LEATHERHEAD WAR MEMORIALS

TAKEN, NOT GIVEN

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Appendix 3 - The Infantry - their organisation and what they endured

When the British Expeditionary Force embarked for France in August 1914 it was the spearhead of a small but highly professional regular army. It could have been described as an expert rifle club of working class origins, officered by the aristocracy or at least the gentry. Acting as a kind of cement binding the whole machine together were the non-commissioned officers, the real career men.

Possibly because the Treasury had refused to sanction the necessary expenditure on machine guns, the Regulars had been obliged to become expert riflemen, firing an enormous number of aimed shots in 60 seconds - the famous 'mad minute'!

In 1914 the wartime establishment of an infantry battalion was 1,000 officers and men. In peacetime this figure was only achieved in India because in a crisis there, the army would need to hold out until reinforcements arrived from home. At home the battalions were usually very much below strength, the intention being to swell their ranks with recalled reservists in the event of an emergency.

A British infantry battalion in 1914 would be described to day as labour intensive. Apart from the rifles and bayonets of the rank and file and the heavy service revolvers of the officers - and their swords in the opening weeks of the war - there were only two machine guns per battalion. Usually these were Vickers guns though there were still some Maxims in service. Battalions were 'brigaded' in fours and three brigades constituted an infantry division.

Towards the end of the war a brigade was reduced to three battalions. However, these 'triangular' brigades weere much stronger inasmuch that they now had light Lewis guns firing a drum of ammunition instead of it being fed by a belt. Additionally they were were supplied with Stokes' trench mortar, the infantryman's own artillery.

Other things had changed by 1918. The officers were no longer drawn from the upper echelons of society - they now included the middle classes such as solicitors, school teachers and bank clerks. They dressed like rankers, wearing subdued rank emblems and carried a rifle and bayonet like their men to make them less conspicuous to the enemy.

These changes were caused by four years of stalemated trench warfare on the Western Front, From 1914 to 1918 the British [French] and Germans glared at each other from their trenches - wintry snow or summer rains. Show your head above the parapet and you were dead! Sometimes the barbed wire trenches were a mile or so apart across open ground, sometimes only a few yards. Sometimes both sides shared ownership of the same trench with only a knife-rest covered in barbed wire and a rough barricade between them.

Apart from a constant supply of death, one thing both sides had in common was squalour - rotting bodies, rheumatism, ever-present colds and pneumonia and of course mud everywhere - sometimes ankle deep, sometimes waist deep.

The Germans, with a large conscript army, had been much quicker to appreciate the sway which the machine-gun would hold in any future war. As far back as 1901 the Machine Gun Sections had been constituted as a separate 'arm of service'. In addition to the line machine-gun battalions, both the Prussian Guard and the Bavarian Army possessed their own. A couple of machine guns, well-sited and accurately served could scythe an infantry battalion to bits in almost seconds. It took the British Army four years to realise this terrible truth.

In 1914 the First and Second Battalions of a British Infantry Regiment were Regulars. The First Battalion served abroad, usually in India, whilst the Second trained recruits at home. The Third Battalion would comprise supplementary reservists and the Fourth and Fifth were invariably Territorials. With the influx of volunteers on the outbreak of war 'Service' Battalions were formed - for example the Queens raised a total of 29 battalions and the East Surreys raised 16. Almost invariably they would be brigaded with battalions of other regiments.

Sometimes these volunteers shared a common interest or background e.g. the Sportsman Battalions or the Public School battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.

If the officers had changed by 1918, so had the rank and file - they were no longer marksmen. There was no time to train the wartime repalcements to the high levels of the regulars. In any event, snipers apart, it was probably no longer necessary. In trench warfare grenades and Lewis guns were more effective and a sawn-off shotgun could come in useful.

The man in the ranks was now much different. By the end of 1914 the Regular Army had lost its identity. It had perished at Ypres. By the end of October 1914 the 1st Bn. Queens only retained 32 of its original strength. The 2nd Bn had suffered 676 casualties (see Private Albert Bennett and Private Leonard Penfold).

The Territorials were 'used up' at Loos and Festubert in 1915. In 1916 it was the turn of the wartime volunteers - Kitchener's Army - on the Somme. The British Army sustained 60,000 casualties on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme. The conscripts were mown down at Passchendaele in 1917. In 1918 an amalgam of surviving regulars, territorials, wartime volunteers and conscripts had to face the last German offensive of the war. By using bridging companies, personnel from Gas Warfare Schools, batmen, clerks and Household Cavalry men as infantry, the British somehow or other held the line and finally turned the tide - just.

What were the odds of a man surviving unscathed two or more of these major battles? In addition there was always influenza and service at Gallipoli in the pot of misery.

If static warfare was awful, an offensive or a local trench raid was murder. First the attacker shelled the opposing trenches for hours or days or even weeks. Then the trenches were drenched in poisonous gas. Sometimes the trenches were undermined by high explosives. So much for the defenders now shaking in their dugouts.

Now for the attackers. The barrrage having ceased and the officers blown their whistles, the attackers climb the ladders out of their trenches hoping for two things. First that the enemy barbed wire has been cut by the artillery (usually it had not); second, they pray for delays in the enemy emerging from a state of shock, in reaching his own parapet and getting his machine guns operational.

Very often the Germans did get their machine-guns going. Sometimes the enemy was invulnerable in concrete blockhouses. However, if the first line of trenches was reached (by either side) then the storming parties were in no frame of mind to take prisoners. Usually it was brutal work with grenades and rifle butts.

This then was the organization and lifestyle of the 1914-18 war infantryman of the British Army. They were termed the PBI - the Poor Bloody Infantry.

source: Leaflet issued by the Queens Regimental Museum, Clandon Park, Surrey

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