With Manchesters in the East Part 1

With Manchesters in the East.

by Gerald B. Hurst.

NOTE

During the pa.s.sage of this book through the press, the Author has been engaged overseas on active service, and has been unable to devote the necessary attention to the correction of the proofs, etc. Due allowance must therefore be made for such errors as have crept into the pages.

The Publishers have felt obliged to delete the numbers of the Territorial Battalions mentioned in the book, a fact which accounts for occasional vagueness in terminology.

CHAPTER I

EASTWARD HO!

Our Battalion of the Manchesters was typical of the old Territorial Force, whose memory has already faded in the glory of the greater Army created during the War, but whose services in the period between the retreat from Mons and the coming into action of "Kitchener's Men" claim national grat.i.tude.

Their earlier history hardly emerges from parochialism. Founded in 1859 and recruited mainly from the southerly suburbs of Manchester, the Battalion lived through the common vicissitudes of the English Volunteer unit. It knew the ridicule and disparagement of the hypercritical and cosmopolitan, the too easy praise of the hurried inspecting general, the enthusiasm of the camp fire, the chill of the wet afternoon on a wintry rifle range at Crowden. The South African War gave many a chance of active service, and infused more serious and systematic training in the routine of the yearly Whitsuntide camps. At that time everything depended on the Regular officer who acted as adjutant, and officers and men owed much to the inspiring energy of Captain (now Colonel) W.P.E.

Newbigging, C.M.G., D.S.O., of the Manchesters, whose adjutancy (1902-1907) meant a great step in their efficiency. The letter "Q,"

which signifies success in all examinations required by the War Office, figured in the Army List after most of our officers' names during this vivid and strenuous phase. For the rest, the pre-War period turned mainly on the fortnightly camps and occasional Regimental exercises.

Salisbury Plain, the Isle of Man, Aldershot and a few North Country areas are full of memories of manoeuvre and recreation in a peaceful age. Regimental exercises filled weekends in Ches.h.i.+re or the West Riding.

Volunteering served many purposes in England. It kept alive in luxurious times a sense of discipline and a cultivation of endurance. Its comrades.h.i.+p brought cla.s.ses together so closely that the easy relations.h.i.+p between officers and men in the 1st line Territorial unit of 1914-1915 was the despair of the more crusted Regular martinet. Its joyous amateurism freed it from every trace of the mental servitude which is the curse of militarism, and stimulated initiative and individuality. Long before the War, most Territorials believed in universal training, not so much on account of the German peril, which to too many Englishmen seemed a mere delusion, as on account of its social value. It is pleasant to remember how solidly Lord Roberts received local Territorial support when he made the most prophetic of all his speeches in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on the 22nd October 1912.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Jerome, Southport._

Lieutenant-Colonel H.E. GRESHAM.]

Lord Haldane's conversion of the Volunteers into the Territorial Force of 1907 meant little change in the internal economy or in the personnel of this Battalion. Its mounted infantry company, 140 strong, and its cyclists were lost in the interest of uniformity. Nevertheless, the change made us better fitted for war by incorporating us in the larger Divisional organisation essential in European war. Volunteer units supplied select companies for South Africa in 1899 and 1900. The East Lancas.h.i.+re Territorial Division was ready to take the field _en bloc_ against the Germans in 1914.

The story to be told in these pages is so largely that of one battalion that a word can be said of its leaders in August, 1914, without making any claim to special pre-eminence, for our old and honourable rivalries with other local battalions faded long ago in mutual confidence.

Lieutenant-Colonel H.E. Gresham, who had commanded since 1912, was an ideal C.O.--a Territorial of long service and sound judgment, a fine shot, and in civil life a distinguished engineer. In Major J.H.

Staveacre, the junior Major, we had an incomparable enthusiast, with a zest for every kind of sport, a happy gift of managing men and an almost professional apt.i.tude for arms which had been enriched by his experiences in the Boer War. Captain P.H. Creagh of the Leicesters.h.i.+re Regiment was a fine adjutant, whose ability and character were to win him recognition in wider fields. His management of our mobilisation was beyond praise. The quartermaster, Major James Scott, was an old Manchester Regiment man, with a record of good work at Ladysmith and Elandslaagte. Of the company officers and N.C.O.'s, there is no need to add here to the tribute which will be theirs in any detailed history of Gallipoli. Nothing was more characteristic than their readiness to volunteer for foreign service as soon as we mobilised--long before the immensity of the War was understood, and considerably before the day of the lurid poster and the recruiting meeting.

