Britain was nervous of Germany’s growth as a naval power and of its sabre-rattling aimed at France, Russia and the British Empire. Russo-British relations also became strained, not least over conflicting interests in Persia, just as Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia were at odds in the Balkans, where eventually the Great War would be sparked off by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

In 1907 the Army’s combined Southern and Eastern Commands exercised 20,000 troops in southern Wiltshire. Perhaps conscious of the criticism that very few exercises were on the coast, the War Department decreed that the land east of the River Avon was to be regarded as the sea, with safe anchorages at Figheldean and south of Wilton, near Salisbury. Even so, the exercises failed to give any practice in preventing an invasion, for they started after the invaders – ‘Blue Force’ – had ‘landed’ and consolidated at Marlborough. Matters were not helped by food supplies and transport not being where they were expected to be, and an overnight ‘armistice’ had to be extended until the matter was rectified. When the 8th Hussars, part of the Blue Force, captured Sir Frederick Stopford, the defending Red Force commander, and Brigadier-General Samuel Lomax, these two worthies were released so they could ensure effective deployment of their troops!

The Honourable Artillery Company, founded in 1537, was a regular visitor to the Bulford locality before the war, first as a Volunteer unit, then, from 1908, as part of the Territorial Force.

The year 1908 saw the introduction of many Army reforms proposed by the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, including the creation of a part-time Territorial Force embracing the Yeomanry and Volunteers. Most of the former Yeomanry and Volunteer units continued under new designations with the same regiments to which they had been attached previously. From 1908 usually the 1st and 2nd battalions of a regiment were composed of Regular troops (one often serving overseas), the 3rd was the Special Reserve (formerly the Militia), and the 4th and subsequent battalions were drawn from Territorials. The Haldane review also led to a switch in military thinking away from an invasion of England towards a Continental war, with plans for an expeditionary force to cross the Channel in the event of hostilities. An Officers’ Training Corps was also introduced, with members drawn from public schools and universities and intended to provide candidates for officers’ commissions.

Units of the new Territorial Force mustered on the Plain in August. The South Midland Division’s performance was watched with particular interest because it was the first exercise involving a complete Territorial division, comprising men trained by their own officers, who would lead them in wartime. The Territorials, who also included the 1st and 2nd London Divisions, performed creditably, their achievements including building a 50ft bridge on four trestles over the River Avon at Fittleton.

But there was concern about the disappointing numbers of part-time soldiers. The 6th Light Brigade, with an establishment (or allocated number of posts) of 3,840 men, excluding officers, had only 1,287 on its strength; of these, 1,043 were in camp on Salisbury Plain, but 45 per cent of these attended for only eight days, rather than a full fortnight, as did 307 of the 14th London Regiment (the ‘London Scottish’), which had an establishment of 960, a strength of 675 and only 491 at camp. Much of the blame was laid on employers’ reluctance to release workers for longer.

Wireless telegraphy proved useful but only sometimes, as its reliability was subject to atmospheric conditions. In theory, one mobile station could communicate to another that was 50 miles away, though a disadvantage was that the operators needed to work from a stationary base. A suggestion that two telegraphy stations, one operating, the other on the move, should be attached to the main body of men was rejected because extra transport would be needed, as would a protective escort for the mobile station.

In late September 1909 major exercises involving 50,000 troops took place in an area bounded by Cheltenham, Northampton, Oxford and Salisbury, the last city being the headquarters of the Blue Army, whose territory extended to the River Thames, close to which most of the action took place. Observers from nineteen countries attended. (A tradition in Highworth had it that Germany’s Kaiser was present, but this would certainly have been a case of mistaken identity or village gossip.)

At the end of August, a two-day cavalry reconnaissance exercise was held in eastern Wiltshire and western Berkshire. Wireless telegraphy units were attached to the cavalry, but their equipment was still too cumbersome for effective use in the field, so experiments were being made with acetylene lamps that could transmit messages in daylight, without needing the sunshine as did heliographs. The Times thought motorcycles a better way of communicating, though this was not borne out by message-sending trials in September, involving a motorcyclist, a heliograph – and a horse-rider, who won.

