page_title: British Army during World War I
section_title: Recruitment and conscription
hierarchical_section_title: British Army during World War I / Recruitment and conscription
caption_attribution_description: Commonly believed to be a company of the Public Schools Battalion (16th Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment) at "White City", opposite Beaumont Hamel prior to the Battle of the Somme, 1916. (Alternatively, the men may be from the 1st Battalion, The East Lancashire Regiment on 1 July 1916.)
context_page_description: The British Army during World War I fought the largest and most costly war in its long history. Unlike the French and German Armies, the British Army was made up exclusively of volunteers—as opposed to conscripts—at the beginning of the conflict. Furthermore, the British Army was considerably smaller than its French and German counterparts.
  During World War I, there were four distinct British armies. The first comprised approximately 247,000 soldiers of the regular army, over half of which were posted overseas to garrison the British Empire, supported by some 210,000 reserves and a potential 60,000 additional reserves. This component formed the backbone of the British Expeditionary Force, which was formed for service in France and became known as the Old Contemptibles. The second army was provided by the approximately 246,000-strong Territorial Force, initially allocated to home defence but used to reinforce the BEF after the regular army suffered heavy losses in the opening battles of the war. The third army was Kitchener's Army, comprising men who answered Lord Kitchener's call for volunteers in 1914–1915 and which went into action at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
context_section_description: In August 1914, 300,000 men had signed up to fight, and another 450,000 had joined-up by the end of September. Recruitment remained fairly steady through 1914 and early 1915, but it fell dramatically during the later years, especially after the Somme campaign, which resulted in 360,000 casualties. A prominent feature of the early months of volunteering was the formation of Pals battalions. Many of these pals who had lived and worked together, joined up and trained together and were allocated to the same units. The policy of drawing recruits from amongst the local population ensured that, when the Pals battalions suffered casualties, whole towns, villages, neighbourhoods and communities back in Britain were to suffer disproportionate losses. With the introduction of conscription in January 1916, no further Pals battalions were raised. Conscription for single men was introduced in January 1916. Four months later, in May 1916, it was extended to all men aged 18 to 41. The Military Service Act 1916 specified that men from the ages of 18 to 41 were liable to be called up for service in the army, unless they were married (or widowed with children), or served in one of a number of reserved occupations, which were usually industrial but which also included clergymen and teachers. This legislation did not apply to Ireland, despite its then status as part of the United Kingdom (but see Conscription Crisis of 1918). By January 1916, when conscription was introduced, 2.6 million men had volunteered for service, a further 2.3 million were conscripted before the end of the war; by the end of 1918, the army had reached its peak strength of four million men.
  Analysis of death records from the Hundred Days in 1918 suggests that around 60% of those who died were conscripts, and that despite the recent lowering of the age limit for service on the Western Front to eighteen-and-a-half, the average age was still in the mid-twenties. Although incompleteness of records makes it hard to say whether these dead men were a representative sample of the BEF as a whole, assertions that the late-war BEF consisted largely of conscripted “boys” should therefore be treated with caution. Furthermore, although there were certainly many cases of men being sent to regiments from parts of the country other than their own, many battalions were still filled with men from their traditional local areas, the same as earlier in the war. Caution therefore should be employed before accepting claims that there was a deliberate attempt to “destroy the Regiment … and nationalise the Army” (e.g. by Dunn in The War The Infantry Knew (1938)).
  Women also volunteered and served in a non-combatant role; by the end of the war, 80,000 had enlisted. They mostly served as nurses in the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD); and from 1917, in the Army when the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), was founded. The WAAC was divided into four sections: cookery; mechanical; clerical and miscellaneous. Most stayed on the Home Front, but around 9,000 served in France.
caption: A company of the Public Schools Battalion prior to the Battle of the Somme
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