The Manchester Territorial Infantry Brigade was embodied on the 4th August 1914, and on the 20th marched out through Rochdale to a camp on the Littleborough moors near Hollingworth Lake, where they were asked to offer themselves for service abroad. Twenty-six officers and 808 men of our Battalion (roughly, 90 per cent. of our strength) volunteered. A wise pledge, afterwards unavoidably broken, was given by the authorities that no man should be transferred from his own unit against his will.

We dropped down the Channel on the evening of the 10th September 1914 in a convoy of fourteen transports and one ammunition s.h.i.+p, with H.M.S.

_Minerva_ as escort--the first Territorial Division that ever left England on active service. We sailed in a s.h.i.+p with a few East Lancas.h.i.+re details and the Headquarters Staff of the Brigade. General Noel Lee, the Brigadier, was an old Manchester Territorial officer, who understood the Territorial spirit to a nicety, and his death from wounds received in the battle of the 4th June 1915 was our irreparable loss.

The Brigade Major was a tower of strength when on Gallipoli.

Of our Battalion, who enjoyed during those s.h.i.+ning autumn days their first vision of Gibraltar "grand and grey," with its covey of German prizes in harbour, and of the Mediterranean, then free of the submarine, and who half feared that the War would be over while they were still buried in the African desert, only a small number survive unscathed.

Many sleep amid the cliffs and nullahs of Gallipoli.

The virtues and capacities of these my comrades will always haunt my imagination. Their psychology was extraordinarily interesting. They were unlike the Regulars, who preceded them in the field, and to some extent unlike the New Army, which gathered in their wake.

They had very little of the professional soldier. Only 45 among them had ever served in the Regular Army. Their homes and callings and the light amus.e.m.e.nts of a great city filled their minds in the same way as the Regimental tradition and routine filled those of the old British Regular Army. With a few exceptions, the feeling of duty was a far stronger motive to their soldiering than any love of adventure. These Manchester men had little of the Crusader or Elizabethan but his valour. They were, in fact, almost arrogantly civilian, coming from a country which had dared ineptly to look down on its defenders. The Northerner is not an enthusiast by nature. His politics are usually limited to concrete questions of work and wages, prices and tariffs, and he knows no history. The Germans in August, 1914, were still "Lancas.h.i.+re's best customers"--not a warlike race bent on winning world-empire by blood and iron. The social traditions of the middle-cla.s.s urban population, from which the Territorials were drawn, had never fostered the military spirit, nor the power to recognise and understand that spirit in others.

In such circ.u.mstances the sober zeal with which middle-aged sergeants forsook their families and businesses at the very outset of the War, without a moment's hesitation, is a signal proof of their character. No men were ever greater lovers of peace. Some philosophers have seen or tried to see in the War a judgment on the luxury and frivolity of pre-War England, on her neglect of defence, and her absorption in opulence. Were this the case, it would be ironical to reflect how the North Country homes, first and most cruelly scourged by the War, were homes to which the so-called "sins of society" were least known and most repugnant, and where military training had been long pursued in the teeth of public ridicule and at the sacrifice of leisure. Long afterwards the father of a very talented private (Arthur Powell), who was killed in Turkey, wrote of his son: "We never intended him for the rude alarums of war, but his sense of duty and the horrors of Belgium fired his imagination, so that with hundreds of thousands of high-spirited young Englishmen, he placed himself in his country's service." This cast of thought is uncommon in the ranks of a Regular army.

Officers and N.C.O.'s were obviously and admittedly amateurs, and never acquired the distinctive dash of the old Army. Soldiering was not their profession. Yet Territorials like the Manchesters possessed a range of talent in many ways beyond the normal standard of the Army. They had the manual arts and crafts of the industrial North. These volunteers were in civil life builders and joiners; railwaymen, tramwaymen, engineers; clerks, shorthand-writers, draughtsmen, warehous.e.m.e.n, packers; carters and fitters; telephonists, chemists. When half of C Company was suddenly converted into the British Camel Corps at Khartum it was discovered to contain the camel-keeper of Bostock's menagerie. We found piano-tuners for the Sirdar's Palace, gardeners for the Barrack plantations, and in later days expert mechanics for anti-aircraft gunnery. Skilled clerks like Sergeants J.C. Jones and Beaumont were marked out by Nature for the orderly room. Many men well qualified to hold commissions served in the ranks and died before the nation recognised their quality. Lastly, we could turn out more barristers than all the other East Lancas.h.i.+re units put together. It would be hard to imagine better officers than our three ex-Juniors of the Northern Circuit--N. H.P. Whitley, J.H. Thorpe and Hans Hamilton.

