2	The Flower of Scotland

 

At the beginning of the First World War, as at any other time in history, Scotland was no stranger to the business of warfare. The country’s story is bloody with battles: some fought against the nearest neighbour, England; many more fought amongst the Scots themselves, family against family, clan against clan, Lowlander against Highlander, Catholic against Protestant. Scotland’s history of warfare is long and varied and it includes long periods of fighting abroad: from the sixteenth century onwards Scots mercenaries fought in the service of the kings of France, Spain, Russia and Sweden. Scots made good fighters and in common with many other minorities on Europe’s fringes – the Croat cavalry in Wallenstein’s army, for example – they exported their skills, becoming soldiers of fortune who gave good value for money. At least 25,000 were in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, half as many fought for King Louis XIII of France, often confronting their fellow countrymen on the field of battle, neither giving quarter nor expecting to receive it. One, Sir John Hepburn, scion of an old East Lothian Catholic family, fought in the Swedish and the French armies and rose to become a marshal of France, having raised the formation which became The Royal Scots, the 1st of Foot and the senior line infantry regiment in the British Army’s order of battle.

A further reason for the Scots’ interest in soldiering was provided by recent history and the creation of dubious military traditions. In the middle of the previous century Scotland had been gripped by the Volunteer craze, that Victorian fancy for part-time amateur soldiering which involved some gentle shooting practice and drills and, best of all, dressing up in turkey-cock uniforms. In Scotland the recruitment figures for the Volunteer units were twice the British average, a figure which was undoubtedly assisted by the creation of units with Highland affiliations, most of them in the Central Belt. Their panoply of kilts, tartan trews, ostrich feathers and ornate sporrans were an irresistible attraction and everywhere men rushed to wear them. Most of these outlandish uniforms owed nothing to tradition but were invented by local colonels and they came to represent one of the flowerings of a self-conscious nationalism or what the military historian John Keegan has described as ‘a force for resistance against the creeping anglicisation of Scottish urban life’.1 Nostalgia for a half-forgotten romantic past was a factor, as was the existing iconography of the Scottish soldier, which found its apotheosis in Roger Fenton’s Crimean War photographs of the sternly bearded Highland soldiers of Queen Victoria’s army. However, there was more to soldiering than putting on fancy dress. Being a part-time soldier meant following an honourable calling: it was companionable, offered self-respect and produced steadiness of character, all important moral virtues in Presbyterian Scotland.

The vogue for soldiering can also be traced back to the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden in 1746 and to the subsequent subjugation of the Highlands and the despoliation of its Gaelic culture. In time it came to be considered a romantic episode in Scotland’s history – Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, at the head of his kilted Jacobite army – and it became a sentimental myth in poetry and song, one which most Scots were happy to swallow. The facts, though, were rather different and far from glorious. The army commanded by Prince Charles Edward Stewart was not a professional force in the sense that his opponent and near relative the Duke of Cumberland would have understood it. True, many of the officers had seen service in Europe, and, equally true, it was based on regimental lines which gave it a sense of orderliness to distinguish it from being a rabble of revolutionaries, but it relied on tactics which were fast becoming an anachronism in the middle of the eighteenth century. Cavalry was lacking, modern weapons were in short supply, the commissary arrangements were not of the best and all too often the soldiers had to rely on their own resourcefulness to make up for the deficiencies of the command structure.

Against them on the government side were soldiers who had seen service in the recent European campaigns. They were well trained, well fed and strong in artillery and cavalry, and many of them were Scots fighting in regiments which survived into the twentieth century: The Royal Scots of St Clair’s Regiment, The Royal Scots Fusiliers of Campbell’s Regiment and The King’s Own Scottish Borderers of Sempill’s Regiment. Add on the Argyll Militia and the Earl of Loudon’s Independent Companies of the Highland Watch and it is impossible to view the defeat at Culloden as a battle between the English and the Scots. Rather, as Cumberland saw it and as he addressed his men before the battle, it was an action fought by the government’s internal security forces to put down a rebellion by a group of disaffected rebels. His policy was clear. Cumberland was determined ‘to bruise those bad seeds spread about this country so as they might never shoot again’ and in so doing to prevent the Highlands from offering their traditional threat to the body politic. It was a chance, he said, to demonstrate to the clans that they were not above the law and that it was in the power of the government’s security forces to march into lands previously considered inaccessible. After the defeat the clans were forced to disarm, their centres of power destroyed: around 7,000 houses were razed and steps were taken to garrison the areas concerned. Finally, measures were taken for ‘disarming and undressing those savages’ through the Disarming Act of August 1746. Not only were traditional weapons and the plaid made illegal but Highlanders were forced to swear an oath of allegiance which left the clansman in no doubt that his day was over.

The destruction of Highland Scottish military power and the Clearances of the traditional clan lands have been described as the beginning of the end of a way of life which was barely understood by outsiders, not least Lowland Scots, but it has to be said that, at the time, the process was largely welcomed. In the aftermath of the union of the parliaments and the economic benefits of ‘heavenly Hanoverianism’ it was thought no bad thing to have this lawless area with its savage population and their heathen way of life (for so it seemed) brought under control. What to do with them was another matter. Either they could accept modernity and the union or they could be moved elsewhere to make new lives, courtesy of landowners who regarded themselves not as destroyers but as liberal reformers. As for the soldierly instincts of their tenants, these could be offered to the British Army at a time when it was being used as an imperial gendarmerie to expand the country’s growing colonial holdings.

During the Seven Years War the elder Pitt, acting on a suggestion made by King George II, opened the door for the creation of the Highland regiments. It was a simple concept. Highlanders were regarded as good soldiers: their powers of endurance and their fighting qualities had become evident during the earlier Jacobite rebellions. Here was a ready supply of soldiers who would do their duty, were known for their abilities as fighters, displayed hardihood in the field and gave unbending loyalty to their commanders. One other factor intruded: the traditional clan structure produced a sense of coherence and loyalty which would translate into good military practice. As the days of the clan system were numbered after Culloden and would soon disappear – other than as a sentimental entity based on chiefdoms, tartan and yearning for a lost past – the Highland regiments became handy substitutes for the old clan way of life.

