Welsh Journals

Dai Bach Y Soldiwr: Welsh Soldiers In The British Army 1914-1918 Gervase Phillips This article examines the extent to which the trauma of service in a mass army and the trenches overwhelmed the distinctively Welsh character of those caught up in the war of 1914-18. It seeks to challenge the assumption that the distinctive features of Welsh politics and society were submerged, as Welsh- speaking, non-conformist, liberal and socialist Welsh civilians were trans- formed into British soldiers. It draws on the military records of a sample of202 Welsh soldiers, with (rough) representativeness established by comparison with census returns.1 According to the assessment of the House of Commons, 272,924 men, 21.52% of the male population of Wales, enlisted, voluntarily or by conscription, into the British Army between May 1914 and November 1918.2 These men were recruited from a country with marked traditions of political radicalism and religious non-conformity, traditions which had, prior to 1914, kept Welshmen out of the army. When dealing with the First World War it is tempting to look not at the mainstream experience of ordinary Welsh men and women but rather at the activities of those courageous, but exceptional, individuals who were involved in pacifist movements or chose to be conscientious objectors. These individuals seem to be the representatives of those marked traditions; yet to concentrate on them ignores the experience of the majority, those who did acquiesce in the war. They, by their very number, are surely more representa- tive of their nation's history. This article looks at those men who exchanged the chapel for the barrack room and the coal-face for the battlefield. In the years before the war the recruiting officer's leanest recruiting ground had been Wales. In the industrial south-east for the respectable wage-earning working class to lose a son to the army was a crushing disgrace, and in the more rural, non-conformist north and west the same was true for, as Robert Graves noted, The chapels held soldiering to be sinful and in Merioneth the chapels had the last word's (see Table 1). Table 1: Recruitment by nationality, 1912-13 (%) English Welsh Scottish Irish 79.4 2.4 8.6 9.6 Source: Ian Beckett & Keith Simpson, A Nation In Arms. (Manchester, 1985), 219