That year the Army Act was amended to allow billeting of troops during an emergency. So, during the cavalry divisional training in Dorset and Wiltshire in August 1910, the Army experimented with a voluntary scheme, inviting farmers to provide overnight accommodation for a payment of 1s for each man and horse. The men usually slept in barns, as did officers unless they were invited to stay in the farmhouse. Major R. L. Mullens drove 2,976 miles in his own car (without receiving any form of mileage allowance) to make all the arrangements and found little trouble in securing sufficient offers.

Observing activities on the Plain in early August, a correspondent for The Times repeated the feeling that they were somewhat artificial:

The final issue at which the position was decided happily coincided with the place where the march past was to take place ... it cannot be said that these rapid operations bore much resemblance to what might be expected in war in similar circumstances, and the unreliability of such a morning’s work, in the opinion of many, exercised a dispiriting influence on the minds of those who take their training [seriously].

In mid-September 1910 some 50,000 troops under the control of the commander-in-chief, Sir John French, took part in manoeuvres in Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire and western Sussex. Assembling the troops served as practice in mobilization of the Army in the event of war. Britain’s first military airfield had recently opened at Lark Hill and aircraft were used unofficially for reconnaissance for the first time, but failing to impress. The exercises ended with a set-piece battle, which a German observer pronounced ‘very pretty indeed. I would rather not say more’. Another foreign observer remarked: ‘Your soldiers – oh, yes, they are admirable; but your generals is – pouf’.

Communications were still problematical, though cavalry on pedal cycles were much employed as dispatch riders and the sunny weather allowed heliographs to be used. About a hundred motorcyclists, some civilian, some military, were involved, acting as orderlies for the directing staff and scouting for both ‘armies’. Wireless again failed to distinguish itself: in an exercise in August a detachment of the 18th Hussars had captured from the Red Force an unescorted Yeomanry wireless unit near Andover, together with papers revealing the basis on which the ‘enemy’ was operating. Later that month, the wireless units proved ‘serviceable’, one based 2 miles north-east of Salisbury contacting others at Semley (17 miles away) and Hamilton Camp (8 miles distant), though the Semley unit was unable to transmit back. The Sphere commented that ‘wireless telegraphy was not altogether an unqualified success’.

Difficulties facing the soldiers in camp included roughs attacking them and hawkers selling them ‘injurious trash’. (Permits were required to sell on War Office land and were not available to sellers of sherbet and lemonade – perhaps because the purity of the water they used was questionable.) Damage by such people was often blamed on the troops and some of the offenders were hunted down by bloodhounds. Two problems that had been noted as long ago as the 1898 manoeuvres recurred: the gaiters worn by some troops were too stiff and caused blisters, and some of the part-time soldiers’ boots fitted badly, partly due to their having been worn by other people.

Writing in the Wessex Divisional Journal, Captain John Savile Judd of the 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry added to the reservations about Salisbury Plain: ‘I have never noticed enthusiasm on the part of the Territorial soldier when it is announced that he is going to camp on Salisbury Plain.’ He pointed out that the part-time soldier wanted to cut a dash in his uniform, but so commonplace were military men on the Plain that no one came running to see him. And many Territorials preferred camps within a reasonable distance of a seaside town, to which they could repair at the end of the day. (Braunton, Lulworth, Mudeford and Kingsbridge all hosted Territorial camps around this period, as did Blackpool, Clacton and Morecambe.)

In July 1911, 4,000 members of the Junior Division of the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) camped at Tidworth Park and Tidworth Pennings. The Senior Division was at Windmill Hill, near Ludgershall. For the Junior OTC, reveille was at 5.45am and breakfast at 7.30am, followed by field work from 9 until 1; after dinner there was a parade and further field work. There was as little ceremonial drill as possible. Postcard photographs of such camps show fresh-faced and enthusiastic lads, many of whom would die as young officers in a few years’ time.*

This card was posted on 4 August 1911, its sender stating that the damage is the result of manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain; ‘you can hear the Guns all day’, he wrote. The building was probably part of a farm near Market Lavington included in the War Office’s purchase of land for training.