Through the barbaric allure of their uniforms Scottish soldiers became an instantly recognised and widely feared element of the British Army, and their service in Africa, India and North America helped to consolidate Britain’s growing mercantile empire. The long tradition of soldiering was also a powerful factor in establishing the Scottish people’s relationship with the army. While it is true that there had been a falling-off in the numbers and the quality of recruits in the second half of the nineteenth century, leading to higher numbers of English and Irish soldiers joining the Scottish regiments, the army was not in itself considered a dishonourable calling. The career of Hector Macdonald is a case in point. The son of a crofter in the Black Isle, he left a steady job as a shop assistant to join the 92^nd (Gordon) Highlanders and was granted a commission while serving in Afghanistan in 1871. He was eventually knighted in the rank of major-general and was a much-lauded national figure who was praised as a good example of Scottish pluck and determination, the epitome of the upright Highland soldier. Men like him provided young Scots with an example of what could be achieved and Macdonald helped to create the ideal of the kilted soldier as one of nature’s gentlemen, a lion in the field but a lamb in the house. (Macdonald’s career ended in disgrace when he committed suicide in 1903 rather than face charges of sexual misconduct; but so great was his reputation in Scotland that many chose to believe that he had been framed by jealous senior officers.) War Office figures showed that 26.9 per cent of the men aged 15 to 49 volunteering for the army in 1911 were Scots, compared to 24.2 per cent in England, and in her study of the composition of the Highland regiments between 1870 and 1920 Diana Henderson insists that, despite seasonal manpower problems, ‘soldiering was widely looked upon as a respectable profession in Scotland’. Military matters were widely reported and discussed in the Scottish press – the Scotsman published regular ‘Military and Naval Notes’ – and regiments returning from overseas were always given a warm welcome as they marched from the quayside back to their barracks.3

There was, of course, another side to the question of recruitment. Young men also joined the army because they had no option. In the poorest families an unemployed boy was an extra mouth to feed and in every Scottish regiment there were large numbers of young men who had escaped grinding poverty by becoming soldiers. A return by the Army Medical Department in 1903 showed that of 84,402 recruits examined on enlistment the majority, 52,022, came from the lower stratum of the working classes. This was especially true in Lowland regiments where recruits often came from backgrounds where families lived below the poverty line and overcrowding and lack of decent sanitation were commonplace. Conditions in Glasgow and many parts of Lanarkshire were particularly bad. Although the prevailing squalor and degradation of the previous century had been addressed by a combination of philanthropy and the introduction of radical improvements in public health, the physical conditions for most workers in Glasgow were not good, with the population density in 1911 being twice that of Edinburgh and Dundee.⁴ In 1917 a Royal Commission on Housing revealed a situation which was bedevilled by ‘gross overcrowding and huddling of the sexes together in the congested villages and towns, occupation of one-room houses by large families, groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the old burghs, clotted classes of slums in the great cities’. Faced by those conditions, and the low pay which caused them, the army was often seen as an escape route. Peter Corstorphine, a poorly paid fourteen-year-old apprentice plumber in Edinburgh, tried to join the army in 1907 but was considered to be ‘too small and too young’. Three years later he got his wish. It helped that his brother was already serving in The Black Watch:

What made me want tae join the army at that time wis merely the fact that there were no jobs goin’ around, especially for the likes o’ me. And workin’ as an apprentice joiner ah was gettin’ about 3/6d a week.

Ma mother used tae give me a sixpence pocket money. And life became very hard, especially when you got to the length of fifteen and sixteen. You were still only gettin’ 4/6d a week and you were gettin’ very little pocket money. Ye couldnae even go tae the theatre. And the young lads at that time were a’ beginnin’ tae wear bowler hats and what have you. I was goin’ about like Coconut Tam [a well-known, diminutive Edinburgh street vendor].

Now the army wis seven shillins a week and ye’re all found, plus the fact that ye got your uniform and boots and everything. Ye were well fed and a good bed. What more did a fellow want?5

Like his brother, Corstorphine also joined The Black Watch, serving in Ireland and Edinburgh before going to India with the 2^nd Battalion. Although he found the training hard and the conditions in the barracks in Edinburgh Castle ‘terrible’ he made the grade and like other men in his position soon appreciated the order, cleanliness, regular meals and close companionship which were central to army life. For Corstorphine, as for every other recruit to a regiment’s rank and file, the initial period of service was seven years, after which they could be discharged to the Reserves for a five-year period or elect to spend that time with the Colours, provided that they were found to be efficient and of good conduct. At the end of the twelve-year period they could opt for a discharge or sign on for another nine years to complete twenty-one years of service. The best soldiers were promoted and in time became senior non-commissioned officers or warrant officers, the backbone of any self-respecting infantry battalion.

The commissioned officers were a different breed. The purchase of commissions had ended in 1871 but Britain’s military officer class was still one which Wellington or Marlborough would have recognised, as most of its members, including the Scots, came from the aristocracy, the landed gentry, the clergy and the professions and had been educated at Britain’s great private schools. All were expected to have private incomes, as the annual pay of a second lieutenant, the entry rank, was just over £95 a year and that was insufficient to cover his uniform costs and mess bills which amounted to roughly £10 a month. In 1914 the War Office recommended that the minimum needed to survive was £160 a year but even that amount meant that a young officer would have to lead an abstemious existence. Some regiments were extremely expensive. Officers in cavalry or foot guards regiments had to purchase a variety of uniforms to meet all the variations in service and mess dress; they were expected to live well in the mess and to keep at least two hunters and three polo ponies. It was not considered unusual for a smart cavalry regiment to insist on a young officer being in possession of a private income of up to £1,000 a year, an enormous sum in 1914. For the Scottish regiments this made the Royal Scots Greys and the Scots Guards the most expensive, but smarter Highland regiments such as The Black Watch or The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders required a private income close to £400 a year. Lowland regiments were a little less costly at an average of £250 a year and the implied differences in social scale were not only understood but accepted by the men involved. So too were the differences in rank within a battalion. Officers were meant to be a breed apart but they were also supposed to put their men’s best interests before theirs and prided themselves on setting high personal standards of behaviour. Soldiers like Peter Corstorphine knew only too well that the creation of mutual trust precluded any intimacy: ‘Relations between the other ranks and officers before the war were, oh, very much apart, you were very much apart. They were a different class altogether. They could be comradely enough, ye know, but ta, ta a lot. Each rank was segregated.’6

