The 36th (Ulster) Division

Soldiers of the 14th Royal Irish Rifles (YCVs) in camp at Randalstown, Co. Antrim.

Training was in full swing by the end of September, 1914, the 107th Brigade being at Ballykinlar, the 108th at Clandeboye and Newtownards, and the 109th at Finner; where the accommodation consisted at this early date almost entirely of tents. By good chance the weather of the first three weeks of October was fine and mild, but thereafter, and before the hutting was completed, a very wet and severe winter set in.

The U.V.F. training was a great advantage. It was easy to handle bodies of men, the most ignorant of whom could at least number, form fours, march in step, and keep alignment from the first. And the old organization held till it could be replaced by the new. As one Commanding Officer writes: "The U.V.F. officers and N.C.O.'s kept the men in order till we straightened out into the regular army formation" The enthusiasm of the men of those days of 1914 is something that no officer who served with them can ever forget; something perhaps, also, that none but those officers who began their training in the first six months of the war ever witnessed.

There is a slow-burning flame in the Ulster blood that keeps her sons, once raised to the passion of great endeavour, at a high and steady pitch of resolution. They took their work with extraordinary seriousness. They were all anxiety to learn. They made their platoon commanders, beginners for the most part like themselves, struggle to keep ahead of them in the art that both were acquiring.

How many of the junior officers must remember those "conferences" of sergeants and section leaders after parade hours and the circle of keen heads bent inward toward them; how many the "parades" on the mess table, matches for sections, inked on one side so that after many manoeuvres the front rank might remain the front!

The Infantry of the 36th Division was formed on perhaps the most strictly territorial basis of any Division of the New Armies; the general rule being that battalions were drawn from the larger regimental areas of the U.V.F., companies from the smaller, and platoons from battalion areas. This had the great advantage that it engendered a natural companionship and spirit of pride in the units. The company, the platoon, was a close community, an enlarged family. In after days, in the trenches and in billets behind the lines, the talk, not only of men from Belfast and the larger towns, but of those from the country villages, would be of streets and, in the latter case, of farms and lanes of which those present had known every detail from childhood.

The old clan-names of the Northumbrian and Scottish Borders were clustered thick together. A platoon would have five Armstrongs or Wilsons or Elliots, a company half a dozen Irvines or Johnstons, a battalion half a score of Morrows or Hannas. To be set against that great accretion of moral force which springs from such a survival of the clan was the minor disadvantage that the non-commissioned officers for the most part, and certainly all the juniors amongst them, were the brothers and cousins and close companions of the men they commanded.

It was not that their orders were disobeyed; it was rather that there was at first a diffidence about the orders, which sometimes appeared to be rather in the nature of persuasive requests. In a few units the non-commissioned officers were changed about, so that they came in contact with men with whom they were less familiar. But the problem was never a serious one, and it finally disappeared.

The only other disciplinary problem was that of week-end leave. The great bulk of the men of the 107th and 108th Brigades and most of the Divisional Troops were training near their homes. They could not understand why they should be kept in camp doing nothing on Sundays when they might have been visiting them. Though leave was given generously enough, this remained a sore point till the Division moved to England.

Apart from "absence without leave" there was no crime to speak of. Such occasional blackguards as were found in the ranks were swiftly disposed of, a sentence of "discharged as incorrigible and worthless," which was, as a fact, quite illegal in time of war, being their fate.

The Divisional Commander was a firm believer in marching, not only as a preparation for that feature of military life, but as a creator of toughness and endurance to meet the varied strain of war. By the early months of 1915 one brigade route march of from twenty to twenty-five miles, and shorter battalion marches each week, had become the general rule. Equipment being slow in making its appearance, General Powell had rucksacks, of the Alpine pattern, made in Belfast, to be carried, fully loaded, on the march instead of the pack, and bolts from the shipyards to take the place of small-arm ammunition in the pouches. There was, as might be expected, some grumbling at what appeared to be a needless imposition, but the troops benefited by the experience, and Sir Archibald Murray, when they marched past him the following summer, remarked how easily they carried their packs.

Numerous recruiting marches were also carried out, which provided further training in marching and march-discipline, and at the same time exhibited detachments of the units from the countryside to the remotest villages in their area. Everywhere they were received with the greatest pride and enthusiasm.

For the rest, the training was that of all the New Armies. The Infantry had "D.P." rifles, the R.E. for a long time no material save what was bought for them. Little musketry could be carried out, such as there was being done with a handful of short service rifles allotted to each battalion, and in some cases with rifles borrowed from the U.V.F. - upon which inspecting Generals turned a blind eye.

By Infantry and Sappers alike trenches were dug, as an officer of the latter acidly remarks, about eighteen inches wide and with perpendicular sides. But that, of course, was a universal experience. Much discussion took place upon the relative merits of trenches sited upon the forward and reverse slopes of undulating ground. Not till 1918, and then to an extent but small, was any choice to be left by the enemy in the siting of positions.

The R.A.M.C. was the first to be equipped. The people of Ulster showed its affection for its Division by the presentation of very fine motor ambulances, each of which bore inscribed upon the body the name of the town or association from which it came. In some of these cars the gangway was sufficiently wide to take two additional stretchers, which proved an inestimable boon in the Battle of the Somme.