The major exercises planned for September 1911 were cancelled, ostensibly because of ‘scarcity of water in Wiltshire’, which meant (reasoned the War Office) that many acres of root crops could not be put at risk as they were of ‘exceptional value’ after drought had caused a scarcity of cattle food. (Rain fell on 13 September, two days after the cancellation was announced.) Certainly it had been a very dry summer, though in August the Andover Advertiser reported no scarcity of water on the Plain, thanks to the reservoirs serving the camping-grounds. Noting that the Army was limiting leave to just three days, the Salisbury Times was also sceptical about the reason for the cancellation. It was actually due to increased international tensions, with Germany having provocatively sent a warship to the Moroccan port of Agadir, a move seen by France as a threat to its interests there. As the latter’s ally, Britain was poised to send an expeditionary force to northern France.

Furthermore, there was violent unrest at home in many industries, notably on the railways. This led to soldiers guarding railway installations and controlling riots elsewhere in the country, in some cases firing on crowds with resultant injuries and deaths. Workers on the Midland & South Western Junction Railway (MSWJR), which ran through Wiltshire, did not take part in the strikes, certainly in the Ludgershall area, from where special trains departed carrying troops to trouble spots. Bulford and Grateley stations on the London & South Western Railway also saw much military activity.

Though the Haldane reforms had led to a reduction of 37,000 troops in the size of the Regular Army, there was now a shortfall of some 8,000 men and, in an attempt to bring the Wiltshire Regiment up to strength, its 1st Battalion left Tidworth in mid-June on a 150-mile recruiting march lasting a week and extending to Devizes, Swindon, Chippenham, Trowbridge, Warminster and Salisbury.

August Bank Holiday in 1913 saw London Territorials arriving on the Plain for their summer camp, thirty-six trains leaving Waterloo, Clapham Junction and Nine Elms stations with 12,000 men. Among them was the London Regiment’s new Hackney-based 10th Battalion (the original 10th, the Paddington Rifles, having been disbanded the year before), which camped at Perham Down. It comprised 800 men, with eight drill sergeants loaned from the Coldstream Guards for the occasion. The observations of one of its officers, Henry Prittie (later Baron Dunalley), were franker than most contemporary accounts, which, in the newspapers at least, tended to eulogize about the quality and bearing of Britain’s soldiers. According to Prittie:

What my crowd wanted was steady drill from dawn to dark every day, varied by a bit of musketry instruction. Instead of which – two days wasted by brigade schemes, one by a division day, another by night operation. Night operations for men who had never been out of sight of the street lamps of Hackney!

The battalion’s guard-tent was usually packed with offenders, some of whom Prittie tried to punish with from ten to fourteen days’ detention – until it was pointed out that certain of them were due to spend only eight days in camp and they would lose their civilian jobs if detained any longer. He halved the sentences and had no more trouble.

In 1914 a feature of the early summer camps was a larger proportion of Territorials staying for a full fifteen days, due to a bonus system introduced to discourage them from leaving after only a week. Growing friction between the European powers meant that a common topic in the camps through the summer was the likelihood of war; when the Wiltshire Yeomanry broke up in May from its camp at Pyt House, Tisbury, few of its members doubted that the next time they would come together would be on mobilization.*

Few villages as small as Ludgershall had such a busy railway station. This extra-wide platform was designed for large numbers of soldiers arriving at and departing from their summer camps.

Mobilization

Late in July 1914, with international tension growing by the day following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on 28 June, troops were preparing to concentrate on Salisbury Plain for the usual extensive summer manoeuvres. The British Government believed that cancellation of these would be seen as provocative by other nations, though it started to prepare to mobilize the Army on 27 July when Reserve officers were ordered to report to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) headquarters. On the evening of Sunday, 2 August, all units training away from their usual bases were ordered to return. But already some 10,000 Territorials were assembling on the Plain for their annual camp, with the Home Counties Division assembling at Bordon in Hampshire to march to Amesbury. So when Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August they were in a high state of readiness but often a long way from their home localities, so had to rush off to designated war stations to guard depots, stores, railway signal boxes and tunnels. Four Hampshire Territorial battalions left their camp at Bulford for Hilsea, near Portsmouth, but were back at Bulford within nine days (moving to Hamilton Camp on 31 August and to Bustard Camp a week later). The Army Service Corps’ 12th Horse Transport Company from Portsmouth was at Tidworth, having a relatively easy life with officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) enjoying rambles towards the end of the day when they collected mushrooms and raspberries for their messes. It was ordered to return to Portsmouth as soon as possible, a trip of 55 miles that normally took two days by road, with an overnight stop at Romsey. The 12th completed the journey in one day, with only one horse going lame.