Although it is dangerous to generalise, the Scottish infantry regiments of the regular army in 1914 were very much the nation in uniform. In each battalion there would be representatives of the different social classes, from well-connected and wealthy aristocrats or landed gentry in the officers’ mess to the rank and file who had known only the subjugation of extreme poverty. In between were small numbers of the professional classes – clerks and shopkeepers and trained artisans and farm labourers – but the bulk of Britain’s regular army was drawn from what one historian has called ‘the lower end of the working class’.⁷ There would be a fair share of men who drank too much or gambled away their modest pay; equally there would be temperance men and others who used their spare time to improve their education. There would be officers who did not fit in with the battalion’s way of life and behaved irresponsibly, while there would be those who took a Jesuitical interest in their calling and put a high premium on personal honour and courage. There were battalion commanders who would fail the test of combat and men who forgot to die like heroes in the hellish fear of battle. But there would also be those, the majority, who were bound up in the common cause: to serve the regiment which had become their physical and spiritual home. They might have spent a great deal of time grumbling, they probably thought they were better trained and more professional than they really were, but warts and all they represented the first flowering of Scotland’s contribution to the war effort in the late summer of 1914.

The most visible elements of Scotland’s ‘army’ consisted of its ten infantry regiments, each of which consisted of two Regular line battalions, one at home and one stationed abroad on service in the empire. This two-battalion system had been evolved in 1881 by Edward Cardwell, the innovative Secretary for War, allowing the home-based battalion to provide both a training facility for drafts and reliefs when they were required. Regiments numbered 1 to 25 in the army’s order of battle already had two battalions and they were left alone, but the remainder were rearranged into new paired relationships, some of which were unhappy and took time to settle down. Thus it was that in August 1914 the 2^nd Battalion Royal Scots was based in Plymouth where it formed part of 8^th Brigade in the 3^rd Division, while the 1^st Battalion had been based in Allahabad in India since 1911 where it formed part of the British garrison in a country which one military historian has described as ‘the greatest formative influence on the life, language and legend of the British army . . . India, with its heat, stinks and noise, its enveloping dust, became the British army’s second home – perhaps its first.’8 That arrangement worked with no rancour between the battalions but matters were less settled in The Cameronian Regiment. Its 1^st Battalion had been the 26^th Foot, which had been founded in 1689 by the Earl of Angus, while the 2^nd Battalion began life in 1794 as the 90^th (Perthshire) Light Infantry, a regiment raised for service in the wars against France by Lord Lynedoch. Each considered themselves to be a cut above the other: the 1^st had a long and distinguished history which stretched back into the seventeenth century, while the 2^nd Scottish Rifles (as they always styled themselves) were proud of their light infantry heritage, which was considered socially superior, leaving a regimental historian to remark that ‘there was a good deal of animosity between the battalions, which was not really killed until the 1930s’.9 All line infantry regiments also had a third Reserve battalion, which was based at the regimental depot and was largely an administrative formation to provide reinforcements for the two Regular battalions.

These infantry regiments, plus two battalions of Scots Guards and one cavalry regiment, The Royal Scots Greys, were the symbol of the country’s military prowess and, with their kilts or trews, they were held in high regard by the Scottish public. Yet in August 1914 only three battalions were resident in Scotland: the 1^st Cameron Highlanders were stationed in Edinburgh Castle, the 1^st Cameronians were in Glasgow and the 2^nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were at Fort George outside Inverness. Eight Regular battalions were based in England or Ireland, helping to form the six infantry divisions which would make up the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) created before the war to provide an army to fight in Europe in the event of a major conflict breaking out on the Continent. These were: 1^st Scots Guards, based at Aldershot, 1^st Brigade, 1^st Division; 2^nd Royal Scots, based at Plymouth, 8^th Brigade, 3^rd Division; 1^st Royal Scots Fusiliers, based at Gosport, 9^th Brigade, 3^rd Division; 2^nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers, based in Dublin, 13^th Brigade, 5^th Division; 2^nd Highland Light Infantry, based at Aldershot, 5^th Brigade, 2^nd Division; 1^st Black Watch, based at Aldershot, 1^st Brigade, 1^st Division; 2^nd Seaforth Highlanders, based at Shorncliffe, 10^th Brigade, 4^th Division; and 1^st Gordon Highlanders, based at Plymouth, 8^th Brigade, 3^rd Division. Another ten battalions were based abroad, seven in the garrison in India – 1^st Royal Scots (Allahabad), 1^st King’s Own Scottish Borderers (Lucknow), 1^st Highland Light Infantry (Ambala), 2^nd Black Watch (Bareilly), 2^nd Camerons (Poona), 1^st Seaforths (Agra), 1^st Argylls (Dinapore) – one in Malta (2^nd Scottish Rifles), one in Cairo (2^nd Gordons) and one in Gibraltar (2^nd Royal Scots Fusiliers). The 2^nd Battalion Scots Guards were at the Tower of London as part of London District while The Royal Scots Greys were in York as part of 5^th Cavalry Brigade, which had also been committed to the BEF.

The home-based battalions would be the first to fight in France and Flanders: most crossed over the Channel with the BEF in August, including the three Scottish-based battalions, which were deployed as lines of communication troops. However, the overseas battalions followed close behind. The Seaforths arrived in England on 21 September, The Black Watch on 12 October, The Royal Scots and the Camerons on 16 November, The Argylls on 19 November and The King’s Own Scottish Borderers on 28 December. All crossed over to France and all were in action with the BEF by the beginning of 1915.10

The fighting strength of the BEF was 247,432 officers and men, about one third of whom were based in India, and the official historian of the war has called it ‘incomparably the best trained, best organised and best equipped British Army which ever went forth to war’. (Ominously, he added the caveat ‘except in the matter of numbers’.¹¹) Of those, it is difficult to estimate the total number of Scottish Regular soldiers as not every Scottish battalion was manned entirely by Scots and many Scots served in other formations in the army. However, as twenty-two Scottish-named infantry battalions were committed to the BEF in August 1914 the figure must be at least 20,000, with more serving in the artillery, engineers and support arms. This closely mirrors the demographics of the British Isles in that accepted population figures for 1914 showed that Scotland made up 10.6 per cent of the British and Irish population.

