The Making Of The British Army (46 page)

While this reform of the system as a whole was going on, in the field army there was unparalleled activity. For the first time in its history the army was provided with official manuals on how war was to be made:
Field Service Regulations Part I – Operations
, and
Part II – Organization and Administration
(1909). These were to be the basis of campaign planning for both British and imperial forces, and without them the mobilization of the Empire in the First World War could scarcely have been conceived. The Staff College was at once reinvigorated: with such clarity at the top, at last it now had a real sense of purpose. In turn, each arm and service received a new training manual too (the word ‘training’ was itself a significant change from the former ‘drill’), and reworked its tactics and procedures.
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The Esher Report had sought to decentralize administration from the War Office not simply to improve efficiency but because ‘if the Army is to be trained to exercise the initiative and independence of judgement which are essential in the field, its peace administration must be effectively decentralized. The object should be to encourage the assumption of responsibility as far as possible.’ Training thus became the direct responsibility of the officers who would command in the field. Hitherto in the cavalry, for example, training had been the business of the adjutant and the riding master; it now became unequivocally that of the squadron and troop
leaders. And since the majority of officers and NCOs throughout the army wore the South Africa medal, there was no lack of understanding why the change was necessary. Any who doubted it had only to glance at the
Report of His Majesty’s Commissioners on the War in South Africa
(1903), which found serious fault with every branch of the army save for the Army Service Corps.

The scale and zeal of change was at least comparable with the Cromwellian reforms and the formation of the New Model Army. Ironically, in fact, the New Model’s red coat was now abandoned entirely except for ceremonial parades: soldiers now both trained and walked out in khaki service dress, which was in itself a psychological advance – in the infantry, especially. Marksmanship rather than drill became their obsession, for as old President Kruger had said – and as the infantry had learned to their cost – ‘The Boers can shoot, and that is everything.’ Indeed, the infantryman’s pay was now linked to his skill with the improved Lee – Enfield rifle, a shorter version of the one that had entered service in South Africa and one that the cavalry could carry too, instead of the less powerful carbine. The ‘rifle, short, magazine, Lee – Enfield’ – the SMLE – had a fast-operating bolt action and a ten-round magazine which could be quickly recharged by clips of five. Fifteen aimed rounds per minute became the standard rate on the order ‘rapid fire’, though well-trained riflemen could manage twenty to thirty rounds a minute, making the Lee – Enfield the fastest bolt-action rifle of its day. In 1914 Sergeant-Instructor Snoxall of the School of Musketry at Hythe set a record which still stands for a bolt-action – thirty-eight rounds in a 12-inch target at 300 yards in one minute. Little wonder that in the opening weeks of the First World War German field intelligence reported that the establishment for machine guns in a British infantry battalion was twenty-eight. It was, in fact, two.
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Gone with the red coats was close-order drill for fire and movement alike (in the fighting at the crossing of the Tugela, the Irish Brigade had advanced shoulder to shoulder). As early as 1904 a foreign military observer noted the change in tactical movement: ‘In their manoeuvres the British infantry showed great skill in the use of ground. Their thin lines of khaki-clad skirmishers were scarcely visible. No detachment
was ever seen in close order within three thousand yards. Frontal attacks were entirely avoided.’ And although a fierce debate about the future of cavalry continued between those who saw its role as mounted infantry and those who advocated shock action in the charge with sword and lance (the
arme blanche)
, and although the artillery still preferred direct to indirect fire (their experience of the veldt had convinced them of the advantage of seeing the target from the gun itself), the tactical atmosphere was of innovation, with technology an added driver. To a great extent the SMLE decided the
arme blanche
versus mounted infantry debate, for the cavalryman’s pay was now linked to his shooting prowess, as the infantryman’s was, and when it came to war in 1914 and he was
forced
to dismount, he was almost as good as an infantryman. But the artillery, although re-equipped with a superb field gun, would have a particularly rough time in the first six months of the war, losing many gun crews and horse teams in the direct-fire role before the end of the mobile phase determined the issue.

