We dropped down the Channel on the evening of the 10th September 1914 in a convoy of fourteen transports and one ammunition ship, with H.M.S. _Minerva_ as escort--the first Territorial Division that ever left England on active service. We sailed in a ship with a few East Lancashire details and the Headquarters Staff of the Brigade. General Noel Lee, the Brigadier, was an old Manchester Territorial officer, who understood the Territorial spirit to a nicety, and his death from wounds received in the battle of the 4th June 1915 was our irreparable loss. The Brigade Major was a tower of strength when on Gallipoli.
Of our Battalion, who enjoyed during those shining autumn days their first vision of Gibraltar "grand and grey," with its covey of German prizes in harbour, and of the Mediterranean, then free of the submarine, and who half feared that the War would be over while they were still buried in the African desert, only a small number survive unscathed. Many sleep amid the cliffs and nullahs of Gallipoli.
The virtues and capacities of these my comrades will always haunt my imagination. Their psychology was extraordinarily interesting. They were unlike the Regulars, who preceded them in the field, and to some extent unlike the New Army, which gathered in their wake.
They had very little of the professional soldier. Only 45 among them had ever served in the Regular Army. Their homes and callings and the light amusements of a great city filled their minds in the same way as the Regimental tradition and routine filled those of the old British Regular Army. With a few exceptions, the feeling of duty was a far stronger motive to their soldiering than any love of adventure. These Manchester men had little of the Crusader or Elizabethan but his valour. They were, in fact, almost arrogantly civilian, coming from a country which had dared ineptly to look down on its defenders. The Northerner is not an enthusiast by nature. His politics are usually limited to concrete questions of work and wages, prices and tariffs, and he knows no history. The Germans in August, 1914, were still "Lancashire's best customers"--not a warlike race bent on winning world-empire by blood and iron. The social traditions of the middle-class urban population, from which the Territorials were drawn, had never fostered the military spirit, nor the power to recognise and understand that spirit in others. In such circumstances the sober zeal with which middle-aged sergeants forsook their families and businesses at the very outset of the War, without a moment's hesitation, is a signal proof of their character. No men were ever greater lovers of peace. Some philosophers have seen or tried to see in the War a judgment on the luxury and frivolity of pre-War England, on her neglect of defence, and her absorption in opulence. Were this the case, it would be ironical to reflect how the North Country homes, first and most cruelly scourged by the War, were homes to which the so-called "sins of society" were least known and most repugnant, and where military training had been long pursued in the teeth of public ridicule and at the sacrifice of leisure. Long afterwards the father of a very talented private (Arthur Powell), who was killed in Turkey, wrote of his son: "We never intended him for the rude alarums of war, but his sense of duty and the horrors of Belgium fired his imagination, so that with hundreds of thousands of high-spirited young Englishmen, he placed himself in his country's service." This cast of thought is uncommon in the ranks of a Regular army.