First Territorial division goes to France

According to the British chronology of the war, on 24 February 1915 the North Midland Division left England, the first division of the volunteer Territorial Force to be sent complete to the Western Front. The crossing took a dozen or so days. Billeting parties landed at Boulogne as early as 23 February, the first infantry battalions reached France on 25 February, and the rest, mainly through Le Havre, by the beginning of March. By 8 March the whole division was concentrated in Flanders.

Volunteers from the Midlands

The Territorial Force was created in 1908 from the old volunteer formations. Its soldiers trained in their spare time and in the event of war were to defend the country. They were not obliged to serve abroad, although they could volunteer to do so. When in August 1914 they were mobilised together with the regular army, most of the men signed such an undertaking.

The North Midland Division came from the middle of England. Its three infantry brigades were made up of Territorial battalions of the county regiments of Staffordshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire and of battalions of the Sherwood Foresters from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. It was commanded by Major-General Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley. After mobilisation the division assembled around Luton and then trained in the Bishop’s Stortford area and in Essex. On 19 February 1915 it was inspected by King George V.

The first complete one

Territorials had fought in France before, but as individual battalions and regiments attached to regular divisions. The Scots of the London Scottish battalion had won fame at Messines as early as October 1914. Whole Territorial divisions had been sent abroad in the autumn of 1914 to Egypt and India, but there they were to replace in the garrisons the regular units that had gone to the front. The North Midland Division was the first division of the Territorial Force to reach a theatre of war complete. It should not be confused with the divisions of Kitchener’s New Armies, made up of volunteers enlisted after the outbreak of war. The first of these was to arrive in France only in May 1915.

For the British Expeditionary Force every new division was valuable. The old regular army had bled itself white in Flanders in the autumn, and the French were pressing the British to take over a longer stretch of the front. At the turn of 1914 and 1915 the regular 27th and 28th Divisions arrived, formed from battalions brought back from the garrisons of the empire, in February the Canadians, and now the Territorials from the Midlands.

The first weeks

After its arrival the division assembled in the valley of the Lys, and at the end of March its units learned trench warfare alongside the experienced 4th Division near Ploegsteert. It spent the spring in the trenches on the Messines ridge, and on 12 May 1915 it received the number and name of the 46th (North Midland) Division. In the summer it moved to Ypres, and in the autumn it suffered heavy losses in the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt at Loos.