At the time, an infantry battalion consisted of around a thousand soldiers under the command of a lieutenant-colonel, usually an experienced officer in his forties. His executive consisted of a second-in-command, an adjutant in the rank of captain who was responsible for the smooth running of the battalion and a quartermaster who dealt with stores and supplies. Also part of the team was the regimental-sergeant-major, the battalion’s senior non-commissioned officer who ran the battalion headquarters and the orderly room. The fighting strength of the battalion lay in its four rifle companies of six officers and 221 infantrymen under the command of a major or a senior captain; each company had four platoons, each one having four sections and the men were equipped with the recently introduced Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle and an 18-inch bayonet. The battalion itself formed part of an infantry brigade with three other battalions under the command of a brigadier-general. Beyond that, and well beyond the imagination of most soldiers, were the Division, the Corps and the Army.

For most soldiers, especially the pre-war Regulars who made up the BEF, the first loyalty was to the regiment and the battalion in which they served. This was their home and one whose honour and history they would go to great lengths to protect. As John Baynes put it in his account of the 2^nd Scottish Rifles at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 ‘all the ranks in the battalion were caught up, whatever their origins, in the powerful grasp of the Regiment. By the time they had lived for two or three years in the atmosphere of the Regimental tradition, had made the strongest friendships of their lives within the Regiment, and had been constantly reminded of their duty to it, the Regiment could claim them as its own . . . I do not suppose Regimental spirit will ever mean so much again as it did to those Regular soldiers of 1914.’12 It helped that the regiments had their own recruiting areas with the depot being central to the local community and a focus for recruitment. The majority of the men in The Cameronians’ two battalions came from Glasgow and industrial Lanarkshire, with a handful having their original homes in other parts of Scotland and England, the latter mainly in London and Newcastle. For them the regiment had become home, perhaps the only home they would ever know. As one Cameronian, Company Sergeant-Major Robert Leggat, remembered the period before 1914, ‘in those days the regular army carried its own life with it, wherever it went, and you lived pretty much the same, whether you were in India or any other place. You lived between the barrack-room and the wet canteen, without any social life at all.’¹³

That understanding lies at the heart of the regimental tradition in the British Army and the Scots were no strangers to upholding its mystique, part family and part fighting formation. Indeed, given the tribal nature of much of Scottish society and the allure of the Scottish regiments’ uniforms with their tartans and feathered bonnets, Scottish soldiers had a good conceit of themselves and were not slow to parade the fact that they thought themselves a superior breed. Regimental attachments ran deep. The Royal Scots were proud of the fact that they were the oldest line infantry regiment in the British Army, the ‘First of Foot’, and rejoiced in their nickname of ‘Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard’. The Black Watch was the senior Highland regiment, wore the distinctive black and green government tartan kilt with a red hackle in the soldiers’ bonnets and in common with the other Highlanders took a great deal of interest in their traditions and heritage. Scotland’s only cavalry regiment, The Royal Scots Greys, rode exclusively on the type of big grey horses which had charged at Waterloo and Balaklava, and The Scots Guards traced their history back to King Charles I’s civil wars. Of course, English, Irish and Welsh regiments were equally proud of their histories and traditions, and the rifle regiments’ dark green uniforms were thought particularly smart, but the kilts of the ‘tartan curtain’ were difficult to ignore even by those who resented the attention given to the Highland regiments. In 1916 Private Ernest Parker, 15^th Hussars, watched a Scottish formation marching up towards the line:

One thing I shall never forget is the sight of thousands of rhythmically swinging kilts as a Division of Highlanders swept towards us. Skirling at the head of the column strode the pipers, filling the air with their wild martial music. Behind glinted a forest of rifle barrels and the flash of brawny knees rising and straightening in rhythm. Were these the freemen of yesterday, peaceful citizens who a few months ago strolled to work? These men seemed to us a crack military unit ready to carry out its mission.14

Not everyone was so impressed. The adjutant of the 2^nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, in which the poet Robert Graves served, accused the Scots ‘both the trousered kind and the bare-arsed kind’ of being loudmouthed braggarts who left trenches in a filthy condition and were indifferent to basic hygiene, while a private soldier in the South Staffordshire Regiment was moved to complain, ‘It’s no use an English regiment trying to get on when there’s a regiment with the kilts. The kilts put all the other regiments in the dark.’ Insults were common and it took little to start a fistfight when rivals clashed. A shout of ‘two pints of broken squares’ in the pub or wet canteen would cause Highland soldiers to clench fists and unbuckle belts as they defended their honour against the allusion that The Black Watch had allowed the square, then the infantry’s basic defensive formation, to be broken at the Battle of Tamai in 1884 during the campaign against Osman Digna in the Sudan. The cry of ‘who shot the cheese?’ would rouse the Gordons to fury – an ‘allegation that they had once opened fire on a ration cheese, mistaking its pallor in the dusk for the pale face of an enemy’ – and The Royal Scots would take on anyone daring to hail them as the ‘first and worst’. Even outsiders would respond to any insult, real or imagined. English and Irish soldiers serving in Scottish regiments quickly became perfervid Scots and would take a savage delight in refusing to obey orders other than from their own officers; they would often be found at the forefront in inter-regimental scraps.15

This was the old Regular Army, which had come into being after the Boer War and which was destined to undertake the first fighting of the war as the BEF in France and Flanders in 1914. It was professional, well equipped and well led. Its commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir John French, was a cavalryman who had performed well, and the two corps commanders, Douglas Haig and Horace Smith-Dorrien, also enjoyed good reputations. In addition to those Regular regiments there were two other armies which would fight alongside them: the volunteers of the Territorial Force, which had been raised in 1908 to provide the country with a second line of home defence manned by part-time soldiers, and the New Army, which was created as a result of Kitchener’s call for manpower in the immediate aftermath of the declaration of war. As we have seen, Kitchener entertained misgivings about the worth of the Territorial Force – he dismissed the force as a ‘town-clerk’s army’ consisting of skylarkers who would disrupt army discipline – but his criticisms were belied by the fighting spirit and courage of the fourteen first-line divisions of the Territorial Force which were raised during the war, four of which, 51^st Highland, 52^nd Lowland, 64^th Highland and 65^th Lowland, were Scottish. All ten Scottish infantry regiments had Territorial battalions based in their recruiting areas where local county Territorial associations, presided over by the lord lieutenant, were responsible for running their property and supplying their equipment.

