MAJOR-GENERAL T. S. BALDOCK, C.B. The West Riding Territorials in the Great War With a Foreword by Field-Marshal Earl Haig, O.M., K.T., G.C.B., G.C.V.O. BY LAURIE MAGNUS Fully Illustrated LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., Ltd. , BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74, CARTER LANE, E.C. 1920 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BEN JOHNSON AND CO., LTD., YORK, ENGLAND....

When all Divisions, Regular, Territorial and New Army, from whatever part of Great Britain or quarter of the Empire they were drawn, have rendered such splendid service, it is difficult to refer particularly to individual units or formations. The pages of this book, however, furnish in detail an account of the exploits of two gallant Territorial Divisions, to one of which, the 62nd, it fell to carry out an operation of outstanding brilliance on the occasion of the Cambrai attack on the 20th Nove

While this book has been at press, the Territorial Force has passed into the Territorial Army, thus closing another chapter in the history of the British citizen-soldier. That closed chapter has still to be written, as a complete history of the Territorial Force, called into being by Mr. (Lord) Haldane, when Secretary of State for War, in 1907, struggling against adverse circumstances for existence and recognition from 1908 to 1914, and approving itself from 1914 to 1919, by the testimony of Mr.

At half-past five in the afternoon, on Monday, April 12th, 1915, the first detachment of troops in the West Riding (1st Line) Territorial Division left England for France. Their going, like all English goings and most English home-comings, was quiet and unobserved: the War Diary of the Division merely states that thus ‘the move to France commenced’; further, that Divisional Headquarters left Doncaster the next day, embarked at Folkestone on the Invicta , and reached Boulogne 9-50 p.m.; that the

The civilian effort before the war to create a ‘people’s army’ under the provisions of the Territorial Force Act, was a fine national exploit, whether in the West Riding or elsewhere. Equally fine, if not finer, though no basis of comparison can be fixed, was the response of the men, including officers and other ranks, to whom the appeal was made. It is essential to see this clearly. Parliament might pass the best Act which ever adorned the legislature. The Secretary of State for War and His Maj

No one in the present generation is likely to forget Tuesday, August 4th, 1914. A greater complexity of emotions was crowded into the twenty-four hours which ended at 11 p.m. (midnight by mid-European time) that day than was known before or has been known since. We moved from war to peace in 1918-19 through a gradual series of experiences: relief from fear, even from anxiety, growing hope, moral certainty, real conviction, the armistice, the surrender of ships, the peace conference, civil unrest

Once more the point of view changes. We have seen the 49th Division nursed by its ministering Association into the semblance of a military force. We have noted its cheerful submission to the discipline of drill and camp, and its fine-strung spirit of renouncement when the vague thought of active service at a remote date broke on the urgent call of the country’s immediate need. Either aspect has been encouraging. Whether viewed individually or in the mass, this Territorial Division, one of many,

During January, 1916, the 49th Division was ‘in rest’: the first period of complete rest which the Division as a whole had enjoyed since the previous April, when it first entered the field. Even before this complete rest the Division could look back on some months of comparative military inactivity. It had not been called upon to take part in the severe fighting at Loos in September, 1915; and no other big operations, on the scale of the warfare in May and June, had occurred since the Battle of

The intensive training of a 2nd Line Division, which was to take a conspicuous part in the battles of 1917 and 1918, is the subject of the present chapter. The military confusion at home during the period prior to the passing of the first National Service Act, and prolonged to some extent through 1916, though it never affected the keenness and enthusiasm of the 2nd Line troops themselves, has yet to be taken into account in any impression which may be given of the conditions under which training

We return from the 62nd Division in England to the 49th in France, in the same year, 1916. The battles of the Somme were fought mid the pleasant, folded hills of Picardy, where the Sussex Weald almost seems to have crossed the Channel into France, and Spring renews every year the glad tokens of that poets’ May, when the sons of Champagne and Picardy, between the valleys of the Marne and the Somme, made France splendid in history as the mother of fable and romance: classic soil, a French writer t

