Kitcheners Army: The Full Story of a Great Achievement

Kitchener's Army And The Territorial Forces by Edgar Wallace

THE FULL STORY OF A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born on the 1st April 1875 in Greenwich, London.  Leaving school at 12 because of truancy, by the age of fifteen he had experience; selling newspapers, as a worker in a rubber factory, as a shoe shop assistant, as a milk delivery boy and as a ship’s cook.

By 1894 he was engaged but broke it off to join the Infantry being posted to South Africa. He also changed his name to Edgar Wallace which he took from Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur.

In Cape Town in 1898 he met Rudyard Kipling and was inspired to begin writing. His first collection of ballads, The Mission that Failed! was enough of a success that in 1899 he paid his way out of the armed forces in order to turn to writing full time.

By 1904 he had completed his first thriller, The Four Just Men. Since nobody would publish it he resorted to setting up his own publishing company which he called Tallis Press.

In 1911 his Congolese stories were published in a collection called Sanders of the River, which became a bestseller. He also started his own racing papers, Bibury’s and R. E. Walton’s Weekly, eventually buying his own racehorses and losing thousands gambling.  A life of exceptionally high income was also mirrored with exceptionally large spending and debts.

Wallace now began to take his career as a fiction writer more seriously, signing with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921. He was marketed as the ‘King of Thrillers’ and they gave him the trademark image of a trilby, a cigarette holder and a yellow Rolls Royce. He was truly prolific, capable not only of producing a 70,000 word novel in three days but of doing three novels in a row in such a manner. It was in, estimating that by 1928 one in four books being read was written by Wallace, for alongside his famous thrillers he wrote variously in other genres, including science fiction, non-fiction accounts of WWI which amounted to ten volumes and screen plays. Eventually he would reach the remarkable total of 170 novels, 18 stage plays and 957 short stories.

Wallace became chairman of the Press Club which to this day holds an annual Edgar Wallace Award, rewarding ‘excellence in writing’.

Diagnosed with diabetes his health deteriorated and he soon entered a coma and died of his condition and double pneumonia on the 7th of February 1932 in North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills. He was buried near his home in England at Chalklands, Bourne End, in Buckinghamshire.

Index Of Contents

The Reveille

Introduction

The Men Of The First Army

The Recruit's First Days In The New Army

The Recruit's Progress Towards Efficiency

The Artilleryman In The Making—Horsemanship And Gunnery—With The Engineers

The Training Of The R.A.M.C. Recruits—Army Service Corps—The Naval Brigade

How The Territorials Answered The Call—Special Regiments—The Training Of The New Officers

Edgar Wallace – A Short Biography

Edgar Wallace – A Concise Bibliography

THE REVEILLE

Hark! I hear the tramp of thousand!

And of armed men the hum;

Lo! a nation's hosts have gathered

Round the quick alarming drum

Saying, "Come,

Freemen, come!

Ere your heritage be wasted," said the quick alarming drum.

"Let me of my heart take counsel:

War is not of Life the sum;

Who shall stay and reap the harvest

When the autumn days shall come?"

But the drum

Echoed, "Come!

Death shall reap the braver harvest," said the solemn-sounding drum.

"What if, 'mid the battle's thunder.

Whistling shot and bursting bomb,

When my brothers fall around me,

Should my heart grow cold and numb?"

But the drum

Answered "Come!

Better there in death united than in life a recreant—come!"

Thus they answered hoping, fearing,

Some in faith, and doubting some.

Till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming

Said, My chosen people, come!

Then the drum,

Lo! was dumb.

For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, Lord, we come!

—Bret Harte

INTRODUCTION

KITCHENER'S ARMY! a phrase which may well stand for a hundred years, and, indeed, may stand for all time as a sign and symbol of British determination to rise to a great occasion and to supply the needs of a great emergency. It is not my task here to discuss the military situation as it might have been, or to offer arguments for or against national service, nor yet to say whether the recruitment of the first few months of the war disposes of or makes inevitable a system of compulsory service. The purpose of this volume is to place on record in a permanent form a chapter of Britain's history of which the people of all ages who call these islands their home may indeed be proud.