However, most of their weapons were obsolescent: Territorial soldiers were not trained on the Short Lee Enfield, were forced to use earlier models of the rifle and possessed little or no artillery. This led senior Regular commanders to argue that the force was of little practical use and could only be used to fulfil its original role of home defence. Even then their abilities were open to question: Territorial soldiers only trained twice a week and attended a fortnight’s camp once a year, attendance was not compulsory, recruiting was lax (at the start of the war the force was 47,317 men short of its establishment) and there was a widespread feeling in military circles that Territorial soldiers looked on their service as a pleasing diversion and preferred organising dinners and dances to studying tactics. The yeomanry were considered to be even worse, based, as many of their regiments were, on local hunts. Just as the cavalry demanded officers with good private incomes so too did yeomanry regiments, with the exception that even troopers had to be able to afford their mounts and purchase their expensive uniforms. Scotland had seven yeomanry regiments, in order of precedence: the Ayrshire Yeomanry (Earl of Carrick’s Own), the Lanarkshire Yeomanry, Lothians and Border Horse, Queen’s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry, Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, the Lovat Scouts and the Scottish Horse.

Although yeomanry regiments thought themselves second to none so too did many Territorial Force battalions. When John Reith was commissioned in the 1/5^th Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) in 1911 he observed that the ‘social class of the man in the ranks was higher than that of any other regiment in Glasgow’. Whole companies were formed from staff of Glasgow’s leading business firms and one was raised from the University of Glasgow, with the result that many of the rank and file were educated members of the middle class who thought themselves equal to, if not better than, any Regular formation. By way of contrast the same regiment’s 1/6^th Battalion drew its men from the industrial towns of Lanarkshire, and the 1/7^th Battalion had one company of total abstainers while the 1/8^th Battalion drew one of its companies from Glasgow’s breweries. The same was true on the other side of the country where the 1/5^th Royal Scots recruited heavily from George Heriot’s School while the 1/9^th Royal Scots had close links with George Watson’s College; as a result both battalions had many professionals in the ranks whereas the 1/7^th Royal Scots was composed of men who worked in the Leith docks or the East Lothian coalfield.16 Inevitably the Territorial soldiers had a variety of reasons for serving. One was a chance to wear uniform without facing the normal dangers of a soldier’s life. The opportunity to earn extra pay was also a factor as was the possibility of going on the summer camp, which many of the poorer soldiers regarded as a holiday. That was one of the considerations which persuaded Bill Hanlan, a coal miner at Newbattle, to try his luck with the 1/8^th Royal Scots which recruited in Midlothian and Peebles-shire: ‘When we got tae camp we got a shillin’ a day and our food and we got a uniform and we got sleepin’ in tents, because it was summer weather. It wis always in July, when the pit holidays wis on, that we went. We went for two weeks. And if ye had to stay over and above the two weeks ye got your pay that ye had at your work. Ye always got paid full up, ye never lost anything.’17

In July 1914 the 1/8^th Royal Scots were at Stobs Camp near Hawick where they heard their first rumours of war and Hanlan was one of the majority of his battalion who volunteered for additional service overseas, a practice that allowed Territorial battalions to cross over to France. Once introduced on 13 August the idea caught on and group pressure made it difficult for serving Territorials to refuse to serve overseas if the majority of the battalion volunteered. This was the case with the 10^th King’s Liverpool Regiment, or Liverpool Scottish, which produced a ‘miserable response’ when volunteers were requested but, as Colour-Quartermaster Robert Scott Macfie noted in a letter home, by 1 September more and more men were coming forward with the result that it was very difficult for individuals to stand aside and refuse:

I have one member who did not intend to volunteer for foreign service, but when appealed to agreed to go. He was an only son, and his parents heard from somebody else that he had volunteered and sent a long telegram forbidding him to go abroad. He came to me almost crying and withdrew his name. Then he wrote to his parents and said he felt like a coward and that he hoped they would not write to him for a long time. Last night we had another telegram from his mother. ‘It is we who are cowards, you must go’ – so he came to me again almost crying and said that it was the best news he had ever heard in his life. This is the sort of fellows we have in E Company and I’m very proud of him.¹⁸

Macfie was aged 46 and had rejoined his unit on mobilisation; the chairman of a sugar-refining firm he refused a commission and like many other Territorials was happy to remain in the ranks.

The Liverpool Scottish crossed over to France at the end of October by which time the Territorial Force had already been blooded. The first to see action was the London Scottish which had come into being in 1908 as the 14^th (County of London) Battalion, the London Regiment (London Scottish), and was manned by Scots living in the London area and along with the 13^th (Kensington) and 28^th (Artist’s Rifles) was one of the London Regiment’s smarter battalions, as much a social and sporting club as a military formation. They went into action on the Messines ridge on 30 October, attacking the heavily defended German position at Wytschaete during the First Battle of Ypres. The attack was made by 750 soldiers, with their pipers playing encouragement, but raw enthusiasm was no armour against the German machine-gunners: 394 London Scots were killed in the action. Just as bad, the battalion’s War Diary recorded that ‘the rifles Mark I were proved to be very bad and nearly 50% were useless for rapid firing owing to faulty magazines’. Amongst the survivors was Ronald Colman, who would later emerge as a film star in Hollywood.19 By the end of 1914 the London Scottish had been joined by seven other Scottish Territorial formations: 1/8^th Royal Scots, 1/5^th Cameronians, 1/9^th Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Highlanders), 1/5^th Black Watch, 1/4^th Seaforth Highlanders, 1/6^th Gordon Highlanders and the Liverpool Scottish. Amongst their number was Private James Marchbank from Dalkeith who was serving with the 1/8^th Royal Scots, and at the age of fourteen years and four months he was the youngest soldier recorded to be on active service in November 1914. The bulk of the Scottish Territorial Force deployment came in the spring of 1915 when the 51^st (Highland) Division moved over to France and the 52^nd (Lowland) Division took part in the operations in Gallipoli.

