142 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
admission to a public school, the state secondary school system emulated the
public school model, thus hitting the middle-class child with an increasing
barrage of nationalist sentiment.^37
The working-class exhibited a certain amount of internationalism and
class consciousness in the immediate wake of the declaration of war. Some
Labour organizations denounced the war as ‘a war of the rulers and not of the
people.’ This attitude was quickly subsumed, however (at least on the part
of Labour leadership) in the rising tide of patriotism by the end of August.^38
In addition many of the youth organizations of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries developed a distinct paramilitary character, whether
it be the Boy Scouts, the Boys’ Brigade, or the Church Lads’ Brigade.^39 By
1914 working as a part of a team, wearing quasi-military uniforms, and
giving and taking orders within a hierarchy of command had been a part of
as much as 41 percent of the adolescent male population’s growing up.^40
To many of these young men the war represented an escape, a chance
for adventure. Some enlisted to escape the clutches of the law. Others
were coerced by employers, or social superiors, or their social equals; the
white feather still carried weight in 1914.^41 Some signed up in a fit of
alcoholic fervor. At least one did so and ‘having never remembered taking
the shilling“when the sergeant came and claimed” him next morning
he was as surprised as his wife was annoyed.’^42 For whatever reason, they
had never seen fit to sign up in the past.
These new men did not begin to arrive in France in any significant
numbers until the spring of 1916. The training and equipping of such a
massive influx of volunteers was a monumental task.^43 Even after the first
New Army finished training, the failures of the first half of 1915 prompted
Kitchener to delay its deployment. Only after the defeat at Gallipoli and
some intensive French diplomacy did the British government commit to
France and Flanders as the main theater of British operations, and even with
this decision the government wanted to delay any major operations until
at least June 1916 in order to build up manpower.^44 Thus, when they did
arrive, Haig, who had replaced French as the Commander-in-Chief of the
BEF on 10 December 1915, husbanded them carefully, introducing them to
the realities of the front and integrating them into existing formations.^45 The
British Army could not afford to waste manpower in the fruitless manner
of 1915.
In addition to expanding the ranks of the British and empire forces, much
work had to be done to prepare for the big push when it came. Most of
the new men found themselves digging trenches, burying communications
wire to protect it from shell fire (a total of 50,000 miles of telephone line
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