It is not seemly to be too modest about the Somme, nor to insist over-much upon the limitation of the Allied objective. We know that it was not intended to drive the Germans out of France; at least, not in 1916. As a fact, in the Spring of 1917 there was a big German retirement, which was only voluntary in the sense that the enemy bowed to necessity before necessity broke him, and again, in the Autumn of 1918, there was another big German retreat, which brought the war to an end. They take a sho

The eleven miles from Albert to Bapaume, eight of which we travelled in the last chapter, should be familiar by now. In order to gain a clear view of the activities of the 62nd Division after its arrival in France, we may now draw a rectilineal figure enclosed by four main roads, with the Albert-Bapaume road as a portion of the base. Call the Albert-Bapaume road A, B. Extend it to C, Cambrai, on the east; draw a line C, Aa , from Cambrai to Arras, north, north-west; draw a line, Aa , D, from Arr

Between the Battle of Arras in the Spring and the Battle of Cambrai in the Autumn came the Third Battle of Ypres in the Summer. This middle battle in time (with which, in the history of the West Riding, we shall not be much concerned) was the northernmost battle in space, and its success, if it had been fully successful, would have been amphibious in kind. It would have rendered untenable by Germany the sea-bases of her submarine campaign, thus relieving the food-problem for the Allies, and it w

All accounts agree that the close of 1917 found the Allies very unfavourably situated. The balance seemed to be shifted against them; and the contrast, in retrospect, is striking between the natural elation of the troops who had taken part in the push at Cambrai, and had put to a practical test the three-in-one new factors of success—Tanks, secrecy and speed—and the equally natural depression of public opinion at home, and even at the front, wherever the chances of the campaign were accurately w

General Braithwaite, then Commanding the 62nd, has said to the present writer that he regards the action at Bucquoy as, perhaps, the finest achievement of his Division. They were hurried to Ayette as early as March 25th, and there, as stated, the Staff Officer who had been sent on to IVth Corps Headquarters brought Orders for the Division to proceed at once to Bucquoy. Divisional Headquarters reached it at about 8-30 in the morning, and the General went forward to the Headquarters of the 40th an

We reach a confused tract of warfare, punctuated, as ever, by noble deeds, through which we must strike a careful trail. In an Order, issued by Major-General Cameron, Commanding the 49th Division, and reviewing the period from April 10th to May 5th, 1918, upon which we are now to enter, the General drew attention to the fact that his Division had not been fighting as a whole. ‘In some ways it is sad,’ he wrote; ‘but the fact that we have been separated for a great part of the time has in no way

The pace was too fast to be kept up. The Germans could not be doing it all the time, and pauses, lengthening in duration as the fury of the attacks increased, were bound to be interposed between one onslaught and the next. Here, again, as on previous occasions, the official German historians of the war will be able to correct the impression which their daily bulletins sought to create, and will tell an attentive world how the desperate courage of the invader broke on the final factor which no re

The force of the German onslaughts of March 21st and April 9th, 1918, had been spent beyond hope of renewal on the fronts in which they occurred. On the Lys, as, a month earlier, on the Somme, and more necessarily because of the further month’s exhaustion, time had to be taken to reorganize, to recuperate, and to recommence; and the time taken by the enemy was time given to the Allies. How admirably they employed it in May, June and the first part of July does not fall within the province of the

This Return is provisional only, and, though so deplorably heavy, cannot be regarded as complete....

BY THE SAME AUTHOR AND PUBLISHERS. 428 pages. 12s. net. A GENERAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE CENTURIES OF ROMANCE. By LAURIE MAGNUS, M.A. Starting at the twelfth century, “The Centuries of Romance” brings down the history of literature in Europe to the year 1637 (including the works of Milton and Calderon), when the French Academy was founded, and a natural break occurs between the centuries of Romance and Bon Sens . It is intended to provide English students, both professional and ama