The creation of the New Armies and the gradual use of Territorial Force formations meant that the country’s line infantry regiments expanded massively during the course of the war and became huge organisations handling thousands of men. To take one example, The Royal Scots raised thirty-five battalions at various stages of the war and all played a role, from seeing active service to raising and training soldiers at home in Scotland, England or Ireland:

1^st Battalion (Regular Army): Western Front, Salonika, Russia

2^nd Battalion (Regular Army): Western Front

3^rd (Reserve) Battalion: Scotland, England, Ireland

1/4^th (Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force): Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine

2/4^th (Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland, Essex, Ireland

3/4^th (Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

4^th (Reserve) Battalion (Territorial Force: Scotland, Catterick

1/5^th (Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force): Gallipoli, Egypt, France

2/5^th (Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

3/5^th (Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

1/6^th Battalion (Territorial Force): coastal defence Scotland, North Africa, France

2/6^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

3/6^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

5/6^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Western Front (formed in 1916 from 1/5^th and 1/6^th Battalions)

1/7^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine

2/7^th Battalion (Territorial Force): coastal defence Scotland, England (Essex), Ireland

3/7^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

1/8^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Western Front

2/8^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland, England (Essex)

3/8^th Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland

1/9^th (Highlanders) Battalion (Territorial Force): Western Front

2/9^th (Highlanders) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland, England (Essex)

3/9^th (Highlanders) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland, England (Catterick)

1/10^th (Cyclist) Battalion (Territorial Force): Scotland, Ireland

2/10^th (Cyclist) Battalion (Territorial Force: coastal defence Scotland, Ireland, England (Aldershot), Russia

11^th Battalion (New Army): Western Front

12^th Battalion (New Army): Western Front

13^th Battalion (New Army): Western Front

14^th (Reserve) Battalion (New Army): Scotland

15^th (Cranston’s, 1^st City of Edinburgh) Battalion (New Army): Western Front

16^th (McCrae’s, 2^nd City of Edinburgh) Battalion (New Army): Western Front

17^th (Rosebery’s Bantams) Battalion (New Army): Western Front

18^th (Reserve) Battalion (New Army): England

19^th (Labour) Battalion (Mixed): Scotland, France

1^st Garrison Battalion (Mixed): Greece (Mudros), Egypt, Cyprus

2^nd Garrison Battalion (Mixed): Scotland20

The Royal Scots’ make-up and its experiences during the war were not untypical and from the regiment’s order of battle a pattern emerges. Both the Regular battalions saw action, as did the first battalion of each Territorial Force formation and all but the 14^th Battalion of the New Army formations. Two battalions (1^st and 2/10^th) served in Russia in 1919 during the operations against Bolshevik forces and the regiment fought on every battle-front except Mesopotamia and East and West Africa.

By the nature of the army’s prearranged strategy for going to war in Europe the first Scottish units to go into action were the ten Regular battalions of line infantry and foot guards regiments which crossed over to France with the first four (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 5^th) divisions of the BEF. Before leaving they had to be brought up to strength and all regiments had been in a state of heightened activity since 29 July when the War Office issued its orders for a ‘Precautionary Period’ prior to full mobilisation. As we have seen, for the 1^st Cameronians this meant an abrupt departure from their summer camp near Blair Atholl and a return to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow where they began receiving their reservists to bring them up to a full war establishment of 1,022 infantry soldiers. These were part of the 145,347 soldiers who had completed their service in the Regular Army but were still obliged to serve in the event of war and as one officer remarked they required ‘tuning up’ in the short period available. Only two reservists failed to make an appearance. Full mobilisation was completed on 8 August and five days later the battalion left Maryhill station in four special trains which took them to Southampton and then across the Channel to Le Havre.²¹ For the Scottish regiments based in England the position was more complicated as the reservists had to be summoned from all over the country to go to their regimental depots before being sent south by train. At the end of July the 2^nd Royal Scots were taking part in a field firing exercise when they were ordered to return to Plymouth in preparation for mobilisation. At the same time some 500 reservists were being processed by the regiment for service with the 2^nd Battalion. As one of their number remembered, the system worked with cool efficiency: on the morning of 5 August, having said his farewells to his wife and family, he left his home in Mussel-burgh by train. He was not at all surprised to find other Royal Scots joining him before they arrived at the regimental depot at Glencorse, near Penicuik:

I reported myself at the guardroom, and the sergeant, after taking all particulars, gave me a form and directed me to the hospital to go before the doctor. I wasn’t long in his hands, and being fit and sound, I was told to go over to the Orderly Room to pass before the Commanding Officer. At the same time I was to hand in my old discharge papers. That done the next move was towards the Keep. There I got my kit and equipment, all bundled into a blanket, and with these thrown over my shoulder and my rifle in hand, I marched to the drill shed, which was our temporary quarters, changed my clothes, and lo and behold, there I was, a soldier once again. The whole proceedings only took about an hour all told, as everything was ready. It was just a case of in one door a civilian and out the other a soldier.22

The anonymous diarist and his fellow reservists were then sent by train to Plymouth that same night. Earlier in the day he had told his wife that he might be home again in three weeks and if he had to stay at Glencorse she and the children would be able to visit him. In common with many others he thought that the fighting would be over by Christmas.

The BEF began moving across the Channel on Monday 10 August, sailing in cramped steamers to Boulogne, Rouen and Le Havre and receiving warm and often tumultuous welcomes from the local populations. Within eight days the War Office was able to report that the first 80,000 soldiers of the BEF had landed in France with their equipment and were preparing to deploy in their agreed sector around Maubeuge and Le Cateau just south of the Belgian border, prior to taking up their position on the left flank of the French Fifth Army. Travelling by train in forty wagons whole battalions were moved into the area with a speed and efficiency which said much for the pre-war planning even if it meant that the men travelled in extreme discomfort through the summer heat in packed railway wagons. On 14 August 2^nd Royal Scots arrived in Boulogne where the pipers responded to the welcome by playing ‘La Marseillaise’; on the following day it entrained for Landrecies where the men went into billets at Taisnieres. A routine of daily route marches and musketry practice was introduced to get the reservists into shape; this was much needed as most of them had not had any practice with the new Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle.23 At that stage of the operation the Scottish regiments were deployed as follows:

I Corps (Haig)

1^st Division, 1^st Brigade

1^st Scots Guards

1^st Black Watch

Positioned at Grand Reng, Rouveroy and Givry

2^nd Division, 5^th Brigade

2^nd Highland Light Infantry

Positioned at Paturages

II Corps (Smith-Dorrien)

3^rd Division, 8^th Brigade

2^nd Royal Scots

1^st Gordon Highlanders

Positioned at Nouvelles

9^th Brigade

1^st Royal Scots Fusiliers

Positioned at Frameries

5^th Division, 13^th Brigade

2^nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers

Positioned at Wasmes²⁴

In addition, two battalions were acting as lines of communication troops – 1^st Cameronians and 2^nd Argylls – but on 22 August these formed a new 19^th Brigade with 1^st Middlesex and 2^nd Royal Welch Fusiliers. (1^st Cameron Highlanders were deployed as lines of communication troops but joined 1^st Brigade in September to replace 2^nd Royal Munster Fusiliers.) All were in action by 23 August, the day after the first encounter between the British and German armies had taken place when C Squadron, 4^th Dragoon Guards, under the command of Major Tom Bridges, had attacked a patrol of German cavalrymen of the 4^th Cuirassiers and routed them near the village of Le Cateau. The first shot of the war was fired by Trooper Ted Thomas who was reported to have said that ‘it seemed to me to be more like rifle practice on Salisbury Plain’.