Nor was the petrol engine neglected: the motor car was fast becoming the means of liaison between headquarters, and increasingly too the motor lorry displaced the horse in the Army Service Corps, although horsepower would remain the primary motive means for the ASC and the Royal Artillery for another twenty years until the reliability and durability of motor vehicles, particularly on unmade roads, was proved.

The electric telegraph had linked London with the army in the Crimea, and the first telephone exchange had opened in the capital in 1879, yet twenty years later in South Africa there had been no field telegraphy, let alone telephony: a line paid out to headquarters during the climb up Spion Kop would have made all the difference to the course of the battle. Consequently, battlefield line-laying, and rudimentary radio, now joined the repertoire of the already versatile Royal Engineers. And if further proof of the Edwardian army’s innovative spirit were needed, in 1914, just five years after Blériot’s precarious pioneering flight across the English Channel, the four ‘aeroplane squadrons’ of the newly formed Royal Flying Corps (which had also taken over the Royal Engineers’ balloon squadron) would fly to France with eighty aircraft. It had indeed been a dynamic decade.

The exam question, however, was ‘How long would a continental war last?’ In the opinion of the general staff and successive governments, based in part on observation of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5,
it would be violent but relatively brief, with the advantage to the professional rather than to the conscript army. This was of course an analysis that underpinned the remodelling of the British army; or, put another way, it made something of a virtue of necessity. The TF, though under-recruited, had some fine men and fine units in 1914; the regular army was without question the best equipped, organized and prepared army that Britain has ever sent abroad at the beginning of a war. The trouble was that the war it went to fight was not the war the prevailing orthodoxy envisaged. Violent it was; brief it was not.

Before the fateful pistol shot in Sarajevo, however, a most extraordinary crisis would convulse the upper echelons of the army. It would lead to the resignation of the CIGS, Sir John French, as well as the war minister; it poisoned the wells of trust between senior officers and politicians; and it threw a match into the kindling wood beneath the great bonfire that was Ireland. Yet few today know much if anything about the ‘Curragh Incident’, or ‘Curragh Mutiny’ as it is sometimes called (and not without reason).

It began with that sacred cause of the old Liberal Party, Irish home rule – what would today be called devolution – which had twice defeated Gladstone and would now very nearly undo the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith. In 1912 he introduced the Third Home Rule Bill,
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which was passed in the House of Commons by ten votes but rejected overwhelmingly by the Lords. In 1913 it was reintroduced with the same result. Asquith intended bringing it forward for a third reading in 1914, after which – expecting a further defeat in the Lords – he would use the provisions of the new Parliament Act to over-ride the Lords and send it for royal assent.

But how would it be implemented? In Ulster the Protestants, who were in the main strongly Unionist – opposed even to home rule, let alone independence – were in a slight numerical majority. Whatever their coreligionists in the south were prepared to live with, the staunch Ulster Unionists were not prepared to be ruled from Dublin by a Catholic majority. In January 1913 the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was formed to resist implementation of the Bill (estimated
80–100,000-strong). They were well armed (Germany actually supplied more Mauser rifles to the ultra-loyal UVF in 1913 than to the IRA during the First World War) and well organized, and enjoyed the active support of a good number of senior army officers both retired and serving – including Lord Roberts.

To reinforce the garrisons in Ulster and guard the military armouries and ammunition depots, and perhaps support the Royal Irish Constabulary there, the commander-in-chief in Ireland, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Paget (grandson of Lord ‘One Leg’ Uxbridge), had at his immediate disposal a cavalry and an infantry brigade at the Curragh camp outside Dublin. What actually happened in the run-up to the ‘mutiny’ – what was said and the exact sequence of events – has never been definitively established. It is at least known that the secretary of state for war, Jack Seely, a colonel in the yeomanry with a DSO from South Africa, asked Paget if he thought the two brigades would be prepared to go north, for it was well known that in the 3rd Cavalry Brigade there were a good many officers from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, not least its commander, Hubert Gough, who might be opposed to home rule. Seely suggested a certain latitude be given to those Anglo-Irish officers who would find duty in the north objectionable – that they might be allowed to disappear on leave before any actual order was given.