On 2 August the 14th London Regiment – the London Scottish – was experiencing its first night under canvas at Ludgershall Camp when, fifteen minutes after ‘lights out’, a bugler aroused the men to return to London.

John F. Lucy was based with the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles at Tidworth and, in There’s a Devil in the Drum, described how he and his colleagues mobilized:

We sold our own review uniforms to visiting contractors. We also sold our mufti clothing and boots, and the other few possessions we had. Property does not encumber Atkins [a popular term for the private soldier]. All superfluous Army peace-time gear was given back to the quartermasters; and ammunition, iron rations, jack-knives, and identity discs were received instead.

We were all inoculated against typhoid, and some of the men fainted under the full shot. We were advised to make our wills in our soldiers’ pocket-books, but the pay columns of these little books interested us more than the will forms. We would get higher pay in the field.

Also at Tidworth, Ben Clouting of the 4th Dragoon Guards was told to let everything go rusty and that nothing that reflected sunlight should be polished.

On 25 July the 4th Wiltshire Regiment had started its annual camp at Sling, the camping-ground next to Bulford barracks, and on 3 August was put under mobilization orders, expecting on the outbreak of war to go to its depot at Trowbridge. In fact, it marched to Salisbury, ‘piled arms’ on Cathedral Green, and entrained, without kit, for Devonport on 4 August, then travelled to Durrington (barely 4 miles from Sling) on the nights of the 9th and 10th; it then moved to West Down Camp on 16 September and on to Trowbridge on 15 October.

James McCudden was an engine mechanic at Netheravon Airfield where on 4 August his squadron mobilized for war and armed guards were placed in the aero sheds. Three days later he and his comrades were turned out to scour ‘the country in the vicinity of the sheds to look for supposed spies who were reported to be prowling around with the intention of blowing up our sheds, but we did not find anything’. Later that month McCudden left for France, a journey that would lead to his being commissioned as a pilot, claiming fifty-seven victories over enemy aircraft and winning the Victoria Cross.

At the same time Reservists (men who had been discharged, in most cases in the past five years, and who comprised 60 per cent of the British Expeditionary Force preparing to leave for France) were reporting to their regimental depots and travelling on to join their units, often hundreds of miles away – all this at the busiest time of the year for the railways.

The London & South Western Railway provided thirty-eight special trains to convey the Home Counties Brigade of Territorials from Amesbury to its home stations between 10.20pm on 3 August and 3.30pm on 5 August – 14,000 officers and men, 1,387 horses, 310 tons of luggage, seventy-eight guns, 211 vehicles and 222 cycles were transported. During the fortnight of mobilization 632 special troop trains (not all carrying men from Salisbury Plain) ran over Great Western Railway lines, including 186 to return Territorials from their summer camps. Regular civilian services were maintained, only excursion trains being cancelled.

Perhaps officers and men of the 18th Hussars (Queen Mary’s Own) had mixed feelings after they were told on 7 August that Queen Mary was coming to Tidworth the next day to bid them farewell before they departed for France. The gesture was well meant, but must have proved a distraction at a time when they were hastily mobilizing for war prior to landing in France on the 16th.

Quite how appropriate to war had been all the training of the past seventeen years on Salisbury Plain is debatable. There was nothing wrong with the basics: moving and deploying large concentrations of men; feeding them in the field; teaching them to shoot; and instilling esprit de corps. The mass movements of troops by train to and from manoeuvres had provided worthwhile experience, the rail companies coping well with mobilization, carrying 80,000 men of the BEF (and running eighty special trains into Southampton Docks on one day alone). This was facilitated by improvements for military reasons to Wiltshire’s railways since 1897, which also proved invaluable through the war years.