The role of the BEF had been agreed before the war but by the time it deployed in support of the French Fifth Army on the northern end of the French line the situation was changing day by day. The German attack into France and Belgium was based on the pre-war Schlieffen Plan, aimed at knocking out France quickly and decisively. When the attack began the French underestimated its strength and a counterattack was quickly repulsed. To make matters worse, on 22 August General Lanzerac’s Fifth Army was defeated on the Sambre with the loss of over 4,000 casualties. The setback forced him to withdraw, leaving the BEF isolated in its defensive positions on the Mons–Conde Canal with I Corps deployed to the east and II Corps stretched out along a twenty-mile front to the west. Bearing down on them from the north were six divisions of General Alexander von Kluck’s First Army. French agreed to hold the position for twenty-four hours and his men began digging-in for the expected onslaught, using the features of the mining area with its spoil heaps and buildings to enhance their defences.

The expected German assault began on the morning of 23 August and for the attacking enemy infantrymen it was a sobering experience. Trained to fire fifteen rifle rounds a minute the British regiments poured their fire into the advancing German lines with predictable results; the rate was so rapid and concentrated that the Germans believed they were facing machine-gun fire. The 75^th Regiment lost 381 men in their attack on the 2^nd Royal Scots’ positions on the Mons–Harmignies road while the defenders’ casualties were slight: one officer and one soldier wounded and four others reported missing.* By the end of the day the attack had faltered as exhausted and frightened Germans attempted to regroup, but, despite halting the assault, the BEF was obliged to retire and in the coming days its regiments were to receive increasingly high casualties. (The exact numbers are impossible to compute as War Diaries were written up later and information about casualties was understandably, given the circumstances, incomplete.) At one point in the retreat D Company 2^nd Royal Scots was reduced to one officer and seventeen soldiers and the battalion lost its commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel McMicking.²⁵

The Great Retreat, as it was known, towards the River Marne would allow the German Army to push on to the outskirts of Paris, and the BEF suffered further casualties on 26 August when II Corps turned to face the advancing Germans at Le Cateau some 30 miles from Mons. It was the British Army’s biggest set-piece battle since Waterloo and their 55,000 soldiers faced German opposition which numbered 140,000. Smith-Dorrien’s three divisions, supported by the Cavalry Division, were able to hold the line by dint of their superior firepower but by evening they were outnumbered and only a German failure to press home their advantage allowed II Corps to resume their retreat. Even so, the casualties were heavy – 7,812 killed – and gave a stark indication of worse things to come. Exhausted by the battle and the summer heat the BEF continued to pull back amidst rumours that the war was lost and that the French government had evacuated Paris for Bordeaux. It was a time of confusion when the fog of war seemed very real indeed as the battle-weary infantrymen continued to sleepwalk, as Captain R. V. Dolbey, the medical officer of 2^nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers, put it, through the French countryside: ‘In a dream we marched, unconscious of the towns we passed, the village we slept in; fatigued almost beyond endurance; dropping for sleep at the five-minute halt that was the reward for four miles covered. All companies, dozing as they marched, fell forward drunkenly on each other at the halts; sleeping men lay, as they halted, in the roads and were kicked uncomplainingly into wakefulness again.’26

For the men of The Kings Own Scottish Borderers, ahead lay the next battle on 13 September when they reached the River Aisne where the long retreat ended and the Allies were able to counterattack. During the battle the Scottish regiments won their first Victoria Crosses (VC) of the war. They were awarded to Private Ross Tollerton, 1^st Camerons, for his courage under fire when he carried a wounded officer to safety, despite being wounded himself, and to Private George Wilson, 2^nd Highland Light Infantry, who captured a German machine-gun position at Verneuil by charging it with sufficient resolution to give the impression that he was in command of a superior force. However, they were not the first Scots to win the medal, which is only awarded for ‘most conspicuous bravery, or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy’. The first Scottish VC had been won on 23 August when Lance-Corporal Charles Alfred Jarvis, 57^th Field Company, Royal Engineers, successfully demolished a bridge over the Mons–Conde Canal despite being under heavy enemy fire while he packed twenty-two slabs of gun cotton on to the girders to bring them down. A native of Angus (although born in Fraserburgh he was brought up in Carnoustie), Jarvis had enlisted in the Royal Engineers in 1899 and was one of the thousands of reservists who were called up from civilian life in 1914. Two months later he was badly wounded and invalided home. Captain James Jack, now a staff officer in the newly raised independent 19^th Brigade, won a different kind of award at Le Cateau where he was awarded the French Légion d’honneur for his gallantry under fire while helping to extricate two companies of the 2^nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

Not every incident resulted in heroism and honours. In the confusion of the retreat some battalions became isolated and were unaware of the orders coming down from brigade or divisional headquarters. That was the predicament facing 1^st Gordon Highlanders on the night of 25 August as 8^th Brigade covered the 3^rd Division’s retreat from Le Cateau. With the exception of A Company the battalion found themselves isolated at Caudry together with elements of 2^nd Royal Scots and 1^st Royal Irish as the rest of the brigade, unknown to them, withdrew. The Gordons’ commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel F. H. Neish, was disinclined to follow suit without receiving orders but his second-in-command urged him to see sense and order a withdrawal. The subordinate’s warning carried weight: Major & Brevet Colonel William Eagleson Gordon was not only superior in army rank but had been awarded the VC during the Boer War at Krugersdorp where his gallantry under fire had saved the British guns. A furious row broke out between the two men and Gordon exercised his right to take over command as the senior officer in charge of a mixed force of Gordons, Royal Scots and Royal Irish. The force started pulling out in the early hours of the morning but it was too late. On the outskirts of the village of Bertry the Germans were waiting and the mixed force was surrounded. In the confusion of night most of the men were either killed or taken prisoner and 500 survivors were forced to surrender. As a result the battalion almost ceased to exist and had to be reinforced but that did not stop other soldiers giving the Gordons a new name: ‘The Kaiser’s Bodyguard’. It was a poor jest. The men involved were in an impossible position and the most reasonable comment was left to the Official History, which dryly remarked that ‘the fortune of war was hard upon the 1/Gordons’, adding the solace that their ‘gallant resistance’ had saved others during the retreat.27 Unfortunately, because there was confusion over the actual surrender – Gordon wanted to continue fighting, as did other officers, but Neish gave the order to avoid unnecessary casualties – it was not the end of the matter. The battle was re-fought after the war in both an army board of investigation and a libel case instigated by Colonel Gordon (see Chapter 11).

