The Harvest for War
THE PHRASE ‘over by Christmas’ has echoed through history as a symbol of misplaced optimism. Yet, in 1914, as Europe slid inexorably toward a full-scale Continental war, there were men in positions of command who knew better.
Britain’s newly appointed Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener was one of them.
Kitchener had witnessed modern warfare at first hand and understood what awaited the young volunteers who answered his call.
He knew the devastating effect of the Maxim machine gun. He knew that high-explosive shells bursting above open ground could scythe through ranks of advancing infantry with terrible efficiency. He knew that the age of glorious cavalry charges and decisive battlefield manoeuvres had given way to industrialised slaughter.
He foresaw not a brief campaign but years of attrition, demanding an army unlike any Britain had ever assembled. Even so, the call went out, and it was answered.
Across Britain, hundreds of thousands of young men stepped forward with little conception of the world into which they were marching. They did so willingly, patriotically and often eagerly, while those directing the war already understood that vast numbers of them would never return.
They knew.
THE COMPARATIVELY small British Army was an exceptionally well-trained professional force, respected throughout Europe for its discipline and musketry, but it had never been intended to fight a continental war against one of the world’s great military powers.
Kitchener’s call for volunteers was on a scale that astonished many of his colleagues. Hundreds of thousands were needed immediately. Before the war ended, that requirement would run into millions.
It was an appeal that reached every market town and every village in Britain.
Including Hacconby in Lincolnshire.
As we saw in Part One, while the shadow of war was spreading across Europe, the Wyer brothers were occupied with concerns as old as the village itself.
The harvest had demanded long hours before the weather turned, and autumn promised another cycle of ploughing and sowing. Like countless agricultural families across Lincolnshire, the Wyers measured time by the seasons rather than the meddlings of governments.
However, almost overnight, another calendar had replaced the old, and throughout the country young men faced decisions that would alter not only their own futures, but the fortunes of entire families.
The Wyers were no exception.
WITHIN DAYS OF the declaration of war, recruiting meetings were being organised throughout the county. Brass bands accompanied patriotic speeches in market towns. Newspapers began to publish the names of local volunteers as Kitchener’s appeal met with a resounding response from men in towns and villages throughout the country.
Posters appeared in railway stations and post offices. Every village, however small, found itself connected to events unfolding hundreds of miles away.
It is impossible to say with certainty which of the three Wyer boys was the first to enlist. We know that Edmund joined up at Bourne on the 3rd of September, and William, the youngest of the three followed four days later. We have no actual date for Robert, the eldest, but it was sometime that same month.
The three men had not been among the first wave of recruits, and it would be gratifying to believe that their commitment to bringing in the harvest had delayed their decision to enlist. It is equally possible, of course, that they had simply chosen to wait and see how events unfolded.
If so, perhaps it was the first serious setback of the war in late August that finally prompted their decision — the Battle of Mons and the long retreat that followed, carrying the British and French armies almost to the gates of Paris.
Did they, like tens of thousands of others, now sense that their country’s need had become truly urgent? Was it then that they made the fateful choice to leave the familiar fields of home for the battlefields of Europe?
Edmund, aged 27 and a labourer, joined the newly formed 6th Service Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment. In his medical of 4th September, at which he was declared fit for active service, he was stated to be: 5’7 inches tall, weighing 139 lbs with a 36 inch chest, fresh complexion, brown eyes and dark brown hair.
William’s army medical took place on 7th September at Oakham, Rutland. Here, he was reported to be 5’5 1/2 inches tall, weighing 138 lbs with a 35 inch chest, fresh complexion, hazel eyes and brown hair. He too was declared medically fit to serve. William was assigned to the Leicestershire Regiment.
Robert’s service records were among those lost to fire during the blitz of WW2. We do know, however, that he, too, enlisted that September, and that he was assigned to the Lincolnshire Regiment’s 8th Battalion.
Their decisions were made individually, yet together they reflected a remarkable moment in British history when thousands of ordinary men volunteered, believing that their duty required no further explanation.
For their parents, William and Sarah, the decisions of their sons must have brought conflicting emotions.
There may have been pride that they had answered their country’s call, but pride could not have silenced anxiety. The casualty lists were already lengthening, and the promise of a short war was fading.
Whatever words passed between them are lost to us; we can only imagine the trepidation with which they watched three of their sons exchange the familiar security of home for the uncertainties of war.
A month after the brothers’ enlistment, on 3rd October, the following piece appeared in the Grantham Journal:
KITCHENER’S ARMY – Nine men have volunteered from these parishes, viz.,
Hacconby, Robert Wand, Robert Wilson Wyer, Edmund Wyer, William Wyer,
Jack Healey; Morton, Fisher Handford, William Holmes, George Smith, John
Ashton.We trust that others will be actuated by their splendid examples
and follow suit.
Neither editor nor writer could possibly have known that, in their partisan plea for volunteers, they were recording the beginning of a tragedy that would devastate an entire community.
THE ARMY THAT Kitchener sought to create scarcely existed beyond paper when the volunteers began to arrive. Camps overflowed with recruits. Uniforms were scarce. Rifles were often unavailable, forcing men to drill with wooden substitutes while factories struggled to meet unprecedented demand.
Experienced instructors found themselves responsible for thousands of eager but inexperienced volunteers whose military knowledge rarely extended beyond what they had read in newspapers.
Yet gradually an army began to emerge.
For agricultural labourers such as the Wyers, the adjustment proved less difficult than many had anticipated. Farm work had already accustomed them to early mornings, physical hardship and obedience to routine.