The outbreak of war found all the nations concerned unprepared save one. Germany alone, which had been preparing, scheming, and planning for the day on which it would be at war, was ready in every department to the last button on the last service tunic. Germany, with huge reserves of men and stores and warlike material, swept resistlessly down through Belgium and secured for herself a momentary and, as it was thought at the time, an unchallengeable advantage. Russia was not ready, France was not ready, and most certainly Great Britain was not ready to deal with the huge numbers and the great masses which were instantly directed against the Allies.

At the time when the British Army was mobilising in England, and when Russia had no more than 300,000 men on the scene of action, Germany had concentrated forty-four Army Corps, divided into nine Armies, the smallest of which, under General von Deimling, was charged with the task of keeping strictly on the defensive behind the Vosges. The rest of this enormous mass was concentrated between Aix-la-Chapelle and Strasburg, and the eight Armies which were equipped and in the field days, indeed weeks, in advance of some of the Allies were, reading from right to left (that is to say, from north to south), the first army under von Kluck, the second under von Buelow, the third under von Hausen, the fourth under the Duke of Wurtemburg, the fifth under the Crown Prince of Prussia, the sixth under the Crown Prince of Bavaria, the seventh under von Heeringen, and the eighth army, which was merely temporarily formed, was known as the Army of the Meuse and was under von Emmich.

Von Emmich's Army was immediately ready for service the moment war was declared, and stationed, as it had been before the outbreak, a short distance from the Belgian frontier, it had during the later days of July been brought up to war strength by the secret additions of reserves, who had been personally notified and had been charged to keep their notification to themselves.

The British Army Expeditionary Force, which immediately mobilised on the outbreak of war, was roughly 160,000 officers and men; but only a very small proportion of these was ready for war. When the Germans swept down through Belgium they found themselves opposed at Mons to two Army Corps only (80,000 men), which later at Le Cateau, were reinforced by a division, and were still further augmented in the early part of September by another Army Corps. Large as was this force from the point of view of a nation which has never engaged more than 160,000 men in any one battle formation since the wars of the Middle Ages, it was insignificant by the side of the great armies which were gathering on the Continent. A little table showing the comparative sizes of the armies is instructive.

Nation    Peace Footing War Footing No. of Guns

Austria    500,000 2,200,000 2,500

France (incl. Algerian Troops) 790,000 4,000,000 4,200

Great Britain   234,000 380,000 1,000

Germany   850,000 6,000,000 5,500

Russia    1,700,000 7,000,000 6,000

As will be seen by the above table, the only advantage—and it was merely a relative advantage—which Great Britain possessed was the larger proportion of guns she had to the number of men under arms, but this advantage is neutralised by the fact that the Indian Native Army, which is not included in this table, possess no guns at all, and depend for their artillery upon the British Army. So whilst at first it seems that we have one gun to every 380 men, if we put in the 200,000 Indian native troops serving, the proportion is reduced to one in 580.

It may be said, and, indeed, has been said, that Great Britain, from the insularity of her position and the protection which her huge Navy and her narrow seas afford her, is not so greatly in need of an Army as was either of her great rivals, who have huge frontier lines to protect and must needs depend upon seas of armed humanity to protect their great industrial districts and their strategic positions.