The Aisne marked a new phase of the operations and signalled the end of a war of manoeuvre as both sides struggled to fill the gap between the Aisne and the Channel coast before it was exploited by the other. This was known as the ‘Race for the Sea’ and it ended in stalemate with the only potential gap in the battle-lines being the wastes of the Flanders plain, an unprepossessing region peppered with names which would soon become drearily familiar to the soldiers who fought over it: Ypres, Passchendale, Messines, Langemarck, Vimy, Arras. The style of the fighting was also changing as the armies faced one another in the fields of Flanders. Trenches were dug, barbed-wire obstacles were thrown up and field fortifications constructed; the German plan to encircle Paris had finally stalled in the mud of Flanders and the first great set-piece battles were about to be fought.

The town of Ypres was the fulcrum of the German attempt to break through and the first battle was fought there between 20 October and 22 November. For the British it was the first large-scale killing battle of the war. Athough the BEF stemmed the German attack it paid a heavy price: 8,631 officers and men had been killed, 37,264 were wounded and 40,342 were missing. Amongst the casualties was Captain Ortho Brooke, 2^nd Gordons, who was awarded the VC for leading a counter-charge which saved many lives. Corporal George Matheson, 1^st Camerons, now with 1^st Brigade, spoke for many of those who took part in the action when he said that while his regiment had made a name for itself in the course of the fighting, what they had experienced was ‘pure murder, not war’.28 During the fighting the 2^nd Royal Scots Fusiliers held their position south of the Menin Road and paid the price for their courage, the regimental historian noting tersely that their losses ‘need not be discussed for the battalion had simply disappeared’. Three months later they received their thanks in a message from their brigade commander that could have been replicated in many other regiments which had fought at Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne, the Aisne and Ypres:

The Germans came pouring through, and it soon became obvious that our position was untenable, and we were asked to take up a position further back. I tried to telephone [Lieutenant-] Colonel [A. G.] Baird Smith, but the wires had been cut by shrapnel. I sent two orderlies with a message to withdraw, but the message was never received. Both orderlies must have been killed or wounded.

Colonel Baird Smith, gallant soldier that he was, decided – and rightly – to hold his ground and the Royal Scots Fusiliers fought and fought until the Germans absolutely swarmed into the trenches.

I think it was absolutely splendid. Mind you, it was not a case of ‘Hands up’ or any nonsense of that sort; it was a fight to the finish. What more do you want? Why, even a German general came to Colonel Baird Smith afterwards and congratulated him and said he did not understand how his men had held out so long.²⁹

By then other overseas Regular Army battalions had arrived in France and had taken their places with the BEF in the front line. Soon they would be joined by the soldiers of the Territorial Force and the New Armies. Soon, too, their lines would form part of the pattern of trenches which ran from the Channel coast to the frontier with Switzerland as all hope of attacking vulnerable flanks disappeared. When 1914 drew to an end the Western Front, as it would be known, was quiet as the three armies took stock of the situation, regrouped and restocked their depleted supplies of men, stores and ammunition. At home in Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, families were coming to terms with the fact that many of the men who marched away so blithely in the late summer would not be coming home in the near future.

One last rite remained. In common with many other frontline troops, Scottish regiments took part in the ‘Christmas Truce’, a brief period over Christmas when hostilities ceased in many sectors of the Western Front as soldiers from both sides put down their arms and fraternised with the enemy in no-man’s-land, the area between their trenches. Souvenirs, cap badges and luxuries such as cigars and whisky were exchanged as men celebrated their Saviour’s birth after trying their best to kill each other. The War Diary of the 1^st Scots Guards recorded that one of their men had met a German on patrol who ‘was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them they would not fire at us’.30 Impromptu games of football were played, one of which took place in the Frelinghien-Houpline sector and involved a battalion of Seaforth Highlanders playing against the 113^th Royal Saxon Regiment. The Germans won 3–2 but everyone involved, including the German Lieutenant Johannes Niemann who recorded the incident, agreed it was an opportunity to savour an unexpected few hours of peace:

The Scots marked their goal mouth with their strange caps and we did the same with ours. It was far from easy to play on the frozen ground, but we continued, keeping rigorously to the rules, despite the fact that it lasted an hour and that we had no referee. A great many of the passes went wide, but all the amateur footballers, although they must have been very tired, played with huge enthusiasm. Us Germans really roared when a gust of wind revealed that the Scots wore no drawers under their kilts – and hooted and whistled every time they caught an impudent glimpse of one posterior belonging to one of ‘yesterday’s enemies’.31

It could not last. Although the truce lasted for up to a week in some sectors and was welcomed by the troops – Private Bill Hanlan, 1/8^th Royal Scots met two German soldiers who had worked in a footwear shop in Edinburgh – the British high command was determined that it should be the only instance of that kind of behaviour. From his headquarters at St Omer French issued strict orders to prevent a recurrence of fraternisation and warned that local commanders would be punished if there was any slackening of offensive spirit. As the year ended the BEF, Britain’s small professional army, counted the cost of five months of fighting and estimated that its losses amounted to 89,969 casualties, killed, wounded or missing. This was almost half its original number of professional Regular soldiers and time-expired volunteers; of the 84 battalions which had taken part in the fighting to date only nine had more than 300 fit men on their strength.³² Now it would be the turn of Kitchener’s New Armies.

 

* On the previous day the regiment had lost its first casualty. Lieutenant G. M. Thompson, on secondment to the Gold Coast Regiment, was killed in action leading a company of Senegalese tirailleurs against German forces on the Chra river north of Nuatja in the German protectorate of Togoland. He was also the British Army’s first officer casualty.