Edward Spears - Army Service Before First World War

Army Service Before First World War

In 1903, he joined the Kildare Militia, the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. In the mess, he acquired the nickname of Monsieur Beaucaire after a play about an urbane Frenchman. The nickname stuck and he was called this by both of his wives, the first of whom would often shorten it to B. In 1906 he was commissioned in the regular army with the 8th Royal Irish Hussars. Spears did not conform to the conventional image of a young army officer. In the same year that he was commissioned, he published a translation of a French general’s book, Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War. His upbringing with a succession of tutors meant that he had not learnt to mix, and so he did not easily adapt to life in an officers’ mess. He could be tactless and argumentative and became an outsider – something he would remain all his life. In 1911, he worked at the War Office developing a joint Anglo-French codebook. In 1914, he published Cavalry Tactical Schemes, another translation of a French military text. In May of the same year, he was sent to Paris to work alongside the French at their Ministry of War with orders to make contact with British agents in Belgium. With the outbreak of war in August 1914, on the orders of his colonel at the War Office, Spears left Paris for the front. Later he would proudly claim that he had been the first British officer at the front.