Paget was perhaps the least suitable man to be commander-in-chief in these circumstances. Now 63, he had seen service, but contemporaries said that he spoke as if he were thinking aloud. His obituarist in
The Times
in 1928 wrote: ‘Had he only devoted to Military Study a fraction of the time which he gave to the observation of trees and shrubs he might have ranked as a learned soldier.’ On 20 March he called the brigade commanders to his office and spoke with sufficient vagueness to give the fiery Gough the impression that he would be asked to ‘coerce Ulster’ into accepting home rule, and that his officers’ views were to be sought. When Gough put the question to the assembled officers of his brigade later that day – saying that the decision was for each of them, but that he would prefer dismissal to taking up arms against Unionists – all but two voted with him.

Paget informed the War Office by telegram that all was not well. The press learned of it at the same time and a full-blown crisis followed in which hardly anyone had a clear idea of what anyone else had said, or even in key respects what the actual issues were. The press thundered,
the
Daily Chronicle
reporting: ‘For the first time in modern English history a military cabal seeks to dictate to Government the Bills it should carry or not carry into law. We are confronted with a desperate rally of reactionaries to defeat the democratic movement and repeal the Parliament Act. This move by a few aristocratic officers is the last throw in the game.’ The
Daily Express
announced in thick, black, funereal type that ‘the Home Rule Bill is Dead’. The
Daily News
asked ‘whether we govern ourselves or are governed by General Gough’. The chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, who as prime minister overseeing war strategy after 1916 would find himself at odds with most senior officers, practised his famed demagogy: ‘We are confronted with the greatest issue raised in this country since the days of the Stuarts. Representative government in this land is at stake. In those days our forefathers had to face a claim of the Divine Right of Kings to do what they pleased. Today it is the Divine Right of the aristocracy to do what it pleases.’

In a week it was all over. Asquith said there had never been any intention of using the army to ‘coerce Ulster’; Seely gave Gough and his fellow officers the assurances they sought, and those officers who had already resigned were reinstated – while at the same time all who had refused the hypothetical order said they would of course obey any specific order to help maintain law and order in Ulster. On 28 March a new army order concerning discipline was issued, beginning: ‘No officer or soldier should, in future, be questioned by his superior officer as to the attitude he will adopt in the event of his being required to obey orders dependent on future or hypothetical contingencies.’

But however deftly the cracks were papered over, damage had undoubtedly been done – and very publicly. The following month both the CIGS and the secretary of state resigned, and Asquith himself took the War Office portfolio. French was replaced by the 64-year-old Sir Charles Douglas, inspector-general of the forces (whose place French took in a face-saving exchange). Remarkably, therefore, as the crisis over the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand mounted, the war department was in the hands of a man whose maxim as prime minister was ‘wait and see’, and the army was headed by an unlikely general who would die of the strain of office almost as soon as war broke out.

The legacy of suspicion between the ‘brass and the frocks’
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was an
enduring one, and mutual distrust would dog the conduct of the war. The distrust was born of many things, but the intemperate language and precipitate actions of the Curragh Incident unquestionably fuelled it. Even Churchill, who as a Liberal MP and first sea lord had been actively involved in championing the home rule Bill, and had made sanguinary pronouncements against the Unionists, was to feel that distrust. In the end, the Curragh Incident made no difference to the passage of the Bill, which was quietly laid aside when war broke out with Germany in August. But it was grist to the mill of violent Irish nationalism: with all confidence in parliamentary procedure now lost, a resort to arms by the most extreme nationalists was virtually unavoidable. On Easter Monday 1916, under a banner proclaiming ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’, an armed rebellion broke out which ever since has shaped the army and its thinking.
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