The Plain had benefited artillerymen, who were to play a key role in the war, though the original land acquisitions had soon proved too limited for the increasing range of modern weapons. It had also enabled the comparative long-distance testing of communications, including the initially unreliable wireless. Fortunate too had been the locating there of airfields (at Lark Hill, Netheravon and Upavon), whose aircraft and pilots had eventually convinced a sceptical Army of the value of their cooperating with ground troops, even if, at the time that war broke out, little thought had been given to arming aeroplanes. Some attention had been paid to giving the different military arms a chance to work together and there had been a few experiments in billeting soldiers, albeit long after other modern European armies had been practising it regularly.

However, exercises on the Plain or other open spaces provided experience only in warfare on similar terrain. (Ironically, several soldiers were to compare ground close to the Somme with that of the Plain.) Luckily there was to be no test of the oft-voiced criticism that they never simulated preventing enemy troops landing, only fighting them in open country after they had done so. The commanding officer at Tidworth, Sir Henry Beauvoir de Lisle, may have spent three years from 1911 preparing his cavalry regiments for the war he saw coming, but after 1914 cavalry usually rode to battle and, being vulnerable to modern firepower, then fought on foot. For infantrymen, exercises on the Plain had consisted too much of moving around en masse, usually with little harassment from the opposing force, so as to be in position for an exercise or for their overnight camp, as had been planned several weeks before. Despite the role of trenches in the Crimean and American Civil Wars, there had been little practice in attacking defensive works or digging in. Artillerymen had been assessed on their gun drill and accuracy, but not so much on their ability to move their guns quickly into position or out of trouble. Machine guns had been little exploited, partly because their numbers were limited for budgetary reasons. Modern transport had not been tested in the field.

But then no nation had imagined a world conflict that would last for four years, feature static trench combat, introduce tanks and gas warfare, speed up the emancipation of women, depose several monarchs, lead to Germany and Russia becoming republics and kill ten million people.

For the next four years military training in Wiltshire would concentrate on preparing civilian recruits for the new type of war. First came the ‘Kitchener’ battalions, comprising civilians who had responded to the field marshal’s famous appeal for 100,000 men, which was met so rapidly that there were acute shortages of uniforms, equipment and accommodation. Then in October 1914 arrived the First Canadian Contingent, hastily assembled from civilians and ex-soldiers, to be followed in mid-1916 by Australian and New Zealand troops, some with basic training back home but softened by the eight-week voyage, and others convalescing and retraining after wounds and sickness. The aim was to turn civilians into soldiers in only a few months, improving their fitness through marches, introducing them to basic drill and field craft, providing instruction in using firearms and the bayonet, and putting them through a few field exercises. The wounded and sick would have their progress assessed, the training increasing in severity as their condition improved and often irritating those who had already seen active service and thought they knew it all, or most of it. By the spring of 1915 the Army realized the significance of trenches in the new-style warfare and reflected this in training programmes, with most camps having intricate sets of practice trenches nearby where men spent a couple of days and nights to gain a foretaste of the real thing.

All this was in contrast to the carefully planned manoeuvres of peacetime and would take place throughout the year in all types of weather, rather than only in summertime. With its camping-grounds, improved railways and roads and proximity to the port of Southampton (and easily reached by two main rail lines from Plymouth, also much used for embarking and disembarking troops), Wiltshire may have seemed a suitable place to train the men of Britain’s New Armies and troops from the Empire, but it was hardly to prove ideal.

__________

*The terms ‘War Office’ and ‘War Department’ related to the same institution and both forms were in use.

*‘Lark Hill’ (occasionally ‘Lark’s Hill or even ‘Hill of Larks’) was the early form of the camp’s name, but soon came to be rendered as one word.

*Militia units had their origins as local forces drawn from civilians. Recruits were engaged for six years and given from three to six months’ initial training, followed by from twenty-seven to fifty-six days’ annual training in the case of infantry. They had permanent adjutants, quartermasters and non-commissioned officers and were liable for service only in the United Kingdom. Yeomanry were mounted troops, recruited for home defence on a county basis from farmers and yeomen and officered by country gentlemen, all providing their own horses. Until 1901 they had no Regulars attached to provide local administration. Many Volunteer Battalions evolved from Rifle Volunteer Corps, formed by Lord Lieutenants from 1859 onward.

