Pals Battalions (thing)

By the end of World War One, far too many men on both sides had lost their lives in battle, not including, countless others injured or missing in action (World War One). Although “hostility had been simmering for years,” the Great War began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 (Robinson). In only five weeks, all of Europe “slid from nervous peace to raging war”; the “boiling point” had been reached and breeched (Robinson). A "determined but unready” Britain, bound by treaty to aid Belgium, joined the fight on 4 August 1914 declaring war on Germany (Robinson). This unreadiness was quite a problem for the British; compared to the continental armies, the British Army was minuscule with only 450,000 men (Robinson). Lord Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War, believed that the war would be won with the last “million men that Britain could throw into battle” (Robinson). “With conscription politically unpalatable,” Kitchener opted on building an army of volunteer soldiers (Robinson). General Henry Rawlinson suggested that “men would be more willing to enlist if they could serve with people they already knew” (Robinson). These groups of men, drawn from their respective communities, would become known as the Pals Battalions. The plan was an enormous success driven by a great sense of “civic pride and community spirit”; new recruits were springing up all across Britain at a magnificent rate (Robinson).

An army of nearly one million volunteers had been built up from scratch, brimming with patriotic optimism and the belief that the war would be over by Christmas. Furthermore, many British men saw military service as a great adventure, the “opportunity of a lifetime,” and most of all a chance to escape from the grueling underclass labor of Early 20th Century Britain (Robinson). The “initial euphoria” of enlistment passed away as the war continued past Christmas into 1915, yet recruitment continued, driven by “immense social and peer pressure” (Robinson). Most of these soldiers remained in Britain in 1915, training and preparing for war. The first day of battle for the vast majority of these men of the Pals Battalions would be a major offensive on the Somme, to draw German forces away from the French at Verdun; twenty-thousand of these men were walking into their deaths. This battle on 1 July 1916 was the British Army’s greatest single loss in history. To place things in perspective, of the nine-hundred men of the Leeds Pals to participate in the Somme, seven-hundred and fifty men lost their lives (Robinson). Because of the nature of the Pals Battalions, these death tolls decimated entire communities and left much of Britain in mourning. This devastating loss can be summed up in the words of one Pal who survived, “Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history” (Robinson). The events at the Somme, in a sense, act as a microcosm for the entire tragic history of war, and specifically of World War One. The legacy of the Great War haunted Europe for the decades following its conclusion in 1918; yet only twenty-one years after the final shots were fired, Europe would once again be gearing up to send its grown children to their deaths.