History
The original battalion began privately recruiting on 1 September 1914 and membership was by application only; over 1,500 applications were received including from retired officers who wished to serve in the ranks. Such was the spirit of adventure that many men wished to serve as private soldiers alongside their mates, rather than as officers. Amongst the recruits were enough former international players for the battalion to field two rugby union and one football team.
Following the success of the original recruitment drive, four further battalions formed at Epsom from 11 September.
However, Kitchener's Army was faced with a dire shortage of officers and so the exclusive nature of the Public Schools Battalions was doomed. "Young gentlemen" — public school and university graduates — were encouraged to apply for commissions and eventually the battalion's ranks were depleted. The numbers were made up with ordinary volunteers but the Public Schools Battalion titles would remain, some of the battalions would be disbanded during the course of the war.
Read more about this topic: Public Schools Battalions
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)