The winter, it has already been remarked, was a very wet one. The health of the troops was generally good, a few cases of that dreadful disease cerebro-spinal meningitis causing the medical staff its greatest anxiety. In order, however, to spare the men as far as possible from strain and discomfort, and to allow those that remained to be accommodated in the huts as they were completed, some units were moved out of the camps; the 9th Irish Fusiliers * of the 108th Brigade, and the 11th Inniskillings * of the 109th, for example, moving to barracks, the first to Holywood and Belfast, the second to the town that gives the regiment its name, Enniskillen.

In January the 109th Brigade, less the 10th Inniskillings, moved to Randalstown. The 10th Inniskillings remained on the West coast till the first days of May, suffering the wildest weather in their exposed camp, but probably no worse than was suffered by the rest of the Brigade in the first days at Randalstown, which became such a quagmire that men who slipped from the "duck-boards" between the huts sometimes sank to their knees in the mud.

As weather improved and the hutments were completed, the full Brigades reassembled in their camps, the 10th Inniskillings marching across Ireland, from west coast to east, to rejoin. With the spring there began a new era of intensive training.

Meanwhile had been fought the Marne, the Aisne, the two Battles of Ypres, Neuve Chapelle. The life in France was impossible to imagine for those who had not seen it. Not all the marching and counter-marching, the attacks, the trench-digging, the bivouacks, and cooking of meals in the open could print for the mind's eye an adequate picture of that. But gradually, through letters, through the recitals of wounded friends, men began to form some conception of the realities of modern war, as fought against a race which, for courage, endurance, and resource, ranked with the most formidable warrior peoples of the world's history. The gas attack in the Salient was evidence, if any were still needed, of the temper of the new Germany. Men did not blanch, but it was inevitable that, to the more seriously minded.

In future, battalions of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Royal Irish Rifles, and Royal Irish Fusiliers will be alluded to as "Inniskillings," "Rifles," and "Irish Fusiliers," respectively.among them at least, another and a grimmer picture than that which had been present with them at the beginning should form itself. They had answered many calls, chief among them love of country in various aspects. Mingled with this had been, however, the spirit of adventure.

The old rowel that had driven Ulstermen over the seas, making them colonists and administrators, was sharpened again by the war. It pricked on these young men, the flower of their country. Now, perhaps, the spirit of happy adventure faded a little, but it was replaced by that of hard resolution and duty. The training had had its physical results.

The troops were strong and supple in their strength. But it had had a moral result also. The Division was no longer a mass of men, even of drilled and disciplined men. It had become, in the mysterious fashion that such things happen, welded into a whole, a spiritual unit. Little by little the group-spirit had grown, till before the troops quitted Ireland a sensitive observer might fancy he could detect it whenever he came in contact with them.

One factor in this group-spirit and in the whole life of the Division, which is here approached with diffidence, but which could not be omitted from a faithful record, was the element of religion. It is sometimes forgotten that the Covenant of the seventeenth century was taken almost as widely in Ulster as in Scotland. Undoubtedly something of the old covenanting spirit, the old sense of the alliance of "Bible and Sword," was reborn in these men.

It was the easier recreated because of the strength of religious feeling which had existed in times of peace in Protestant Ulster, one of the few parts of the country wherein the reformed churches had not, by their own admission, lost ground in the last thirty years. Religious feeling inspired the men of Ulster in those days of training, and remained with them in the days of war.

The General commanding the 4th Division, to which the 36th was attached for instruction after its arrival in France, spoke of his astonishment at finding so many Ulstermen reading their Bibles. The writer of this book can bear witness from personal observation that it was not uncommon to find a man sitting on the fire-step of a front-line trench, reading one of the small copies of the New Testament which were issued to the troops by the people at home. The explanation was that, on the one hand, religion was near and real to them; on the other, that they were simple men.

They saw no reason to hide or disguise that which was a part of their daily lives.

The people of Ulster were given an opportunity to see their Division as a whole. On May the 8th it was inspected by Major-General Sir Hugh McCalmont at Malone, afterwards marching through Belfast, the salute being taken by the General at the City Hall. It was a fine day; the City was dressed in bunting, and the main streets rocked with a mass of enthusiastic spectators, who had crowded in by special train from all about the Province.

The troops were to remain two months longer in Ireland, always on the tiptoe of expectation of a move, but that was the real farewell of Ulster to the Division she had given to the nation

Early in July the Division moved to Seaford, on the Sussex coast, leaving the 9th Inniskillings to recruit * at Ballycastle from the shameful disease of German measles ! But a small proportion of those 15,000 men had ever previously crossed the Irish Sea. The English were new to them, as they were to the English. The impressions made on either side were favourable. The men were treated with the greatest kindliness, and, for their part, their behaviour was excellent; reassuring, indeed, to some of those residents who had been perturbed at the idea of this incursion of "wild Irishmen." Not a few of the people of Seaford, on seeing the announcement of this History in the press, wrote to the author and spoke of their pleasant memories of the Ulstermen's sojourn in the district. Seaford made a fine training area.

It was a healthy place, and the splendid downs behind the town were ideal for tactical exercises. Soon they were scored with white chalk trenches. On one occasion, when the whole Division, with the exception of the Artillery - Infantry, Cavalry, Cyclists Engineers, R.A.S.C., and R.A.M.C.- had been engaged in night manoeuvres, it was discovered when dawn broke that a deep trench had been cut across a very valuable gallop belonging to an Alfriston training stable. An apologetic letter was sent to the owner, who wrote back expressing his pleasure that his ground had been put to a purpose so useful, offered half his jumps to the mounted units and young officers for practice,. and scarcely hinted that he hoped the occurrence would not be repeated.