With the New Army, that was destined to do so much to save the cause of civilisation, our men had more in common than with the Regulars. In 1914, however, we had inevitably a less thorough training in technique than that which fell to their lot in the ensuing years. Only a few of our officers had gone the round of "schools of instruction" and "courses." We had fewer specialists, and our equipment was probably inferior. During all our Eastern experiences we used the long rifle only. It was, however, a real advantage to have had nearly sixty years'

record as a Volunteer unit behind us, with all sorts of Regimental traditions, which lie at the roots of comrades.h.i.+p and ensure happy relations between officers and men. Another distinctive virtue of the Territorial system about Manchester was that all ranks, from Brigadier-General to private, came from one neighbourhood, and viewed life from much the same angle. They ran to type, and their interest in soldiering, obviously spontaneous in the first instance, had been fostered by common experiences in time of peace.

We saw Malta in the far distance on the evening of the 21st September, and next day, in mid-afternoon, our convoy unexpectedly met an Indian Division on its way from Bombay to Ma.r.s.eilles. Their transports, mainly British Indian liners, pa.s.sed ours and exchanged escorts with us, thrilling the least imaginative with pride in the Empire and a sense of the illimitable issues at stake in Europe. We had left England ringing with the legendary pa.s.sage of the Russians from Archangel, the snow still clinging to their furs, just as the British Army in Spain, in 1812, had been cheered by a similar mirage of Russians streaming to their aid through Corunna. The first paper that we read on reaching Egypt announced in giant headlines the arrival of 250,000 no less shadowy j.a.panese at Antwerp. But the Indians were real. Their appearance was a true touch of the World War and they reached the firing line in Flanders on the 19th October.

We eventually arrived at Alexandria on the 25th September 1914. B Company, under Captain (afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel) J.N. Brown, was dropped here, half of it under Captain E. Townson going on to Cyprus, which they garrisoned until the eve of its annexation. Eventually the whole Company, then under Captain (afterwards Major) D. Nelson, was reunited to the rest of the Battalion when it left for the Dardanelles.

The remaining part of the Division also disembarked at Alexandria, in order to relieve the Regular garrisons of Alexandria and Cairo. The Battalion pa.s.sed on to Port Said. As we neared the harbour, our men hailed watchers on the quay for the latest news. Antwerp was then at its last gasp, and the _Aboukir_, _Hague_ and _Cressy_ had been torpedoed in the North Sea. The first cry from the s.h.i.+p was "How is City getting on?" League football was still the first interest of Young England in the second month of the Great War.

We sailed down the Ca.n.a.l on a scorching Sunday morning to Suez and the Red Sea. A few Indians guarded its banks. Onward through the misty heat, under escort of a destroyer, with a wind blowing hot from Arabia, to Port Sudan, where we put in at 11 A.M. on the 30th September. The temperature was 105 F. in the shade. Here half of C Company, under Captain T.W. Savatard (afterwards killed on Gallipoli) were left to garrison and construct defences for the place. Once a desolate coral reef, it is now a great harbour with the promise of a greater future.

This first night of Africa we rowed happily across its starlit lagoon in the full glamour of the East to enjoy British hospitality.

Next morning we started, with Major Boyle of the Egyptian Army Staff as a "cicerone," on the long railway track from the sea to Atbara and Khartum, past scattered villages peopled by staring Fuzzy Wuzzies with erect and luxuriant black hair, and across hot stretches of desert and rock. At a quarter past eleven on the morning of the 2nd October 1914 we arrived at Khartum North, where we detrained and were met by the Sirdar, General Sir Reginald Wingate, then Governor-General of the Sudan, and his Staff. We marched over the Blue Nile Bridge to the s.p.a.cious British barracks, the only spot in the Sudan where the Union Jack flies unaccompanied by the flag of Egypt, and relieved the Suffolk Regiment.

