The West Riding Territorials in the Great WarMagnus, Laurie
History
The West Riding Territorials in the Great War
Magnus, Laurie
Great Britain. Army. Division, 49th; Great Britain. Army. Division, 62nd; World War, 1914-1918 -- Regimental histories -- Great Britain
So, we reach along another route the same point to which we followed
certain units through their months of training at home. Many details
have necessarily been omitted: that the Association’s extra expenditure
‘due entirely to the war’ between August 4th, 1914, and April 17th,
1915, amounted to £349,902; that 551 men of the 2nd Line Units responded
to an appeal for volunteers to transfer to the Reserve of the Regular
Battalions of the West Yorkshire, West Riding, K.O. Yorkshire L.I., and
York and Lancaster Regiments; that a Sanitary Section was added as a new
unit to each 1st and 2nd Line; that Territorial Depots were henceforth
to be known as Administrative Centres, and to be manned by Home Service
members of the Territorial Force[24]; that up to March 31st, 1915, nearly
2,000 patients had been admitted to the Auxiliary Hospitals in the West
Riding; and so on, and so forth. For the local machine had many wheels,
and every wheel was kept moving all the time. It revolved as smoothly as
it might, but the motive force was not in York, nor in London, but, in
the German Headquarters on the Western Front, and in the hate, which,
reversing Dante’s cosmogony, seemed, through those fateful months, ‘to
move the sun and other stars.’
Only one more change need be recorded before we follow General Baldock
abroad. In May, 1915, his Division was re-entitled the 49th (West Riding)
Division. At the same time its Infantry Brigades (the 1/1st, 1/2nd
and 1/3rd) were re-named the 146th, 147th and 148th Infantry Brigades
respectively.[25] A few months later, the 2nd Line Division, which was
still in training at home, and to some features in whose early history
we shall come back, was re-entitled the 62nd (West Riding) Division.[26]
Under these names they won renown in the Great War.
BOOK II
WAR
CHAPTER IV
‘MALBROUCK S’EN VA-T’EN GUERRE’
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, which took the Imperial Service obligation and joined the
Expeditionary Force in the spring of 1915, fills the spectator of so much
courage and the narrator of so much effort with high hope for the Force
as a whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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