The Manchester Bantams by Caroline Scott

Author:Caroline Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

It was now time to address the issue of those ‘unfits’. On 31 August Pinney issued a memorandum to all captains and medical officers in the division. It suggests that the men now coming in as reinforcements had not had enough training or experience before being sent to the front. It, politely but clearly, communicates frustration on Pinney’s part. It reads:

Memorandum ref. Reinforcements

Men found medically unfit or men who are obviously deficient in physique or mind are to be returned to the Base forthwith under instructions issued separately.

Officers are not to reject men who were merely nervous under their first experience of fire and are otherwise fit. Such men are to be carefully brought up to the standard of the Bantam Division by being gradually trained in Trench Warfare, as the Division was originally trained.

Similarly, men temporarily unable to march from sore feet etc are to be taught how to get their feet into good condition and are not to be taken as permanently inefficient.

We have to use every means in our power to overcome the enemy. We must therefore get the best out of all men who can possibly become soldiers.

A note in Pinney’s diary, written the same day, has a rather less diplomatic tone. He had met with GHQ doctors that day and they had together reviewed the results of an inspection of the reinforcements. Pinney wrote: ‘Careful inspection of 2000 reinforcements bore out my report. These are 20% to 30% of degenerates. Some of them miserable objects of humanity. We are to send away these useless ones.’67

There were wider changes afoot as well. Looking at the length of the casualty lists in the Manchester papers gives a real sense of the enormous concentrated impact of the Somme campaign on communities – and a sense of the tragic twist in the logic of the ‘Pals’ concept. This was realised at the time and, after the Somme, an effort was made to mix men more (wounded men, once recovered, could be sent to any battalion requiring numbers). The ‘Pals’ battalions would now start to lose their local identity.

Guillemont was finally taken on 3 September 1916. The History of the King’s Regiment recorded, ‘Guillemont had fallen! At last that rubble heap, of which scarce one stone or yard of ground was unstained by the blood of gallant men, was in our hands.’ When the British line was consolidated, and there was opportunity to explore the ruins of Guillemont, there were found to be networks of subterranean passages under the remains of the village and enormous cellars in which large numbers of the enemy had evidently sheltered.68

In 1928 a magazine called Twenty Years After – The Battlefields of 1914–1918: Then and Now published images of Guillemont. The twin photographs show the same road, between Guillemont and Montauban, in September 1916 (top) and 1928 (bottom). Guillemont Road Cemetery is to the left rear of the car.

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