*The Officers’ Training Corps had been formed in 1908, its Senior Division being drawn from universities and the Inns of Court, the Junior Division from public schools. Before then, mass concentrations of, and extended camps for, individual cadet corps were rare, many schools running their own field days, sometimes with a few near-neighbours such as in July 1906 when Bradfield, Marlborough, Winchester and Wellington came together in Savernake Forest.

*The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry was traditionally linked to Pyt House. During the Wiltshire farm workers’ riots against machinery in the 1830s the most serious disturbance took place there, when the Hindon Troop engaged 500 rioters intent on smashing the machines that threatened their jobs. This action led to the Wiltshire Yeomanry becoming the first such unit to be awarded the title ‘Royal’.

2

The New Armies

Early Chaos

Many civilians who joined the Army early in the Great War found their induction and initial training disorganized, frustrating and demanding. This was particularly true of the very first recruits who with little or no hesitation gave up their jobs and enlisted, only to find that the Army was not ready for them. Many individual and regimental accounts of the war’s early months cite examples of the chaos and discomfort of an organization used to handling 35,000 recruits each year being unable to cope with 500,000 in six weeks. By mid-September it had to look after almost a million men, compared with 125,000 before mobilization.

Small wonder then that many recruits not only had no huts, but also no uniforms and no equipment. Their very few serving officers and NCOs were augmented by those who had retired from the Army and who sometimes brought back outmoded forms of drill and tactics. Many new NCOs were selected on a provisional basis from the recruits themselves. Junior officers were mainly ex-public schoolboys, with experience of the Officers’ Training Corps, but none of handling men from different backgrounds to themselves. At the OTC camp at Tidworth Pennings shortly after war was declared, Cyrus Greenslade, a lance-corporal in the Corps, was commissioned into three different battalions of the Devonshire Regiment. He was instructed to join the 10th Battalion being formed at Stockton in the Wylye Valley and on arrival was ordered to collect about 1,000 men, mostly in civilian clothing, from Codford Station.

A fine account of the trials and tribulations of a new soldier is that of Christopher Hughes, who lived in Wiltshire before the war, served with the Wiltshire Regiment and did his initial service in four different parts of the county. Aged thirty-four, he was an art master at Marlborough College who tried to enlist in the Wiltshire Regiment in September 1914, but initially had to settle for the Wiltshire Yeomanry. After some weeks (for most of which he had no uniform) in billets at Chippenham, where he received very little training, he was accepted by the regiment. After he had taken his fourth medical examination, consisting ‘of a few vague questions as to how I was and as a test for the eye sight being asked how much I could read of the cover of the Army list held at arms’ length’, he found himself back in Marlborough with its new 7th Battalion. Its colonel was Walter Rocke, who had retired from the Wiltshire Regiment nine years before to become Honorary Colonel of the Leicestershire Militia. Shortly after the start of the war he had presented himself at the 5th Battalion’s base in Tidworth in full uniform and was given the command of the 7th.*

Four newly raised battalions of the Cheshire Regiment arrived at Codford in late 1914, including the 13th – the ‘Wirrals’ – shown here in makeshift uniforms. Unlike some units they have rifles, though these are Lee-Metfords, which the Regular Army had phased out almost twenty years before.

The 7th Wiltshire’s officers had the typical backgrounds of a Kitchener battalion:

The Colonel and the Majors had retired from the army some years. Of the four Company Commanders one was, at the beginning of the War, Sergeant Major of the Depot, one a retired Sergeant Major, and two were reported to have had some training in the Colonies but we Subalterns regarded this as somewhat doubtful. The Adjutant came from the first Battalion.

Of the Platoon Commanders some had been in their School OTCs and the others had no training whatsoever...The Battalion Sergeant Major was a marine, the Company Sergeant Majors all men who had retired some yearsas Sergeants. The Company Quartermaster Sergeants were taken from the ranks, Bank Clerks, and Clerks of other kinds. Except for a few old soldiers who had retired as Sergeants and Corporals and had rejoined, the NCOs were all drawn from the ranks and had enlisted at the same time as the rest of the men...

So the only serving soldiers were the Adjutant and one Company Commander. And there were some fifteen hundred men absolutely new to military discipline.