This was largely true; but equally true was it that great armies have functions to fulfil other than the actual winning of battles. It was evident from the beginning that this war could only end when the whole of the map of Europe had been changed, when frontiers had been readjusted and territories acquired or lost by the belligerent Powers, and it was just as evident that, great as might be the influence which a naval Power might exercise in the course of the war, the settlement and the terms of peace would be dictated by the possessors of large land forces. It was evident, too, from the many signs which Germany gave us that she had aimed for many years to secure a world domination, and to impose her will upon the peoples of the earth. Necessarily, Great Britain, of all the countries in the world, stood in the way of her ambitious scheme, and, as inevitably, Germany had planned the overthrow of this country. Britain, however, could only be overthrown by a sequence of circumstances. The first was that she should not intrude herself in this war, but that she should leave Germany and Austria to finish their great antagonists, and establish themselves in Belgium and upon the North Sea, so that at the triumphant end of the war Germany should have a naval base from which she could in course of time operate against her great sea rival. It was evident, therefore, that to make her Navy doubly effective, it was necessary to destroy the enemy's land power.

 Events did not turn out as Germany anticipated; and though, by her lightning mobilisation and the rapidity of her march past, she succeeded in obtaining initial successes and those with great loss she quickly found her advantages nullified by new and menacing forces which were rapidly coming into existence against her. Undoubtedly the greatest of these forces was the creation in Britain of a most unexpected Army. It denotes the machine-made character of German thought that our enemy did not believe in the existence of that Army, palpable as it was, until he received evidence of its excellence and its numbers on the field of battle.

I have related all the circumstances which were responsible for the beginning of Kitchener's Army, and it only remains to add one very important fact, that the reader may appreciate to the full, the extraordinary accomplishment of those entrusted with the conduct of Great Britain's military affairs. To say that Great Britain was unprepared for this great war is to say that, whilst she was ready to believe that Germany, France, Russia, and Austria would someday or other be involved in a world conflict, she did not anticipate that she would be called upon to enter that field, or be asked or expected to organise great military forces to combat Prussian militarism upon land. She did not, indeed, realise that such a conflict could not be waged without Britain's power and Britain's place amongst the Powers being challenged, not only by one section of the belligerents, but by all.

I have referred to the unreadiness of Great Britain to participate in so huge a conflict as that which raged through Europe in the summer and autumn of 1914, and by that I do not mean that our men were ill-trained or ill-equipped. All that is meant is that, while we had the clothing and equipment, arms and ammunition, guns and horses to furnish the British Army and its reserves, we had not supplies for larger forces than the number set down as Britain's normal war strength.

The task the Government set itself was a formidable, nay, a staggering one. It was in the first place to take 500,000 raw men from the streets, from the clubs, from the fields, from the villages, towns, and cities of Great Britain, and not only to train them in the art of war in the shortest space of time that it is possible to train soldiers, but also to prepare the equipment, the arms, and the munitions and stores of war. And so Kitchener's Army came into existence with a rush. It came into existence in the crowded streets of the great cities, in the peaceful villages up and down England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, where men came forth from office, warehouse, and factory, or tramped from their farms and their cottages to the nearest recruiting office; it came into existence on the decks of homeward bound steamers, where little côteries of young men, eager and enthusiastic, returning to their Motherland to give their services, had already joined themselves into parties for enlistment in certain regiments.

I. THE MEN OF THE FIRST ARMY

An observer watching the animated scene before one of the greatest recruiting centres of London in the early part of August might have witnessed a strange sight—a policeman grasping firmly the arm of a flushed and smiling young man, and leading him gently down the road, past his jeering companions to a point a quarter of a mile from the place whence he had been taken. For this young man had, with great temerity, dared to insinuate himself at the wrong end of the long queue which was waiting its turn to parade before the medical officer and to be examined that its fitness for army service might be certified. This young man could complain, as he did, that he had already been waiting for six hours, that he had journeyed from Canada at the first hint of war, and that he was most anxious to begin working at his new profession as soon as it was possible; but the unanswerable retort was that he was only one of thousands, and that the recruiting authorities were quite unable to cope with the rush of men which had followed the demand of Lord Kitchener and the Prime Minister for the first 100,000 men. The machinery of the peacetime recruiting office was not designed to pass thousands of men a day. To pass, as it did, a larger number of recruits for the Army in twenty-four hours than that particular office had passed in a year in normal times was an