Some of the Earliest Automobile Enthusiasts Signed Up to Help the Allies in WWI. They Also Ushered in the Mechanization of War

It was growing dark on August 25, 1914, when Toby Rawlinson cautiously steered his silver Hudson roadster into the town of Landrecies, France, about 15 miles south of the Belgian border. A volunteer driver and scout attached to the British Expeditionary Force, Rawlinson, dressed in civilian clothes, drove down a cobblestone street, watching for enemy patrols. Suddenly, a battery of British horses galloped up behind him, forcing him off the road and onto a railway embankment.

Its carburetor smashed against the asphalt. Copper induction pipes tore loose. The Hudson, he later wrote, was “hopelessly out of action.” As he searched the town for a way to repair the car, a column of spike-helmeted German soldiers burst from the adjacent forest.

British infantrymen scrambled into position. Rawlinson was caught in the open, looking for a towrope. Shrapnel from German field guns smashed onto rooftops.

A commander shouted, “Fix bayonets!” Rawlinson found himself stranded as a battle ignited around him. Yet, the way he later told the story in a memoir, Adventures on the Western Front, it was little more than an inconvenience. The gunfire made a “devil of a noise,” he allowed, and the flying bricks and tiles were “exceedingly unpleasant.” What followed, however, never left him.

They were ex-Olympic athletes, big-game hunters, Boer War veterans, sheltered heirs, notorious rakes, even the London-based American representative of a Cleveland automaker. Some were too old to enlist: Rawlinson had last carried a rifle while stationed in India during the reign of Queen Victoria. But they possessed two things that the British War Office urgently needed: speed and mobility.

World War I, by the numbers By the end of the war, more than 8.5 million troops had died from battle wounds or disease and more than 21 million suffered injuries. Civilian deaths are best estimated at about 13 million. Sixty percent of battlefield deaths were caused by exploding artillery shells, according to the National World War I Museum (U.S.) Once trenches solidified in late 1914, the front lines moved little through the war's end—barely 6 miles, for example, during the historically deadly Battle of the Somme.