Long hours in the fields developed stamina that military training merely redirected. Men who had spent their lives handling horses, lifting sacks, digging drains and labouring through difficult weather seldom complained about hard work.
Officers frequently remarked upon the steady reliability of recruits drawn from the countryside:
‘Our own battalion contained a fair sprinkling of regular officers, whilst the men were of the best natured in the country. Recruited chiefly from Lincolnshire, a large proportion were agricultural labourers, already accustomed to an outdoor life and very fit.’
Colonel F. G. Spring – 6th Service Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment
Months passed.
Musketry replaced haymaking. Route marches replaced journeys behind the plough. The bugle replaced farmyard cockerels and the church clock.
And so, by the beginning of 1915 the brothers will have ceased to think of themselves as labourers or even raw recruits.
They were becoming soldiers.
DESPITE INTENSE, accelerated training regimens, this new civilian army was not expected to be battle-ready until 1917. Kitchener knew this when he had called for volunteers. However, mounting losses at the front were such that recruits would be deployed long before that date.
At first, morale in the training camps had been high. But as the autumn of 1914 gave way to a wet winter, and the new year dawned, enthusiasm began to falter.
Men who had enlisted amid the excitement and urgency of those first weeks, eager to see service in France, found themselves instead enduring month after month of training at home. And as the weather deteriorated, so too did the camps.
Thousands of marching boots churned once-green fields into expanses of mud and slime, while the promised battlefields of France remained tantalisingly beyond reach.
William spent that winter with the Leicester’s 9th Battalion in the training camp at Aldershot, before being transferred to Salisbury Plain. Here, the transformation of recruit to battle-ready soldier, gathered pace.
Days were filled with musketry and bayonet drill, route marches beneath full packs, trench digging, signalling and increasingly elaborate exercises across the open downs.
William and his fellow Leicesters learned to judge distance through rifle sights, to advance by section rather than as individuals, to throw themselves flat at a command and rise again to continue the attack.
Trenches were dug and defended, wire negotiated and imaginary enemy positions assaulted. Gradually the habits of civilian life were being replaced by those of the soldier.
The farm labourer who had answered Kitchener’s call was being fashioned into an infantryman. Soon enough, France would determine how well he had been taught.
Meanwhile, Robert and his younger brother Edmund trained with the Lincolnshire battalions at Halton Park, Buckinghamshire.
There, the transformation continued. The two men marched for mile after mile through the Buckinghamshire countryside, rifles on their shoulders and equipment pulling at their belts.
They learned the Lee-Enfield until its workings became instinctive; fired upon the ranges; charged straw dummies with fixed bayonets; dug trenches, filled sandbags and crawled beneath wire.
Increasingly, the lessons being brought home from France shaped their training. They practised advancing by section, taking cover, carrying messages, standing-to before dawn and moving silently through darkness.
The old rhythms of farm work had not entirely disappeared—there was still mud, hard ground, aching muscles and the relentless demands of physical labour—but its purpose had changed.
The hands that had once guided horses, pitched sheaves and worked the Lincolnshire soil were now being taught to handle rifles and bayonets.
Like their young brother William, ninety miles away on Salisbury Plain, Robert and Edmund were becoming infantrymen.
Soon, the waiting would be over.
ONE BY ONE, the brothers would eventually make the journey to war. But William went first.
On 29 July 1915, after more than ten months in uniform, he packed his kitbag, shouldered his rifle and joined the troop train carrying the men of the 9th Leicesters south towards Southampton.
The journey south carried him steadily away from the world in which he had grown up.
Far behind him lay Lincolnshire and the flat fenland country he knew so well: Hacconby, its familiar lanes and farmyards, the horses he had worked beside, and the family who prayed that one day he would return.
At Southampton there was the bustle of embarkation, the weight of kit upon his shoulders and the crowded troopship waiting to carry another draft of British soldiers over to France.
After months of marching, drilling and musketry, the purpose of it all had finally arrived. William Wyer was going to war.
And as the vessel moved away from the English coast, the land gradually lost its detail. Buildings disappeared first, then the shoreline itself, until England became little more than a dark line upon the horizon.
For Robert and Edmund, still with the Lincolnshire Battalions in England, the waiting continued. They would continue their training for another six weeks, knowing that their own turn must soon come.
For William, however, the waiting was over. And, somewhere upon the grey waters of the Channel on 29 July, 1915, England finally slipped from view.
He would never see it again.
The Wyer Brothers’ story concludes in Part Three.
Author’s Notes:
On 2 April 1911, when the census was taken, only Edmund remained at the family home in Hacconby. Robert was then living with an uncle in Oldham, where he was recorded as a labourer. William, meanwhile, was lodging in the south Lincolnshire village of Greatford, where he was working as a horseman on a farm.
We cannot know for certain where the three young men were three years later, at the outbreak of war. For the purposes of this narrative, and to reflect the close-knit family networks of the area, I have therefore chosen to place them together at Hacconby, working on the harvest. This is a reconstruction, but it is by no means an implausible one.
The village itself has been known by various spellings throughout its history. Today the name is generally rendered as Haconby, but Hacconby was a contemporary spelling found in many records from the period in which this narrative is set. I have therefore chosen to use the latter form throughout.
While I have exercised a degree of creative licence in portraying the Wyers’ lives and activities in the months leading up to the war, the subsequent account of their enlistment, training and movements with the Army is based upon surviving service records, military records and battalion war diaries.
No known images of the Wyer brothers exist. I have therefore used family archive photographs of other, related males from which to create conceivable likenesses.
RAVEN MOON 