1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [45]
But they were not all so experienced as the Terriers who had been rushed to France in the early days. When war broke out not many Territorial battalions were up to full strength and some in country districts had been nowhere near it. In the first weeks of the war they had been forced to enrol new volunteers to make up their numbers and so far as the new recruits were concerned the Territorials were a popular choice. For one thing they were issued with uniforms and rifles right away and for months now they had been swanking over their khaki-less comrades of Kitchener’s Mob in cloth caps and civilian clothes. The trouble was that as many as two in ten of the Territorials were as raw and inexperienced as the masses that flooded into the ranks of Kitchener’s New Armies. In the early days, this had caused difficulties in many Territorial battalions, not least in the 6th Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment. They still remembered one embarrassing incident which, although amusing in retrospect, had not impressed the Colonel at the time.
It had been unfortunate for the Battalion that when the Commander of the North Midland Brigade arrived unexpectedly to confer with Lieutenant-Colonel Waterhouse he was not greeted with the ‘military compliments’ which a full colonel of the regular army was entitled to receive. The soldier enjoying the sun outside the guard-room merely glanced at him with no apparent interest. It was 12 August, the ‘guard-room’ was the gate-house of a brewery in Burton-on-Trent, where the South Staffs had been ordered to concentrate, and ten days ago the soldier leaning against the wall had been a tram-driver. Today, by some fluke of authority, he had been told off for guard-duty, and he had only the haziest notion of what this entailed. He couldn’t recognise a Brigadier when he saw one and, since the sentry was correctly attired in the uniform of a Territorial, Colonel Bromilow did not recognise a raw recruit. Turn out the Guard!’ he snapped. The only response was, ‘Eh?’ ‘Where is the Guard?’ ‘I don’t know.’
The Colonel twigged at once and changed his approach. ‘Where are the other fellows?’ The sentry jerked his head at the guard-room ‘In there.’ Bromilow made for the door but the sentry had gleaned from somewhere that the purpose of a sentry was to guard something which might well be the guard-room itself, and he sprang to life bellowing, ‘‘ERE YOU! You can’t go in there!’ He even went so far as to shove his superior officer out of the way.
Colonel Bromilow was an old soldier. It was thirty years since he had been commissioned into his parent regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He had fought in the South African War at the battle of Ladysmith and been in the legendary charge of the Irish Brigade at Colenso. He had served in Egypt, in India, in the Sudan. And he knew when he was beaten. He turned on his heel and strode off to exchange a few curt words with Lieutenant-Colonel Waterhouse. Next day, for the benefit of newcomers, the regulations governing the duties of the guard were reproduced in Battalion Orders, with the rider that platoon officers must see to it that newly enlisted men were trained to carry them out.
Most Territorial officers in the 6th South Staffs had at least one or two years’ service, but this did not mean that they encountered no difficulties. They were perfectly familiar with duties of Orderly Officer of the day but it was natural that in the course of afternoon or evening drills they had never been called upon to perform the routine task of ‘inspecting men’s dinners’, and it had seldom fallen to their lot during annual camps. ‘Inspecting dinners’ was simply a matter of visiting the cookhouse while the food was being prepared and going to the mess halls when the meal had been served to ask ‘Any complaints?’ It was at the cookhouse that Lieutenant Langley had come to grief, for when the sergeant-cook ordered the lid of a huge dixie to be lifted for his inspection, he realised that he had not the faintest idea what he was supposed to do next. He peered into the bubbling