In the afternoon our band played them out of the cantonment, and we cheered them on the first stage of their long journey to the blood-stained battle-fields of Flanders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARRIVAL AT KHARTUM, 2nd OCTOBER 1914.]

CHAPTER II

THE SUDAN

The tasks allotted to the Battalion between October, 1914, and April, 1915, while garrisoning the Sudan were of great variety. With the gunners at Khartum Fort, they const.i.tuted part of the British force then in the country, of which Colonel Gresham was commander. The detachment left at Port Sudan organised its defences, ran an armoured train, and patrolled the Red Sea in the _Enterprise_. One group, under Captain R.V.

Rylands (afterwards killed on Gallipoli), guarded the railway works at Atbara. Another under Captain B. Norbury occupied the hill station of Sinkat. Important censors.h.i.+p work at Wadi Halfa was entrusted to Captain J.H. Thorpe, and, when he was invalided, to Lieutenant L. Dudley, who fell later in action on Gallipoli. At Khartum a half company, under Captain C. Norbury, was on arrival transformed immediately into the British Camel Corps.

For some little time after our coming the normal social and sporting life of the small British colony at Khartum was hardly ruffled by the storm raging in Europe, and we gratefully enjoyed its warm-hearted hospitality. At the beginning of November war broke out between Great Britain and Turkey, and the loyalty of the Sudanese was put to the test.

The Germans built upon the probability of a Jihad or Holy War, and never dreamed that the handful of young Englishmen who administered the country under the Sirdar's guidance could have won its loyalty against all comers. When the Sirdar announced in English and Arabic the news of the Porte's entry into the War one s.h.i.+ning Sunday morning in early November, to a large gathering of Egyptian and Sudanese officers and dignitaries at the Palace, their zealous unanimity was impressive.

Hundreds of native notables contributed generously to British Red Cross funds. Sheikhs of the Red Sea Province, who had once been dervish partisans, showed me with glowing pride when at Port Sudan silver medallions with King George's likeness, given by him to them on his visit to Sinkat.

Few pages of history are more wonderful than that which records the conversion of the chaotic and down-trodden Sudan of 1898 into the peaceful and prosperous Sudan of to-day. Scepticism as to the uses of Empire, which too often beset the Manchester man at home before the War, was dissipated by seeing what Anglo-Egyptian sovereignty and British character and industry have achieved in a land so long tormented by slave-traders and despots. The happy black boys of Gordon College go to school with books under their arms, and play football, coached by Old Blues and cheered by enthusiastic comrades. On the 30th October (Kurban Bairam day) the Manchesters saw the Sirdar bestow gaily coloured robes of honour on deserving chiefs. Everywhere were signs of economic progress. The cotton-growing plantations on the Gezira Plain, the ginning factory at Wad Medani, the numerous irrigation and public health works, the research laboratories of Gordon College, the industries of Khartum North and of Atbara, all bore the distinctive hall-mark of British Imperialism.

The magic of the British name in the Sudan seemed to us to rest not only on the art of government but on the great memories of Gordon and Kitchener and the abiding influence of General Wingate's personality.

The Gordon statue at Khartum is almost a shrine. The Sudan itself is Lord Kitchener's monument. During our life there we were daily witnesses of General Wingate's tact, power and example. In all Mohammedan areas of the Sudan, Great Britain is wisely defender of the faith, and Islam is wisely with Britain. On the 19th November we were entertained at the Egyptian Army Officers' Club on the occasion of the Mohammedan New Year.

On the 27th January 1915 the Prophet's birthday was celebrated with rapturous pageantry, and the Sirdar and Lady Wingate paid most impressive visits to the pavilions set up by the princ.i.p.al sheikhs and notables in front of the mosques at Khartum and Omdurman, while huge crowds of religious enthusiasts beat tom-toms and sang outside. We saw the Sirdar reviewing his Egyptian and Sudanese troops at Khartum, formally inspecting the schools, hospitals, barracks and prisons around Port Sudan, decorating veterans with medals, and addressing in every native dialect the political and religious leaders of the people. We found that no men appreciated the care and skill of the Red Sea Province hospital more warmly than Arabs from the then Turkish territory of Jiddah.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Elliot & Fry Ltd._

General Sir F.R. WINGATE, G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G., G.B.E., D.S.O.

Honorary Colonel of the Battalion.]