Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors Richard Holmes From the redcoat who served Charles II to the modern, camouflage-clad guard at Camp Bastion, from battlefield to barrack-room, this is a magisterial social history of the British soldier.Since 1660 the army has evolved and adapted, but the social organisation of the men has changed less, with the major combat arms retaining many of the characteristics familiar to those who fought at Blenheim, Waterloo and the Somme. The Duke of Marlborough, who built up the British army to become a world-class fighting force in the 1660s, would recognise in the tired heroes of Helmand the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago.‘Soldiers’ is exhaustively researched, and Holmes’s affection for the soldier shines through on every page. Above all, this book is brimming with great stories, from the chaos of the battlefield to the fug of the barrack-room, from Ulster to Bengal, from Flanders’ fields to the Afghan hills. This is a magisterial social history of the British soldier – and Richard Holmes’s fitting last tribute to the British soldier to whom he was so devoted. Soldiers Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors Richard Holmes Contents Cover (#ulink_6bd40380-0972-5f12-b6d4-cd91e71540f1) Title Page Foreword Introduction I. Politics and Position 1: Chuck Him Out, the Brute 2: King’s Army 3: Parliament’s Army 4: Brass and Tapes 5: To Observe and Obey 6: Weekend Warriors II. Gallant Gentlemen and Officers 7: A National Army: 1660–1914 8: Temporary Gentlemen: 1914–45 9: Sandhurst: Serve to Lead 10: Church Militant III. Recruiting a National Army 11: Soldier Boys 12: The King’s Shilling 13: Pressed into Service 14: All Pals Together 15: Foreign Friends 16: Women Soldiers IV. Tribes And Totems 17: The Regimental Line 18: Imponderable Entities 19: The Regiments Depart 20: Tribal Markings 21: Full of Strange Oaths, and Bearded Like the Pard 22: Tunes of Glory V. Habits and Habitat 23: The Rambling Soldier 24: Barrack-Room Blues 25: Bullies and Beast-Masters 26: Oh! What a Time Those Officers Have 27: The Sergeants’ Mess Dinner is Worth Putting Down 28: Campaigners Straight and Gay 29: Officers’ Wives Get Puddings and Pies Afterword Picture Section Acknowledgements Endnotes Searchable Terms Other Books by Richard Holmes Copyright About the Publisher FOREWORD RICHARD HOLMES WAS a professional in several fields. As an author he never failed to fulfil a contract, so it is ironic and tragic for his many readers that an untimely death prevented him from completing the final touches of this his last book. However, we are lucky that he left it in such good shape that only the odd addition has had to be made. This was typical of the man whose sense of duty meant that he always did what he promised. The trouble was that he frequently promised too much. I was an unlikely friend to Richard Holmes, he an academic and I with not an A level to my name. It was a chance remark and a question that led us to be companions astride our horses, first in France and then in other parts of the world. Our love of the horse and history forged a friendship which coped with late nights, hangovers, and a good deal of snoring. To spend weeks on end in the company of this extraordinarily well-informed man was to me a great joy. On those days the modern world was far away, and only occasionally did outside communication interrupt our imagining of another age and another battle. Reading the pages of this book, I felt increasingly that he was beside me at the camp fire, enjoying a mug of local liquor, telling one more anecdote, one more yarn. On those trips we were a happy band; Richard’s repartee and amusing turn of phrase were an important part of the expedition even when things went wrong – ‘we have a bijou problemette’. Where there was Richard, there were also smiles and laughter. Richard played many roles in his life but soldiering was at the heart of it. From those early days when he joined the Territorial Army and when he studied the Franco-Prussian War at university, he had a fascination for the history of warfare – but then so do many others. He was unusual in that his power of recall was quite extraordinary in its breadth and detail. While on a tour of a World War One battlefield, he stayed at a French nobleman’s house. After the introductions, he remarked in his particular style of French, that it was a pleasure to meet the descendants of a family who had fought against the English at Cr?cy. The family were astonished at his knowledge of French history, and could not do enough for him and his companions. His other notable quality was the way he made his subject so interesting to the reader or listener. One of his obituarists described how he captured the imagination of a group of sceptical soldiers to whom history was unimportant. It was this skill that made him such a brilliant teacher, and there are many of us who reacquired an appetite for military history through his involvement with the army’s Staff College. He had the trick of making that interest and knowledge relevant to today’s operational theories. There were 1,300 people at his memorial service; well over a hundred were senior officers who had sat at his feet at some stage or other. He became the professional head of the Territorial Army at a critical moment, and his passionate defence of that organisation – which played such a large part in his life – marked him out as a fine and selfless leader. The army and the country have much to be grateful to him for. Richard was at his best on the very ground where a battle was won or lost. He had a good eye for ground and was able to describe in a matter-of-fact way what had occurred at a particular spot. He always related his account to the various hills, valleys, and ridges in front of us, so that you could almost smell and hear the action. His stories of the personalities involved and their unusual habits brought that element of humanity to the story, quite often causing a great deal of mirth. Written notes tended to be just a few headings; it was invariably the way he answered questions that held the crowd. The soldier, with all his qualities good and bad, was a passion for Richard. He was deeply moved following his two visits to his regiment in Iraq where they had a particularly testing time. Dusty Warriors is his homage to the soldier of today and to the regiment which adopted him – a Territorial – as their Colonel; he was rightly proud of this unusual accolade. This book shows his devotion to the profession of arms at a very personal level. He much regretted that during his life he had not undergone that test of courage, and Dusty Warriors was, in a strange way, his penance. Soldiers is a typical Holmes product, full of detail usefully comparing modern soldiering with the echoes of the past. His technique of bringing perspective to the events of today through the prism of history is always leavened by that inimitable wit for which he was renowned. Having been a private soldier in the yeomanry at an early age he acquired an inner knowledge of how the dynamics of the barrack room worked; this always made him instinctively sympathetic to the plight of the ‘Tom’. His trilogy, Redcoat, Sahib, and Tommy are masterpieces of the social history of the British Army but Soldiers adds spice to the mix. Although many will be aware of the ‘lives and loyalties’ of the British army, few of us are able to describe them in such an amusing and readable way. As I write this, I am about to embark on another ride in the Borders; we are calling it the Reivers’ Ride and the choice of country and period were Richard’s. He was once more to be our companion and resident historian, as we fundraise for his favourite charity ABF, The Soldiers’ Charity, a charity for which he raised well over a quarter of a million pounds underlining, perhaps, this book’s theme: that all soldiers deserve our sympathy, praise, and ultimately a ‘hand up’. In the weeks before his death, it was this expedition which provided some sort of goal. He will be much in our thoughts as we relive the English victory at Flodden or Cromwell’s annihilation of the Scots at Dunbar. Jessie and Corinna, his daughters, will be with us for part of the ride, making it all the more poignant. I, for one, will miss those tales – perhaps even excerpts from this book – which would have been so much better heard than read, but the time lords will have to work their magic before I can enjoy that old familiar voice. Evelyn Webb-Carter INTRODUCTION IT IS USELESS to deny it. I have loved Tommy Atkins, once a widely used term for the common soldier, since I first met him. And love is the right word, for my affection goes beyond all illusions. I know that he is capable of breaking any law imposed by God or man, and whenever I allow myself to feel easy with him, he smacks my comfortable preconceptions hard in the mouth: it is his nature to do so. Antony Beevor, cavalry officer turned best-selling historian, thought that ‘the British soldier’s unpredictable alternation between the odd bout of mindless violence when drunk, and spontaneous kindness when sober, is one of his most perplexing traits.’ Another former officer described trying to find some soldiers who were late for duty one Sunday afternoon. He was tipped off that they had been seen entering the house of a local civilian: The door was answered by a small, rather timid man who invited us in. ‘We’re looking for some soldiers’, my colleague explained, giving their names. ‘Oh yes, they’re here,’ the man told us, ‘upstairs, screwing my wife.’ A few moments later, nine rather shame-faced soldiers appeared with the fattest and ugliest woman I have ever seen. She was quite clearly drunk and farted noisily as she came into the room … Later I asked one of the boys what he could conceivably have found attractive in the woman. ‘The more gopping the slag is, Sir,’ he replied, ‘the better she is at it.’ The same author identified the moment he decided to resign his commission: At 2 a.m. the Duty Officer’s phone rang and I lifted it, half asleep, ‘Guardroom Sir, we’ve got a tech stores man down here – he says he’s beaten up his wife.’ I got there in a few minutes to find a very drunk man who had apparently ended an argument with his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. He had got drunk, he told me, because he was fed up with the job and ‘Anyway, that kid’s not mine.’ Neither the wife nor unborn child was seriously injured; but that night I decided to leave the Army. Some men look back on their time in uniform with huge satisfaction. One First World War veteran, Sergeant Adolphus ‘Dolph’ Jupe of the Hampshire Regiment, thought that: I suppose that in our life we give our hearts unrestrainedly to very few things. I had given mine to the battalion and bore its three stripes on my arm with greater pride than I have ever experienced since. We had worn a proud uniform for over five years and with many others I was disconsolate at its putting off. For the sufferings, the sacrifice and the heroism of a million men of our generation whose bones lay at rest across the sea, had raised the prestige of our race to a height never before achieved, and even upon us, however faintly, was reflected the glory of their achievements. But another, Bombardier Ronald Skirth, like Jupe a wartime soldier, declared that: My abhorrence of war equated with a detestation of the war-machine – the Army of which I was a member … it personified everything I despised. I was a cog in that machine, vastly more powerful than myself, so I was compelled to live a hypocrite’s existence … By the time the war ended, my prejudices had become so unreasoning and so deeply embedded that I resolved never to accept any honours, promotions, benefits or even monetary advantages from an Authority I both detested and despised. Author Colin MacInnes, who served in the Intelligence Corps in a later war, hated the whole thought of killing or being killed, but disliked military service itself almost as much: Three-quarters of military discipline is mindless, obsolete and wastefully self-frustrating – apart, of course, from being highly irritating. No one can serve in any army for years without being to some extent an inbred malingerer and scrounger, irredeemably slothful. Conversely, several of the National Servicemen interviewed by Trevor Royle for his book The Best Years of their Lives thought that military service had changed them for the better. ‘I sometimes wonder how different I’d have been without the discipline of National Service,’ asked one. I mean, what did a Teddy Boy graduate to? ‘Most if us did feel proud to be part of an army which had only recently won the war’, admitted another. ‘I feel sorry that modern youth cannot experience such feelings.’ Tommy Atkins certainly has a capacity for extraordinary gentleness. Guardsman Gerald Kersh was abed in a Second World War Nissen hut when the rest of his squad of potential officers returned, heavy-footed, from the cinema: Everybody clumped in … I breathed regularly, and kept my nose under the blankets. Then I heard a Potential Officer of a Rifle Brigade Sergeant say: ‘Take it easy. Have a little consideration. Man asleep here.’ Something clicked above my head. Looking out of the narrow slit of one partly-raised eyelid, I saw the Rifle Brigade Sergeant take my greatcoat off its hook, open it, shake it gently and approach me. He covered me with it, and then everybody went to bed. It was not that I was ill, it was not that I was fragile and in need of protection. I was asleep. He has a harsh edge too. The capture of Goose Green in the Falklands by 2 Para in 1982 was a remarkable feat of low-level dogged courage, and earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones. Ken Lukowiak, who fought there as a private, admitted that one of his comrades carried a couple of pairs of dental pliers ‘to acquire gold’, and a handful of his comrades looking at a pretty girl’s photograph were soon speculating about her propensity for vigorous anal intercourse. The gallant victors neither expected nor received kid-glove handling, as Lukowiak, chided by Colour Sergeant Frank Pye for obeying an order to clear up after the battle, assures us: ‘What the fuck are you doing, you stupid cunt?’ said Frank. ‘If I told you I was sweeping the floor, Colour, would you believe me?’ ‘Don’t get fucking gobby with me, you crow, or I’ll fucking drop you.’ ‘Sorry, Colour.’ Nor are officers always chivalrous gentlemen, as Lieutenant Colonel Edward Windus observed in 1761 when telling his colonel why he had thrown Lieutenant Meredyth out of the regiment: When sober, he cannot keep away from a billiard table, or when drunk, out of a bawdy house, where he is very apt to draw his sword upon friends or foes, though he seldom meets any of the former there, or anywhere else. In short, he has made himself despised by the people of Cork, and this place; as much as he was disagreeable to his brother officers. Like a rich and time-worn tapestry, Atkins shuns easy analysis. There is an appetite for alcohol, sex, and casual violence. This is then interwoven seamlessly into a personality indelibly coloured by self-sacrifice, comradeship, generosity, humour, a tenderness for other men that owes little to sexuality, and the fiercest of pride in the primary group. A thick braid of decency is folded around the darker strands of self-indulgence, even though it can never quite conceal them. Whatever the controversies of the occupation of Iraq, Steve Brooks, who served there as an officer with the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, firmly believed that he was doing the right thing: I have found that soldiers are simple people and in general are apolitical – not amoral. As such I deployed to Ulster to stop children having to walk to school between picket lines under a hail of missiles, to Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing of a population, and to Iraq to secure democracy for a people who deserved the right to it. By looking at the basic scars of Saddam’s regime I knew that we were doing right by the common man. Yet the judge advocate in the trial of officers and soldiers court-martialled for alleged involvement in the death in army custody of an Iraqi civilian, Baha Mousa, maintained that evidence within the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had been impossible to secure because of ‘a more or less obvious closing of the ranks’. After his release from prison, former corporal Donald Payne, who had pleaded guilty to the inhumane treatment of Mousa, maintained that he had seen several of his comrades ‘forcefully kick and/or punch the detainees,’ and added that ‘he had previously covered up the extent of abuse by British troops out of misguided loyalty.’ Part of the difference between the behaviour of two groups of soldiers, in Iraq at different times and places, is circumstantial. It owes a good deal to local mood, regimental and small-group culture, and the tone set by commanders, senior and junior alike. In a deep and abiding sense there is less real difference than we might hope for. Atkins retains the chameleon-like ability to be both hero and villain. Rudyard Kipling, the first writer to get to grips with the British private soldier, could be penetratingly honest about the man’s complexity. His own research was carried out in the 1880s with the help of soldiers of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the East Surreys at Mian Mir – the great military cantonment outside Lahore. This allowed him to glimpse a world rarely seen by middle-class outsiders: The red-coats, the pipe-clayed belts and the pill-box hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of the oats and horse-piss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mishandled, the crowded troop-ships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. Alongside his heroes, like Captain Crook O’Neil of the ‘Black Tyrone’, stand tragic figures like Private Simmons, mercilessly bullied by Private Losson, who eventually shoots his tormentor and duly hangs for it. In the poem ‘Cells’, the narrator, locked up yet again for being drunk and resisting the guard, regrets that ‘my wife she cries on the barrack-gate, my kid in the barrack-yard’ but knows that ‘as soon as I’m in with a mate and gin, I know I’ll do it again.’ It was a portrait drawn from life, as we can see from Horace Wyndham’s description of a commanding officer’s orders – the meting out of summary jurisdiction – in an infantry battalion at Aldershot in the 1890s: At first sight, one would scarcely imagine that the pasty-faced, feeble-looking youth in the centre had, a few hours ago, required the united efforts of four of the regimental police to carry him, striking, blaspheming and madly drunk, from the canteen to the guard-room … The burly scoundrel at the end of the row is now to answer as he may for making a savage assault on a non-commissioned officer. He has ‘ex-Whitechapel rough’ writ large all over his evil countenance, and although he knows perfectly well that trial by court-martial will be his fate, he does not appear to be in the least concerned thereby. William Roberston was the only man in British military history to rise through the ranks from private to field-marshal. When he arrived to join the 16th Lancers in 1877, the orderly officer warned him that he was entering a world where private property no longer existed: ‘Give your watch to the sergeant-major of your troop, my lad … for it is unsafe to leave it lying about, and there is nowhere you can carry it with safety.’ His barrack room was peopled with folk addicted to rough behaviour, heavy drinking, and hard swearing … treated like machines – of an inferior kind – and having little expectation of finding decent employment on the expiration of their twenty-one years’ engagement, they lived only for the present … These rugged veterans exacted full deference from the recruit, who was assigned the worst bed in the room, given the smallest amount of food and the least palatable, and had to ‘lend’ them articles of kit which they had lost or sold. This deference was enforced with the aid of unofficial punishment. In 1836 a private of 1st Foot Guards told the Royal Commission on Military Punishments that his battalion had company courts-martial, in which soldiers judged their own kind. Offences like ‘thieving from his comrades or … or dirty tricks’ could result in a man being sling-belted, held down trouserless across a bench and lashed with the leather sling of a musket. It was a disgraceful punishment, and a man thus treated was thereafter ‘never thought anything of’. When Roberston joined the army, every military offence, no matter how trivial, was regarded as a crime, for which the offender was flung in the unit’s guard-room until he could be dealt with by his commanding officer. The guard-room in the case of the cavalry barracks at Aldershot, was about fifteen feet square, indifferently ventilated, and with the most primitive arrangements for sanitation. No means of lighting it after dark were either provided or permitted. Running along one of its sides was a sloping wooden stage, measuring about six feet from top to bottom, which served as a bed for all the occupants, sometimes a dozen or more in number … no blankets (except in very cold weather) or mattresses were allowed, except for prisoners who had been interned for more than seven days. Until then their only covering, besides their ordinary clothes – which were never taken off – consisted of their cloaks, and they had to endure as best they could the sore hips and shoulders caused by lying on the hard boards. Life in military prisons was infinitely worse. Flogging remained despite having been abolished in the army generally in 1881. By 1895 the cato’-nine-tails was rarely used, and had been replaced by the birch, which was applied across the bare buttocks so sharply that most victims cried out with pain. In 1895 Private Jones of the 16th Lancers, found guilty of idleness at the crank and reporting sick without cause, received eighteen strokes, and the eighteen-year-old Private Dansie of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was awarded eighteen strokes in Dublin Military Prison for repeated idleness. At Gosport, assaulting a warder brought Private Murphy of the West Riding twenty-five strokes. Not all violence has been formal. From the very beginning, the process of converting civilian into soldier was entrusted to NCOs who used fists or sticks to help things along. In 1738 an ex-soldier maintained that his comrades had to stand to be beat like dogs; which, indeed, is generally the case if a man does not speak or look contrary to some officer’s humours. I have known men beat with canes and horse-whips till the blood run from their heads into their shoes, only for speaking in their own defence, and very often laid in irons in some dungeon afterwards … These frequent liberties taken by certain officers, in extending their authorities to use unsufferable severities, is the reason of the best men’s avoiding the army, and good recruits being so difficult to get. It could mean death for a man to strike back. When guard was being mounted in the English enclave of Tangier in July 1677, one drummer was late with his stroke. Captain Carr promptly hit him, and the drummer went for his sword, almost as a reflex. He was sentenced to hang, but the garrison commander, well aware that he had few enough soldiers as it was, commuted the sentence so that the drummer had to stand at the foot of the gallows with a rope round his neck until the crime was expiated. Until relatively recently some soldiers would rather accept an illegal whack than undergo due process that would leave its mark on their official record. Young Spike Mays, who joined 1st Royal Dragoons as a band-boy in 1924, found that a moment’s inattention earned him ‘a cut across the backside’ from the bandmaster’s stick. When Lieutenant Peter Young transferred from his infantry battalion to a newly raised Commando unit in 1940, his NCOs assured him that soldiers far preferred this sort of discipline. Beevor described the army at what he thought was the tail end of an illegal, though quietly ignored, system of justice as old as the army itself. In many regiments, a sergeant would offer the miscreant a choice: either ‘accept my punishment’ – usually a thump administered behind the vehicle sheds – ‘or the company commander’s’ – which almost certainly meant a fine. ‘I’ll take yours, sarge,’ was the usual resigned reply. He would certainly have drawn the line at striking the blow himself, but in May 1780 the thoughtful Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the Black Watch, confided to his diary ‘I knocked down Norman McKay on the parade not so much for being drunk as swearing he was not, and though he deserved it I am sorry for it, for we should never punish a soldier in a passion.’ Peebles was neither a thug nor a martinet. When he returned home in February 1782 he made a moving farewell address to the men of his company, stressing the ‘satisfaction and pleasure’ of having been their commander, and commending them for ‘that good name you are so justly possessed of whether in quarters or the field.’ He remembered that he ‘could hardly make an end of this little speech, my voice faltered, and my knees shook under me.’ Evidently ‘the poor fellows were affected too.’ He promptly ordered them ‘five gallons of rum to make a drink of grog in the evening,’ effectively giving them nearly half a pint of rum a head, a gift no doubt destructive of the very sobriety he had urged upon them. Continuity and change lie at the very heart of my story. Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, has argued that different forms of military organisation were ‘ultimately rooted in political, social and economic structures … each of them was also partly the product of the technology then in use.’ The British army that came into being with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 has evolved in myriad ways since then, with these political, social, economic and technological pressures all playing their part in the process. I have no doubt that the Duke of Marlborough, who oversaw the army’s transition from a scarlet puddle of ‘guards and garrisons’ in the late 1600s to the world-class force that helped dash the dynastic ambitions of Louis XIV, would recognise, in the tired heroes of Helmand, the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago. They wear loose camouflage fatigues, not red coats with bright facings; their professional knowledge would leave Marlborough’s men dazzled, and their rationality and scepticism would mark them off from an age coloured by belief and deference. And yet their social organisation is so recognisably similar that we may doubt whether, in the British context, technology has really shaped structures quite as much as it has elsewhere. The major combat arms, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, have retained forms and terminologies that the men who fought at Blenheim – or Waterloo or the Somme, for that matter – would readily grasp. Lieutenant colonels, leading their regiments into action, have lost nothing of their pivotal importance in the hierarchy, and the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe of the Welsh Guards, killed in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, underlines the risks they still run. Regiments, with their elders and distinctive markings – as characteristic of the army as an ancient Briton’s woad, the cicatrices of an African warrior or a junker’s duelling scars – are still an enduring feature of the army, usually much misunderstood and endemically under threat, but thudding on like the beat of a distant drum. Formal and informal structures continue to intermesh. Most modern soldiers would recognise the close and comradely world prescribed in the 1800 Regulations for the Rifle Corps, which stipulated that every corporal, private and bugler should select a comrade from a rank differing from his own. Comrades were to berth, drill and go on duties together, and comrades could not be changed without the permission of the captain. Although the technology would doubtless baffle a Wellingtonian footsoldier, Colour Sergeant ‘Stick’ Broome’s description of extracting the wounded Private Johnson Beharry from a Warrior armoured vehicle in Iraq shows the same bonds of comradeship that have helped hold men together for three centuries: We hit the ground, and we came under contact from small arms immediately. Woody and Erv went left, myself and Cooper started to pull Beharry out of his seat. This was the first chance I had to see the badly lacerated face of Bee … I pulled him out with the help of big Erv and Jim Cooper and put him into my Warrior with his head in my lap. There is much in common between a rifleman like William Green of Lutterworth, whose ‘disposition to ramble’ took him into the army, and Dorset shepherd Benjamin Harris, carried away by the understated glory of a green jacket, and the likes of Lance Corporal Wood and Private Ervin. A modern recruiter would squirm at the Duke of Wellington’s assessment of the army of his own age: A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class – no matter whether your son or my son – all must march; but our friends – I may say it in this room – are the very scum of the earth. People talk about enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are. It remains true that the majority of infantry soldiers are recruited, as they always have been, from boys whose civilian futures do not seem bright. The modern army’s growing tendency to cream off the cleverest of its recruits for its technical corps has accentuated the process. In 1942 the army’s adjutant general, responsible for its manpower policies, admitted that the infantry ‘received in effect the rejects from the other arms of the service’. It is still easiest to recruit at times of economic depression. Just as Wellington could scarcely have beaten the French without the aid of men who had chosen to serve rather than starve, so the army of the early twenty-first century has been saved from a manning crisis by the shortage of jobs elsewhere. In Scotland the issue has become heavily politicised, with Scottish National Party backbencher Christine Grahame maintaining that many Scots recruits were in fact ‘economic conscripts … turning to the Army as a way out of poverty and deprivation, brought on by the failed policies of London Labour’. The predictable furore aroused by these remarks cannot alter the fact that Scotland’s economic plight was a spur to recruitment from the army’s very earliest years. As historian Stephen Wood wrote of the Scottish soldiers who signed on to fight in Marlborough’s wars: ‘Many would be enlisted while drunk or have the edges of their doubts blunted with alcohol; some would enlist as an alternative to gaol, or starvation, or domestic responsibilities.’ It is evident that economic compulsion was not restricted to Scotland. In 1859 Lieutenant General Sir George Weatherall, the adjutant general, told the Royal Commission on Recruiting ‘there are very few men who enlist for the love of being a soldier; it is a very rare exception … they are starving, or they have quarrelled with their friends, or there are cases of bastardy, and all sorts of things.’ In 1877 the sergeant major of the 77th Foot asked a Geordie recruit if he had served in the army before, only to be told ‘No. Aw were niver hard enough up, to list, afoor.’ Robert Edmondson, who signed on as a private in the late 1880s, suggested that up to 80 per cent of the army was drawn from the unemployed, adding ‘Empty pockets and hungry stomachs are the most eloquent and persuasive of recruiting sergeants.’ The First World War made comparatively little difference, and in 1926 The Times reported that 60 per cent of recruits from the London area were unemployed when they signed on. When Spike Mays arrived at Canterbury to begin his basic training, he was received with a cheery greeting from Mitch, a fellow recruit ‘Wotcher, mate. Ain’t ’arf ’ungry. Could scoff a scabby-’eaded ape.’ There were always some genuine enthusiasts. Joseph Gregg, who was to take part in the charge of the Light Brigade, wrote, ‘My father was a soldier at the time of the battle of Waterloo … As a boy, I always had a desire to see a battlefield, and made up my mind to enlist in a cavalry regiment.’ Herbert Wootton, who joined up on the eve of the First World War, agreed that he too was very keen on becoming a soldier. I had two uncles, both regulars, who served through the South African war of 1899–1902. As a youngster I was thrilled with their stories. I became a keen reader of G. A. Henty’s books on war, and later read Rudyard Kipling’s books. I loved to be in the company of old soldiers. Captain Doug Beattie’s assessment of his own predilection for a military career (he signed on as a 16-year-old in 1981) has many answering echoes: I suppose soldiering was in my blood. My dad was a serviceman. My grandfathers had fought in World War Two, one with the Royal Artillery, the other with the Irish Fusiliers. I entered the world in England, a result of the posting system of the army that dad – then a colour sergeant in the Royal Ulster rifles – was subject to. Wellington’s point about conscription is fundamental to understanding the British army. For most of its history it was recruited by voluntary enlistment, although economic necessity, judicial compulsion, and the gulling of drunken youths all blurred the definition of what a real volunteer might actually be. For example, an Englishman in eighteenth-century Atholl observed a poor fellow running to the hills as if for his life, hotly pursued by half a dozen human blood hounds. Turning to his guide, the gentleman anxiously inquired the meaning of what he saw. ‘Och,’ replied the imperturbable Celt, ‘it’s only the Duke raising the royal Athole volunteers.’ In the British experience legal compulsion has been the exception not the rule. The first Military Service Act was passed in early 1916, as a response to losses in the first eighteen months of the First World War. This represented a sea-change in public policy. Conscription was in force from 1916 to 1919, and again in 1939–60; from 1948 this was in the guise of National Service. It was only during these years that the army was in any sense a genuinely national force, its members, serving and retired, strewn so liberally across society that there was no escaping them. As a young Territorial private in the early 1960s I hitch-hiked in itchy battledress, getting lifts, without any real effort, from lorry-drivers who asked knowing questions about my ‘mob’; mothers whose boys had recently completed their National Service; and men whose conversation slid onto sangars and bocage, desert roses and PIATS – the well-burnished argot of folk who had done it, which I, most demonstrably, had not. It was a world full of men who understood the difference between a brigadier and a bombardier, a battalion and a brigade. They knew that you stepped off with the left foot and that although you assiduously called a warrant officer ‘sir’, you did yourself no favours by imagining that you might salute him. In the early twenty-first century, as in the first decade of its existence, the army now constitutes a tiny proportion of the population; all the signs suggest that this proportion will decrease still further. About one in seventy of us has a close family member who has served or is still serving, and regular soldiers themselves account for just 0.087 per cent of the population. For good or ill, Britain is almost wholly demilitarised. Now, as the success of the charity Help for Heroes and the moving unofficial ceremonies that greet the bodies of those being repatriated in the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett demonstrate, there is a sympathy for servicemen and women that has little direct connection to the conflicts in either Iraq or Afghanistan. But as Horace Wyndham complained over a century ago, ‘Outside the pages of “popular fiction” the soldier as he really is, is scarcely heard of, and over his life hangs a veil of reserve that is but seldom lifted.’ Changes in the system of military honours and awards, instituted towards the end of John Major’s administration, mean that acts of bravery are now rewarded with medals whose significance is scarcely grasped by the population as a whole. Successive changes in the regimental system, however good the case in their favour, have replaced the names and badges so familiar to my father’s generation with terminology that the nation has not taken readily to its heart. Somehow 1 Mercian (Cheshire) does not have quite the ring of the Cheshire Regiment. Things that loom large in a soldier’s intimate life – like the length of a tour or operational duty; the duration of rest and recreation (‘R and R’) during it; and the quality of single accommodation and married quarters – are rarely discussed in the press. In contrast, there are frequent articles about the poor quality of equipment. Steve Brooks, writing of his time in Iraq, resented this: I hate nothing more than civvies taking the piss about the latest article in the Mail or the Mirror about the army where the rifles don’t fire and radios don’t work. Yes, comms are shit, but we are the calibre of soldiers … to work hard for comms … like all aspects of soldiering we had to fight for comms to remain effective. Not all the news is bad. The growing number of parades marking units’ return from overseas is welcome evidence that the army is beginning to emerge from beneath the cloak of invisibility that has shrouded it for so long. This cloak was woven in the long-running campaign in Northern Ireland. It is salutary to recall just how costly this was in terms of human life. In 1972, its worst year for casualties there, the army lost 102 officers and men killed in the province, and on 27 August 1979 two bombs at Warrenpoint left eighteen soldiers dead. There is a strong case for saying that the most serious damage that the IRA did to the army was not by killing its soldiers, but by attacking isolated uniformed soldiers outside the province which led the services to ban their members from wearing uniform in public, except on clearly specified occasions. I had grown up in a world full of uniforms, but by the time I attended Staff College in the 1980s things were very different. Most officers avoided the uniform ban by slipping on a civilian jacket over their military sweater, and downtown Camberley abounded with well-trimmed men in their early middle years. The subterfuge would have been unlikely to fool even the dimmest hit squad, but it was another step on the road to self-effacement. My first arrival as a staff officer at Headquarters Land Command at Wilton (wafted in by a gust of self-importance, for I had contrived to become a colonel) drew a polite rebuke from the MOD policeman on the gate. I had broken the rules by wearing uniform, and should take care to keep it covered up in future. Reversing the uniform ban has not proved easy. In March 2008, shortly after the Government had commissioned a study that was to recommend that servicemen should be able to wear their uniforms as a matter of course, the station commander of Royal Air Force Wittering ordered that uniforms were not to be worn off-duty because of ‘persistent threats and abuse’ in nearby Peterborough. In January that year, 200 soldiers had their aircraft diverted, because of bad weather, from RAF Brize Norton to Birmingham. They were told to change from uniform to plain clothes on the tarmac before passing through public areas because, as a ministry spokesman put it ‘For security reasons, the MOD wishes to reduce the military profile on flights carried out on its behalf at civilian airports.’ There have been numerous cases of discrimination against service personnel in uniform. In November 2006 an army officer was refused entry into Harrods on the grounds that he was in ‘combat dress’; in September 2008 a hotel refused a room to a wounded soldier, who was forced to spend the night in his car; and in late 2009 four soldiers attending the funeral of a comrade killed in action in Afghanistan were banned from a Maidenhead nightclub: ‘You can all come in,’ said the helpful doorman, ‘apart from the squaddies.’ My regard for the soldier stems from a lifetime’s study as a military historian and almost as long a reserve infantry officer. For more than forty years I have read about soldiers, taught them at Sandhurst and Staff College, listened to them grumble or exult, watched them ply their trade in the Balkans and Iraq, visited them in hospital at Selly Oak and seen them arrive in flag-draped coffins at Royal Air Force Lyneham. It should already be very clear that this portrait will show Tommy Atkins warts and all. At one extreme there are those who prefer their pictures to have blemishes air-brushed out. Many years ago, a military reviewer was pained that the psychologist Norman Dixon (a former Royal Engineer officer, wounded and decorated for his work in bomb disposal) should ‘write so cynically about his former profession’ in his important book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. One of the few adverse reviews of my own book Firing Line appeared in the British Army Review. The converse is also true, for there are perhaps as many who focus on an image of unrelieved savagery, or who see the army as a boss-class tool for turning nice boys into layabouts and killers. This is not a chronological history of the army and its achievements. There have been many published in my working lifetime, with Correlli Barnett’s Britain and Her Army (1970) wearing its judgements well even where recent scholarship has advanced our detailed knowledge. Allan Mallinson’s The Making of the British Army (2009) is the most recent easily accessible account. This book is instead a social history of the soldier. Its organisation is thematic rather than chronological, and its preoccupation not with big battles or frontier scrimmages, but with the myriad routine observances of military life. It is the story of a man as ancient as a redcoat in Charles II’s Tangier garrison and as modern as the gate-guard on Camp Bastion. It also concerns the women who followed him, anxiously watched his progress from afar or, more recently, soldiered with him. Given the immense change in Britain over the past three centuries, it would be inconceivable for the soldier not to have changed too. What surprises me, as I get ready to endure the fug of our first barrack room, is not how much he has changed: but how little. I POLITICS AND POSITION CHAPTER 1 CHUCK HIM OUT, THE BRUTE WRITING JUST AFTER the First World War, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson maintained that ‘the army is not popular in the sense that the navy is. The latter usually enjoys full public support, the army seldom does except in war, and consequently it labours under considerable disadvantages in order to prepare for war, and from this it has followed that our wars have so often been a case of muddling through.’ To the high Victorians, the British soldier was Tommy Atkins. The nickname probably originated in an 1815 War Office publication showing how the Soldier’s Pocket Book should be filled out, giving ‘Private Thomas Atkins, No 6 Troop, 6th Dragoons’ as its exemplar. By 1837 Atkins was a sergeant, and could sign his name rather than scrawl a mark. We are sometimes told that the name was chosen by the Duke of Wellington. He remembered the pivot man of the grenadier company of his regiment, the 33rd Foot, dying in Flanders in 1793 with the stoic words ‘Never mind, Sir, it’s all in the day’s work.’ However, Wellington did not become commander-in-chief of the army till 1827, so it is very unlikely that he would have been consulted. In 1883 the Illustrated London News showed ‘Pte Tommy Atkins returning from Indian Service’, and in 1892 Rudyard Kipling dedicated his Barrack Room Ballads to ‘T.A.’ The collection included ‘Tommy’, Kipling’s visceral condemnation of society’s predilection for ‘makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep’, which concluded: For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’ But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot; An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please; An’ Tommy ain’t a blooming fool – you bet that Tommy sees! Ambivalence about the redcoat long predated Kipling. To the Georgians he was Mr Lobster, a nickname stemming from a 1740 dialogue between ‘Thomas Lobster, soldier, and Jack Tar, sailor’, in the political news-sheet The Craftsman, a periodical so offensive to Prime Minister Robert Walpole that he had its publisher arrested every six months as a matter of course. The conversation redounded little to Mr Lobster’s advantage, for while he was weighed down by firm discipline and a heavy pack, plied his murderous trade at close quarters and was commanded by popinjays who had bought their commissions, his apple-cheeked interlocutor cruised the rolling main, defending Britain’s maritime prosperity, and returned to a grateful nation enriched by prize money. Nearly a century later Portsmouth’s ladies of the night made their own preferences clear: Sailors they get all the money Soldiers they get nought but brass. I do love a jolly sailor Soldiers you may kiss my arse. Part of the reason for the nation’s long-standing suspicion of her soldiers can be traced to the circumstances prior to the regular army’s formation in 1661. Britain had just emerged from a long civil war, and had had quite enough of soldiers, whether they had fought for king or Parliament. Moreover, in 1655–7 Oliver Cromwell had instituted direct military government in England and Wales, through major generals presiding over twelve regions, answerable to the lord protector himself. Although the proximate cause of the experiment was a series of royalist plots, Cromwell believed that the nation’s morals needed urgent reform. The major generals, their troops of cavalry funded by a 10 per cent ‘decimation tax’ on royalists, stamped out seditious and ungodly pastimes like horse-racing, plays, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, and closed unruly ale-houses. They also punished those guilty of licentiousness, blasphemy, and swearing. Although the rule of the major generals was unpopular, the scars left by the Civil War were far deeper. As historian Charles Carlton has observed, ‘No standing army’ was a Restoration slogan driven by ‘fear of soldiers, not because they killed people, but because they turned society head over heels’. Oxford scholar Anthony Wood thought that his fellow undergraduates who went off to be soldiers were ‘debauched’ by the experience. Although Bulstrode Whitelock, Cromwell’s ambassador to Sweden, was on the winning side when he told his hosts of the horrors of civil war, he believed that his fellow-countrymen were heartily sick of ‘seeing servants riding on horseback and masters in great want’. Although most of the New Model Army’s officers were not much different from their cavalier opponents – Lord General Fairfax was a peer’s son and Lieutenant General Cromwell a country gentleman – enough of them rose from humble beginnings to high rank to cause affront. Cromwell’s assertion that ‘I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’ struck a jarring chord within a stratified society used to obeying its natural leaders. Amongst the reasons for the long-standing practice of the purchase of commissions, which disappeared only in 1871, was a desire to ensure that officers were gentlemen rather than enthusiasts. Part of it was about national identity. The Civil War was not simply an English phenomenon, but had extended across each of the three kingdoms ruled by Charles I. It was at its most bloody in Ireland, where its agonies reflected long-standing religious frictions, and each new episode, from the revolt of 1641 to the Cromwellian pacification of 1649–53, simply added fresh horrors, with new heroes and martyrs, to a list that was long enough already. The Scots seemed to have prospered from their early alliance with Parliament, but their war soon turned sour. There was a bitter conflict within Scottish society: part clan feud, part power struggle, part confessional dispute. Alongside this there was an external war which saw Scots royalists suffer appallingly in their invasions of England in 1648 and 1651. So many were sent off as bondsmen to the West Indies after their defeat at Worcester, that merchants complained there was no profit in shipping them out. Suspicion of the soldier was writ large enough in England, but in Ireland and Scotland it was seared on the national consciousness. The ripples of antimilitarism curled out across the Atlantic. Many Americans were ambivalent about their own Continental Army, without which the War of Independence could not have been won. After the Revolution, the State of Pennsylvania made its feelings clear by affirming in its constitution that a standing army was ‘dangerous [and] ought not to be kept up’. Americans did not simply dislike British soldiers, but regulars in general. ‘The general instinct to disparage the professional soldier,’ writes Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘which was discernable at the opening of the seventeenth century, had become by the eighteenth century a political and constitutional principle of enduring significance.’ In 1812 President John Adams warned, ‘Nothing is more important than to hold the civil authority decidedly superior to the military power.’ The point was not lost on the opponents of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. A 2007 polemic lamented that ‘the conservative fawning over the military displays an attitude that would have infuriated those first generations of Americans who actually built this country.’ When Charles II was restored in 1660 he found himself the proud possessor of not one army but two, though he had scarcely the money to pay for either. First, there was the remnant of the Parliamentarian New Model Army under the command of General George Monck, soon to become Duke of Albemarle. In the Declaration of Breda, which set out the conditions for his acceptance of the throne, Charles had agreed to ‘the full satisfaction of all the arrears due to’ the New Model Army, whose officers and men ‘shall be received into our service, upon as good pay and conditions as they now enjoy’. In practice, though, an ‘Act for the Speedy … Disbanding’ made provision for paying off the army, with a sweetener of a week’s bonus pay from the king’s own pocket. There was also a sensible relaxation of apprenticeship rules, so that discharged officers and men could practise civilian trades as they pleased. There were concerns, however, that pay arrears were too eagerly converted into ale, so in December 1660 discharged officers and soldiers were banned from coming within twenty miles of the capital. That month only Monck’s own ‘Coldstream Regiment’ of foot and his regiment of horse remained. Next there was Charles’s own tiny army, raised in the Low Countries amongst exiled royalists. Much of this was stationed in the English enclave of Dunkirk, where life was complicated by the fact that the garrison included both royal troops, like Lord Wentworth’s regiment of foot guards, and former Cromwellian soldiers. The guards were brought back to England, and most of the rest were posted off to be part of the garrison of Tangier, which came to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Charles’s wife, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, or sent to Portugal to support Charles’s father-in-law, John IV. A smattering of plots culminating, in January 1661, in a rising in London led by the cooper Thomas Venner, encouraged Charles to proceed with earlier plans for the formalisation of a royal guard. A new regiment of foot guards was raised by John Russell. He had commanded Prince Rupert’s guards in the Civil War; Wentworth’s regiment, at first dispersed amongst garrison towns, was soon amalgamated with it. In February 1661 Albemarle’s regiment of foot was mustered on Tower Hill and formally disbanded before being immediately re-engaged. The two senior regiments of foot guards, today the Grenadier Guards and the Coldstream Guards, both claim histories which pre-date the regular army’s formation: Monck’s regiment had been raised in 1650 and the royal guards in 1656. However, the peculiar circumstances of the Coldstream’s transfer to royal service made it junior to Russell’s 1st Guards. One would be pressed to notice the fact, however, for the Coldstream motto is ‘Nulli Secundus’ (‘Second to None’) and, despite Grenadier mutterings about ‘Second to One’ or ‘Better than Nothing’, the Coldstream has never been known as 2nd Guards. Charles’s little army had cavalry too, with three troops of Life Guards, and a single New Model regiment of horse, Colonel Unton Crooke’s, that had somehow escaped disbandment. This moved to London, where it became the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards. It is generally known, from the colour of its coats, as the Horse Guards Blue or more simply The Blues. In addition, there were twenty-eight garrisons elsewhere, larger ones at seaports like Portsmouth and Hull and smaller outposts like the castles of St Mawes and Pendennis, their Cromwellian officers now replaced by reliable royalist gentlemen with local interests. The cost of guards and garrisons exceeded Charles’s total income. Parliament was reluctant to fund a standing army, and there were fears that the soldiery would soon become, as Lord Treasurer Southampton put it, ‘insolent and ungovernable’. Charles’s motives in raising the army were threefold. First, at a time when monarchs were on the move a good deal, he would be personally vulnerable without reliable troops for close protection. Second, it was evident that an army, however small, was needed to underpin his foreign policy. Furnishing overseas garrisons is a recurrent theme in the army’s history. It is no accident that the Dunkirk garrison predated the Restoration, and it was run down partly by the direct dispatch of units to the new garrison of Tangier. Third, the army created jobs, and Charles had been restored to a throne resting on the shoulders of men who felt entitled to them. Some royalists had accompanied Charles into exile, and far more had endured life under the Protectorate, often ruined by having to ‘compound’ with the new authorities for their ‘delinquency’. In 1662, when Parliament decided to raise money to pension royalist ex-officers, it found that no less than 5,353 gentlemen, mostly former captains and subalterns, were entitled to a share. Ex-NCOs and men petitioned local magistrates for pensions, supporting their claims, where they could, by fulsome testimonials from former commanding officers, setting out the ‘many dangerous hurts’ they had received. Those who could manage it got jobs not just for themselves, but for their children too. Winston Churchill, father of the future Duke of Marlborough, was a West Country gentleman and lawyer turned captain of horse. He spent the 1650s living, with his growing brood, in the genteel poverty of his Parliamentarian mother-in-law’s house. But in 1660 he found himself the delighted recipient of royal favour, with an augmentation (‘Faithful but Unfortunate’, announced his new motto) to his coat of arms, a knighthood, a series of sinecures and a seat in Parliament. His daughter Arabella and his son John both obtained minor posts at court, and after the former had attracted the roving eye of James, Duke of York (she went on to bear him four children), young John was given an ensign’s commission in 1st Guards. Charles’s little army survived, and by his death in 1685 had taken on some of the characteristics which still define it. It was the monarch’s own, its officers ‘trusty and well-beloved’ gentlemen bearing royal commissions whose wording has changed little over the centuries, with a fresh document marking successive promotions. CHAPTER 2 KING’S ARMY MANY OFFICERS AND men have felt comfortable in vesting the moral responsibility for their actions in the monarch’s person. Waterloo veteran Colonel Francis Skelly Tidy told his daughter: ‘I am a soldier and one of His Majesty’s most devoted servants, bound to defend the Crown with my life against either faction as necessary.’ Sergeant Sam Ancell, who fought in the 58th Regiment in the 1779– 83 siege of Gibraltar, announced: Our king is answerable to God for us. I fight for him. My religion consists in a firelock, open touch-hole, good flint, well-rammed charge, and seventy rounds of powder and ball. This is the military creed. Come, comrades, drink success to British arms. In 1914 Dora Foljambe, married to a keen Territorial, with a brother in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a brother-in-law in the same battalion and two sons in the regular army, was delighted to see that the government had apparently shrunk from using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland. She told her daughter, married to yet another rifleman, that I am very glad this did happen as it shows the feeling in the army against being used as a political tool – for one party against another – if there is to be civil war the army must break up or stand in a body for the King, it is impossible they should fight side by side with the [Irish] Nationalists who cheered every Boer victory in the South African war. Our army is not made up of paid levies. Writing in 1972, Lieutenant Colonel John Baynes affirmed that the monarch’s immense significance to the armed forces must first be strongly emphasised … This link with the Head of State is not merely symbolic, but reflects a close loyalty to the person of the Queen as well as to her office. No firmer guarantee of the British soldier’s exclusion from politics exists than his personal dependence on the authority of Her Majesty. Robert William Lowry’s commissions lie before me. His appointment as ensign in the 47th Foot, dated 7 June 1841, is signed by Queen Victoria (black ink over a pencil cross reminding the young monarch where she should put her name), though by the time he became a lieutenant colonel on 18 February 1863 the queen entrusted such work to the army’s commander-in-chief, her uncle, George, Duke of Cambridge. He later became the epitome of conservatism, telling the officers of Aldershot garrison, assembled to hear a lecture on cavalry, ‘Why should we want to know anything about foreign cavalry? … We have better cavalry of our own. I fear, gentlemen, that the army is in danger of becoming a mere debating society.’ But he had commanded a division in the Crimea, fighting bravely in the shocking bludgeon-match at Inkerman, and was, as William Robertson recalled, ‘a good friend of the soldier and extremely popular with all ranks of the army.’ When he signed Robert Lowry’s new commission he was interested not only in military reform, but in maintaining (though with diminishing success) that he was directly subordinate to the monarch rather than to the secretary of state of war. His rather deliberate ‘George’, with a curlicue swinging round from the last letter to encircle his name, looks restrained on a document rich in stamps and seals. Both commissions are made of robust parchment, folded in four, with the holder’s name on an outer fold, and fit neatly in the inside pocket of an officer’s tunic. Lowry’s second commission is almost exactly the same size as my own – though that was produced almost a century later. When Cambridge was eventually prised out of office in 1895, after a tenure just short of forty years, Victoria resumed signing commissions on her own behalf. Declining health and the flood of new commissions necessitated by the army’s expansion for the Boer war (1899–1902) made things difficult but, borne on by a powerful sense of duty, she struggled hard against having a signature stamp until she was at last persuaded that it would not be misused. With the exception of Queen Mary and her sister Anne, all British monarchs who ruled 1625–1760, had fought in battle. Charles II received his baptism of fire at twelve at Edgehill in 1642. His brother, James II, had also participated in the Civil War, and was a lieutenant general in the French service during the Interregnum. He accompanied the royal army to the West Country to face William of Orange in 1688 although, racked by nose-bleeds, he was not an inspiring commander. William himself was an accomplished general. His invasion of England in unreliable autumn weather, in the face of a well-posted royal navy and an army whose internal collapse could not be confidently predicted, betokened extraordinary self-confidence. He beat James (also present in person on the field) at the Boyne in 1689, where he was clipped by a cannon-ball that came within an inch or two of changing history. The first Hanoverians came from a Germanic tradition of soldier-kings. The future George I had fought the Turks as a young man and served as an Imperialist officer in the War of Spanish Succession. His eldest son commanded the allied army in the victorious battle of Dettingen in 1743. The first two Georges took a close interest in the day-to-day running of the army. During their reigns it was still small enough for them to know all senior officers by name and repute. When Lieutenant General Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for failure to charge as ordered at Minden in 1759, George II personally struck his name from the roll of the Privy Council. The king also penned an order, which was read at the head of every regiment in the service, saying that such conduct was ‘worse than death to a man who has any sense of honour’. Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, the king’s second son, was wounded at Dettingen, narrowly beaten by Marshal Saxe at Fontenoy, and then broke the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746. Defeated in Germany in 1757, he was disgraced on his return home. Opinion on ‘Butcher Cumberland’ has now softened somewhat. His style of command was uncomfortably Germanic; he was easily impressed by severe officers like Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley. He backed the seedy and idiosyncratic James Wolfe, victor at Quebec in 1759. The attractive old Huguenot warrior, Field Marshal Lord Louis Jean, Lord Ligonier, always thought Cumberland a good general. George III had a military brood. His eldest son, the Prince of Wales or ‘Prinny’ (later George IV) was no soldier, although in later life he came to believe that he had served with Wellington in the Peninsula. ‘So I have heard you say, Sir’, the Duke would observe when the Regent recounted another martial triumph and turned to him for support. Prinny’s younger brother Frederick, Duke of Albany and York, was not a successful field commander, for the French thrashed him in both 1793 and 1799. However, he was a serious-minded commander-in-chief of the army from 1798 to 1827. There was a brief gap in 1809–11, after he had been forced to resign when it transpired that his mistress, Mary Ann Clark, had been dabbling in the sale of commissions. George III’s fourth and seventh sons, Edward, Duke of Kent, and Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, both became field marshals, although they never held command in the field. His fifth son, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, lost an eye at Tournai in 1794, later commanded the Hanoverian army and succeeded as King of Hanover in 1837. The third son of George III, Prince William, broke with family tradition by joining the navy at the age of thirteen, and fought at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780. Captain John Peebles saw him in New York during the American War, and reported that he was ‘a very fine grown young man, smart and sensible for his years … & sufficiently well grown, a strong likeness of the King … he was in a plain Midshipman uniform, and took off his hat with a good grace.’ Commissioned lieutenant in 1785 he was a captain the following year. Prince William served under Horatio Nelson in the West Indies, and the admiral reported that: ‘In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the [Navy] list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal.’ Created Duke of Clarence in 1789 by his reluctant father, to avoid political embarrassment, William sought active command during the Napoleonic wars, though without success. He managed to get involved in a skirmish near Antwerp in early 1814, narrowly avoiding capture thanks to the efforts of Lieutenant Thomas Austin of the 35th Foot. When George IV died without legitimate issue in 1830, Clarence ascended the throne as William IV. His simple, approachable style gained him many supporters, but his intervention in military affairs was not a success. Coming from a highly centralised service, he had no feel for the army’s innate tribalism. He insisted that soldiers should wear red, and sailors, blue, resulting in light cavalry (traditionally clad in what had begun as workmanlike blue) becoming redcoats. Most of them gladly reverted to blue in 1840, although the 16th Lancers, perverse as ever, retained red to become the ‘Scarlet Lancers’. In her youth Queen Victoria appeared in a prettily modified version of a general’s uniform, and took military duties very seriously. She had a passionate interest in regimentalia, especially where it concerned the Scots regiments so close to her heart. In 1877 she told the Duke of Cambridge that projected amalgamations would create insuperable problems as far as tartans were concerned, for ‘to direct the 42nd to wear the Cameron tartan, or my own Cameron Highlanders to wear that of the Black Watch, would create the greatest dissatisfaction, and would be unmeaning.’ She went on to warn against the compromise of using the ‘Royal Hunting Tartan … which is a sort of undress Royal Stewart, [and] will not be appreciated by the Highlanders, nor considered advisable by the Queen’. Her husband Prince Albert was colonel of both the 11th Hussars and the Rifle Brigade. He ensured that two of the equerries allocated to their eldest son, the future King Edward VII, were upright men who had won the Victoria Cross in the Crimea. Albert, had he lived longer, might have ensured that the prince received a proper military education. As it was, young Bertie was commissioned lieutenant colonel on his eighteenth birthday, and in the summer of 1861 was sent off to the Curragh, the great military camp near Dublin, to train with the Grenadier Guards. The project was not a success. Amongst the visitors to the Curragh was the actress Nellie Clifden, ‘a London lady much run after by the Household Brigade’ who did not need much persuading to share the prince’s bed. Bertie’s parents soon found out: Prince Albert wrote him a pained paternal letter, and Victoria always attributed her husband’s fatal illness to the shock and disappointment caused by the news. Despite this inauspicious apprenticeship and his reputation for being ‘lackadaisical’, Edward took a serious interest in military reform, notably in the period of national soul-searching that followed the Boer War. His adviser, Lord Esher, sought to persuade him that he was de facto commander-in-chief of the army, an argument strengthened by the abolition of the post of commander-in-chief in 1904. The following year he affirmed that: There is always to be developed as time goes on the authority of the King as Commander-in-Chief. I mean in all personal questions. The King should adhere tenaciously to his right to veto any appointment. Gradually it will become clear to everyone that under the King a C-in-C was an anomaly. Edward’s heir apparent was Prince Albert Victor. Albert died from influenza in 1892, leaving his brother George heir. George married his late brother’s fianc?e, Princess Mary of Teck. He had served as a naval cadet with his elder brother and was commissioned sub-lieutenant in 1884. George left the navy on his marriage and lived quietly in York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate, succeeding to the throne in 1910. The couple had six children, five of them sons. Their eldest, Edward (known in the family as David), had served as a naval cadet and midshipman. As an undergraduate at Oxford he had trained in the university Officers’ Training Corps. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, and urged Lord Kitchener to allow him to go to France with his regiment, saying ‘What does it matter if I am shot? I have four brothers.’ Kitchener pointed out that it was not the risk of death but the possibility of capture that prevented him from serving at the front. General Sir Dighton Probyn VC, the distinguished warrior-turned-courtier, feared that the young prince felt ‘disgraced’ by his inability to share his generation’s risks. The Prince of Wales spent 1915–16 on the Western Front, occasionally under shellfire, sometimes closer to the fighting than was wise, but scarcely deserving the Military Cross he was awarded in 1916. General Sir Charles Monro tells us that he heard that the prince had gone up the line, early in the morning, with a Grenadier battalion. He set off in pursuit in his staff car, soon caught up with the young man, and ordered him in. ‘I heard what you said, prince’, said Monro, ‘Here is that damned old general after me again. Jump in the car, or you will spoil my appetite for breakfast.’ The prince also served in Egypt and Italy, but the same hard rule of no real action applied. He was unquestionably touched by all the suffering he saw. There is a painful account of his brushing the cheek of a badly wounded soldier with his lips. When assessing the complex character of Edward VIII, shot through with self-indulgence and populism, we should not under-emphasise the impact of the war, which saw him snared by a protective privilege he had never demanded and would willingly have discarded. His brother Bertie’s status as ‘spare’ rather than ‘heir’ meant that he had been able to embark on a full-time naval career, serving first as a Dartmouth cadet and then being posted to the dreadnought HMS Collingwood in 1913. At Jutland three years later Collingwood was bracketed by a salvo from Derrflinger or L?tzow. He recalled the excitement of being aboard a great ship shuddering under the recoil of her guns, with water from the splashes of shell-bursts surging across the decks. Bertie transferred to the RAF on its formation in 1918 and, when he succeeded to the throne on Edward’s abdication in 1936, he was the only British monarch who had qualified as a pilot. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had no sons, but their eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was appointed colonel of the Grenadier Guards in January 1942, on her sixteenth birthday. At her first official function officers found her ‘charming, and very sincere’. In February 1945 she was commissioned into the Auxiliary Territorial Service as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and completed her basic training in driving and maintenance at No 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot. She became colonel-in-chief of the Grenadiers on her accession, and for many years wore the regiment’s uniform at the Queen’s Birthday Parade. Until 1986 she attended the parade mounted, latterly on her favourite mare Burmese. Between 1971 and 1976 Prince Charles trained with both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, qualifying as both fixed-wing and helicopter pilot. He also commanded the coastal minehunter HMS Bronington during the last year of his service. The Princes, William and Harry, both trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and were commissioned into the Blues and Royals – a 1969 amalgamation of the Royal Horse Guards, whom we first glimpsed as Colonel Unton Crooke’s Regiment, in 1660, and the Royal Dragoons, raised in 1661 for duty in Tangiers. Prince William, denied the chance of operational service by the same concerns that kept the future Edward VIII in limbo, qualified as a Search and Rescue pilot. Prince Harry characteristically affirmed, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’ He served in Afghanistan, and might have stayed there longer had an unhelpful intervention by the press not drawn attention to his presence, imposing unacceptable risk on those serving alongside him. In 2008 Prince Harry received his medal for campaign service at Combermere Barracks, Windsor from his aunt, Princess Anne, colonel of the Blues and Royals. As we branch off from the direct royal line, so the undergrowth thickens, with junior members of the ruling house serving on their own account or marrying into military families. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was to marry the future George VI, lost one brother, in that most traditional of Highland regiments, the Black Watch, at Loos in 1915. She also lost a cousin, also in the Black Watch, at Ypres, Belgium in 1914, and another cousin, this time a Grenadier, at Cambrai in 1917. Centuries earlier illegitimate offspring also played their part in the process. Of Charles II’s extensive illegitimate brood, Henry, Duke of Grafton commanded the 1st Foot Guards, lined out along the Bussex Rhine as the Duke of Monmouth’s rag-tag men ran in through the mist at Sedgemoor in 1685; he was mortally wounded attacking Cork in 1690. His half-brother Monmouth, on the other side of the ditch at Sedgemoor, had commanded English troops in French service, showing courage that left him briefly when he pleaded with James II for his life, though he had recovered his self-possession when he faced the axe on Tower Hill. James II’s own child, James, Duke of Berwick, one of the four offspring borne him by Arabella Churchill, emerged as a general of European stature. He had already served against the Turks in Hungary when, in 1688, he did more to check the disintegration of the royal army than his father. In French service after 1690, he was largely responsible for wrecking allied hopes in Spain during the War of Spanish Succession. Although his character showed that streak of inflexible cruelty that had marked his father’s, he was the most capable of the later Stuarts, and had become marshal of France by the time that a cannon-ball carried him off at Philippsburg in 1734. William IV’s illegitimate son, George Fitzclarence, served in the Peninsula, became the army’s deputy adjutant general, and his father eventually made him Earl of Munster. All four of his boys served in the army or the navy; the youngest was killed in the assault on the Redan in the Crimea. Amongst George Fitzclarence’s grandsons were twin brothers, Edward, killed at Abu Hamid in the Sudan in 1897, and Charles, who won the VC with the Royal Fusiliers (first raised in 1685) in the Boer War, then transferred to the Irish Guards in its formation in 1900, and finally died as a brigadier-general on 11 November 1914 in the desperate fighting outside Ypres. His name heads the cruelly long list of officers and men missing in the Ypres Salient battlefields between 1914 and mid-1917, graven in stone on the Menin Gate memorial. It would be easy to develop the theme more widely, but the point is already hammered home. The monarch was at the centre of a wide constellation of military officers, often serving in the regiments of the Household Division, who were familiar figures at many of the court’s activities, from official events at Buckingham Palace or Windsor, Royal Ascot or shooting parties at Sandringham. Members of the royal family serve as colonels-in-chief of regiments, and Court and Circular announcements still chart the passage of lieutenant colonels as they report at the palace to formally take over command. Although George VI was constitutionally more cautious than his predecessors, he encouraged senior officers to open their hearts to him. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) for much of the war, found the process very helpful. ‘At 3.15 went to see the King,’ he wrote on 21 December 1943, ‘who kept me for 1? hours. He was in excellent form and most interested in all details of conferences and of my visit to Italy. He has a wonderful knowledge of what is going on.’ But regimental politics could corrupt even the most scrupulous monarch. In 1946, Field Marshal Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, hoped to reduce the Foot Guards by the same proportion as the infantry of the line, but found his plans dashed when the major general commanding the Household Division appealed directly to the king. Nor should the long influence of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother be underestimated, especially as far as the Black Watch and the London Scottish were concerned. The military importance of the monarchy goes beyond the ties of family, friendship, and familiarity. The significance of both the Dukes of York and Cambridge serving as commander-in-chief of the army for such long periods can scarcely be overstated. Moreover, some of the monarch’s most trusted servants were military officers, whether at court for short tours of duty as aides-de-camp or equerries, or in key long-term appointments like private secretary and assistant private secretary. The urbane and gossipy Frederick ‘Fritz’ Ponsonby was grandson of Peninsula veteran General Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby. He served in the Grenadier Guards during the Boer War and the First World War. His court career started as an equerry to Queen Victoria in 1894, going on to be assistant private secretary to both Victoria and Edward VII, and ending up as lieutenant governor of Winsdor Castle till 1935, the year of his death. His immediate superior in 1901–13 was Francis Knollys, long a civilian, but a former officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with good military connections. Both his father, a general and Crimean veteran, and brother served in the Scots Guards. Knollys’s successor as private secretary was the honest but humourless Arthur Bigge, better known by his peerage title of Lord Stamfordham. Bigge was a gunner who had served in the Zulu War of 1879, he was the queen’s private secretary for the last years of her reign, and then served George V in the same capacity for most of his life. He was succeeded by Clive Wigram, who had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1893 and had then gone off to the Indian army. Wigram made his mark as assistant chief of staff to the Prince of Wales (the future George V) during his 1905–6 tour of India, returned to serve as equerry until George succeeded, and became the king’s assistant private secretary, going on to be private secretary between 1931 and his retirement, gaining the peerage that has generally rewarded royal servants of his status, in 1936. Focusing on Wigram’s family is instructive. He was married to the daughter of a paragon of British India, Field Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain. Their eldest son served with the Grenadier Guards in the Second World War and then commanded its 1st Battalion in 1955–6. He was married to the daughter of another Grenadier, General Sir Andrew ‘Bulgy’ Thorne, who had made his mark on history while staff-captain to Brigadier-General Fitzclarence, by whipping-in the fine counter-attack that enabled the Worcesters to repair the broken British line on the Menin Road on 31 August 1914. ‘The Worcesters saved the Empire’, wrote a grateful Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force. Not only did their eldest son, heir to the family’s barony, also serve in the Grenadiers, but so too did their son-in-law, Major General Sir Evelyn Webb-Carter, who commanded the Household Division in 1988– 2001. Clive Wigram’s grandson, Captain Charles Malet of the Coldstream Guards, has served in Afghanistan, and was an extra equerry to the queen at the time of writing. Michael Adeane, maternal grandson of Lord Stamfordham, was private secretary to Elizabeth II for the first twenty years of her reign. He had taken over from Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, unusually a yeomanry (territorial cavalry) officer rather than a regular, and handed over to Martin Charteris of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It was only with the latter’s departure in 1977 that military officers lost what had become firm tenure of this crucial post, although Robin Janvrin, who took over in 1999, had served in the Royal Navy for eleven years. It may be that his successor, Christopher Geidt, represents a definitive break with tradition, having been a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before initially joining the royal household as assistant private secretary in 2002. CHAPTER 3 PARLIAMENT’S ARMY AS THE MONARCHY’S power has shrunk over the three and a half centuries of the army’s existence, so that of the House of Commons has increased. We can chart this process and its effect on the army through events like the constitutional settlement of 1688, the last royal veto of legislation in 1707, the great reform bills of the nineteenth century, and the 1911 Parliament Act. It has certainly not removed royal influence, but it has transformed the nature of political control. What is less obvious is that, as the process has spun on, the links between the army and the legislature have become progressively weaker, to the point where almost any major professional group is more widely represented in both houses of parliament than the armed forces. In one sense the development is as much social as political, with the army’s increasing professionalisation and diminishing size reducing the political visibility and impact of its officers. Restoration parliaments imposed no control over the army, provided the king was able to pay for it. The 1661 Militia Act gave Charles II command of ‘all forces by land and sea and all forts and places of strength’, and both Charles and his brother James II proceeded to run the army as what John Childs calls ‘a department of the royal household under the command of the king and his nominees’. It had no foundation in common or statute law, and its code of discipline, the Articles of War, stemmed from the royal prerogative. It was not until 1689 that discipline was given the force of statute. The senior regiment of infantry of the line, the Royal Scots (in existence since 1633 but allowed to claim seniority only from 1661), had fought at Sedgemoor in 1685 as the Earl of Dumbarton’s Regiment. It had previously served under Monmouth on the continent, and a poignant story has him looking out from Bridgwater church towards the royal camp and seeing the regiment’s saltire colours in the gloaming. He would be sure of victory, he sighed, with Dumbarton’s drums behind him. In 1689 the new government of William and Mary was shipping troops to the Low Countries to fight the French. The fact that the army had not fought for James II the previous year reflected the defection of senior officers and James’s failure of will rather than its affection for William. Scots troops were particularly concerned about being sent abroad while English and Dutch units remained in Britain. After serious unrest along the line of march, the Royal Scots mutinied when they reached Ipswich; over 600 of them set off northwards. The deserters were rounded up with little bloodshed, escorted back to London, and shipped thence to Holland. Nineteen officers were tried, and all but one, who was executed on Tower Green, were simply stripped of their commissions. The Commons at once passed the first of the many mutiny acts. In theory all it allowed the army to do was to inflict capital or corporal punishment for serious offences, thus meeting the demands of the moment, and it was not conceived as a means of asserting parliamentary control. Indeed, there were times during William’s reign when it lapsed altogether without bringing about a collapse of discipline. From 1690 to 1878 Parliament passed mutiny acts annually, and as time went on both their scope and intent changed. As late as 1761 it was decided that neither the act nor articles of war deriving from it were binding on the army when engaged in war abroad, although discipline in such circumstances was preserved through similar articles issued under the royal prerogative. In 1803 the Act was extended to include the army within or without the Crown’s dominions in peace or war. It was replaced by the Army Discipline and Regulating Act of 1879, itself superseded by the Army Act of 1881 which, just like the old Mutiny Act, had to be passed annually. By this stage it was, as the Manual of Military Law announced, the essential means of ‘securing the constitutional principle of the control of parliament over the discipline requisite for the government of the army.’ This was in turn replaced by the Army Act of 1955, the current basis for military discipline, whose Section 69 – the catch-all ‘conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline’ – has been the bane of the scruffy, ill-disposed or unlucky ever since. Alongside the assertion of parliamentary control came a gradual shift of power as the army became first a department of state in its own right, and eventually part of a unified Ministry of Defence. The detail does not concern us here, but the salient features are worth noting. ‘The Sovereign is Commander-in-Chief,’ affirmed the Manual of Military Law, ‘unless the office is granted away.’ Such was often the case. The Duke of Marlborough, the army’s captain-general under Queen Anne, commissioned officers on his own authority, telling a delighted Lady Oglethorpe that her boy could have his promised ensigncy in the Foot Guards: ‘If you please to send me the young gentleman’s Christian name, his commission shall be dispatched immediately.’ Sometimes the office was not filled, and sometimes its holders were ineffective, but as we have seen, the royal dukes of York and Cambridge both exercised substantial power. The secretary at war was a civilian official, who had begun as the commander-in-chief’s secretary, based in the army’s headquarters which established itself at Horse Guards at Whitehall in 1722. The secretary at war became increasingly important, and in 1793 was made responsible for submitting the army estimates to parliament. Since the Restoration there had been two secretaries of state, peers or members of the House of Commons, initially for the northern and southern departments of Britain, but with their responsibility later refined to cover home and foreign affairs. A third secretary of state had been appointed from time to time. In 1794 the office became permanent, and its holder took charge of the army’s efforts in the war against revolutionary France. The secretary at war was now responsible to this secretary of state, a system which continued until 1855 when the Crimean reforms shifted all the former’s duties to the secretary of state for war. Although this minister’s effectiveness depended on many factors – not least hitting-power within a cabinet that might not have the army in the forefront of its thinking – he made steady inroads into the influence of the commander-in-chief, and in 1870 was made formally superior to him. As part of the reforms that followed the Boer War, the office of commander-in-chief was abolished in 1904, and the Army Council came into being. It initially had seven members – the secretary of state, the chief of the imperial general staff, the adjutant general, the quartermaster general and the master general of the ordnance, as well as a finance member and a civil member. In 1906 the War Office crossed Whitehall from Horse Guards to the neo-baroque War Office Building. When the three service ministries merged to form the Ministry of Defence in 1963 the Army Council became the Army Board of the Defence Council, now established in the Ministry of Defence’s main building. This solid monolith was built in the 1930s, and Anthony Beevor surmises that the ‘muscular, large breasted women in stone’ surmounting the entrance date from the days when the Board of Trade had half-tenure. Although the style ‘falls short of the totalitarian architecture of that decade … it is still not a place calculated to lift the spirits.’ The Army Board’s membership now includes six ministers, one official and five senior generals. The board’s executive committee (ECAB in unlovely abbreviation) dictates the army’s immediate policy, and comprises its most senior generals under the chief of the general staff, whose office lost its ‘imperial’ designation in 1964. This shift of power away from the military and into the hands of politicians was paralleled by changes in the Civil Service. The Northcote–Trevelyan report of 1854 recommended that this should be divided into ‘mechanical’ and ‘administrative’ classes, and instituted processes that led to entry by open competition into a service that, until its corrosion by politics over the past decade, was a source of impartial professional advice to ministers. The Fulton Committee’s 1968 report judged that the Civil Service was too close to the traditional sources of power within the British establishment, and though its recommendations did not succeed in creating a British equivalent of the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration the process of breaking down formal barriers within the Civil Service, and between it and outside agencies, has continued steadily. A by-product of all this was the rise of senior Civil Servants within ministries, notably their permanent under secretaries. They tend to remain in post longer than military officers, who serve in the ministry for between two to three years at any one time, and their links with senior colleagues across Whitehall often give them a sense of collegiate expertise which serving soldiers lack. To this must be added the influence of a Treasury, which, long before the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, was both intrusive and pervasive. No balanced assessment of the Ministry of Defence in the first decade of this millennium should ignore the slurry of management-speak that washes across its decks from time to time, and the many officials who have come to regard defence as they might a commercial organisation with the receivers in. It is certainly not a case of ‘boots versus suits’, for if there are civil servants who believe in the commodification of defence, there are those who work purposefully towards the preservation of military capability in times of real stringency. Conversely, some military officers, especially those ‘Whitehall warriors’ on a second or third tour of duty, become so wise in ‘the ways of the building’ that they sometimes forget that men and women in uniform are much more than ‘line serials’ on a spreadsheet. Part of this book’s contention is that soldiers have, across the army’s history, been subjected to treatment that has fallen far short of that to which they have reasonably been entitled, and it is not enough to maintain that this all happened in a distant land where things were done differently. We have done it in recent memory and, given half a chance, would still do it today. The increase of political control over the army, the diminution of the power of its senior officers, and the growing authority of the Civil Service were all products of wider developments. The two great wars of the twentieth century added their own weight to the process, emphasising that what happened on battlefields was only an index of a much broader national effort. Interwoven with all this has been the increasing professionalisation of the officer corps, a process that has ensured that officers are now educated for longer than ever before. The period spent at Sandhurst is now half the length it was in the 1960s, but many more officers are now recruited as graduates. In the process the army has become estranged from the political nation. From the army’s birth until 1945 serving officers sat in both Houses of Parliament. Retired officers, and gentlemen holding commissions in the auxiliary forces, were added, to make a substantial military voice. The close association between officers and legislature had begun under Charles II and accelerated under James II, who saw officers as convenient placemen, deployable either to Westminster or to local councils. James encouraged officers to seek election not because he valued their opinions, but because he wanted their votes. Those elected in 1685 were told to ‘give their attendance to the House of Commons as soon as possible’, and James made it clear that they were not to simply to turn up as ordered, but to vote for the court party. Crossing the inflexible James II was fatal to a man’s career. That year Charles Bertie lamented that My nephew Willoughby, my brother Dick, and brother Harry – the three battering rams of our family – are all turned out of their employment as captains … and I am also told that my nephew Peregrine Bertie – who is cornet [the most junior commissioned officer in a troop of horse] to his brother Willoughby – is also dismissed, so they have cleared the army of our whole family, which proving so unlucky a trade I would not have us bend our heads much to for the future. The precedent established by the later Stuarts proved durable. Army and navy officers regularly sat in parliament thereafter. Between 1660 and 1715 up to 18 per cent of MPs were serving officers, and subsequent general elections regularly returned at least 10 per cent. There were 60 military officers in the 558 members elected to the English House of Commons in 1761. Sixty-five were elected to the century’s last parliament in 1796. Gwyn Harries Jenkins argues that ‘from the late eighteenth century the military formed the largest single occupational group in the unreformed House.’ Of the 5,134 MPs who sat in the period 1734–1832, 847 held commissions and of these two-thirds seem to have been career officers. The reform acts of the nineteenth century helped reduce the number of military MPs by making it harder for interest to procure a man’s election, at the same time that the army’s growing use as an imperial police force made it more difficult for officers to carry out duties that their constituents were now coming to expect of them. Traditionally the Foot Guards had furnished a disproportionately high number of MPs, pointing not simply to ‘a close link between wealth, birth and military-cum-parliamentary activity’, but to the fact that it was easier for officers quartered in London to get in to the House than it was for their comrades in the marching regiments, scattered across realm and empire. In 1853 the military, with its 71 sitting MPs, had been eclipsed by the law and their 107 solicitors or barristers – the largest profession in the house. By 1898 there were still 41 officers in the house (all but four of them Conservatives) and 165 lawyers. From 1660 until 1945, when the serving military were no longer allowed to sit in parliament, most military MPs were officers, though there were a handful of exceptions, like Sergeant W. R. Perkins MP, called up for service with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1939. So too were the huge majority of former members of the armed forces who were elected to the Commons. There was one remarkable exception. William Cobbett, born in 1762 to an‘honest, industrious and frugal’ labouring family, joined the 54th Regiment in 1784. He had trudged all the way to Chatham to enlist in the Marines, only to be assured by the recruiting sergeant that they were full up. His literacy and steady ways soon brought promotion to corporal, and he went on to be a regimental clerk, using his spare time to study ‘Dr Louth’s Grammar, Dr Watt’s Logic … Vauban’s Fortifications and the former Duke of York’s Military Exercises and Evolutions’. Promoted to sergeant major, at a time where there was only one in each battalion, he took on much of the day-to-day work of running his unit, for the adjutant was ‘a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate’ and the other officers were distinguished by ‘their gross ignorance and vanity’. Cobbett was discharged on his battalion’s return from Nova Scotia in 1791, and at once set about the prosecution of some of his former officers for corruption. The attempt misfired, and he fled abroad to avoid retribution: while in America he wrote pro-British articles under the name of Peter Porcupine. Soon after his return he started the news-sheet Weekly Political Register, and in 1802 began publishing Parliamentary Debates, forerunner of the modern Hansard. Refusal to bribe voters lost him the Honiton election in 1806 and accelerated his shift from Tory to radical. In 1810 the Register’s furious condemnation of the flogging of militiamen by German soldiers saw him sentenced to two years imprisonment for treasonous libel. On his release he was honoured by a huge dinner presided over by Sir Francis Burdett, a leading champion of reform. Cobbett deftly changed the format of the Political Register from newspaper to pamphlet to avoid tax, and it was soon selling 40,000 copies a week. In 1817 he left for America to avoid prosecution for sedition. After his return repeated attacks on the government culminated, in 1831, in prosecution for an article supporting the machine-breaking and rick-burning of the Captain Swing rioters. Cobbett conducted his own defence and was triumphantly acquitted. He was a major political figure and author. His Rural Rides was an affectionate description of an old, honest countryside progressively corrupted by the seepage of poison from the towns. It was first serialised in the Register and then published as a book in 1830. Despite repeated attempts to get into Parliament, he would have to wait until the 1832 Reform Act, when he was elected for Oldham. By now he was a confirmed radical, though his beliefs were shot through with a profoundly conservative yearning for a pre-industrial world of honest toil, interlaced with duty, and for political dispute across the class divide to be undertaken ‘with good humour, over a pot or two of ale’. A conflict soon developed between the constitutional theory that an officer-MP required no permission to attend to his parliamentary duties and could express an opinion freely, and the awkwardness of giving military pay to non-serving men who might make statements of which the government or army might disapprove. In December 1880 Major John Nolan, MP for Galway North, was appointed a Conservative whip, although he was on full pay and commanding a battery on its way to India. The Speaker thought that the best solution was for officers to be seconded from the service on election, but, given the fact that MPs were not then paid, this smacked of penalising the peoples’ choice. It was felt safest to let the matter run on unresolved, and Nolan left the army in 1881. The number of military MPs would have doubtless continued to decline had not the two world wars reversed the trend. Members of both houses volunteered on a huge scale in 1914. Twenty-two MPs died: Arthur O’Neill, Unionist member for Mid-Antrim and a captain in the Life Guards was the first MP to die, at Ypres in 1914. They ranged in rank from lieutenant, with 39-year-old Viscount Quennington (Michael Hicks-Beach MP) dying of wounds in 1916 as a subaltern in the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, to lieutenant colonel, with Guy Baring (elected for Winchester in 1906 while still a serving officer) killed at the head of his Coldstream battalion on the Somme. In the field, a man’s politics could be ignored. Willie Redmond, an Irish Nationalist MP since 1884, joined the attack on Messines Ridge in 1917 (at 56, he was too old for front line infantry service). Hard hit, he was carried from the field by two Ulster Division stretcher-bearers who disapproved of his politics but would not leave him to die alone. In volunteering, many MPs turned their backs on the manicured world of old, comfortable Britain. Tommy Agar-Robartes left beautiful Lanhydrock to die at Loos commanding a company of the Coldstream, and William Gladstone, grandson of the grand old man of Victorian liberalism, set off from Hawarden Castle to perish as a lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915. Sir Fredrick Cawley of Berrington Hall, Leominster had four sons and of these, three died. One was a regular cavalryman in 1914 and the other two, both MPs, died at Gallipoli in 1915 and the Western Front in August 1918. Sometimes we remember them for oblique reasons. Major Valentine Fleming, member for South Oxfordshire, died at Arras in May 1917 commanding a squadron of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars: his son Ian was to be the creator of James Bond. Distinctions between Commons and Lords are unhelpful, for eleven of the MPs who died were peers’ sons, and some would have gone on to inherit the family peerage. Approximately 1500 members of the 685 peerage families in the United Kingdom served in the war, and 270 were killed or died of wounds. The oldest was 82-year-old Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who had won his VC in the Indian Mutiny. He had been the army’s last commander-in-chief and was carried off by pneumonia at St Omer in November 1914, during a visit to Indian troops in France. The youngest was 17-year-old Midshipman the Hon Bernard Bailey, youngest son of Lord Glenusk, who perished when the armoured cruiser HMS Defence blew up at Jutland. His eldest brother fought with the Grenadiers on the Western Front throughout the war, and was commanding a battalion at the war’s end. His second brother, farming in East Africa when war broke out, returned to England at once and the fact that he had been a lance corporal in the Eton College OTC helped him waft into the Grenadiers. He was killed at Givenchy on 10 August 1915, and lies in Guards Cemetery, Windy Corner, not far from Brigadier-General the Hon John Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, late of the Irish Guards and one of Lord Clinton’s sons, who died two weeks later. The concentric ripples of family and friendship made the relationship between Westminster and the war even more pervasive. Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister at the start of the war, had four sons. The eldest, Raymond, died with the Grenadiers on the Somme; Herbert served as a gunner officer on the Western Front, and the much-wounded Arthur commanded a brigade of the Royal Naval Division. Anthony, being born in 1902, was too young to serve. All three sons of Labour leader Arthur Henderson fought: the eldest was killed on the Somme, where he lies, with a brisk walk in the lee of Delville Wood between him and Raymond Asquith. Liberal politician Jack Seely, had served in the yeomanry in the Boer War, and been forced to resign as secretary of state for war over the Curragh affair in 1914. He commanded the Canadian Cavalry Brigade on the Western Front, and his son Frank, a second lieutenant in the Hampshires (the family lived on the Isle of Wight and this was the county regiment) was killed at Arras in 1917. Although the military demand for manpower in the Second World War was much smaller than in the First, twenty-three MPs died on war service, although this includes seven who perished in aircraft crashes, a retired lieutenant colonel who killed himself, fearing that an old wound might prevent his going on active service, and Private Patrick Munro, MP for Llandaff and Barry, who died on a Home Guard training exercise. Sir Arnold Wilson had served in the Indian Army before the First World War, had gone on to become a colonial administrator, and was elected Conservative MP for Hitchin in 1933. The New Statesman thought him ‘an admirer of Hitler’, but when war came he affirmed ‘I have no desire to shelter myself and live in safety behind the bodies of millions of our young men.’ He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as a pilot officer air gunner, and was killed at 56 over France in 1940. John Whiteley, elected MP for Buckingham in 1937, had served as a gunner officer in the First World War, and died as a brigadier when the aircraft carrying General Sikorsky crashed at Gibraltar in 1943. Peers and their children (for women were now conscripted) also served in large numbers, and relationships within the Westminster village meant that, just as had been the case in the First World War, there were intimate links between the two houses. The Hon Richard Wood, third son of the Earl of Halifax, lost both legs but went on to serve as a junior minister in four administrations, and was ennobled as Baron Holderness. He married the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Orlando ‘Flash’ Kellett, MP for Birmingham Aston, who had been a regular officer before joining the yeomanry: Kellett was killed commanding the Sherwood Rangers in North Africa in 1943. The cases of Edward Kellett and John Whitely underline the strength of military representation in the parliament of the inter-war years. In 1919, 12 per cent of new Conservative MPs had served in the forces. Between 1919 and 1939, ex-regular officers were, after lawyers, the second largest occupational group in the Commons. There were the very senior: Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston was elected Unionist MP for North Ayrshire in a October 1916 by-election while commanding a corps on the Somme. He left the army in 1919, and sat as an MP till 1935. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was elected Unionist MP for North Down in 1921, though he was murdered by Irish nationalists outside his London home the following year. And there were the more junior: Jack Cohen sat for Liverpool Fairfield in 1918–31, and lost both legs at Passchendaele. Ian Fraser, who sat for St Pancras North in 1924–9 and 1931–7, then for Lonsdale in 1940–58, had been commissioned into the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in time to be blinded on the Somme. He crowned a remarkable career by being ennobled as Baron Fraser of Lonsdale, Britain’s first life peer, in 1958. Most striking is the close connection between military service and high office. Winston Churchill had fought on the North-West Frontier, at Omdurman and in the Boer War before entering politics. In 1916, widely blamed for the Gallipoli fiasco, he rejoined the army (having maintained his military status by serving in the yeomanry), and was attached to the Grenadier Guards to learn the ways of trench warfare before commanding 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers in the Ploegsteert sector, south of Ypres, for the first five months of 1916. Churchill’s deputy from 1940 to 1945, and his successor after that year’s general election, was Labour leader Clement Attlee. He had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics when war broke out in 1914, and was immediately commissioned into the South Lancashire Regiment. In 1915 he commanded a company on Gallipoli, and probably owed his life to the fact that he was being treated for dysentery during some very heavy fighting. His company was one of those chosen to furnish the rearguard during the withdrawal from Suvla Bay in December, and he was the last but one man to leave. Attlee was wounded in Mesopotamia, so spent 1917 in Britain, and was then posted to the Western Front for the last six months of the war. In the inter-war years he styled himself ‘Major Attlee’, and his open, collegiate style of leadership reflected the skills needed to command a mixture of wartime volunteers and conscripts in a middle-of-the-road infantry regiment. Attlee was ousted by Churchill in 1951, and Churchill himself was succeeded in 1955 by Anthony Eden, a classic example of the well-connected officer (Durham landed-gentry, Eton and Oxford) who had a good war. He was commissioned into 21/King’s Royal Rifle Corps, proudly known as the Yeoman Rifles and raised by Charles, Earl of Feversham. The battalion was first committed to battle on the Somme on 15 September 1916; Feversham was killed that day. Eden won the Military Cross, became adjutant of his battalion and finally, aged just 21, became the youngest brigade major (chief of staff of a formation then comprising three infantry battalions) in the army. Styling himself Captain Eden he was elected to parliament in 1923. In 1939 he returned, briefly, to the army as a major. He served as foreign secretary from 1935 to 1938, when he resigned over appeasement. He held important posts during the war, lost one of his two sons in Burma, and again served as foreign secretary for part of Churchill’s second administration. By the time Eden became prime minister he was already past his best, and ended up resigning in 1957 as a result of the Suez affair. There is a strong case for blaming some of Eden’s misfortunes on the strains imposed by two years on the Western Front. Eden was succeeded by Harold Macmillan, who had served him as both foreign secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. A publisher’s son, Macmillan was at Oxford in 1914 and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He was first wounded at Loos in 1915 and had been wounded again by the time he was hit in the pelvis as the Guards Division attacked Guillemont on 15 September 1916. This was the same battle that killed Lieutenant Raymond Asquith and Lieutenant Colonel Guy Baring. Macmillan lay in No Man’s Land reading Aeschylus in Greek, and then spent the rest of the war undergoing a series of operations. Like Eden, he was marked by his experiences. He could not bear to return to Oxford to finish his degree, for he could never forget that of his first-year group at Balliol, only one other had survived the war. In 1924 he was elected, as Captain Macmillan, for the industrial constituency of Stockton. He lost his seat in 1929, but returned to the Commons in 1931. Like Eden he was scornful of appeasement and appeasers, and his easy but authoritative style made him a natural choice for high office when Churchill came to power. From 1942 to 1945 he was resident minister in the Mediterranean. He took over from Eden in 1957 and served till 1963, assuring the country that ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Macmillan’s concern for social reform, which put him towards the left of the Conservative party of his day, reflected his contact with ordinary folk in the trenches. ‘They have big hearts, these soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘and it is a very pathetic task to have to read all their letters home. Some of the older men, with wives and families who write every day, have in their style a wonderful simplicity which is almost great literature.’ The pattern was broken by Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had contracted spinal tuberculosis in 1938. He was bedridden for the first two years of the war and unfit for service thereafter. Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister 1964–70 and 1964–6, had volunteered for service in 1939 but had, very sensibly in view of his first-class economic brain, been directed into the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Edward Heath, Conservative Prime Minister 1970–74, had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and soldiered on part-time with the Honourable Artillery Company after the war. Martial prime ministers are the tip of the iceberg. Until the 1960s the front benches were packed with men who had fought in the world wars, and, certainly as far as the Conservatives were concerned, having had the proverbial ‘good war’ was almost a sine qua non of political success. But a man’s service record did not determine his political stance. Denis Healey had been at Balliol College, Oxford with Edward Heath (the men remained friends) and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers, serving as military landing officer at Anzio in 1943. He gave a ‘barnstorming and strongly left-wing’ speech, still in uniform, at the 1945 Labour Party Conference. But although he made a massive dent in the traditional Conservative majority at Pudsey and Ottley that year, he was not elected till 1952. In 1962 it was estimated that 9 per cent of MPs were former regular officers, and that military representation in the Commons was nearly a hundred times greater than in society more broadly. Conscription endured till 1962 and, until the sharp cuts of 1967, the Territorial Army was over 100,000 strong: both factors helped maintain military experience in parliament. Margaret Thatcher selected all her secretaries of state for defence from former officers. Michael Heseltine, who held the post in 1983–6 was the least martial. Son of a Second World War lieutenant colonel, Heseltine was called up in 1959 in the dying days of National Service and commissioned into the Welsh Guards. From 1945, serving officers were suspended from duty when they ran for parliament, and were required to retire if elected. Heseltine contested the safe Labour seat of Gower in 1959, and was not required to resume service after his defeat. It was not until the appointment of Malcolm Rifkind in 1992 that this chain was broken. No subsequent secretaries of state for defence have had military service, although John Reid, first-rate minister for the armed forces 1997–9 and secretary of state for defence 2005–6 owed part of his affinity with the military to his family ties, for his father had served in the ranks of the Scots Guards. The passing from politics of the Second World War generation was underscored by the last of the ‘good war’ Tories. Lord Carrington had been commissioned into the Grenadiers in January 1939, and fought from Normandy into Germany with the Guards Armoured Division where he earned a Military Cross commanding the first tank across the great bridge at Nijmegen. Foreign secretary in 1982, he resigned, with characteristic probity, to acknowledge his department’s failure to predict the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. William Whitelaw, ex-Scots Guards and awarded a Military Cross in Normandy, 1944, held a variety of government appointments. He exercised huge influence over Margaret Thatcher, who made him the first hereditary peer created for eighteen years after her victory in the 1983 election. His resignation in 1987, on grounds of ill-health, deprived her of a major steadying influence. The Parliament whose life ended with the general election of 2010 contained 43 MPs with military service of some sort. Eighteen were ex-regular army officers, ranging from Michael Mates, sometime lieutenant colonel in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, to Andrew Mitchell, who had held a ‘gap year commission’ between school and university. There were thirteen Territorials, one of them an ex-regular army officer and another a former member of the RAF; seven former members of the RAF; one of the Royal Navy; one who transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Naval Reserve; and another naval reservist. One, Rudi Vis, Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, had served in the Dutch Armed Forces in his youth. This constituted 6.6 per cent of a house of 646 members. The breadth of the definitions above, which includes both an MP who served in his university’s Officer Training Corps forty years ago, and another medically discharged after a brief period of regular training, underlines the thinness of real military experience, though at least two of the Territorials have been mobilised for service in Iraq or Afghanistan. To enable peers and MPs without military service to speak with more knowledge of the armed forces, Sir Neil Thorne, a Conservative MP and Territorial colonel, founded the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme (AFPS) in 1987. ‘The whole purpose of the scheme,’ he writes, ‘is to enable Members of all parties to speak in debates on the Armed Forces from a position of experience’. The scheme lasts a year, during which participants are expected to spend at least 21 of 30 offered days with the armed forces, selecting the service of their choice. They are initially given status roughly aligning them with majors or their equivalents to enable them to spend time with soldiers, sailors, and airmen, rather than to receive the two-star status normally accorded to MPs visiting military units. The AFPS makes it possible for participants to return, ‘at four levels from Major to Brigadier equivalent’. At least one, Dr Julian Lewis, Conservative MP for New Forest East, spent some time at the Royal College of Defence Studies, writing a 10,000-word dissertation that was rated in the top ten for his year. In all about ninety MPs have participated in the scheme. The opinion of serving army officers on its usefulness is divided, with some contributors to the invaluable Army Rumour Service website arguing that anything that brings MPs into closer connection with the services can only do good. The facts that the scheme has flourished despite its lack of official funding, and attracts both peers and MPs who take it very seriously, underline the perceived need to remedy the progressive demilitarisation of parliament. Political allegiance and holding a senior military position have existed independently of each other at many points in history. Most military and naval MPs still sitting immediately after 1688 were Tories, although they were soon outweighed by Whigs. It was, by then, possible for an officer to be opposed to the government and to enjoy senior command. Major General James Webb won a useful little victory at Wynendaele in 1708, ensuring that a vital convoy got through to Marlborough who was besieging Lille. Webb was a Tory and the Tories were in opposition. His supporters in the Commons at once complained that he had been insufficiently rewarded for the Wynendaele exploit. The credit seemed to have gone to Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, who sat in the Whig interest for Woodstock – the town adjacent to Marlborough’s country estate, Blenheim Palace. Ministers were assailed by those who shook the tree of patronage to get commissions, promotions, and appointments for family, friends, and clients. As time went on, ministers became more reluctant to intervene save where they could do so with probity. The papers of the hard-working William, Viscount Barrington, Whig secretary at war 1755–61 and 1765–78, show how patronage worked in the high eighteenth century. In 1760 George, Duke of Marlborough wrote asking for ‘a troop of Dragoons, or a company [captaincy] in an old regiment for a gentleman whose name is Travell: his father was a very zealous friend to us in the late Oxfordshire election … he may stick some time unless your Lordship will favour him with your interest to get promoted.’ Marlborough’s insistence on an ‘old’ regiment was intended to ensure that Travell did not get appointed to a junior regiment that would be disbanded at the first opportunity, shoving him off onto half-pay. Barrington failed to oblige the duke, for Francis Travell soldiered on unpromoted, and the 1800 Army List has him as a half-pay lieutenant in the now-disbanded 21st Light Dragoons. Barrington was unusually scrupulous in refusing to break the army’s rules even when pressed hard. In 1771 he told Lord North, then Prime Minister, that although he valued the influential Scottish Whig Sir Gilbert Eliott just as much as North himself did: Yet I must not assist you in getting a company for his son. Two invariable and indispensable rules of the army are that every man shall begin military life with the lowest commission, and that he shall be at least 16 years of age till he shall obtain any … Mr. Elliot was not I believe ten years of age when he had a commission of lieutenant & soon after he was most irregularly made a captain. At the reduction [disbandment] of the corps, he was not kept on any list, or kept on half pay … What shall I say to the friends of Mr Stuart, or Price, or a great many others if Mr Elliot is a Captain before them? I shall be told with great truth that his former commission is a nullity though it still remains in his possession. The whole world will condemn me, and what is worst of all, I shall condemn myself. There was a growing belief that an officer should not be penalised, in his military capacity, for opinions expressed as a Parliamentarian. Yet there were still some serious upsets. William Pitt the Elder was commissioned into Lord Cobham’s Dragoons, with Treasury approval, so that the government could expect the support of his brother, already an MP, and joined his regiment at Northampton. William himself soon became Whig member for that most addled of rotten boroughs, Old Sarum, which had no resident voters at all. He made strident attacks on government policy, causing Prime Minister Robert Walpole, always slow to turn the other cheek, to observe ‘We must muzzle this terrible cornet of horse.’ In 1736 Walpole duly secured the dismissal of Pitt and several other military and naval MPs who had opposed the government. The move was not popular in the house, but none of the dismissed officers was reinstated. In 1764 Lieutenant General Henry Conway, who enjoyed the prestigious colonelcy of the 1st Royal Dragoons, voted against the government and was stripped of his colonelcy. The opposition at once protested that this was military punishment for political offence, and although George III did not restore Conway ‘he never again breached the principle enunciated by Conway’s supporters’, and Conway himself went on to be commander-in-chief. By the 1780s it was clear that the espousal of firm political views was not necessarily a bar to either high rank or employment in sensitive posts. Three of the most senior generals in North America, William Howe (C-in-C 1775–78), Henry Clinton (C-in-C 1778–82) and John Burgoyne, who surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, were serving MPs. Both Howe and Burgoyne were Whigs, and had spoken in Parliament against the American war. Howe had assured his Nottingham constituents that he would not serve against the colonists. When he agreed to do so one told him that: ‘I don’t wish you to fall, as many do, but I cannot say I wish success to the undertaking.’ Howe replied that ‘I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serve my country in distress.’ The social unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars saw the clearest example of politically-engaged officers attaining high rank despite firmly held opinions. Charles James Napier was a scion of a military family: his father Colonel George Napier and brothers George and William were soldiers, and another brother was a sailor. He earned a brilliant reputation as an infantry officer in the Peninsula. The Napiers were all radicals, and in George senior’s case experience of revolt in America, Ireland, and France had given him much sympathy for the rebels. For Charles, the process owed much to his wide reading while at the Senior Division of the Royal Military College. In 1839 the government appointed him to command Northern District as a major general. It was a courageous choice, for he was known to sympathise with the Chartists, who constituted the greatest threat to the order he was sworn to preserve, to hate the Corn Laws that kept the price of bread artificially high, and to tell the government precisely what its errors were. Charles Napier was able to distinguish between personal sympathy with the Chartists and professional determination to keep the peace. He was inclined to the view that ‘the best way of treating a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards’, and a notion of responsibility to the Crown rather than its ministers also helped him deal with the inconsistencies in his own position. He made it clear that if the ‘physical force’ Chartists rose, then he would crush them. ‘Poor people! They will suffer’, he wrote. ‘We have the physical force not they … What would their 100,000 men do with my hundred rockets wriggling their fiery tales among them, roaring, scorching, tearing all they came near.’ This combination of genuine sympathy and absolute firmness made him a notable success in the post. He went to India, where his sense of natural justice (laced with a good slug of ambition) encouraged him to beat the Amirs of Sindh at Miani, going on to rule the newly annexed province with benevolent despotism. He returned home in 1847 after much bickering with the East India Company’s hierarchy. In 1849 that arch-conservative the Duke of Wellington was sure that Napier was the only general capable of rescuing the Sikh War from the head-on enthusiasm of the commander-in-chief in India, Sir Hugh Gough. By the time Napier arrived Gough had sledge-hammered his way to victory, and his subsequent trial of strength with the viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, saw Napier return home under a cloud. Charles Napier died a general and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, an achievement not prevented by his political views or notorious scruffiness. His brother William, who had also fought with distinction in the Peninsula, was no less radical. When on half-pay in the 1830s, he declined suggestions that he should stand as an MP, and even more wisely refused command of the Chartists’ projected ‘National Guard’. He was a regular speaker at political meetings, and argued that while the army as an institution might indeed be politically neutral, ‘if a soldier does not know and love the social happiness springing from equal and just laws, how, in God’s name, is he to fight as the soldier of a free nation ought to fight?’ He was not re-employed between the end of the Napoleonic wars and appointment as lieutenant governor of Guernsey in 1842, and in the meantime had produced his multi-volume History of the War in the Peninsula. This remains an extraordinary achievement, not least because of its flashes of tangible affection for private soldiers, such as John Walton, in Napier’s company of 43rd Foot on the retreat to Corunna. Walton was charged by determined French horsemen, but stood his ground, and wounded several of his assailants, who then retired, leaving him unhurt, but his cap, knapsack, belts and musket were cut in about twenty places, his bayonet was bent double, and notched like a saw. There was much more to the book than narrative. Napier was convinced that the French army embodied the egalitarian principles of which he approved, while the British was dominated by privilege. ‘Napoleon’s troops fought in bright fields where every helmet caught some beams of glory,’ he wrote, ‘but the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of the aristocracy.’ William Napier also died a general and a knight, as did his third martial brother, Thomas, who lost his right arm at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812. Being in the same political camp as the rest of his family, Thomas was delighted to be governor of Cape Colony when slavery was abolished across the empire in 1834. In the early nineteenth century in the unreformed House of Commons, officers sometimes sat for family-controlled constituencies. Occasionally, as an ingredient of the oleaginous mix of influence and obligation then known as ‘interest’, they were installed on behalf of a powerful patron, either because he valued their support, or because he believed that possession of a seat in parliament might improve their own career prospects. Lieutenant General Sir John Moore (killed at Corunna in 1808) was the son of a Glasgow doctor who acted as bear-leader to the Duke of Hamilton on his Grand Tour, travelling with the party. Hamilton not only secured John an ensign’s commission in the 51st Foot, but then proceeded to have him elected for the family-run Lanark Burghs in 1784–90. General Sir Henry Clinton sat from 1772 to 1784, first for Boroughbridge and then for Newark upon Trent. These were both constituencies controlled by his cousin, the Duke of Newcastle, who devoted almost as much attention to fostering his career as he did to the breeding of his affable Clumber spaniels. His widow married Thomas Crauford, and in 1802 gave another of her family’s pocket boroughs, East Retford, to his brother Robert ‘Black Bob’, who was to be mortally wounded commanding the Light Division at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812. There was much the same pattern in the Irish House of Commons until its disappearance with the Union of 1800. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, sat for the family borough of Trim, and Edward Pakenham, brother of Wellesley’s wife Kitty, for his own family’s Longford borough. Galbraith Lowry Cole (Kitty’s rejected suitor) sat first for Irish constituencies, and then represented Fermanagh in the British House of Commons, although he spent most of his time commanding one of Wellington’s divisions in the Peninsula. He might have discussed politics with several of his senior colleagues, including cavalry commander Lieutenant General Sir Stapleton Cotton, MP for Newark in 1806–1814 and in the upper house as Lord Combermere thereafter. From the 1790s there were as many redcoats as black in the Commons, for, with the country mobilised against France, it was hard to tell regulars from militia or volunteer officers. About half the members returned in 1790–1820 held part-time commissions. Indeed, Robert Crauford was nicknamed ‘the regular colonel’ to distinguish him from the numerous MPs whose colonelcies reflected their local status. William Pitt the younger, out of office as prime minister from 1801 to 1804, raised three battalions of Cinque Ports Volunteers. He modestly referred to them as ‘the advanced guard of the nation’, drilling them himself as their colonel commandant and expatiating, red-coated in the House, on the virtues of volunteering. There was a similar rash of part-time officer-MPs during the French invasion scare of the 1860s, and in 1869 no less than 130 had connections with the volunteer movement. While a government could not affect a senior ranking military career, they could influence their income, being in control of the much desired government appointments. All promotion above lieutenant colonel was, until the reforms of the 1880s, wholly dependent upon seniority, and so once an officer had reached this rank even the government’s concentrated spite could not stop further ascent. But generals received no pay (getting by on the half-pay of their regimental rank) unless they were given a specific appointment, like command of troops engaged in operations or a governorship, at home or abroad. There were a good deal more such jobs than one might expect: Regency Brighton kept three generals gainfully employed. All of these posts were at the government’s disposal, as were regimental colonelcies, a useful source of income until the late nineteenth century. George De Lacy Evans – ‘an obstreperous radical from an Irish landowning family’ – had served in the Peninsula, was present at the burning of the White House in 1814, and fought at Waterloo the following year. On half-pay after the war, in 1835–7 he commanded the British Legion that fought for Queen Isabella, the liberal claimant to the Spanish throne, in the first Carlist War. The British Government was anxious to help Isabella against her uncle Don Carlos but was not prepared to do so directly, although it is clear that Evans’ officers and men were ex-soldiers, most serving because of the lack of employment at home. But Evans was also an MP, sitting for Rye in 1830 and 1831–32, and then for Westminster from 1833 to 1841 and 1846 to 1865. Although the diarist Charles Greville testily described him as republican, he was impeccably radical, pro-Chartist but (like his middle-class electors, whose opinions he took very seriously) firmly opposed to political reform by force. He was passed over sixteen times for the colonelcy of a regiment, but when Horse Guards was reviewing the long list of generals to find commanders for the Crimean expedition, it settled on Evans to head the 2nd Division. His broad military experience commended him even though his political views did not, and, in the event, he proved one of the war’s most capable generals – and returned to radical politics after it. The dukes of York and Wellington, as commanders-in-chief, did their best to consider claims to commissions, promotions and appointments on their own merits, and in 1827 Wellington told the king, ‘The principle is that the pretensions of officers to Your Majesty’s favour should be fairly considered, notwithstanding their conduct in Parliament.’ He was less scrupulous during his second term as commander-in-chief (1842–52) when ‘he made partial sacrifice of the claims of merit to those of political or party interest’, and Rowland Hill (commander-in-chief 1828–42) was, in the kindly way that had earned him the nickname ‘Daddy’, inclined to favour ‘Conservative members of Parliament, old friends, the offspring of brother soldiers and unfortunate widows, [who] all found the way open to their solicitations.’ The abolition of the purchase in 1871 and the increasing formalisation of promotion made it harder for politics to influence an officer’s career for good or ill, though it has never wholly prevented it. While government could not stop the declining number of officer-MPs from speaking their minds in parliament, it stamped down hard on the public expression of political opinion by serving officers. Redvers Buller was one of the heroes of his generation. His VC, won in a dreadful fight with the Zulus on Hlobane mountain in 1879, was a remarkable achievement even by the high standards of that award. He was less successful commanding British troops in the Boer War, and in the mood of recrimination that followed his recall he was widely attacked. On 10 October 1901 he replied publicly to an outspoken article by Leo Amery. Both Lord Roberts, now the army’s commander-in-chief (and, no less to the point, Buller’s successor in South Africa), and the Conservative Secretary of State, St John Brodrick, had much to gain from off-loading the blame for initial failures onto Buller. For speaking without authorisation he was summarily dismissed on half-pay and denied the court martial he requested. Buller remained popular in the country at large, and when the Liberals came to power in 1905 they offered him a safe seat, which he was wise enough to decline. The Buller affair did not stop officers from having political views, although the fate of a general with a VC and close connections to the king made them cautious about expressing them while they were serving. In 1913 it seemed likely that if the Liberal Government persisted in its plan to give Home Rule to Ireland, then Ulstermen would fight to avoid rule from Dublin. Thousands flocked to Unionist rallies, and the newly formed Ulster Volunteer Force drilled hard. Lord Roberts, outspokenly sympathetic to the Unionist cause, recommended Lieutenant General Sir George Richardson, a retired Indian Army officer, as its commander. Captain W. B. Spender, hitherto the youngest Staff College graduate, resigned his commission to serve on his staff. The North Down Regiment was commanded by a retired major general, and Richardson’s chief of staff was a former colonel. All these officers were recalled to service in 1914 when the UVF formed the bulk of 36th Ulster Division, whose service on the Western Front has left such an enduring mark on the province’s history. It was evident that using the army to enforce Home Rule in Ireland would be fraught with difficulties, and in September 1913 the king wrote a statesmanlike letter to Prime Minister Asquith, reminding him that ours is a voluntary army; our soldiers are none the less citizens; by birth, religion and environment they may have strong feelings on the Irish question; outside influence may be brought to bear upon them; they see distinguished retired officers already organising local forces in Ulster; they hear rumours of officers on the active list throwing up their commissions to join this force. Will it be wise, will it be fair to the sovereign as the head of the army, to subject the discipline, and indeed the loyalty of the troops, to such a strain? Sir John French, the CIGS, had already assured the monarch that the army ‘would as a body obey unflinchingly and without question the absolute commands of the King no matter what their personal opinion might be,’ though he added that intervention in Ulster would subject discipline to serious strain, and ‘there are a great many officers and men … who would be led to think that they were best serving their King and country either by refusing to march against the Ulstermen or openly joining their ranks.’ He concluded, though, that he would impress on all serving officers ‘the necessity for abstaining from any political controversy’. The so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ of 1914 remains instructive. It was not in fact a mutiny, and the best evidence suggests that while deployment to Ulster would have imposed a severe strain on the army’s loyalty, most officers would have obeyed unequivocal orders. Because they then required private means to serve, resignation would not have been as damaging as it would be today, when almost all officers live on pay and look forward to pensions. There remains little evidence of how the army might have behaved even if many of its officers had indeed resigned. In Francis Foljambe’s artillery brigade (then the equivalent of a regiment in any other army) all officers but one decided to go, changed into plain clothes and left command in the hands of the sergeant major and the NCOs. Non-commissioned personnel did not have the luxury of being able to send in their papers, and most had joined the army to make a living. Regiments recruited in Ireland would have been in an agonising position, and many of the Irishmen serving across the rest of the army would have found their own loyalty taxed. Most soldiers would have stayed true to their salt, and we would do well to remember that issues that generate heat in officers’ messes do not necessarily cause such dissention in barrack rooms. Lastly, the incident occurred when Jack Seely, secretary of state for war, was a reserve officer with a reputation for personal bravery, and who knew most major players personally. The CIGS was very close to his political master and on good terms with both the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor. Soon after French’s resignation he went off to lick his wounds with Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, aboard the admiralty yacht Enchantress. It was not a case of political ignorance of the ways and attitudes of the military, rather a crisis that slid out of control, leaving the army’s professional head caught between the hammer of government policy and the anvil of military opinion. Few senior officers would necessarily have fared better at the point of impact than Johnnie French. The army has faced nothing on the scale of the Curragh ever since. Although there have been suggestions that it would have resented being asked to carry out some tasks, like intervention to help enforce majority rule upon Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the 1960s, all the evidence suggests that the army does as it is told. This is the case even when some senior officers have substantial moral and practical reservations about the task, as was undoubtedly the case with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is striking that none of them, well aware of the rules against making public pronouncements, spoke at the time, although some of the evidence given to the Chilcott enquiry makes the scale of their unhappiness evident. Some officers suffered for the public expression of their views. In 1938 Duncan Sandys, Conservative MP for South Norwood, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law and a subaltern in a Territorial anti-aircraft unit, raised issues of national security that reflected his own military specialism. He was then approached by two unidentified men (presumably representing the security service) who warned him that he risked prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Sandys at once reported the matter to the Committee on Privileges, which ruled that disclosures to parliament were not subject to the Act, although an MP could be disciplined by the house if, in its view, his disclosures were damaging or unwarranted. Sandys’ territorial career was unharmed. He was badly wounded in Norway in 1941, retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1946, and as defence minister in 1957 produced the Sandys Review. The First World War case of Sir Henry Page Croft MP was different. He went out with his Territorial battalion in 1914, and was first of the few Territorials to command a brigade. Frank reports on his dissatisfaction with the high command – delivered informally rather than on the floor of the house – caused sufficient controversy to get him recalled in 1916: all his political connections could not save him. The army’s own regulations grew progressively sterner about the need for serving officers to gain formal clearance for their publications. They had once been very relaxed. Lieutenant Winston Churchill published his idiosyncratic Story of the Malakand Field Force in 1898. The first edition of The River War, his account of the Omdurman campaign, was highly critical of Lord Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb and of the poor quality of some military supplies, notably the soldier’s boots. Kitchener was furious, and although Churchill left the regular army soon afterwards, he was recommissioned during the Boer War, then became a yeomanry officer and commanded a battalion when Kitchener was still secretary of state for war. The rules were much stricter after the Second World War. In 1949 the future Field Marshal Lord Carver, then an acting lieutenant colonel, reviewed Field Marshal Montgomery’s Alamein to the Sangro for the Royal Armoured Corps Journal. He unwisely observed that it was ‘a high price to pay for a short book’, and was nearly court-martialled. Montgomery ordered Carver’s director to ‘tell him that a junior officer is not allowed to criticise the head of the army’. Later, when Carver had written his own book on Alamein he found it difficult to get permission to publish. Although he was by then an upwardly mobile brigadier, permission was actually refused for a chapter on training and doctrine which was to have formed part of a Festschrift to mark Basil Liddell Hart’s seventieth birthday ‘as it was clearly controversial’. A more recent case of a serving officer being disciplined for public criticism, this time of his own superiors rather than politicians, is that of Major Eric Joyce. He enlisted into the Black Watch in 1978 and subsequently attended Stirling University, graduating with a degree in religious studies. Joyce became a probationary second lieutenant while at university, attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst after graduation, and was commissioned into the Royal Army Educational Corps in 1988. His service took him to Northern Ireland, Germany, and Belize, and during it he obtained two master’s degrees. He was promoted captain in 1990 and major in 1992 – the year that the RAEC was amalgamated into the newly-formed Adjutant General’s Corps and became the Educational and Training Services branch. In August 1997 the Fabian Society published a pamphlet by Joyce called ‘Arms and the Man – Renewing the Armed Services’, maintaining that the forces were ‘racist, sexist and discriminatory’. He had written it without getting the permission to publish required by Queen’s Regulations, telling The Times that ‘you can’t get radical ideas like this into the public domain if you go through the chain of command.’ Joyce denied that he was being covertly supported by ministers, but argued that ‘what I’m saying is broadly in line with the modernising agenda which the government is promoting.’ He went on to launch the Armed Services Forum, which was authorised by the military authorities but contained severe criticism of the forces. When at length the army moved to discipline him, he affirmed that it was ‘terribly important’ that soldiers should be allowed to speak freely. He also condemned the army’s obsession with an ‘officer class’, and argued that Queen’s Regulations, simply ‘a convention’, were not legally enforceable. The Conservative opposition saw the Labour Government’s hand behind Joyce’s continued survival. In December 1998 Keith Simpson MP, a former Sandhurst lecturer, told the Commons that the case ‘strikes at the heart of the important principle that our armed forces do not participate in party politics.’ He went on to argue that: He has his own political agenda. As a serving officer, he has openly been a Labour party supporter and, for the past four months, has been actively seeking to become a parliamentary candidate. Not only has he repeatedly and blatantly broken every agreement that he has ever made, but he has become party politically partisan. Major Joyce was eventually directed to resign his commission and did so in 1999. He went on to become Public Affairs Officer at the Commission for Racial Equality (Scotland), and, unsurprisingly, a Labour MP after winning the Falkirk West by-election the following year. He served as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to a number of ministers, and in September 2009 resigned as PPS to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth. As one of the few Labour MPs with recent military experience he had been a logical choice for the post, but his letter of resignation went to the heart of his old unhappiness: The Conservatives … think they can convince the public that we have lost our empathy with the Defence community … I do not think the public will accept for much longer that our losses [in Afghanistan] can be justified by simply referring to the risk of greater terrorism on our streets … Most important of all, we must make it clear to every serviceman and woman, their families and the British public that we give their well-being the greatest political priority. Behind the hand attacks by any Labour figure on senior service personnel are now, to the public, indistinguishable from attacks on the services themselves. Conversely, in my view we should allow our service personnel greater latitude to voice their views on matters which make distinctions between defence and politics pointless. Joyce’s resignation was overshadowed by the fact that he had become the first MP to claim more than ?1 million cumulatively in expenses. The website Army Rumour Service suggests far more resentment amongst serving officers of an MP on the gravy train, than sympathy for a former colleague with a reformist agenda. His case underlines two hard old truths. First, no government, whatever its persuasion, relishes serving members of the armed forces pointing to political failings. Tony Blair abolished the individual services’ directors of corporate communication to reduce the risk of senior officers briefing the press ‘off message’. In that climate Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, when Chief of the Defence Staff, declined a ‘non-attributable’ lunch with the distinguished author Sir Max Hastings, regretting that he could only attend if a civil servant was on hand to take notes of the conversation. When General Sir Richard Dannatt spoke, within a few weeks of his appointment as Chief of the General Staff, of the need to withdraw troops from Iraq, it was immediately clear that he would not, as had been expected, succeed Sir Jock as CDS. Second, the army itself remains profoundly uneasy about criticism from within its ranks, especially when that criticism has an explicit political purpose. For most of the army’s history its officer corps was closely aligned to the social class that sent members of parliament to Westminster. The proportion of serving officers sitting in parliament fell away substantially as the nineteenth century went on, but the two world wars of the twentieth century packed both houses with an unusually high number of folk with wartime service. That generation has now moved on, though in the second decade of the twenty-first century there are again MPs with direct links to the military. Modern wars have never been more political and senior officers are inevitably politically ensnared. CHAPTER 4 BRASS AND TAPES ARMIES ARE HIERARCHIES, their structure given daily prominence by costume jewellery and codes of behaviour. Even those that, in the white heat of revolutionary ferment, destroy the titles and badges associated with status tend to reinstate them once the tumult is over. The Red Army, which had gleefully done away with epaulettes – hated symbol of officership under the tsars – brought them back in 1943 to reinforce its identity at the height of the Great Patriotic War. Chinese officers, for so long dressed in drab and rankless Mao jackets, now sport big shoulder-boards modelled, for such are the ironies of military fashion, on the same tsarist pattern as Russian epaulettes. Although the detail of rank varies across ages and nations, the most crucial distinction has been between officers, who hold a commission signed by the head of state, and other personnel who lack this crucial document. For most of the British army’s existence there was a rough congruence between social status and military rank, although this never prevented, on the one hand, the phenomenon of the gentleman ranker, serving as a private soldier against the grain of his background, or, on the other, the rise of the humble but talented. A striking example of the former is the Hon. Michael Francis Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle and formerly a lieutenant in the Scots Guards and 18th Hussars, killed as a private at Passchendaele in October 1917. Conversely, William Cobbett, that steadfast enemy of privilege, admitted that When I was in the army, the adjutant-general, Sir William Fawcett, had been a private soldier; General Slater, who had recently commanded the Guards in London, had been a private soldier; Colonel Paton, who I saw at the head of his fine regiment (the 12th, at Chatham) had been a private soldier; Captain Green, who first had the command of me, had been a private soldier. In the garrison of Halifax there were no less than seventeen officers who had been private soldiers. In my regiment the quarter-master had been a private soldier; the adjutant, who was also a lieutenant, had been a private soldier. Samuel Bagshawe, whose papers are a valuable resource on the army of George II, also blurred conventional distinctions. He was a young man with excellent prospects but ran away from his tutor in 1731 after being reproved for extravagant habits, and enlisted as a private in Colonel Philip Anstruther’s Regiment of Foot. He spent seven years in the ranks of the Gibraltar garrison, becoming a quartermaster sergeant. Bagshawe eventually restored himself to family favour by writing to his uncle and guardian, begging him to Imagine a youth who for some fancied distaste flings himself into the sea, in his fall he sees his folly, but when he views the miseries that surround him (though sensible it is owing to compassion alone if he is taken in) with all his might he strives to regain his ship; you may easily conceive the earnest desire I have to repossess a happiness … which, the more I reflect upon the more I am confounded and the more I hope to recover. His uncle arranged for him to be bought out of the service. Two years later family connections secured him an ensign’s commission, and he died a colonel, a rank gained by raising a regiment at his own expense. Nonetheless, these exceptions scarcely bend the general rule. Lieutenant General Sir John Keir, writing in 1919, emphasised that Britain was at that moment ‘a nation in Arms’, with the chance of creating, for the first time in its history, ‘a real National Army.’ Hitherto, he argued, The regular army consisted of two main groups, patricians and proletarians. The officers were patricians, or patricianists; the men almost entirely proletarians. Between these two extreme poles of the social system there was no shading off. A gulf separated the two classes. Some of the army’s friends, and even more of its critics, see a similar gulf today: the Irish writer Tom Paulin condemned British soldiers as ‘thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people’. The British have never used the American terminology of officers and ‘enlisted men’, having initially differentiated between officers, standing outside the formed body of the unit, and the ‘rank and file’ within it. They then preferred officers and ‘other ranks’, wisely jettisoning the latter term, with its demeaning overtones, for ‘soldiers’ in the 1960s. The line of cleavage became evident from the regular army’s earliest days. Sergeant Nehemiah Wharton was an earnest puritan and former London apprentice who served in Denzil Holles’s Regiment of Foot, fighting for parliament in the Civil War. He wrote his last surviving letter before his regiment was destroyed at Brentford on 12 November 1642. When Wharton wrote of ‘we officers’ he meant both officers and sergeants, drawing his own line between sergeants, with their sashes and halberds, and corporals, armed and equipped just like the men. From 1660, though, the army was clear in its distinction between ‘commission-officers’, until the end of the eighteenth century, whose ranks began with cornet (for cavalry) and ensign (for infantry), and non-commissioned officers, who then constituted sergeants and corporals. In Queen Elizabeth’s day a captain, be he a white-haired gentleman gravely stepping out at the head of his company of militia, or a braggadocio roaring back from the Spanish war, was an important man. His title derived from the Latin caput, head, and the slightly later captaneus, chief. His deputy, ready to take his place when the need arose, was the lieutenant, its French root meaning ‘place taker’; the same as the Latin locum tenens that now describes the replacement for our usual GP. The ensign (corrupted to give Shakespeare’s ‘Ancient Pistol’ his swaggering title) was the infantry company’s most junior officer, and carried its ensign or colour, just as his comrade in its counterpart, the cavalry troop, bore its distinguishing cornet or guidon. The proud Spanish infantry, until its 1643 defeat by the French at Rocroi, was the cynosure of European armies. Its columns, each made up of several companies, were commanded by officers whose title derived from the colonello itself, and they too had deputies, lieutenant colonels, to take their place. The major, from the Latin magnus, great, and so on to the Italian maggiore, was indeed a major figure, who came to rank between the captains and the colonel’s stand-in. Until the 1680s his title in Britain was sergeant major, not to be confused with the later non-commissioned sergeant major. Captains and their subalterns constituted ‘company officers’, and majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels were soon known as ‘field officers’. Above them came officers enjoying more general authority. Initially their most senior had been the captain general, Marlborough’s highest rank. Although that term fell out of use in the early eighteenth century, the Honourable Artillery Company, with its idiosyncratic ‘regimental fire’ toast, still drinks the health of ‘The Queen, our Captain General’. Field marshal, Britain’s highest military rank, currently in abeyance, was a relatively late arrival. It does not appear in the Army List till 1736, and in 1744 John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair, was the first army commander-in-chief to hold it. In the army’s early history the rank was granted sparingly, and there were no field marshals from 1773 to 1792, though there was plenty of fighting. Below this comes general, sometimes colloquially ‘full general’, just as colonels are ‘full colonels’ to distinguish them from their ‘half colonel’ subordinates. Next, for just the same reasons that give us lieutenant and lieutenant colonel, comes lieutenant general. This was, perversely, a senior rank to that of major general (the latter having been ‘sergeant major general’ in the armies of the Civil War). By the end of the nineteenth century one of generals’ dress distinctions was oak-leaf braid around the peak of their flat forage-cap; by the First World War this had given them the nickname ‘brass hats’. It is now conventional wisdom to see debates over the war’s strategy being carried on between the brass hats and the ‘frocks’ – the politicians in black coats – and one of the blood-and-thunder memoirs written by Brigadier General Frank Crozier was entitled A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land. The British were long ambivalent about the rank between colonel and major general. Brigades of horse or foot, two to four regiments of each, could simply be commanded by whichever of their colonels was ‘eldest’ by date of rank: we can almost glimpse that anxious fumbling with commissions, followed by beams of satisfaction or growls of exasperation. Or they might be headed by a major general, the working rank for brigade command for much of the army’s life. Senior colonels stepping up to lead brigades might be invested with the local rank of brigadier to do so, or might receive formal commissions as brigadier general. In 1685 James II introduced a note of confusion by having ‘Colonels of Brigades’, ‘Brigadiers’ and ‘Brigadiers-General’. The rank had much in common with its naval equivalent, commodore, with brigadier generals resembling commodores of the first class, who looked very much like the admirals they yearned to be, and brigadiers mirroring commodores of the second class, who were most definitely captains briefly ‘acting up’. It was not generally substantive, and officers holding the rank gave it up when the relevant appointment ceased. In 1810 Henry Torrens, the adjutant general, described the rank as ‘inconvenient and temporary’, and thought that the answer was to make more major generals. While lieutenant colonels and above were promoted by the buggins’s turn of seniority, brigadiers were appointed to fill specific vacancies, a process that inevitably caused mutterings. On the march to Blenheim, Marlborough promoted Colonel Archibald Rowe to command a brigade and, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the seniority roll, saw at once that this might cause difficulties: He is the eldest colonel we have here, and a very diligent officer [he wrote], but this will give just occasion for Colonel Shrimpton of the Guards to desire the like commission, he being an elder Colonel than Rowe, so that I desire they [i.e. their new commissions] may be dated of the same day. Rowe solved the issue of long-term seniority by boldly ordering his brigade, attacking Blenheim village, not to fire until he had struck the French palisade with his sword; he was knocked over by the opening volley. We remember Reginald Dyer, responsible for the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, as ‘General Dyer’. He was a brigadier general, commanding 45th Infantry Brigade, at the time of the shooting of perhaps 380 civilians in the town’s Jallianwalla Bagh. On retirement in 1920, he reverted to his substantive rank of colonel. Regulations contained a provision enabling the Army Council to recommend the grant of honorary rank to any officer who had held local or temporary general’s rank. It had taken the view that Dyer’s action constituted ‘an error of judgement’, but did not propose to take disciplinary action, and therefore there seemed ‘to be no reason why honorary rank should be withheld’. The Army Council asked the India Office to arrange for the publication of Dyer’s rank in the London Gazette, but the India Office, nervous of bad publicity, duly missed the publication date and the moment passed. When Dyer mounted a campaign for honorary rank he was able to marshal powerful support, but the fortuitous presence in London of General Sir Claude Jacob, Chief of the General Staff in India, revealed that senior Indian army officers were not in favour, least of all in view of the Prince of Wales’s imminent visit. The issue split the Army Council, but it no longer backed Dyer, whose application perished quietly amongst the files and ink-pots. Colonel Dyer had already been disabled by a stroke, and died in 1927. By the time that Reginald Dyer died the rank he craved had expired too. Brigadier generals were spoken of as ‘general’ tout court and their uniforms and badges of rank aligned them clearly with other generals. The army’s massive expansion during the First World War, and the burgeoning of senior officers in supporting arms and services, had led to an unprecedented expansion in the number of generals, with a recent survey identifying 1,253. They narrowly included Hugh Garvin Goligher Esq, financial adviser to the commander-in-chief in France, who capitalised on his precedence as temporary brigadier general by getting a uniform run up, and having his portrait painted in it. As part of its campaign to reduce the visible impact of generals and staff officers in the aftermath of the First World War, the army did away with the rank of brigadier general altogether, replacing it on 1 January 1921 with that of ‘colonel commandant’, as opposed to ‘colonel on the staff’. This compromise soon foundered, and might prove untraceable today were it not for a memorial in the main hall of the old Staff College at Camberley, commemorating officers killed in Ireland in the 1920s. Two brigade commanders, killed as colonel commandants, are included. In 1928 the rank of brigadier reappeared, although it was not substantive till 1946, and its holders looked far more like colonels than major generals. Their red collar tabs lacked generals’ gold embroidery, and their epaulettes bore a crown and three stars, the latter so configured as to make it hard for officers from those regiments (like the Foot Guards) wearing oversize stars to squeeze them onto the epaulette. Today British brigadiers are one-star officers but not generals, though those on the staff of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps style themselves, by convention, ‘brigadier general’ in multinational correspondence. All of these arrangements applied to the red-coated army controlled by the commander-in-chief. Rank titles were standardised as armies evolved to become an essential part of the apparatus of the new nation-state in the ‘post-Westphalia’ world that followed the 1648 treaty ending the Thirty Years War. Absolutist monarchs, with France’s Louis XIV (to whom both James II and Charles II looked with envy) as their exemplar, asserted themselves by ensuring central control of the armed forces. Royal iconography gradually replaced the crests or arms of individual noblemen; uniforms took on a prevailing national hue; and cannon glowed with symbolism reflecting the status of their master – their large-scale production in royal arsenals so symbolic of the power of new monarchical authority. Louis had the words ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ embossed on his cannon, and until the end of the First World War German field guns bore ‘Ultima Ratio Regis’, affirming that their sharp yap was indeed the king’s last argument. Royal ciphers and armorial bearings graced the new angular fortifications that helped define the period, for a state needed to protect its frontiers against armies or fleets equipped with modern artillery. Fortress gates routinely bear the confident stamp of the king. In Britain this is most evident in coastal fortifications. Henry VIII’s arms still grace the gateways to the south-coast fortifications he built. Portsmouth was declared a Royal Dockyard by King John in 1212, and impressed Samuel Pepys during a visit in 1661; he found it ‘a very pleasant and strong place’. When Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, landed there in May 1662 she was less impressed, being offered beer, which she hated, and calling for tea instead. Portsmouth still bears the royal stamp in the form of a crown embossed above the keystone of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Portland stone Landport – the only surviving gate to the city’s demolished fortifications. Unicorn Gate, now the main entrance to the dockyard, is distinguished by its crown-collared unicorn. Its lion counterpart, once standing sentry on a gate of its own, has now come to rest at the base of Semaphore Tower. In 1779 the two beasts cost the Exchequer ?203. 1s. 8d., a small price to pay for such an elegant affirmation of status. In the fortress warfare that preoccupied engineers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries a trench dug towards an enemy-held fortress from the parallel lines of entrenchments surrounding it, zig-zagging so that shot would not rake murderously down its line, was called a sap, and the man who dug it was called, in what became the Royal Engineers’ word for private, a sapper. The engineers long used the rank of second corporal for their one-stripe junior NCO. The artillery had always called its own private soldiers gunners, and it soon scrapped the rank of matross, a kind of sub-private who did much of the heavy work associated with guns and gunnery. A petard was an explosive-filled container, shaped like the hat traditionally worn by Welsh ladies, which was screwed or propped (crown side outwards, as it were) to the gate of a fortress, its name derived from the same root that gives us the French verb p?ter for the emission of a more discreet personal bang. The grade of petardier, a soldier with the unenviable specialism of attaching the petard to the gate, disappeared early on. We still half-remember just how tricky the job was, though, for the petardier risked being ‘hoist with his own petard’ if its sputtering fuse was too short, or if enemy fire prevented him from scampering back the way he had come. The arrangement of rank applied to the redcoats did not, in the first instance, cover the ‘gentleman of the ordnance’, the artillery and engineers. They answered instead to the master-general of the ordnance, usually a peer with a seat on the cabinet, through eventually demoted to become a mere member of the Army Board. Until 1716 artillery and engineer officers were in theory a homogeneous group, though it was increasingly evident that their skill-sets were different, and gunner officers, their importance rising with the power of the weapons they controlled, resented their subordination to men preoccupied with running up the very fortifications that they themselves sought to knock down. In 1716 the two branches were split, with a corps of engineers and a regiment of artillery. The engineers enjoyed their own rank structure, with one chief engineer, two directors, two sub-directors, and six apiece of engineers in ordinary, engineers extraordinary, sub-engineers, and practitioner engineers in Britain. There were three engineers, headed by a director, in Minorca, and two, with a sub-director in charge, in Gibraltar. This system gave rough equivalency with the rest of the army, with the chief engineer ranking as a brigadier and the practitioner engineers with ensigns, but led to endless difficulties. Engineers were not strictly speaking commissioned, although they might purchase or be granted commissions. On campaign there were never enough of them to go round, and Marlborough (combining, in his august though overworked person, the offices of captain general and master general) was given to granting bright infantry officers warrants to act as engineers. In 1707 Captain Richard King of Lord Orrery’s Regiment of Foot was appointed an assistant engineer, with a useful ?100 addition to his annual pay. There was also the problem of authority. Badges of rank were far from being standardised, and it might not be an easy matter for a young sub-engineer, supervising an infantry working-party, to persuade a grimy sergeant that he did indeed speak with an officer’s authority and it was not yet time for the men to knock off and return to camp. In 1757 the engineers at last adopted formal military ranks, though there long remained a tension between engineers, with their relatively high pay, and the infantry, invariably at the other end of the scale. In late 1915 Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard of the Dorsets was pleased to observe the scribbled work of a trench poet: God made the bee The bee makes honey The Dorsets do the work And the REs [Royal Engineers] get the money. The ranks of the Royal Artillery were simpler from the beginning, although the most junior commissioned rank of fireworker, was soon transformed to lieutenant-fireworker and later to second lieutenant. The rank of second lieutenant also crept into the infantry, first replacing ensign in fusilier regiments, and then used by rifle regiments from their formation in 1800. From 1871 it replaced ensign and cornet across the army as the most junior commissioned rank, although the army’s incurable resistance to standardisation means that the old ranks crop up from time to time. Dine with the Queen’s Guard in St James’s Palace and you will discover that the major commanding it is styled the captain, and his two commissioned subordinates are the subaltern and ensign, although one may actually be dressed as a captain and the other as a lieutenant. The old artillery rank of bombardier survived, and the bombardier was for many years the most junior NCO rank in the Royal Artillery, with corporal above it. When Corporal Ronald Skirth crossed an incompetent officer in 1917 (a process that drearily punctured his service) he found that the conversation had an immediate result on his battery’s notice-board: As from April 23rd 1917 Corporal Skirth, J.R., reverts to the rank of Bombardier, as a disciplinary measure. R. A. Snow, Major Commanding 239 Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery. ‘Partly from pique,’ he recalled, ‘I renounced the privilege of “messing” with the NCOs’. He wrote: I told my three friends I would muck in with them. If in future if any of them addressed me by rank (which had been their way) I’d kick him in the shins. ‘My name is Ron,’ I said. ‘Not Corporal, of course, and not bloody Bombardier.’ It was not until after the First World War that corporal disappeared from the Royal Artillery, with the two-stripe bombardier replacing him and the one-stripe lance bombardier close behind. Non-commissioned ranks were not short of complexities of their own. At first most soldiers held the rank of private sentinel, soon abbreviated to private. John Marshall Deane of 1st Foot Guards and one of the few non-commissioned diarists of Marlborough’s time, always preferred the term in full. When his regiment helped storm the strongly fortified Schellenberg on its way to Blenheim in 1704, he recorded that it lost five officers ‘killed upon the spot’, and another seven wounded: ‘we had likewise in our regiment killed upon the spot and died of their wounds 172 private sentinels, besides above a hundred that was wounded and recovered again.’ There were at first only two grades of non-commissioned officer. A man’s first step was corporal, derived from the Latin corpus for the small body of men the corporal led. It was ‘a rank which, however contemptible it may appear in some people’s eyes, brought me a clear twopence per diem, and put a very clever worsted knot upon my shoulder too’, wrote William Cobbett. His second, took him to sergeant – dating back to the Latin serviens, servant, but widely used in the Middle Ages to describe a mounted man-at-arms who was not actually a knight. Self-styled ‘Captain’ Peter Drake served in several armies during the War of Spanish Succession. He did this, often without completing the tiresome necessities which should have accompanied his discharge from one army prior to his enlistment into another. He spoke of the ‘brethren of the halberd’, an archaic weapon with its spiked axe-blade mounted on a long haft, and carried by infantry sergeants. The halberd was useful for aligning ranks, laying firmly across the rear rank of a unit that was beginning to give way, or forming the ‘triangle’ to which soldiers were tied for flogging. Halberds were officially replaced by nine-foot half-pikes in 1791, although units in North America had laid theirs aside long before. The half-pike was not to be despised. A sergeant in 3/1st Foot Guards at Waterloo recalled how his comrades put their pikes to good use at the battle’s climax: ‘the line was held up by the sergeants’ pikes against the rear – not from want of courage on the men’s part (for they were desperate) only for the moment the loss so unsteadied our line.’ The pike went in 1830, and sergeants then carried a shorter version of the infantry musket. When the breech-loading Martini-Henry rifle came into service in 1871 sergeants generally carried a sword bayonet rather than the socket bayonet used by corporals and privates. Soldiers habitually wore their sidearms when walking out. The sword-bayonet, metalwork and leather duly buffed up, sat comfortably on the rear of the left hip, dividing the fringes of a sergeant’s shoulder-sash like a bridge-pier splitting the shining torrent. There is a good deal of undiluted dandyism to soldiering, and the small satisfactions of a new step up the hierarchy’s long ladder should never be ignored. The sergeant major, having started life in the officers’ mess, reappeared as a non-commissioned officer in the eighteenth century. The rank had been in existence for some time before it was formalised in 1797 to mark the most senior of the NCOs. There was one for each infantry battalion and cavalry regiment, and sergeant majors were branded by a style of dress that put them, rather like their rank, somewhere between officers and sergeants. In William Cobbett’s regiment, for example, the sergeant major wore a fur bearskin cap like the officers and men of the grenadier company; Cobbett hated his. In the infantry, sashes and sticks were essentials, the former often in the solid crimson worn by officers rather than the red cut with a stripe in the regiment’s facing colour used by sergeants. These sticks began life as a silver-headed cane, evolving over the years into the pace-stick – sometimes used to measure off a regulation pace of 30 inches, but more usually, in its glossy splendour of varnish and burnished brass, carried as a badge of rank, echoing the vine-staff of the Roman centurion. William Cobbett’s early promotion to sergeant major, straight from regimental clerk, shows that in these early days, the post was primarily administrative, and the sergeant major spent much of his time closeted with the adjutant, working on the rolls and returns that could wreck a man’s career as surely as a bullet. In 1813 there was more significant change. The old cavalry rank of troop quartermaster, the senior non-commissioned member of the troop, was replaced by that of troop sergeant major. In the infantry the rank of colour sergeant was introduced, squarely between sergeant and sergeant major. There was to be one colour sergeant for each of the ten companies then found in a battalion, chosen from ‘the ten most meritorious sergeants in the regiment’. For the next century the colour sergeant was the captain’s right-hand man, his position equating to that of first sergeant in an American company. One of the company’s sergeants was responsible for its provisioning, and he was known as the company quartermaster sergeant (CQMS). Sergeants on the strength of battalion headquarters, grave and clerkly men concerned with pay and administration, ranked as staff sergeants, a term which still defines the senior sergeants’ rank in all arms except the infantry. It is impossible to dwell too much on administrative detail here, for the quantity of troops and companies within units often changed. The most significant change, though, was the introduction of grenadier and light companies, one of each per battalion, into the infantry, and a compensating reduction to bring the ‘battalion companies’ to eight. Grenadier companies (‘tow-rows’) were traditionally composed of the sturdiest men in the battalion, just the fellows for rushing an enemy post or for waiting at the colonel’s supper-party, beery faces and big thumbs everywhere. The ‘light bobs’ of the light company were lithe and nimble and were specially trained in skirmishing – and, said their critics, apt at making off with other people’s property. It was common for these ‘flank companies’ to be swept together to form combined grenadier or light battalions. A commanding officer enjoyed having smart flank companies, but losing the best of his battalion to someone else’s command was wholly infuriating. Flank companies, officers and men alike, wore distinctive caps and short coats. While the grenadiers applied symbolic grenades to any vacant surface, the light companies were as fond of the corded bugle – their own badge of expertise. The flank companies went in 1862, as part of the post-Crimea reforms, to muted mourning. The tactical revolution of the late nineteenth century, a reflection of the increased range and firepower of modern weapons, encouraged armies to seek larger groupings so as to place more combat power in the hands of individual commanders. The combination of cavalry troops into squadrons, not taken too seriously when Wully Robertson was an NCO, became standard towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1913 an infantry battalion’s eight companies were merged into four. These changes required the creation of, first, squadron sergeant majors (SSMs) in the cavalry, and then company sergeant majors (CSMs) in the infantry. In the latter process the four senior colour sergeants in each battalion were promoted, and the remaining four took over the function of quartermaster sergeant. This arrangement remains in use today, and Colour Sergeant Frank Pye, who makes his incisive appearance on this book’s first page, was responsible for keeping his company of 2 Para fed and watered in the Falklands in 1982. Promotion from sergeant to company sergeant major now takes a man through the rank of colour sergeant, but during the First World War it was felt that the qualities that made a man a good quartermaster sergeant did not necessarily make him a good sergeant major. Ronald Skirth, whose account of his wretched time in the army is aptly titled The Reluctant Tommy, took over from his battery quartermaster sergeant when the latter contracted typhoid, although he himself was only a junior NCO. ‘The Q.M.’s job I would say is the most envied in the whole service’, he wrote, and so there was both disappointment and consternation when I was appointed temporary, unpaid ‘Quarterbloke’… The Q.M. is in charge of stores – clothing, food and equipment and, most important to many, tobacco and rum. I think I made a reasonably efficient QM. Nobody ever ‘drew’ anything from my stores without a ‘chit’ bearing the duty officer’s signature. Nobody, that is, except ME! It didn’t seem right that I should do extra work without financial reward, so I used the opportunity to look after No 1. Ernest Shephard, in contrast, simply leapfrogged quartermaster sergeant on his way on up. He happily copied the relevant extract from his own battalion’s daily orders into his diary: Bn Orders by Major Radcliffe DSO commanding 1st Dorset Regiment … No 8817 Sgt Shephard: Appointed Acting CSM from 25.4.15 vice CSM Searle wounded 24.4.15, and promoted CSM on 1.5.15 vice CSM Searle, died of wounds. In a process wholly typical of the army’s need to find a spare ‘line serial’ into which to promote a man, he had bypassed colour sergeant altogether, and replaced the three stripes on his arm (‘tapes’ in soldier’s jargon) with a crown on his forearm, leaving his company’s colour sergeant (three tapes with a crown above them) in his dusty world of tables: six-foot, and lamps: hurricane. The process of promoting to fill a vacancy echoed William Todd’s elevation to corporal in 1758: Sergeant William Bennet of our company was broke by the major’s orders for being drunk when he should have attended the hospital … and that James Crawford, corporal, was appointed sergeant and that I was appointed corporal in the room of Corporal Crawford preferred. When Shephard was promoted his company commander was the 28-year-old Captain W. B. Algeo MC, a clergyman’s son from Studland, Dorset. Their relationship typified the warmest of associations between figures who, at this crucial level, were headmen of their own distinct tribes. But on 17 May 1916 Algeo and the battalion’s intelligence officer crossed into a wood on the German side of the lines. There were shots, and they did not reappear. Shephard raced to battalion headquarters, where the commanding officer authorised him to send a follow-up patrol ‘but not to go myself on any account, although I wished to do so’. The pioneer sergeant, Sergeant Goodwillie – ‘very well liked by the captain’ – set off with Sergeant Rogers a little way behind. There was more shooting, and Rogers returned to report that he had lost Goodwillie and could not find the officers. Shephard was distraught: The loss of my gallant Captain to the Battalion, my Company and myself cannot be estimated. He was the bravest officer I have ever met, his first and last thought was for the good and honour of the Bn, his Coy and his men. ‘An officer and a gentleman’. We now know that Algeo and Goodwillie were both killed, and now rest, three long strides apart, in Miraumont Communal Cemetery. The responsibilities of company commander and CSM remain distinct but interlocked. One friend told me of striding across to speak to his CSM who was chatting to the CQMS and the three platoon sergeants. He was greeted with a cracking salute, and the words ‘It’s all right, sir, you can fuck off: knobber.’ It seemed a bad moment for decisive confrontation, so he withdrew to his office, dignity narrowly preserved. When the sergeant major appeared later, the officer cautiously raised the issue of that last word. The sergeant major was aghast. It was the acronym NOBA: ‘Not Officers’ Business: Admin’. Another officer recalled how his own attempt to tinker with his company’s daily programme produced the as-if-by-magic materialisation of the CSM. ‘Sir,’ announced that worthy, ‘you command this company, but I run it.’ When the relationship works well there are few finer, as Major Justin Featherstone of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment tells when describing the way he and CSM Dale Norman used to conduct after-action discussions in the Iraqi town of Al Amarah, scene of fierce fighting in 2004: We shared what became termed ‘DVD time’. During tactical pauses we would watch a DVD on his laptop and take the time to reflect on recent events and discuss our prevailing feelings, with unflinching and disarming honesty that would surprise anyone who had not shared similar experiences; such a friendship was critical in enabling us to function over such a tumultuous period. Yet a steady support to his company commander can easily seem a tyrant to his subordinates. William St Clair joined the RAMC at the beginning of the First World War, and spent his time on the Western Front in a field ambulance forming part of the admirable 9th Scottish Division, seeing more action than most. His commitment to winning the war never wavered, but he was bitterly disillusioned with the standard of leadership, especially with a sergeant major who delayed his overdue leave and sent ‘passes for new chaps before their turn so that most of the boys are a bit disgusted at his attitude’. Less than two months before the Armistice he wrote: Ach I am so tired of being away and the atmosphere of our unit is worse now than ever … It is a weary life this with so much in it that goes against the grain, perpetual discipline that any Tom, Dick and Harry can work against you if they feel inclined … I do not say it is unbearable, but oh my word, what a glorious day it will be when we are free and need take nothing from any man. With the creation of the new grade of SSM, a cavalry regiment’s original sergeant major had been renamed its regimental sergeant major to differentiate him from these lesser myrmidons. When CSMs appeared in the infantry the same rank title was adopted for the unit’s senior sergeant major, although ‘battalion sergeant major’ would have been a more accurate job description, for in the British infantry the battalion, rather than the regiment, has always been the key tactical grouping. And there was another important change. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the army took up the navy’s practice of emphasising the status of key individuals by awarding them warrants, issued by the Army Council, and looking not unlike officers’ commissions. This process had swept up sergeant majors, together with other folk, mostly specialists like the Ordnance Corps’ ‘Conductors of Stores and Supplies’. Warrant officers were now set apart from the NCOs from whose ranks they had risen. They were generally addressed as ‘Mr’ by their superiors, and even within the infantry tended to deplore the term ‘sergeant-major’, though Guards officers call their RSMs ‘sergeant major’ and CSMs ‘companys’ major’. For many years RSMs were spoken of as ‘the regimental’ and addressed, in the comfortable fug of the Warrant Officers’ and Sergeant’s Mess as ‘major’, although when stalking their domain they were ‘Sir’ to all their subordinates. But different tribes still have their own rituals, as a Guards RSM explains: A sergeant’s mess in the Household Division would appear to be much more rigid than in other regiments. We never relax. Warrant officers are always called ‘sir’ … But everything is kept within the four walls. Any misbehaviour or indiscretion is never talked about outside. That would not happen in a line regiment. In 1915 an army order brought SSMs and CSMs into the fold by making them warrant officers, though it elevated RSMs and their equivalents to ‘Warrant Officers Class One’ and created the rank of ‘Warrant Officer Class Two’ for CSMs. Warrant officers enjoyed valuable legal privileges, for the Army Act freed them from punishment by their commanding officer, and specified that even if they were reduced to the ranks by sentence of court martial they would not be required to serve as a private soldier. When he was a sergeant major, William Cobbett had feared that the officers he so despised would reduce him to the ranks if he crossed them: now, at least, sergeant majors were secure from the vagaries of summary punishment. After the bruising experience of the First World War German army, the British were persuaded that their enemy’s practice of using selected senior NCOs to command platoons had much to recommend it. In 1938 the new rank of Warrant Officer Class Three was created, specifically to allow warrant officers to command infantry platoons or Royal Armoured Corps troops. The transplant failed to flourish. Only commissioned officers were allowed to handle official funds. At this time soldiers were paid in cash, and so WO3s could not pay their platoons, but had to get an officer to take pay parades on their behalf. Moreover, while officer platoon commanders were senior to the CSM, and thus in theory able (though it was seldom a simple business) to offer their men some protection against his voracious need for ‘bodies’ when fatigues were at hand, warrant officer platoon commanders were his juniors, and their men stood naked before his clip-board. The rank was placed in abeyance in 1940, although those who held it already were allowed to remain WO3s until promoted or discharged. It has left at least one enduring mark on history. When 4th Royal Tank Regiment was hotly engaged in the Arras counter-attack of 21 May 1940, one of its tanks was commanded by an ex-circus ‘strong man’, WO3 ‘Muscle’ Armit. He had already destroyed two German anti-tank guns when his own gun was damaged, and the tank was hit several times as he tried to repair it. Eventually he reversed under cover, repaired the gun, whacked the jammed turret hatch open (an achievement for which his former profession had so well prepared him), and returned to the fray. ‘They must have thought I was finished,’ he recalled, ‘for I caught the guns limbering up … and revenge was sweet.’ Portsmouth-born George Hogan lived close enough to the Royal Marine barracks at Eastney to hear the bugles sing out the alarm on the morning of 4 August 1914, summoning married men who lived out of barracks to report immediately. The ever-helpful booklet Trumpet and Bugle Sounds for the Army gave words to help soldiers remember the various calls, and alarm was officially: ‘Larm is sounding, hark the sound/Fills the air for miles around/Arm! Turn out! And stand your ground.’ But young George already knew it as ‘Sergeant Major’s on the run! Sergeant Major’s on the run! Sergeant Major’s on the run.’ His father was a sergeant-cook in the Hampshires and he thought it ‘right and reasonable’ to join the regiment as a boy soldier, but it was not easy to get photographed with his father. ‘Non-commissioned officers and men were not allowed to walk out together,’ he remembered, ‘so I left home a few minutes before dad and we met at the photographers.’ He arrived in France just five days too late to gain the 1914–18 war medal, and a long career took him on through the Second World War. He was promoted WO3 – a rank he remembered in its infantry guise of Platoon Sergeant Major – and added a laurel wreath to the crown on his cuff. When officers took to wearing collar and tie with their khaki service dress in the early twentieth century, warrant officers, who already sported officer-style Sam Browne belts, followed suit. In 1915 a GHQ instruction still had them armed with sword and pistol, although there were few enough swords to be seen on the Western Front, save in the cavalry, by this time, and instructions had already been issued for sending them home. Nevertheless, a photograph of the RSM of 14/Welsh in 1917 shows an elegant figure with gently waxed moustache, officer-style cap with the stiffening removed, officer’s tunic with baggy ‘patch pockets’, Sam Browne and empty sword frog. It is only when you see the royal coat of arms on his forearm that you can tell that he is actually the RSM, rather than a much grander rank. Small wonder that newly-commissioned officers made awkward mistakes when confronted with such splendid figures, as the greatest of the war’s skits, The Song of Tiadatha, tells us: Then at last my Tiadatha Sallied forth to join the Dudshires Dressed in khaki, quite a soldier Floppy cap and baggy breeches Round his waist the supple Sam Browne At his side the sword and scabbard Took salutes from private soldiers And saluted Sergeant-Majors (Who were very much embarrassed) And reported at Headquarters Of the 14th Royal Dudshires. In contrast, CSM Jack Williams DCM MM and Bar (his VC still in the future) of 10/South Wales Borderers, serving in the same division as the 14/Welsh, is scarcely distinguishable from a private soldier save by the brass crown on his sleeve. Nothing could make the gulf between the two grades of warrant officer clearer. The RSM of a battalion was part hero, part villain, and part shaman, encapsulating all the glory of his tribe and the status of his rank. John Jackson worked for a Glasgow railway company and enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders (‘a choice of regiment which I never regretted’) in August 1914. He fought at Loos with its 6th Battalion, and one of his lasting memories was of RSM Peter Scotland, upright and steady, though his battalion had lost both commanding officer (‘our brave old colonel’) and adjutant (‘cool and unruffled to the last’) as well as 700 of its 950 officers and men, reading the roll-call after the battle: There were few responses as names were called, though what little information there was about missing men was given by friends … Another good friend, big ‘Jock’ Anderson was missing, and to this day his fate remains an unsolved mystery, but I have no doubt he did his bit, for Jock was a whole-hearted fighter. Wounded, Jackson was posted to 1/Camerons on his return to France, and the battalion was paraded by RSM Sydney Axton, ‘known through all the Cameron ranks as “Old Joe”’: As a new draft, we had come out wearing khaki kilt aprons, and I well remember the first order of the RSM was, ‘Take off your aprons and show your Cameron tartan.’ ‘Old Joe’ was the real old fashioned type of soldier, a smart man in every way, a terror for discipline when on duty, a thorough gentleman off duty. A man who would sing a song or dance with the best; who knew everything there was to know about soldiering, and took the greatest pride in his regiment. His decorations numbered 9, and included the Military Cross, won on the Aisne, and the Distinguished Conduct Medal, won in the South African War, so that he was a real old warrior. His word was law in the battalion, and he would give an officer a ‘lecture’ just the same as he would a private soldier, so all ranks looked up to him as a man to be respected. Personally I always got on well with him, my duty bringing me often in contact with him, and I soon learned that his bark was worse than his bite. Doug Beattie was RSM of 1/Royal Irish in March 2003 when Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins made his famous pre-battle speech before the entry into Kuwait. Beattie feared that the message ‘had been rousing, but also sobering. It pulled no punches’, and there was a danger that the men would become morose and reflective. And so they were going to stop thinking about Colonel Collins and start paying attention to their regimental sergeant major. And woe betide any who didn’t. I began to bollock them. I yelled at them about the pitiful state of their weapons. I laid into them over their poor state of dress, their abysmal personal hygiene, their failure to salute senior officers, their inability to get anywhere on time. I told them they were a disgrace to their uniform and weren’t fit to call themselves soldiers of 1 R IRISH. I accused the warrant officers of running slack companies … I called the CSMs to me. They sprang to attention … and marched forward, coming to a halt in a perfectly straight line, shoulders back, chests out. Beyond the earshot of the rest of the ranks I explained what I was trying to do … It is true that battalions are commanded by their officers. If 1 R IRISH was a car the driving would be done by them. But the engine that powers that car is to be found in the sergeants’ mess, with the five men now standing bolt upright in front of me. Today’s non-commissioned hierarchy reflects other changes. The Wellingtonian army selected its corporals from trusted private soldiers known, by that most satisfying term, as chosen men. Chosen men soon became lance corporals (‘lance-jacks’), with a speculative etymology linking the word to the seventeenth century ‘lancepesade’. The word derives from the Italian lazzia spezzata or broken lance, because the soldier in question was a veteran, likely to have broken a spear or two in his day. Initially the post of lance corporal, its holder distinguished by a single stripe rather than the maturity of the full corporal’s two, was an appointment rather than a rank: easy come, easy go. Before long ‘lance’ became a prefix for junior sergeants too. Having lance sergeants was a matter of regimental preference, as First World War headstones demonstrate. The Foot Guards have retained the rank, although it really equates with corporal. Any Queen’s Birthday Parade will show that lance sergeants, with their three white stripes, are not quite the same as sergeants proper, whose gold braid tapes earn them the sobriquet of gold sergeants. A short walk through a military cemetery tells one a good deal about an army’s character. A First World War German cemetery abounds with the specific ranks that say much about the man who lies beneath the greensward, even if he was only a private soldier. The rank of grenadier and fusilier shows that he served in a particular sort of regiment. A j?ger, hunter, is the same as a French chasseur, with keen eyes and quick step, and would have served, flat-shakoed, in a j?ger battalion. A gunner is a kanonier, and different sorts of cavalrymen get a proper job description: hussar, uhlan, kurassier or dragoner. A kriegsfreiwilliger had volunteered to serve in the war, a reservist was precisely that, and an ersatz reservist had contrived (probably through having a student deferment from conscription) to incur a reserve liability even though he had not done basic training. In a British cemetery of the same era, in contrast, most unpromoted men are privates. Privates in Foot Guards regiments are described as ‘Guardsmen’, although this rank was granted retrospectively, for it did not exist till 1922. Although ordinary soldiers in the Household Cavalry were termed trooper, they were still called privates in the rest of the cavalry, and the 1922 change in terminology did not affect those who had died before this date. In consequence, the last British soldier killed in the war was Private George Ellison of the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers, a Leeds man, buried at St Symphorien, just east of the Belgian town of Mons. The rank of trooper first referred to privates in the cavalry, then spread into the Royal Tank Regiment, and has most recently appeared, as the evocative hybrid air trooper, in the Army Air Corps. Rifle regiments had called their soldiers riflemen very early on, and the notion of ‘the thinking, fighting rifleman’ was an attractive currency. Fusilier regiments followed with ‘fusilier’. The Royal Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers selected the word ‘craftsman’ for its private soldiers; and the King’s Regiment, coming close to the end of its own independent existence in the 1980s, took up ‘kingsman’ for its private soldiers. The Queen’s Regiment considered ‘queensman’, but consultation with soldiers about to receive the new designation revealed that they were firmly against it, fearing that inter-regimental debates on the word’s precise meaning might have regrettable outcomes. Rank is one thing and appointment another. In an infantry battalion or cavalry regiment the adjutant remains the commanding officer’s personal staff officer, responsible for what became known as ‘A’ matters: everything to do with personnel and discipline. An unrelenting stream of papers on postings, promotions, honours and awards, courses, and court martials surged across his desk. Adjutants usually held the rank of captain from the late nineteenth century, and the post is now an essential part of that cursus honorum that takes an officer to the highest ranks. But for the first two-thirds of the army’s life adjutants were sometimes ensigns and then, more usually, lieutenants, generally commissioned from the ranks, because any sensible commanding officer wanted an assistant who understood both drill and paperwork, and an ex-sergeant major was just the man. It was not easy to make the step up, and sometimes colonels made the wrong call. When the Light Brigade spurred off to its rendezvous with immortality in the Crimea, Cornet John Yates was adjutant of the 11th Hussars. Troop Sergeant Major George Loy Smith of the 11th was not pleased about it: Unfortunately for us Colonel Douglas allowed Colonel Lawrenson of the 17th Lancers to persuade him that his quartermaster [-sergeant] would make us an excellent adjutant – although at the time our two senior sergeant-majors were both eligible … I have heard on good authority that Colonel Douglas deeply regretted this act. If he did not I know the whole regiment did, for a worse rider, a worse drill, a greater humbug never before held the rank of adjutant in the British army. The 17th might well be glad to get rid of him; they certainly got the laugh of us. Cornet Yates (nicknamed ‘Joey’ by the troopers) had been standing in for a sick staff officer who returned to duty on the day of the battle, but he still managed to avoid the charge. Smith heard a soldier call out ‘There goes Joey’, and sure enough ‘in the distance could be seen the adjutant galloping back towards the encampment. This caused great amusement and laughter – he had only been with us a month and had made himself thoroughly obnoxious to everyone.’ Adjutants were generally ex-rankers until well on in the nineteenth century, for, as Lord Panmure, Secretary at War 1846–52, observed, it was hard to get a gentleman subaltern ‘to take the office of adjutant from the arduous character of its duties and the constant confinement it requires to barracks’. What the adjutant did for an individual unit, so the adjutant general did for the army as a whole. He was based alongside the commander-in-chief in Horse Guards, before crossing Whitehall to the Old War Office, then moving to the MOD’s Main Building and eventually having his own headquarters at Upavon in Wiltshire before being swept up into the army’s new headquarters, Marlborough Lines near Andover. The best adjutant generals combined regimental experience (giving them an understanding of the impact of bureaucracy on the army in the field) with a sharp brain and a thirst for the administrative flood that drenched their regimental counterparts. Henry Torrens, a Londonderry man, was commissioned under-age into the 52nd Foot in 1793, and did a good deal of regimental duty in the West Indies, Portugal, and India. By 1805 he was appointed assistant adjutant general for the Kent district. Another interlude of regimental duty saw him wounded at Buenos Aires, where a musket ball ‘shattered a small writing apparatus which was slung to his side’. He became Assistant Adjutant General at Horse Guards, and then Assistant Military Secretary there, with a brief period in the Peninsula. A major general and a knight, Torrens became adjutant general in 1820. He managed to write a drill-book, Regulations for the Exercise and Field Movements of the Infantry of the Army, and played an important part in rebalancing the army as it ran down for a long period of peace. Contemporaries thought that his ‘excessive labours’ had weakened his health, and he died suddenly in 1828. Individual armies in the field had their own adjutant generals, their tasks mirroring those of regimental adjutants on the one hand and the army’s adjutant general on the other. From February 1916 until the end of the war Lieutenant General Sir George Fowke was adjutant general in France. He had gone to war as the BEF’s senior Royal Engineer, and his promotion partly reflected GHQ’s discomfort with this big, clever man whose influence had grown inexorably with the importance of engineering. As adjutant general he left the routine of office work to others, but retained a penetrating overview, sharpened by a remarkable memory for detail. The scale and diversity of his branch’s work emerges from the digest of administrative routine orders issued to help all officers in the adjutantal line. Fowke’s branch warned individuals of the danger of being struck by the propellers of low-flying aircraft; established the grounds for reporting a man ‘missing, believed killed’; directed units to send the originals of their war diaries up to the Deputy Adjutant General on the last day of each month, and decreed that the only vehicle allowed to fly the Union Jack was the commander-in-chief’s. A commanding officer was no less dependent upon his quartermaster than his adjutant. Quartermasters were originally ex-NCOs given warrants to act in that appointment. When Charles Jones was reviewing officers’ duties in 1811 he observed that the quartermaster of the Blues was unusual in that he held a proper commission, but although quartermasters as a group ‘stand, in front, at the head of their class, [they] can never be on a level with the youngest cornet’. It was not a status that always made for comfortable relations between veteran quartermasters and less experienced junior officers. In July 1811, Quartermaster John Foster Kingsley of the 30th Foot was court-martialled at Campo Mayor for taking possession of bullock carts reserved, by Wellington’s orders, for ammunition and supplies, and using them for his own battalion’s equipment. One of the charges against him was that he had disobeyed the orders of Lieutenant Rae of the Royal Scots, who claimed use of the carts. It transpired that Rae had detained two members of the 30th’s cart-escort, alleging that they were drunk and insolent. When Kingsley declined to hand over the carts there was a quarrel in the street: Kingsley not only refused to acknowledge Rae’s authority but, when Rae threatened to take the carts by force, pointed out that he too had armed men at hand. If Rae demurred, suggested the quartermaster helpfully, then they should step aside and settle the issue ‘in a private manner’. Matters were not improved by Kingsley’s offer to return the carts when he had finished with them, for the commissariat official with Rae said ‘I would not take your word for you are no gentleman’, serving only to remind Kingsley of his position. Moreover, as commissariat officials did not hold commissions themselves, it was exasperating for one to lay claim to status that was by no means evident. Most of the witnesses supported Rae, apart from Hospital Mate Evans, who was about to be appointed assistant surgeon to the 30th, and had good reason for not antagonising its quartermaster. The court martial found Kingsley guilty on two of the three charges against him, agreeing that Rae was indeed his senior officer. Kingsley was suspended from rank and pay for three months, a modest sentence in the circumstances, and earned a surprisingly gentle reproof from Wellington, who reminded him that ‘inconvenience may be felt at some time by individuals’ but the general interest had to take precedence. A modern quartermaster, shown the court-martial papers, concluded that he would have done exactly the same in Kingsley’s place, and put his own battalion first. After 1871 quartermasters were granted honorary commissions as lieutenants or captains, and the Manual of Military Law emphasised that, even though they still held substantive warrant rank, this made them officers within the meaning of the Army Act. They were invariably promoted from the ranks, usually moving on to be their battalion’s quartermaster after having served as its RSM. It was not until after the First World War that they were given full commissions, and not until later that the concept of a ‘Late Entry’ commission was introduced, enabling commissioned ex-warrant officers to do a wide variety of jobs. The post of quartermaster had never been the only outlet for officers commissioned from the ranks. There was the adjutant’s appointment until it became the preserve of mainstream officers. The regimental post of paymaster, once thought highly suitable for an ex-NCO, had become attractive to gentleman officers rather earlier, because it was seen to be ‘one of the best appointments in the service’ from a financial point of view. Riding masters in the cavalry were commissioned from the ranks, and the post still exists in the Household Cavalry. Later, directors of music (senior to bandmasters, who are warrant officers) and masters at arms in the Army Physical Training Corps were also ex-rankers. However, the concept of the Late Entry commission enabled such officers to do a wider variety of jobs than ever before, perhaps commanding headquarters companies in infantry battalions or furnishing the Royal Army Medical Corps with the non-medical administrative officers it needs. Doug Beattie was commissioned in 2005 after his tour as RSM of 1/R Irish and twenty-two years’ service, and acknowledged that while this gave him the opportunity to stay in the army ‘for the immediate future and well beyond’, there was a catch. The army thought him ‘best suited to a training and logistical role’. After a training job he would then be likely to return to his old battalion where ‘I would probably become a welfare officer, looking after the families of those going off to fight.’ It was not for him, and he decided to resign. Before his resignation took effect, though, he was posted to Afghanistan, where he won a Military Cross in a burst of desperate fighting alongside the Afghan National Army and police at Garmsir in 2006. Although still determined to leave the army, he was unable to resist the opportunity of helping his own battalion prepare for its Afghanistan tour, and accompanying them when it deployed. ‘Soldiering was what I did and what I knew’, he wrote. ‘It was in my blood.’ His unhappiness with the sorts of jobs on offer after commissioning is not untypical. It reflects a slow transition, not yet completed, between old army and new. It is impossible to overemphasise either the importance of quartermasters or their impact on superiors and subordinates alike. Some might indeed have deserved the description given the quartermaster of a cavalry regiment in the Indian Mutiny as ‘old, excessively conceited, disobliging and ungentlemanly …’ Their passage through the ranks will not have imbued them with profound confidence in human nature; they will be older than most officers of their rank, and, although the selection of mainstream officers from a broader background continues to reduce the social differences between quartermasters and their brother officers, they will certainly not be graduates in a largely graduate officers’ mess. At their best they are sources of wise advice as well as solid professional expertise, and are often remembered long after most other officers are forgotten. In his Sherston’s Progress trilogy, Siegfried Sassoon modelled that ‘husky-voiced old campaigner’, the gruff but kindly Joe Dottrell, quartermaster of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, on its real quartermaster, Captain Yates. He also appears to no less advantage in The War the Infantry Knew, the battalion’s unofficial history, compiled by Captain James Churchill Dunn, its medical officer for much of the war. Yates met the battalion as it stumbled back from Le Cateau in 1914. ‘The Quartermaster had some stew and tea ready, and we had an issue of rum, and, what was still better, some letters from home.’ He got the men away, a platoon at a time, to have a bath – ‘badly needed’ – when the battalion held autumnal trenches above the Aisne. On St David’s Day 1916 (sacred to the Royal Welch) he secured, though we can only guess how, ‘a leek for everyone’s cap.’ He saved time and trouble by keeping his transport close behind the battalion on the Somme, though everyone else’s was sent further back. When the battalion ran dangerously short of ammunition in the German spring offensive of 1918 ‘Yates has made up, although scrounging is not so easy as formerly.’ When the war ended he not only took home ‘a complete Mobilisation Store for a battalion, down to the last horseshoe and strap,’ but a complete German mortar acquired by the brigadier and ‘innumerable brass shell-cases’ that Yates and the adjutant had collected. And at last, when the battalion paraded through Wrexham on its arrival in Britain, he astonished those who had no notion of there having been a Mrs Yates by spotting her amongst the crowd: ‘forty years of army discipline were forgotten, he dashed from the ranks, and greeted her heartily and unblushingly.’ The quartermaster’s subordinates were headed by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, from 1913 a warrant officer, and included an assortment of storemen, with cooks, grooms, and transport-men often coming under his command too. He had a particular lien on company quartermaster sergeants who, like him, were known as quarter-blokes. Although his post was not the most martial, RQMS T.W. Fitzpatrick of 2/Royal Irish did more than most to save the BEF on 23 August 1914, assembling a scratch force (including the battalion’s armourer, Sergeant Redmond, with that useful asset, a newly-repaired machine gun) to hold the Bascule crossroads near Mons. He was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal and a commission for the day’s work, and ended the war a lieutenant colonel. As adjutant generals were to adjutants, so quartermaster generals were to quartermasters. Yet there was one big difference. Although a quartermaster general and his Q staff were responsible for accommodation and quartering, supplies of all sorts, remounts and accounting, neither the army’s quartermaster general, nor the quartermaster general of a deployed force, would ever have been a battalion quartermaster. Wully Robertson, the BEF’s quartermaster general in 1914, had indeed served in the ranks, though he had been commissioned long before he was eligible to be quartermaster. It is a reflection of the army’s relationship with its own logisticians that Lieutenant General Sir Paul Travers, who had spent much of his career in the Royal Corps of Transport, was the first professional logistician to become quartermaster general, in 1982. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the army’s logistic services were militarised, and even then there was more than a little disdain, on the part of what became known as the ‘teeth arms’, for the supporting services. This did not prevent some quartermaster generals from being very competent. Perhaps the most outstanding of them was General Sir John Cowans, in post for the whole of the First World War and according to Asquith ‘the best quartermaster since Moses’. He combined regimental service in the Rifle Brigade, into which he had been commissioned in 1881, with a series of logistic staff jobs. He was urbane and tireless, and, unusually amongst officers who had grown up in a small army, had the capacity to think big. He got on well with ministers – not always a simple task in that uneasy world of frocks and brass-hats – and his ‘penchant for other men’s wives’ may have endeared him to Lloyd George. When Wully Robertson stepped up from being QMG in France to take over as the BEF’s chief of staff in 1915, the post went to Ronald Maxwell. But he was replaced in December 1917 because of political pressure, and against Haig’s wishes, by Travers Clarke. Maxwell had been good but Clarke was even better, an extraordinary administrator who coped with both the haemorrhaging of resources after the slashing cut of the German 1918 offensive and the unprecedented demands of the mobile warfare of the last Hundred Days. It says something of the way that history is written (for we scribblers prefer warriors to logisticians) that few, even amongst the war’s more serious historians, give him the attention he deserves. Major General Hubert Essame likened him to Lazare Carnot, who had done so much to keep the threadbare warriors of revolutionary France in the field, and called him the ‘Carnot of Haig’s armies’. Clarke’s department worried about the allowances in lieu of billets available to French and Belgian interpreters; the relationship between ammunition parks at corps level and their satellite divisional sub-parks; and the process of compensating landowners for damage to trees and other property. It had a comprehensive policy on the recycling of damaged equipment, advising that ‘any boot which is not badly cut in the uppers can be repaired, and if doubt exists it is better to err on the safe side, and class the boot as repairable.’ When the Machine Gun Corps was formed in 1915, the QMG’s branch had to devise new scales of equipment, so that cavalry machine gun squadrons received, inter alia, two chisels, one plane, one bench vice, and a saddletree-maker (to equip the horses with the packs used to transport ammuntion and the guns themselves). It issued instruction on correspondence, from ordinary letters, through express delivery and on to weekend letter telegrams, which could be sent from France to certain colonies or dependencies provided that they were written in plain English or French and included no code-words. Rations were a major preoccupation, with a complex shopping list of entitlements and alternatives for man and beast. Men working in arduous conditions could receive extra tea and sugar daily, and two ounces of pea soup or two Oxo cubes twice weekly during the winter months. Indian rations included ghee, ghur, ginger, chillies, and turmeric; and Africans were entitled to a pound and a half of mealie meal per man per day. Transport of all sorts was the responsibility of Q Branch: spares, spark-plugs and speeding all merited entries in routine orders. Finally, the branch even ventured into matters adjutantal, warning that officers had been seen returning from France to the United Kingdom wearing Sam Browne belts from which the braces and frog had been removed. At least one of the braces should be worn at all times, although (generous concession) the frog need only be worn with the sword itself. Historically, the quartermaster general of a field army was its commander’s chief staff officer, for military operations were so intimately concerned with supply and movement that it was natural for the QMG’s branch to take the lead. Both Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, and Wellington’s, George Murray, were formally entitled quartermaster general, and Richard Airey, who made his own imprecise contribution to the misunderstandings that led to the Charge of the Light Brigade, held the same title, although he was effectively Lord Raglan’s chief of staff. The title chief of staff did not appear till the end of the nineteenth century, and by the First World War he was defined as the commander’s ‘responsible adviser for all matters affecting all matters of military operations … by whom all orders to field units will be signed.’ The general staff (G Branch) was primus inter pares, with overriding responsibility for all orders, operations, communication, censorship and legal issues. Until the British adopted the NATO staff system in the 1980s, their staff officers had titles prefixed with GSO (for General Staff Officer). A number indicated their ranks, with GSO1 for lieutenant colonels, ‘2’ for majors and ‘3’ for captains. The chief of staff of a brigade had long been its brigade major, assisted, as the First World War went on, by two staff captains, A and Q. Terminology changed, within NATO, to the prefix SO (for Staff Officer) and a number for rank, mirroring the old British system, and then a designation that places the officer precisely within the appropriate general staff branch, with its G prefix: thus SO2 G3 Training is a major in the training branch of a headquarters. The old GOC, for General Officer Commanding, is now replaced by ‘commander’, and brigade majors, like their equivalents at higher levels, are now chiefs of staff. Adding acronyms stirs that alphabet soup which itself contributes to a military sense of identity by helping form a language all but impenetrable to outsiders. The British commander of the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps is COMARRC, and his chief of staff (with a whiff of the steppe) COSARRC. Chief of staff survives, at least conversationally, unabbreviated, but his deputy is generally clipped down to the unlovely Dee-Cos. CHAPTER 5 TO OBSERVE AND OBEY THE NOTION OF a universal hierarchy in the army was slow to evolve. For instance, until 1788 troopers in the Life Guards were ‘private gentlemen’, initially recruited from that flotsam of gentry left unemployed after the Civil War, and expected to buy their own costly uniforms. In 1678 the separate troops of Life Guards had been reinforced by the newly raised Horse Grenadier Guards who used explosives in battle. Diarist John Evelyn described them at camp on Hounslow Heath as ‘dextrous in flinging hand Granados, every one having a pouch full; they had furred hats with coped crowns like Janissaries, which made them look very fierce …’ In contrast to the gentlemen of the Life Guards, however, privates in the Horse Grenadiers were just like private soldiers in the rest of the army. As time went on, service in the ranks, even the ranks of the Life Guards, became less attractive to a gentleman, all the more so because his 1660 pay of ?73 a year (then equivalent to the income of ‘Eminent Clergymen’) was eroded by inflation and by the 1780s an artisan might expect to earn at least as much. By then the Life Guards had become recruited with ‘native Londoners with alternative sources of income, whose part-time jobs as private gentlemen simply furthered family business interests’. The 1788 reform replaced the existing troops of Life Guards and the Horse Grenadiers, with two new regiments: the 1st Life Guards and the 2nd Life Guards. These would now be recruited like the rest of the army, although the grenade badge on officers’ cloaks remained as a last echo of the Horse Grenadiers. This induced the Duke of York to write ‘I was a little sorry for the Horse Grenadiers because they were to a degree soldiers, but the Life Guards were nothing but a collection of London Tradespeople.’ Their regimental custom of addressing their men as ‘gentlemen’ harks back to an older world, and so too does the Household Cavalry practice of addressing lieutenant colonels and above by their rank rather than as ‘sir’. The reform also did away with the old Life Guards rank terminology, where commissioned ranks below captain (just two for the army as a whole) had been cornet, guidon, exempt, brigadier, and sub-brigadier. It left the Household Cavalry with an NCO terminology that still endures. Lance corporals are lance corporals, just as they would be in the rest of the army. But corporals are styled ‘lance corporal of horse’, sergeants are ‘corporal of horse’, staff sergeants are ‘staff corporals’, squadron sergeant majors are ‘squadron corporal majors’, and the regiment’s senior non-commissioned member is the ‘regimental corporal major’. The reforms did nothing about the advantageous double-ranking system enjoyed by Guards officers. Central to its operation was the concept that rank in the army and rank in a given regiment were distinct. In 1687 captains in the Guards were given the army rank of lieutenant colonel. Four years later, the privilege was extended to lieutenants, who ranked as majors in the army. Finally in 1815 – as a reward for the conduct of the Foot Guards at Waterloo – ensigns were granted lieutenancies in the army. When a Guards officer reached the rank of major in his regiment he was at once made a colonel in the army. Formally a Guards captain would style himself ‘captain and lieutenant colonel’, but the custom of referring to officers by their higher army rank, clear enough at the time, easily causes confusion now. At Waterloo there was a glut of colonels in and around the farm complex of Hougoumont. The light companies of the 1st, Coldstream, and 3rd Guards played a distinguished part in the defence of the Hougoumont, standing like a breakwater in front of Wellington’s right centre. All the company commanders, captains by regimental rank, enjoyed lieutenant-colonelcies in the army. James Macdonnell of the Coldstream was in overall command; Charles Dashwood of 3rd Guards in the garden and farm surrounds; Henry Windham of the Coldstream in the ch?teau and farm; with Lord Saltoun of 1st Guards in the orchard. Eventually Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Woodford (and a ‘proper’ lieutenant colonel in this context), commanding 2nd Coldstream Guards, was sent down with most of his battalion from Major General Sir John Byng’s brigade up on the ridge. Although he was now the senior officer in the area, Woodford generously let James Macdonnell remain in command. The burly Macdonnell had already distinguished himself by leading the handful of guardsmen who had closed the farm’s north gate after the French burst in. Private Matthew Clay of 3rd Guards ‘saw Lieutenant Colonel Macdonnell carrying a large piece of wood or trunk of a tree in his arms (one of his cheeks marked with blood, his charger bleeding within a short distance) with which he was hastening to secure the gates against the renewed attacks of the enemy.’ Some called him ‘the bravest man in England’ for his part in animating the defence, although he always maintained that it was a team effort. He was knighted and ended his days as a general. Guards officers eventually lost their double rank in 1871, with the reforms accompanying the abolition of the purchase of commissions. It had always been more than just a genteel way of ensuring that the ‘Gentlemen’s sons’ – as Guards officers were known in the Wellingtonian army – enjoyed added status. This had practical advantages: a force made up of several units or detachments was commanded by the senior officer, by army rank, present. As a general’s rank came by seniority from the date of promotion to lieutenant colonel, a Guards captain found himself on the roll from the date of his appointment. This increased his prospects of becoming a general early, and a handful of officers did indeed find themselves major generals in the army while still doing duty as captains in their own regiments. Andrew Wheeler of the 1st Guards was commissioned in 1678, promoted to captain and lieutenant colonel in 1692, became a major general in 1727, and died a regimental captain three years later. More typical was Richard, sixth Earl of Cavan, commissioned in 1744, made captain and lieutenant colonel in 1756 and major general in 1772. He departed to command the 55th Foot as a regimental lieutenant colonel in 1774, and died, by now a lieutenant general, in 1778. Major Charles Jones, author of the The Regimental Companion (1811), argued that dual rank ‘has often been detrimental on real service, is always a cause of distracting jealousy to the line, and has never … offered one solid advantage’. Ending purchase did not end the concept of dual rank. This situation initiated a long-running joke: a foreign officer in British pay, marching through Portugal in 1810, saw a senior Guards officer astride a donkey: ‘What a beautiful mule that is!’ ‘It is not a mule, my good fellow, it is a jack-ass.’ ‘Pardon me, it would indeed be a jack-ass in the line, but because it belongs to the Guards it must be a mule by brevet.’ From its earliest days the army had granted promotion as a reward for gallant or distinguished service, and this was known as brevet promotion. It was especially relevant in an age where medals and decorations were not generally available, and could be awarded individually or to a whole group. By the nineteenth century brevet was available, as an individual reward, only to officers who were already captains, and it could not take a man beyond colonel. Captain Garnet Wolseley, commissioned into the 12th Foot in 1852, was repeatedly put up for the brevet promotion for which his harum-scarum courage qualified him. But the military secretary regretted that he had not yet acquired the six years service that brevet rank demanded: As Captain Wolseley has only been about three years and six months in the service, he is ineligible under the regulations to be promoted to the rank of Major, for which otherwise, in consideration of the services described by Sir Harry Jones, he would have been happy to have recommended him. Another hero of the Indian Mutiny, Lieutenant Henry Norman, had so many recommendations that all he needed was his captaincy for the honours to kick in. ‘On the day of his captaincy,’ wrote a delighted brother officer, ‘he will be Major, Lieut-Colonel, CB [Companion of the Order of the Bath], perhaps full colonel. He deserves it all and more.’ Fred Roberts (who was to die as a field marshal in France in 1914) received his brevet majority on the day that his captaincy was gazetted in 1860, and a brevet lieutenant colonelcy followed almost immediately. Brevets were granted generously and gave commanders a quick and easy way of showing their approval. The sniper’s fire of individual brevets, aimed at individuals, was interlocked with the wholesale bombardment of general brevet promotions that caught up whole batches of officers of similar seniority. In 1810 Henry Torrens assured a colonel that ‘It keeps up the spirit of an army to give frequent promotion to a Class of Men who have nothing to look to but the honourable attainment of rank in their profession.’ He enclosed an Army List showing the impact of a proposed general brevet. It would make ‘the Cols of 1803 and 1804 to be Major Generals, the Lieut Cols of 1800 to be Colonels, the remainder of the Majors of 1802 and the whole of 1803 to be Lieut Colonels.’ He added a postscript saying that he had just calculated the speed of promotion across the army, and reckoned that a man would be ‘tolerably fortunate’ to make lieutenant colonel with fifteen years’ service, and it would take him ten more years to make colonel and another seven as colonel before he became a major general. This meant that ‘the more fortunate’ of those who had entered the army at 16, could make major general at 51. The last general brevet, he added, had indeed promoted its youngest major general at 51 but its youngest lieutenant general at 75. Torrens understandably added an exclamation mark. General brevet promotions could mark an event like a Royal Jubilee, or the end of a war. A large promotion followed peace in 1815 ‘to reward those by whose brilliant service the peace had been achieved’. When the army was being shrunk in the 1820s, brevet rank was used as an inducement to get officers to leave. They could retire with ‘Superior Brevet Rank in the Army’ and receive the half-pay of that new rank. They could then, if they wished, sell this ‘Unattached Half-Pay Commission’, an enticing departure from the general principle that one could only sell a commission that had been bought. There were an enormous amount of general brevets awarded in 1846, 1851, and 1854, but the process created a huge amount of elderly generals: the average age of major generals in the 1854 brevet was over 65. Over a twenty-year period half the major generals had not served for ten years, many had not served for twenty, and one had had no service for thirty-five. General brevets were abolished in 1854 and a fixed establishment for general officers was introduced, with rules for promotion and retirement. A brevet officer usually did duty in his regimental rank, though serving outside his regiment – for instance, as aide-de-camp to a general – would allow him to be employed in his army rank, and to draw the full pay for it. There were certain other advantages. In 1869 it was laid down that captains holding a major’s brevet would be allocated cabins in troopships ahead of mere regimental captains; and in 1898 all brevet officers were ordered to wear the badges and appurtenances of their army rank. An order of 1912, however, ungenerously warned that brevet rank did not exempt an officer from passing the appropriate promotion examinations. The over-generous use of brevets, together with the granting of temporary rank to help officer an army swollen by war, could create anomalies, with a favoured few enjoying temporary and brevet rank well in excess of their regimental rank. The Duke of Marlborough tried to explain that just because an officer had a temporary commission as brigadier, and brevets taking him through major to colonel, he was still not the senior captain in his own regiment, and when all the froth and bubble had gone, he was likely to finish up commanding a company again. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission as brigadier,’ wrote the duke, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, and there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’ In 1767, a dispute over command of the Cork garrison between Lieutenant Colonel Tulikens of the 45th Foot and Lieutenant Colonel Cunningham (regimentally a captain in the 45th, but holding his senior rank by brevet) established that ‘When corps join either in camp, garrison or quarters, the oldest officer (whether by Brevet or any other commission) is to command the whole.’ Brevet promotion lasted for much of the twentieth century, although it was increasingly discredited. On 26 August 1914, 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders formed part of the 3rd Division, holding the line in front of Audencourt at the battle of Le Cateau. Troops in that sector did not receive the order for a general withdrawal, and so, true to the standards of that tough old army, they fought on. At about 7.45 p.m. that evening Colonel William Gordon VC, second in command of the Gordons as a regimental major, noted that his battalion now had a company of Royal Scots and two of Royal Irish fighting alongside it. He immediately took command of the combined force by virtue of his army rank, which made him senior to Lieutenant Colonel Neish, his own commanding officer. The little party began to fall back just after midnight. It eventually collided with a field gun blocking the route, and although the Gordons rushed the piece before it could be fired, nearby Germans immediately stood to their arms and after an hour’s battle the British were overwhelmed. The Gordons lost about five hundred men, although a few survivors made their way through the German lines to Antwerp and on to England. ‘The fortune of war was hard upon the 1/Gordons’, lamented the official historian. ‘For the time, they practically ceased to exist as a battalion.’ Survivors found the circumstances of the capture extremely galling, and after the war there was a civil action when Gordon sued a Dundee newspaper for repeating a story that he had ordered the men to lay down their arms: he demanded ?5,000 and received ?500, which was nevertheless a substantial sum. Whatever the truth of the decision to surrender, command arrangements had certainly not made for a quick decision at a moment when time was of the essence. Nor did brevet rank make Major General Hubert Hamilton’s task any easier at Le Cateau. His 3rd Division was bearing the brunt of the battle, but when Brigadier General McCracken of 7th Infantry Brigade was wounded, Hamilton had to send for the Army List to determine that, although both Lieutenant Colonel Bird of the Royal Irish and Lascelles of the Worcesters were substantive lieutenant colonels, and the latter had gained substantive rank first, Bird had an earlier lieutenant colonel’s brevet that gave him command of the brigade. Brevet rank lapsed in 1952 but reappeared (though only for major to lieutenant colonel) two years later, to increase the field of selection for promotion to colonel, and ‘earmark outstanding officers and give them incentive’. It was finally abolished in 1967, although it lingered on into the twenty-first century in the Territorial Army, for specific use in the case of a territorial second-in-command of a unit normally commanded by a regular officer. Even if no brevet rank was involved, an officer could be granted temporary or local rank, both of limited duration and the latter more fragile than the first. Local rank began by having a specific geographical limitation, like the ‘for America only’ caveat that made James Wolfe a major general in 1759. When Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief, formed his command into three brigades, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Pigot (in Boston in 1775) was promoted locally to brigadier general. He was to command his own 38th Foot, together with the 5th and 52nd. It was Pigot’s brigade that led the decisive break into the Patriots’ redoubt on Breed’s Hill (the key point in the battle known as Bunker Hill), and Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the American Department, announced in the Gazette that ‘the Success of the Day must in great Measure be attributed to his firmness and Gallantry.’ It brought him not only one of the first available regimental colonelcies, but promotion to local major general. He succeeded to his brother’s baronetcy in 1777, and shortly afterwards seniority brought him the substantive step of major general. Sir Robert was promoted lieutenant general in 1782, three years after his return to England. He did not serve again, but devoted himself to the improvement of his estate at Patshull, work begun by his elder brother, who had consulted Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Temporary rank was linked to a specific appointment, but, unlike local rank which was generally unpaid, brought its holder the appropriate pay. The London Gazette solemnly deprived Winston Churchill of the temporary lieutenant colonelcy he had been granted in early 1916 to command 6/Royal Scots Fusiliers, and when he returned to politics that summer he reverted to major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. The rules could be very hard. Colonel Charles MacGregor was promoted to temporary major-general to serve as quartermaster-general in India in 1881, bypassing the appointment of brigadier. Although he held the post for four years, and was knighted in the process, he gave it up before seniority had yet made him a major general and so crashed back to colonel, and although he made a dignified protest, the system would not budge. Already mortally ill, he set off home. A Gazette of 18 February 1887 duly promoted him to major general, with seniority backdated to 22 January, but he had died at Cairo on 5 February and never knew of it. The two world wars saw a huge expansion of local and temporary rank with the Second World War seeing the creation of a ‘war substantive’ rank which was precisely what its name suggests. The youngest British brigadier general in the First World War was Roland Boys Bradford, killed outside Bourlon Wood in 1917 at the age of 24, still only a substantive captain. The youngest major general of the war was the notoriously testy Keppel Bethell, described by one of his staff officers as ‘the most insubordinate man I have ever met’. He gained the temporary rank in March 1918 but never rose above substantive captain during the whole war, becoming temporary major in 1915, brevet major in 1916, and brevet lieutenant colonel in 1917. At that time promotion to full colonel came after four years as a lieutenant colonel and Bethell duly became a colonel in 1921, though it took him till 1930, six years before he retired, to get his second star back. In 1944 Michael Carver took over 4th Armoured Brigade in Normandy, becoming, at the age of thirty, the youngest British brigade commander of the war. He had been commissioned into the Royal Tank Corps in 1935 and took command of 1st Royal Tank Regiment in 1942: his driver remembered him as a ‘young, serious and very professional soldier, devoid of messes and batmen’. Carver later made no secret of the fact that ‘my attitude to politics and inherited privilege was … left of centre.’ One of his first acts was ‘to rid myself of the encumbrance of my second-in-command, who served no useful purpose’. He then decided that the commanding officer of his brigade’s motor battalion, 2/King’s Royal Rifle Corps had ‘lost his grip’, and decided to replace him. Rightly sensing trouble, he asked another senior officer from the same regiment to visit the battalion to double-check, and then duly sacked the commanding officer. When Carver proposed to lead an attack with the Royal Scots Greys, his divisional commander objected ‘Couldn’t you send a less well-known regiment?’ Undaunted, he moved on to unseat another commanding officer, Sandy Cameron of 3rd County of London Yeomanry, an experienced warrior with bars to both his DSO and MC. ‘He greatly resented the decision,’ admitted Carver, ‘but 20 years later wrote me a charming letter admitting that I had been right.’ Carver was fortunate in gaining a temporary lieutenant-colonelcy after the war, to work for ‘a dull, characterless gunner … a dead loss’. He did not get command of a brigade again until 1960, sixteen years after commanding one in battle. But he was more fortunate than Peter Young, just four days younger, who led a Commando brigade in Burma in early 1945. Young did not become a lieutenant colonel again till 1953, when he went off to command a regiment in the Arab Legion. He left the army in 1959, still a lieutenant colonel, granted the honorary rank of brigadier on his retirement to run the military history department at Sandhurst, where he became this author’s first boss. The army still grants temporary and local rank. The former is often awarded to an officer beginning an appointment in the course of which he will get promoted in the normal way of things, but there are times when temporary rank may reflect a wholly exceptional circumstance. In December 2007 Colonel Richard Iron was made a temporary brigadier to serve alongside the Iraqi army, helping develop its counter-insurgency plan for Basra. The British army’s run-down in Basra was primarily dictated by the political requirement to minimise casualties. Iron became a unrepentantly controversial figure. He was close to senior Iraqi officers who felt that they had received insufficient help, and he later suggested that the British had deviated from the principles of counter-insurgency that they, of all people, should have understood. He reverted to colonel on his return in 2008, and the following spring was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office, which has a proprietary interest in this award. Local rank usually reflects a short term expedient. For instance, when 4th Armoured Brigade was preparing to deploy for the first Gulf War, its established ‘Transition To War’ posts were immediately filled by the grant of local rank. CHAPTER 6 WEEKEND WARRIORS THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN the (full-time) regular army and (part-time) volunteer and auxiliary forces has been long, for there was a militia long before there were regulars. This has been a complex (and often unedifying) association, with militia units being ‘embodied’ for occasional full-time service in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Territorial Army being merged, lock, stock, and barrel into ‘a single integrated national army’ in 1940. Two of the most irritating acronyms in my own time were STABs (‘Stupid TA Bastards’) and ARABs (‘Arrogant Regular Army Bastards’). The Reserve Forces Act 1996 made it much easier than before to mobilise reservists in situations short of major war, and 13,510 were called up between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 1 June 2007. They served in a wide variety of posts, from deputy brigade commanders to private soldiers, sometimes absorbed within regular units, and sometimes serving in composite TA companies. There were more triumphs than disasters. 1/Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment took a slice of Territorials with it to Al Amarah in 2004. Charlie Curry, a regular captain, describes the integration of a multiple (half-platoon) of Scots Territorials into his company: We had ownership of them from the start of their mobilisation and they were trained centrally by the battle group prior to deployment. We had teething problems as we whittled down those not physically or mentally tough enough for the job in hand … What remained was a very well motivated multiple commanded by Sgt Steve Cornhill and supported by Cpl Steve Marsh and LCpl Sven Wentzel. These regs would assist in the integration of the multiple on ops, and eventually step back to allow the TA ranks to take the leash. It is worthy of note that other TA soldiers wound up in company HQ and in other multiples within the company. One such individual was Cpl ‘H’ Hogarth who went into the company signals detachment and manned the ops room throughout the tour … he was a fantastic operator, could effectively run the ops room alone, and could fix anything he turned his hand to – a top lad. A regular Royal Armoured Corps NCO in the same battle group was also impressed by the Territorials he served alongside. ‘At the beginning I thought that because they were part-timers I would be better than them,’ he wrote, ‘but they soon changed my mind. I would honestly work in any environment with them again, and I made some really good mates.’ The regular army could not have fought either world war without a massive influx of non-regulars, with the TA, with all its strengths and weaknesses, taking the strain before the ponderous engine of conscription could cut in. In terms of Britain’s long-term relationship with her defenders, locally recruited auxiliary forces have always been more visible than regulars, who are either away campaigning or mewed up in barracks that have become increasingly forbidding. For most of the army’s history, there were more auxiliaries than regulars actually stationed in Britain. In 1935 Lieutenant Colonel J. K. Dunlop wrote that In these days, most of the Regular battalions are concentrated in one or other of our great military training areas – Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, or Catterick. The Militia is no longer in existence, and there are large areas of the land without any visible sign of the existence of the British Army were it not for the local Territorial Army unit. Things are different today only in that the TA’s geographical ‘footprint’ of training centres is about one-tenth the size of that in 1935. Service in the fyrd, the Old English word for army, was one of the ‘common burdens’ shouldered by free men of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, who were obliged ‘to build fortifications, repair bridges and undertake military service’. I can scarcely think of the fyrd save in terms of that dark October day in 1066 when Duke William beat Harold Godwinson on Senlac Hill to seize the crown of England. But it remained a useful asset even to the victorious Normans. Levies from the northern shires stood steady around the great bloc of dismounted knights (all hefting sword and spear beneath the consecrated banners from the minsters of York, Beverley, and Ripon that gave the fight its name) to break the wild rush of King David’s Scotsmen at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. An obligation for military service was incorporated in the Assize of Arms of 1181 and the Statute of Winchester of 1285, and embodied into the first militia acts in 1558. In the absence of a standing army, the process of selecting men for military service ‘kept the more established householders at home and sent abroad those socially less desirable persons whom deputy [lord] lieutenants and [village] constables wished to be rid of’. The practice of calling up the most easily spared sat uneasily alongside the theory that the country was best defended by free men with a stake in its welfare. Sir Francis Bacon had argued that sturdy yeomen made the best soldiers: tenants, cottagers, and labourers were too servile; vagrants and vagabonds unstable and unfit. The Trained Bands, formed in 1572 in an effort to modernise the militia, were essentially county militia regiments, controlled by the lord lieutenants (who entrusted the heavy lifting to their deputies). They were composed of freeholders, householders and their sons, taught how to use pike and musket by a small number of professional soldiers – the rough equivalents of Permanent Staff Instructors in today’s TA. The quality of the trained bands was mixed, partly because the more affluent strove to avoid personal service but sent servants or hired substitutes to represent them. In 1642 the London Trained Bands numbered 8,000 men in six regiments, named the Red, Blue, Green, White, Orange, and Yellow. They were certainly better than most, partly because of the role they played in providing guards and contingents for the ceremonies of mercantile London. There was an intimate connection between status in the city and rank in the Trained Bands: all the colonels were aldermen. They also gained much benefit from the existence of the city’s voluntary military associations, like the ‘Martial Yard’, ‘The Gentlemen of the Private and Loving Company of Cripplegate’, and ‘The Society of the Artillery Garden’. Many of the enthusiasts belonging to these clubs would have read the drill-books of the period, perhaps taking note of Robert Ward’s warning in his 1639 Animadversions of Warre that drinking was ‘the great fault of the English nation’ and particularly of English martial culture. Ward was profoundly mistrustful of the Trained Bands, and his observations prefigure the exasperated comments of many regular soldiers who have tried to train part-timers. Their training periods were Matters of disport and things of no moment … after a little careless hurrying over their postures, with which the companies are nothing bettered, they make them charge their muskets, and so prepare to give their captain a brave volley of shot at his entrance into his inn: where after having solaced themselves for a while after this brave service every man repairs home, and that which is not so well-taught then is easily forgotten before the next training. In 1642 the London Trained Bands were commanded by Sergeant Major General Philip Skippon, newly returned from the Dutch service, who led them out to Turnham Green that autumn to take part in ‘the Valmy of the English Civil War’ when they helped face off the victorious royalists and save London. ‘Come my honest brave boys,’ called Skippon, ‘pray heartily and fight heartily, and God will bless us.’ He soon went off to command the infantry in the Earl of Essex’s Parliamentarian army, but the Trained Bands remained a valuable part of Parliament’s order of battle thereafter, though they were never wholly comfortable far from their wards and warrens, with mournful cries of ‘Home, home’ letting commanders know that they had been campaigning too long. The Cornish Trained Bands, too, were formidable soldiers, though hugely reluctant to serve in foreign parts, that is, east of the Tamar. However, they formed the nucleus of those remarkable ‘voluntary regiments’ under Sir Bevil Grenville, Sir Nicholas Slanning, Colonel William Godolphin, Colonel John Trevannion, and Lord Mohun that were to form the mainstay of the king’s army in the west. ‘These were the very best foot I ever saw,’ acknowledged the royalist cavalry officer, Captain Richard Atkyns, ‘for marching and fighting … but could not well brook our horse (especially when we were drawn up on corn) but would let fly at us.’ There is more than an echo of Xenophon’s wry suggestion to his Greek infantry (peasant farmers and thus horse-haters to a man) that they should pay no attention to Persian cavalry, for nobody he knew of had been killed by a horse-bite. The King’s western colonels were men whose local power underlines the intimate connection between social standing and the ability to raise troops. This stretched far back into a feudal past and was still important in 1914, when the Earl of Derby raised four battalions of Liverpool Pals, presenting their soldiers with a solid silver cap-badge of the Derby crest. Grenville died atop Lansdown Hill outside Bath in June 1643. ‘When I came to the top of the hill,’ remembered Captain Atkyns, ‘I saw Sir Bevil Grenville’s stand of pikes, which certainly preserved our army from a total rout, with the loss of his most precious life.’ At his master’s side that day, in war as in peace, was the gigantic retainer Anthony Payne. Sir Bevil’s eldest son John was a 15-year-old ensign in the regiment, and when his father slid from the saddle Payne swung the lad up into it, and gave him the dead colonel’s sword. The Cornishmen, in their fury and grief, surged forward to regain the lost ground. Trevannion was killed when Prince Rupert stormed Bristol shortly afterwards and Slanning, mortally wounded in the same assault, lived long enough to quip that ‘he had always despised bullets, having been so well used to them.’ The death of the four men was a great loss: ‘Gone the four wheels of Charles’s wain,’ exulted a Roundhead poet, ‘Grenville, Godolphin, Slanning, Trevannion slain.’ Lest we get too misty-eyed about loyal country-folk and gallant gentlemen, we must remember that social obligation was laced with economic survival. Grenville had already written to his wife, away in their windy house at Stowe in north Cornwall, to tell her that no tenant could stay at home and expect to keep a roof over his head: they were to turn out in his blue and silver livery or pay the price. There was an older obligation, for service in the posse comitatus, the armed power of a county, raised and commanded by its sheriff. It was an expedient resorted to by the royalists early on in the Civil War, though with mixed success. An officer commented that one of its gatherings was ‘more like a great fair than a posse’, but Sir Ralph Hopton secured 3,000 sturdy Cornishmen by summoning the county’s posse to Moilesbarrow Down outside Truro in October 1642. Like so much else, the notion crossed the Atlantic, and the ranchers and citizens who ride off with the sheriff to constitute the posse in so many westerns are behaving in a way their English ancestors would have understood. After the Civil War the militia was retained by Parliament, both because it was seen as a defender of Protestant liberties against arbitrary royal government and because so many members of parliament were themselves militia officers. The Militia Act of 1662 charged property-owners with the provision of men, arms and horses in relation to the value of their property, and was the basis for the militia’s organisation for the next century. But by 1685 it was being argued by the government’s supporters that the militia had performed badly against the Duke of Monmouth. Some, largely, uncritical historians have tended to follow this view, but recent research suggests that accounts of the militia’s incompetence are overdrawn. The argument that its failings justified a significant increase in the regular army says as much about James II’s wish to increase the size of the army for his own purposes, not least the cowing of domestic opposition, as it does about the value of the militia. The countervailing argument, that a regular army would encourage governments to embark upon expensive and risky foreign war, whereas the militia (offering what the 1980s might have termed ‘non-provocative defence’) did not, chimed harmoniously with the mood of the late seventeenth century, and there were to be lasting echoes of it, in both Britain and the United States. The Militia Act of 1757 broke new ground by transferring the responsibility for the militia from individuals to the parish, that keystone of social organisation in so many other aspects, and successive legislation continued in a similar vein. Each county was allocated a quota of militiamen – 1,640 apiece for vulnerable Devonshire and sizeable Middlesex; 1,240 for the West Riding of Yorkshire and 240 each for Monmouthshire and Westmoreland, with just 120 for little Rutland. Lord lieutenants and their deputies were responsible for providing the officers and for overseeing the selection of the men. Able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were liable to serve; though peers of the realm, clergymen, articled clerks, apprentices, and parish constables were exempt. So too were poor men with three or more children born in wedlock, a number reduced to one in 1786. This last adjustment was a blessing for local authorities, for the parish was responsible for looking after the families of militiamen who had been called up. Service was for three years, and was determined by ballot, with potential militiamen being selected from nominal rolls drawn up by village constables. Constables’ lists are an appetising slice through the layer-cake of time and place. The Northamptonshire lists for 1777 show that 20 per cent of men balloted were servants, 19 per cent were labourers, and 11 per cent farmers. The county’s traditional industries were well represented, with almost 10 per cent engaged in weaving and framework knitting, and 6 per cent in shoemaking. At the other end of the scale, the county had ten whip-makers and three woad-men, last of a dying breed, two of them in the parish of Weston Favell and one at Watford. Well-to-do farmers tend to have ‘Mr’ in front of their names, or ‘Esq’ or ‘gent’ after it. Although the constable of Edgcote duly logged four men as ‘Servants to William Henry Chauncy Esq’ he was far too well-mannered to list Mr Chauncy himself. While some constables sent in simple lists, the two constables of the large town of Daventry (assisted by the town’s thirdboroughs or under-constables) produced helpful annotations, telling us that Mr Bailey, surgeon, had been balloted six years since; the mason William Watts had eight children; and William Rogers the baker was infirm. The seventeen students at the nonconformist academy there were liable for balloting, although when they were eventually ordained they would be exempt, for the Act exonerated nonconformist ministers as well as clergymen of the established Church. The constable of Whilton was precise in noting the ‘poor men with three children’ who were guaranteed exemption, and warned that ‘Jos Emery, farmer and church-warden, [has] lost the thumb of his right hand’ – no mean disability, for the thumb was used to cock the musket. A balloted man’s obligation was simply to provide military service, and most who could afford it paid a substitute to serve on their behalf. Every parish was obliged to meet its quota. As they were penalised for failure, parish authorities who fell short sought volunteers and paid them a bounty. Militiamen had a training obligation of twenty-eight days a year, and were billeted in public houses during this time. They were not always popular visitors, their presence striking a chord with that deep undercurrent of antimilitarism. In 1795 the testy Lord Delaval complained of the West Yorkshire Militia on his estate: ‘disturbance – noise – drums – poultry – intrusions – depredations – profligacy with servants – camp followers – interruptions – marauding – how to be protected – compensation – recompense.’ They were subject to the Articles of War when called up, and a range of punishments – from fines to the pillory or flogging – were available for men who failed to appear when ordered out. Militia regiments generally had between eight and twelve companies, with three sergeants and three corporals apiece. Militiamen could be promoted to these ranks, but the system relied on its small permanent staff, which included a regular sergeant major and a handful of regular sergeants. When the Worcestershire Militia formed in 1770 it was allocated Sergeant Major Henry Watkins of the 27th Foot, and two sergeants, Robert Harrison of the 3rd Dragoon Guards and Ezekiel Parks of the 58th Foot. The twenty-five other sergeants appointed were militiamen, and we have no way of assessing their previous experience. Sergeants did not have an easy life, as weapon-handling was never wholly safe. The Worcestershire Militia suffered a serious accident during its 1777 annual training. The men were drilling on Powick Ham when the cartridge pouches of three soldiers caught fire. Two men were ‘terribly scorched’ and three others ‘much injured’. In time of major emergency the militia was embodied for full-time service. In April 1778, after France had allied itself to the fledgling United States, transforming what had been a family quarrel into a world war, several militia regiments were embodied. The Northamptonshire Militia, led by Henry Yelverton, Earl of Sussex, was ordered to a training camp at Warley Common, near Brentwood in Essex. They marched though its county town with ‘repeated huzzas, and (what is the glory of Britons!) with spirits animated to repulse the designs that may be formed by the enemies to their king and country’. The regiment was moved around the southern counties over the next five years, with substitutes and newly balloted men tramping out to join it at Maidstone in 1782. It was disembodied in 1783, and carried out only part-time training till called up again for the French war in 1793. As the Napoleonic wars went on, militia obligations were successively strengthened. By 1815, what with supplementary and local militia and the hybrid ‘Army of Reserve’ of 1803, most adult males found themselves obliged to serve or pay. The issue of Scots militia was extraordinarily contentious, for the Government feared that it might be putting arms into the hands of its opponents: indeed, a major current of the Scottish Enlightenment was a desire to see a Scots militia as a bulwark against English oppression. The seminal 1757 Act did not apply in Scotland or Ireland, and it was not until 1797 that a Scots militia was raised. The last militia ballot took place in 1829, and when the militia was re-raised in 1852 because of the threat posed by Louis Napoleon’s France recruitment was voluntary. Militia officers were commissioned by lord lieutenants, using parchment documents very similar to those given to regulars. There was a property qualification, though it was first modified by permitting ex-regular army or naval officers to serve without it, and then, when the militia was revived in 1852, substantially reduced. It was not until 1867 that it disappeared altogether, so that at last ‘the officers ceased to be necessarily connected with the county or with the landed interest.’ These qualifications had been very substantial. The 1793 Militia Act decreed that a regiment’s colonel had to have ?2,000 a year or be heir to ?3,000; a lieutenant colonel ?1,200 a year or hopes of ?1,800; and so on to an ensign who needed to have ?20 a year or to be heir to ?200 personal property a year. Both the colonel and lieutenant colonel of a county’s regiment had to have half their property in that county. There were sporadic anti-militia riots, notably in 1757 and 1796, largely amongst those who sought to avoid serving. It became evident that the system would only work by bringing ‘the county’ onside: the militia service would be encouraged by those familiar ties of social and economic obligation. A first attempt to raise a Worcestershire Militia failed in 1758, when the lord lieutenant, the Earl of Coventry, and several of his deputies met at the Talbot Inn, Sidbury, only to find that not enough gentlemen were willing to accept commissions. The attempt was postponed, but failed in successive years. By 1770, however, when the process was repeated at Hooper’s Coffee House in Worcester, the outcome was successful, because there were now enough gentlemen prepared to take a lead. The list of officers, headed by the new regiment’s colonel, Nicholas Lechmere, was sent to Lord Weymouth, Secretary of State for the southern department. Sending this to Weymouth emphasised that the militia was a civil and not a military matter. This new proposal was given ‘His Majesty’s Approbation’ in just a week. Lechmere was once captain in 3rd Foot Guards, owner of Lidford Park near Ludlow in Shropshire, and the only son of the high sheriff of Worcestershire, Edmund Lechmere MP. His father-in-law was a landowner in Powick, on the little River Teme just outside the city, and he himself went on to inherit his uncle’s large estates and, in 1774, to become MP for Worcester. His major, Holland Cooksey, of Braces Leigh, was an Oxford-educated barrister, a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant of the county. A lieutenant colonel was appointed shortly afterwards. He was Robert Fettiplace, of Swinbrook Park, just east of Burford in Oxfordshire, happily not too far from the Worcestershire boundary. The son of Thomas Bushell, a substantial landowner of Cleeve Prior in the county, he had adopted the name Fettiplace on marrying Diana, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Fettiplace Baronet, the previous owner of Swinbrook. In 1775, when Lieutenant Colonel Fettiplace decided to soldier no more, he was replaced by Thomas Dowdeswell of Pull Court near Tewkesbury, eldest son of the Right Hon William Dowdeswell MP and his wife Bridget, youngest daughter of Sir William Codrington Baronet. Lieutenant Colonel Dowdeswell was married to a baronet’s daughter, was a JP and DL for his county, and had been a captain in 1st Foot Guards. A similar pattern extends across Britain, with militia commissions congruent with social standing, and the entire apparatus of raising and administering the militia wholly characteristic of the way the country was run. There was also a very clear Westminster connection. Most regiments of English and Welsh militia were commanded by peers, and the best of them took their responsibilities very seriously. Colonel Lord Riversdale of the South Cork Militia built a barracks for his regiment, on his own land at Rathcormac, at his own expense. When the South Cork was disembodied after the Napoleonic wars and there was little chance of the men finding work, he allowed many of them to join the regular army, although this was officially discouraged. The regiment proved true to its nickname ‘The Long Corks’ when, at its disembodiment parade on St Patrick’s Day 1816, the mens’ average height was found to be 5ft 11in. The radical politician and journalist John Wilkes was a committed patriot, and had travelled home from university at Leiden in 1745 to join a loyal association training to defend the capital against the Jacobites. Two years later he became a substantial landowner by marrying an heiress, thus coming within the qualification for senior militia rank. Although he was frequently at odds with the government, and had a highly coloured private life, he was a serious-minded colonel of the Buckinghamshire Militia, though his practice of using his adjutant as second in his duels was an unwise merging of military and civil. Captains and subalterns, with their smaller property qualifications, were more modest figures. The historian and MP Edward Gibbon served as a militia officer between 1759 and 1770, including a period of embodied service during the Seven Years War. He always thought that the Hampshire captain had taught the historian something of value. The novelist Jane Austen, living at Chawton on the main road from Guildford to the garrison town of Winchester, was familiar with militia regiments as they marched through, or were quartered in the surrounding villages. George Wickham, the closest Pride and Prejudice comes to a villain, was a militia officer, eventually posted off to the north to hide his disgrace. Jane’s brother Henry served as a captain in the Oxfordshire militia in 1793–1801, and he acted as regimental agent for several militias (the Devonshire, Nottinghamshire, and North Devonshire among them) before his bank failed in 1816 and he resorted to that perennial stand-by of the educated man down on his luck, and became a curate, following in his father’s footsteps. Militia officers, like their regular counterparts, were given to duelling, and the Worcester Militia’s first training session ended with two subalterns falling out at Stourbridge, ‘but fortunately without a fatal termination’. In many respects the militia’s social composition resembled that of the regular army, with poor men officered by richer ones. In 1852 the Marquess of Salisbury observed of one applicant for a commission, that employment by the General Screw Steam Navigation Company was an ‘insuperable obstacle’ to military advancement. Property qualifications made it all but impossible for a man to work his way through the ranks to a commission, and so the militia was more socially excusive than the regular army, which always had a significant proportion of ranker officers. In the eighteenth century men were forbidden to shift from the militia into the regular army, for by doing so they left a gap, which the parish then had to fill. During the Napoleonic wars, when there was an ever-increasing appetite for men who could serve abroad, militiamen were offered bonuses to transfer, or sometimes treated so harshly during their embodied service that joining the regulars came almost as a relief: The Militia would be drawn up in line and the officers or non-commissioned officers from the regiments requiring volunteers would give a glowing description of their several regiments, describing the victories they had gained and the honours they had acquired, and concluded by offering a bounty. If these inducements were not effective in getting men then coercive measures were adopted: heavy and long drills and field exercises were forced upon them: which became so oppressive that to escape them, the men would embrace the alternative and join the regulars. Militia officers were offered free regular commissions if they could inveigle specified numbers of militiamen into signing on as regulars. George Simmons, from a family of impoverished gentry, managed to persuade a hundred men of the Royal South Lincolnshire Militia, of which he was assistant surgeon, to transfer into the regular army. He was rewarded with a regular commission in the crack 95th Rifles, and enjoyed a lively time in the Peninsula, ending up as a lieutenant colonel. By the end of the nineteenth century, when service in the militia was wholly voluntary, it had become a way for young men to test their aptitude for military service, and was ‘little more than a recruiting vehicle for the regular army, into whose ranks some 35 per cent of its members passed each year’. After the abolition of the purchase of regular commissions in 1871 a young man could still obtain a militia commission, which did not require him to attend Sandhurst. Then, provided he could pass the examination, he could transfer to the regular army: two future field marshals, John French and Henry Wilson, gained their regular commissions this way. In sharp social contrast to the militia were the volunteers. They were raised in times of great national emergency, like the Jacobite invasions of 1715 and 1745, and the threat posed by revolutionary France saw the first great wave of volunteering. Volunteer units were often middle class, their ranks filled with men who would have bought themselves out of militia service, giving the cartoonist James Gillray the unmissable opportunity of pouring meaty-bottomed tradesmen into tight breeches. Units were sometimes raised by the efforts of great families, in just the way that Bevil Grenville would have understood. Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland, had been (as Lord Percy) a professional soldier: a captain in the 85th Foot at seventeen, he fought at Minden and in North America. Percy left the army as a lieutenant general, and inherited his dukedom in 1786. Responsible, as lord lieutenant of Northumberland, for his county’s militia, he also raised the Percy Tenantry Volunteers from his own extensive estates. When he died in 1817 it was reported that the entire force was ‘paid and in every respect maintained in arms at the sole expense of this patriotic nobleman’. Infantry companies and cavalry troops were recruited from specific villages: the 1st and 2nd Barrisford Companies came from the parishes of Simonburn, Stamfordham and Kirkwhelpington, and the Guzance and Thirston Company from Felton Parish. The Percy Tenantry Volunteers numbered around 1,500 men, supported by the two three-pounder guns of its Volunteer Horse Artillery, based at Alnwick, the duke’s seat. The Percy Volunteers mirrored the area’s social fabric, with bigger tenant farmers officering the local companies, farmworkers shouldering their muskets, and the duke’s directing hand on the reins. Volunteer units raised in London were tiny by comparison, and rejoiced in names like the Temple Association, the Hackney Volunteers, the Guildhall Light Infantry, and the Bread Street Ward Volunteers. Often the city’s hierarchy led the way, with the same prominent citizens that summoned public meetings to raise volunteers emerging as the new unit’s officers. Volunteer officers were often elected by the unit as a whole, and democracy did not always obey the dictates of local hierarchy. It was also noticeable that volunteers, most of whom had to buy their own uniforms, tended to favour cutting-edge light infantry fashion (with no shortage of frogging), sometimes selecting blue precisely because regular infantry wore red, and so there was no chance of a heroic cheesemonger in the Poplar and Blackwall Volunteers being mistaken for a private in the umpteenth Foot. There were different terms of service: the Frampton Volunteers in Gloucestershire were prepared to deal with the French up to eight miles from their home village, but for the Hitchin Association in Hertfordshire just three miles was the limit. The government did its best to bring the volunteers under central control and the 1804 Volunteer Act did at least ensure that all were paid for twenty-one days a year. If a man’s zeal for his country’s defence was gratified by turning out as a smart light infantryman, how much more satisfying it was to emerge as a cavalryman with clinking spurs, and sword-scabbard trailing across the cobbles? The problem, even in a horse-using society, lay in the provision of suitable mounts. The Provisional Cavalry Act of 1796, an offshoot of the militia concept, required all those in possession of more than ten riding or carriage horses to furnish, when required, one mounted man, fully armed and equipped. Far more significant, though, was the raising, from 1794, of troops of ‘Gentlemen and Yeomanry.’ These local troops, officered by landowners, tended to be attracted by cavalry uniforms of the showier sort, light by name if not by nature, and one reason why the 1796 pattern light cavalry sword, with its D-shaped guard and broad, heavily curved blade, remains relatively common is the fact that so many of them were used by the yeomanry. Fig 1 (#litres_trial_promo): The Yeomanry Cavalry on manoeuvres by W. B. Giles. Yeomen were countrymen of respectable standing, tenant farmers or smaller freeholders. The Spectator made much of its character Sir Roger de Coverley, that genial baronet so preoccupied with hunters, hares, and partridges. But no less important in the hierarchy of the shires was his neighbour, A yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man. He is just within the Game-Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant … He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges. In short, he is a very sensible man – shoots flying – and has been several times foreman of the petty-jury. The Game Act of 1670 had prevented anyone with less than ?100 a year in lands or tenements from killing game, and authorised the seizure of ‘guns, bows, greyhounds, setting-dogs and lurchers’ that might be used in the process. It was a measure of substantial social control, and was not significantly altered till 1831. In a system that was always more pliable than it seemed, a second-generation yeoman might indeed make the transition to gentleman, or, if harvests failed, thud down into the ranks of the agricultural labourers. A yeoman had more of a stake in the country than most, and one cannot understand the quintessentially British phenomenon of yeomanry without remembering this. Few volunteer units survived the Napoleonic wars, for there was no longer a need for them. But the yeomanry trotted on, because now the nation was in the grip of widespread unrest, with Chartists and Luddites in the towns and the Captain Swing rioters in the countryside all presenting a threat to the established order of JP, squire, and vicar: one of Swing’s threatening letters put ‘Parson Justasses’ amongst the ‘Blackguard Enemies of the People.’ There was no doubt whose side the yeomen were on, and in the absence of a proper police force, they were frequently called out in aid of the civil power. On 16 August 1819 a huge crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to hear the radical speaker Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. The local magistrates had decided to arrest Hunt and other leaders. Although the military commander on the spot, Lieutenant Colonel Guy L’Estrange, had some infantry, two guns, six troops of the regular 15th Hussars and six of the Cheshire Yeomanry wisely deployed, the magistrates sent a troop of Manchester and Salford Yeomanry towards the speakers’ platform. The Manchester and Salford was not a wartime-raised unit, but had been formed in 1817 as a response to local unrest. Their commanding officer, Major Thomas Trafford, was a Roman Catholic landowner, and his second in command, Captain Hugh Birley, a mill-owner. Although we risk confusing history with current politics if we call the troopers ‘younger members of the Tory party in arms’, most were well-to-do tradesmen with an animus against radicals. Trafford apparently told Birley to take a detachment to make the arrests. Some of the crowd maintained that the troopers were drunk, but Birley argued that the yeomanry horses were not used to working together and were frightened by jeers, yells, and the fluttering of banners. After the arrests were made there was a shout of ‘Have at the flags’, and some of the yeomen slashed at the crowd as they kicked their horses forward to get at the banners. The magistrates ordered L’Estrange to disperse the crowd and rescue the yeomanry, so he sent in the 15th Hussars. Although the regular troopers had been ordered to use the flats of their swords, more damage was done by sword-swipes and horses crashing into people who were themselves trying to escape. The affair, dubbed ‘The Peterloo Massacre’ in parody of Waterloo, polarised opinion then and now. Perhaps a dozen people were killed and many more injured, though estimates of 700 casualties beggar belief. The magistrates and yeomanry were supported by the government. Trafford was later made a baronet, while Birley went on to partnership with one Charles Macintosh – who had invented a process for waterproofing cloth. Had things been a little different, we might slip gratefully into a Birley on a rainy day. Although many yeomanry units disappeared in the 1830s and 1840s, individual troops were consolidated into county regiments, and it was to take the TA reorganisation of 1964–5 to remove most of these, with their shoulder-chains and bright forage caps, from the Army List. Some regiments were the hunting field in arms. The future Field Marshal Sir John French recalled that when he was adjutant of the Northumberland Hussars: They were commanded by the Earl of Ravensworth, than whom no better sportsman ever lived. The officers were all good sportsmen and fine horsemen, and to those who can look back fifty years such names as Cookson, Straker, Henderson and Hunter will carry the conviction of the truth of what I say. Two of them were prominent masters of hounds, but my most intimate friend was Charley Hunter, a born leader of cavalry, whose skill in handling ?50 screws over five-barred gates I shall never forget. Others had even more blue blood in their veins. The troops of Gloucestershire Gentlemen and Yeomanry were combined into a regiment in 1834, with the Marquess of Worcester (soon to be the 7th Duke of Beaufort) as its commanding officer. The regiment became the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars in 1841 and, with its roots deep in Beaufort Hunt country, marched past to ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’. When the Yeomanry celebrated its bicentenary in 1994, the 11th Duke was regimental colonel. The Oxfordshire Yeomanry was officially disbanded in 1828 but it remained in being, thanks to being privately financed by the Duke of Marlborough. It was restored to the Army List two years later, becoming the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, or Queer Objects on Horseback, with striking facings of (rather trying) Mantua purple. The regiment was closely linked to the dukes of Marlborough and their seat at Blenheim Palace, which provided a striking backdrop for annual camps: the 6th Duke took command of the regiment in 1845 and the 9th Duke in 1910. Amongst its officers on the eve of the First World War was Major Winston Churchill, who was honorary colonel until his death in 1965. He had given a detachment of the regiment a prominent position at his funeral, but its protocol offended the Foot Guards brigade major who pointed out, with some asperity, that this was not how state funerals were done. Major Tim May, the detachment’s commander, was characteristically unabashed: ‘In the Oxfordshire Yeomanry we always do state funerals this way.’ This was just how jolly yeo-boys were meant to behave, with a faintly cavalier disregard for the formal side of military life and a generous pinch of self-parody. A Yeomanry brigadier detailed one of his colonels to send a subaltern on a wearing and doubtless nugatory mission. ‘I shall send Charles’, decided the colonel. ‘Charles? Charles?’ replied the brigadier. ‘D’you think he’ll go?’ Cartoons in officers’ messes caught yeomen the way they liked to think of themselves. A portly farmer-turned-trooper in the Suffolk Hussars scrambles up a bosky bank, with his sergeant, mounted, in the lane behind him, anxious for a report: No sergeant – no – I don’t see no enemy – not to speak of I don’t – But I do see as John Martin’s roots is terrible backward – wonderful backward they is – to be sure! ‘Beg pardon, Major,’ observes a trooper, drawn up in rank and file, with an easy gesture towards his passing squadron leader. ‘You’ll excuse my mention on it, but you’ve got something on your noose.’ The first part-time major general since the 1940s was the 6th Duke of Westminster. He had joined the yeomanry as a trooper in 1970, was commissioned in 1973, and went on to command the Queen’s Own Yeomanry. He reckoned that ‘military zeal is at its best when tempered by a fine sense of humour’: a wholly yeomanry view. Fig 2 (#litres_trial_promo): Yeomanry reconnaissance at its best: ‘The eyes and ears of the Army’ by W. B. Giles. The Yeomanry underwent a resurgence when the French invasion scares of the 1850s saw redbrick forts put up on Portsdown Hill to prevent an invading army – which might have landed at sleepy Bosham or harmless Chichester – from descending on Portsmouth dockyard. Far more characteristic of the age were the revived volunteers, about as unlike the yeomanry as it was possible to be. They were prevailingly middle class. Some units elected their own officers. They favoured uniforms of ‘French grey’, and were delighted to be forbidden the gold lace worn by regulars since this reduced the chances of being mistaken for ‘the dregs of society’. They seized on innovation: Hans Busk, one of the most prominent leaders of the rifle volunteer movement, set up a model rifle club at Cambridge in 1837. Long before the Boer War gave fresh emphasis to marksmanship in the regular army, volunteers were spending their weekends on the ranges at Bisley in Surrey. The National Rifle Association was founded in 1859 ‘for the encouragement of Volunteer Rifle Corps, and the promotion of rifle-shooting throughout Great Britain.’ It moved to Bisley in 1890 when high velocity rifles made the ranges in suburban Wimbledon unsafe. Volunteers eagerly combined their martial zeal with the bicycle, another great passion of the late nineteenth century, to produce cyclist battalions. There was a Railway Volunteer Staff Corps in 1865 and a Volunteer Medical Staff Corps twenty years later. Cartoonists sniped away (‘Wipe the blood off your sword, general?’) but the volunteers, in their worthy, whiskery way, somehow went to the heart of Victorian England. They were visible to the community in the way that regulars were not. They appeared unfussy and meritocratic, and embraced the innovation that regulars, with all their noise and pipeclay, seemed to shun. But their officers were not necessarily gentlemen. There was a saying of the 1860s that a greengrocer with a volunteer commission was not an officer but a greengrocer pleased. When aspiring Jewish families wanted to confirm their own rising status they joined the yeomanry. The Rothschilds bought Waddesdon Manor in 1874, and patronised the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, soon nicknamed ‘The Flying Foreskins’. The Boer War unleashed a surge of patriotic enthusiasm, and saw volunteers and yeomanry as part of what Kipling eulogised in The Absent Minded Beggar where ‘Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl/Son of a Lambeth publican – it’s all the same to-day.’ The process of getting part-timers embodied, trained and sent to South Africa was wasteful and inefficient. It was quipped that the ‘IY’ (Imperial Yeomanry) hat-badge stood for ‘I Yield’, and it was clear that the whole busy ant-heap of yeomanry, militia, and volunteers needed kicking over. As part of the main post-war reforms that took their name from the Liberal Secretary of State for War, R. B. Haldane, the auxiliary forces were reorganised root and branch, and so the Territorial Force, with an establishment of just under 315,000, came into being on 1 April 1908. One of Haldane’s strokes of genius was to entrust the TF’s administration to County Associations chaired by lord lieutenants. The force’s 1909 yearbook lists county chairman like a digest of Debretts: Chester: the Duke of Westminster; Derby: the Duke of Devonshire; Essex: the Earl of Warwick; Hampshire: the Marquess of Winchester; Middlesex: the Duke of Bedford; Oxford: the Earl of Jersey; and Warwick: the Marquess of Hertford. There were 115 peers in the association by November 1909. Many lord lieutenants were also militia colonels, and had been inclined to oppose the reorganisation, but the king made it clear that he backed Haldane. The powerful National Service League feared that if the TF actually worked, the case for conscription would be weakened, and therefore condemned the scheme as inadequate. Some regulars grumbled about the sheer impossibility of part-timers grasping the mysteries of gunnery, and the new TF embodied all the social complexities of the auxiliary forces that composed it. At one extreme the yeomanry was richly decorated with peers and Tory MPs. Brigadier General the Earl of Longford died commanding 2nd Mounted Brigade on Gallipoli in August 1915. They had advanced across a dry salt lake, marching steadily in open order under accurate shrapnel fire. ‘Don’t bother ducking,’ he told his officers. ‘The men don’t like it and it doesn’t do any good.’ Not far away that day Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Milbanke, 9th Baronet, with a VC from the Boer War and now commanding the Sherwood Rangers, announced that the regiment was to attack a redoubt: ‘I don’t know where it is, and don’t think anyone else does either, but in any case we are to go ahead and attack any Turks we meet.’ He did, and was duly killed. At the other extreme, when young Alan Harding, a Post Office clerk, sought a Territorial commission he knew better than to approach one of the ‘class battalions’ of the London regiment, like the London Rifle Brigade or Queen Victoria’s Rifles. These were subscription clubs for all ranks, but Harding slipped instead into 11/London, the Finsbury Rifles, fondly known, from the location of its headquarters at the top of Penton Street and the beery ways of its members, as the Pentonville Pissers. After a good war, Harding transferred to the regular Somerset Light Infantry, and was knighted in 1942, using the name John which his regular brothers in arms had preferred to Alan Francis. This had not, though, stopped subordinates from maintaining that his initials stood for ‘All Fucking Hurry’. After mobilisation in 1914, middle-class units considered that both 1/8th Royal Scots and 1/8th Scottish Rifles were ‘slum battalions,’ and the gentleman troopers of the Westminster Dragoons found their journey to Egypt aboard the same troopship as 1/9th Manchesters made an ordeal by, horrid to relate, the Mancunians’ predilection for spitting and swearing. On the formation of the Territorial Force all officers had their commissions signed by the monarch. When serving alongside regulars they took precedence ‘as the junior of their degree’, and were subject to military law at all times, principles which have not changed since. Mobilised Territorials served alongside regulars in all the main theatres of the First World War. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Territorial Army was formally absorbed into the regular army. In both world wars, though, the regular army kept a firm grip on senior appointments. In February 1916 the House of Commons was told that only 18 Territorials had risen above lieutenant colonel at the front and three at home. In January the following year Lord Derby, secretary of state for war, announced that four Territorials had commanded divisions, and 52 brigades. He later admitted that these figures included officers in temporary command in the absence of the regular incumbent, and only ten Territorials were currently commanding brigades. Assertions were made that it was wholly proper for regulars to have a controlling interest in senior command. But this is undermined by the fact that both the Australian and Canadian contingents on the Western Front, by wide agreement some of finest Allied troops, were eventually commanded by lieutenant generals John Monash and Arthur Currie, who were respectively a businessman and an engineer by profession. Both had ‘amateur’ major generals amongst their subordinates. William Holmes, killed commanding 4th Australian Division in 1918, had never been a regular, though he had joined the New South Wales Militia as a boy bugler and won a DSO in the Boer War. David Watson, a journalist by profession, commanded 4th Canadian Division for the whole of its existence. Andrew McNaughton, a university lecturer in engineering, commanded the Canadian corps heavy artillery and went on to command the Canadian 2nd Army in a later war. Archibald Macdonnell had been a regular officer for just a year before going off to be a Mountie, and led 1st Canadian Division to some of its greatest successes. The British were occasionally prepared to make generals out of civilian specialists, commissioning Sir Eric Geddes, general manager of the North Eastern Railway, as major general in 1916. But not once did they give a reservist permanent command of a division. In view of the success of the Canadians and Australians, who produced real talent (and not a little rancour and incompetence too) from a far smaller recruitment pool, we can see that there was indeed a khaki ceiling with which non-regulars collided. In September 1939 the Territorial Army was abolished as a separate entity, and its conditions of service were changed so that ‘all wartime promotion would be temporary, with no opportunity for substantive advancement and reversion to the pre-war rank at the war’s end’. Eventually concessions in the form of timed promotions (which could take an officer to lieutenant colonel after twenty-two years’ service) were introduced in May 1945. A few months earlier former TA officers included one substantive major general, Claude Liardet, who had commanded 56th London Division before the war but did not lead it in action; one temporary lieutenant general; seven major generals; and 36 brigadiers. Of the 160 major generals commanding field force divisions between 1940 and 1945 only three were Territorials. Moreover, a sharp cull of TA commanding officers had seen 253 removed in the war’s first thirteen months, as opposed to 72 regulars. There was, in part, good reason for this. The TA was endemically short of officers, despite their selection criteria being lower than for regulars. The lack of soldiers at weekend training and annual camp made it hard for a Territorial officer to feel the full weight of command, and Territorial commanding officers were not obliged to attend the Senior Officers School. There was a wide spread between ‘class corps’ like the London Scottish and the Honourable Artillery Company, that naturally attracted well-educated recruits, and the majority of units that relied heavily on urban working-class soldiers. These working-class soldiers needed the pay and found the two-week annual camp (often at the seaside) a blessed relief from the daily grind, but it was hard to produce NCOs from amongst this group. Many of the TA’s problems stemmed from systemic underfunding. As David French points out in his majestic Raising Churchill’s Army, ‘the Territorials became victims of governments determined to reduce estimates, and a War Office that preferred to see the cuts fall upon the part-time Territorials rather than the regulars.’ Experienced Territorial officers, some of whom had commanded with success during the last phases of the First World War, complained that the regular army, having denied them the opportunity to train and recruit, now blamed them for it. In April 1941, one of the few surviving TA commanding officers in 48th Division discerned ‘a very definite set against Territorial officers’. The Territorial acting commander of 26th Armoured Brigade writing in May 1944, doubted if he would even manage to command his own regiment when his current appointment ended. ‘I have the ever-present spectre of some suitable Lt Col arriving from way back,’ he wrote, ‘either a loathsome little tick from the Tank Corps or else an equally horrible cast-off from some cavalry regiment – we’ve had plenty of experience of them in this war.’ The TA was reconstituted in 1946, and the successive reductions, in 1956, 1961, and 1966 matched wider reductions in defence expenditure and the army’s increasing preoccupation with the defence of Germany. The reductions announced in 1965, however, brought about a more radical downsizing, to some 50,000, and even did away with the name, replacing it with the untidy Territorial and Army Volunteer Reserve, or T&AVR. Territorials had at least abbreviated to ‘Terriers’, and a suggestion that ‘Tavvers’ might replace it drew little applause. The disagreeable title was eventually discarded after a Conservative victory in 1971 saw the gradual increase of the TA to reflect the perceived importance of home defence against Soviet special forces. From 1981 the TA reached its post-war apogee, providing the bulk of a division to reinforce 1st (British) Corps in Germany, and reaching almost 89 per cent of its establishment of 86,000. With the collapse of Communism, however, numbers shrank once again, first with the 1990 Options for Change review under the Conservatives, and then again with the Strategic Defence Review of 1998 under Labour, which brought the TA down to around 40,000. The County Associations (a term harking back to Parliamentarian organisations in the Civil War) were Haldane’s device for ensuring that the TA would be administered and supplied by bodies that would at one and the same time protect it from the War Office, and take some of the load off commanding officers’ shoulders. They would also link the TA to the community and, so Haldane hoped, encourage military training more widely. Over the TA’s evolution these associations had come under the same pressure as the organisation they represented, in part because a smaller TA demanded less administrative support, and in part, too, because a regular army anxious to save money on the TA did not always welcome their interference. There were ninety-four associations in 1909, and sixty-six in 1965, with further reductions to produce the ten large regional groupings that exist today. The associations were successively renamed, becoming, from 2000, Reserve Forces and Cadet Associations. Although the RFCAs rightly emphasise their local knowledge, continuity and independence, they are now more firmly under the control of the army’s chain of command than ever before. There can be no doubt that their influence has declined. In 1965 the Duke of Norfolk, chairman of the Council of Territorial Associations, led the opposition to the reduction, and although he commanded substantial support (the attempt to reverse the cuts was lost by a single vote in the Commons) he was no match for a Labour Government whose military advisers firmly believed that the reforms were essential. But in 1990 the cuts imposed by Options for Change would have been more severe had it not been for the personal intervention of George Younger, who had recently been secretary of state for defence and carried great weight within the ruling Conservative party and the army, in which he had served as both a regular and a Territorial. During the debate over the Strategic Defence Review I was assured by one of the TA’s supporters that ‘the lord lieutenants would never stand it’, but it was evident that the wrath of the lieutenancy did not alarm a Labour administration with a massive majority, and in any event there was a palpable tension between Harris Tweed and Hugo Boss, with the waning power of the old county connections eclipsed by the growing strength of the Whitehall apparat. Moreover, the office of lord lieutenant itself had changed from the days of Elizabeth I, when its holders were concerned with enforcing the Act of Uniformity and commanding the county militia at a time of real threat. During Elizabeth’s reign all who held office for any length of time were peers or heirs to peerages, apart from three who had close relationships with the queen. Forty-six of the 103 lieutenancies were held by peers as late as 1956, all but one of whom (Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke in London) had inherited their titles, and a further sixteen baronets. Most were landowners, thirty-two had held the rank of lieutenant colonel or its equivalent, and amongst their military awards were twenty-three DSOs and eighteen MCs. In 2006 there were only eight hereditary peers and three baronets amongst the 99 lord lieutenants, and only six of the total had held senior military rank. The first female lord lieutenant had been appointed in 1975 when Lavinia Duchess of Norfolk took over from her husband, who had died in office: there were twenty-eight ladies amongst the 2006 sample. There was no longer a natural bias towards the land, and only eight rated their main concern as farming or estate management. Some lord lieutenants have run major public companies, and several of the ladies have had an impressive involvement in charities. The lieutenancy makes an extraordinary contribution to public life, but its days of marshalling county opinion are long over. About 12 per cent of the 2,700 active deputy lieutenants in the United Kingdom held senior military rank, a proportion justified by the need to advise non-military lord lieutenants on their responsibilities towards the reserve forces and cadets in their counties. As evidence of the wholesale shift away from traditional deputies, when most retired brigadiers soon added DL to their post-nominal initials, there is now a conscious attempt to make deputies socially inclusive, and to reflect the ethnic composition of the population. In one sense it is hard to fault the remorseless progress towards what is often hailed as ‘One Army’. Territorial officers are now selected by the same process as their regular counterparts, and pass out from Sandhurst in a parade which culminates (just as it does for regulars) in marching up the steps of the Grand Entrance. Promotion across the whole rank-structure depends on passing the appropriate courses. The TA’s representation within the army has increased. When I became a brigadier in 1994 I was the only one in a large TA. Now there is a two-star Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets), a post held first by the Duke of Westminster in 2004, and there are TA brigadiers at Land Command, Headquarters Adjutant General and the army’s district headquarters. In terms of overall training and efficiency, the TA I left in 2000 was unrecognisable from the organisation I joined as a private in 1964. Its expectation of use had also been transformed. Militia, yeomanry, and volunteers had been concerned with home defence. Haldane’s new Territorial Force was so called because it was territorial (designed to defend the national territory) rather than expeditionary. Those of its members who agreed to serve overseas proudly wore an Imperial Service badge on their right breast. In 1914, Territorials had to volunteer to be sent abroad, and by no means all did so. Although those who joined the TA in the inter-war years and after 1946 recognised that they might be called up for foreign service, there was a clear understanding that this would only happen in time of a major national emergency. Indeed, for most of my own time the mechanism for calling up the TA (‘Queen’s Order’) was so ponderous as to constitute a large on-off switch to be pressed only in time of the gravest crisis. The process of making it easier to use Territorials in situations short of general war began with the ‘Ever Readies’. This small group of TA volunteers was set up in 1962 and they agreed to accept a higher liability in return for a bounty. Ever Readies were called up for service in Aden in 1965. There was some controversy: 14 of the 175 selected appealed against call-up, and men argued unsuccessfully that because they had been unable to take their brief leave entitlement in-theatre, they should have it added as paid leave at the end of their mobilised service. The three officers and 120 men who served with 1st Royal Sussex were well regarded by their battalion, and one of the officers, Lieutenant Mike Smith, won the first Military Cross awarded to a Territorial since the Second World War. The Reserve Forces Act of 1996 did not simply create a small High Readiness reserve intended to produce specialists like interpreters and civil affairs experts, but it made the whole of the TA subject to call-out by the secretary of state, who could use it not only ‘when warlike operations are in preparation or progress,’ but for the protection of life or property and the alleviation of distress at home or abroad. Since then Territorials have been called up for service in the Balkans, the Falklands, Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Kingsman Michael Davison, a 22-year-old Liverpool builder, won the first Territorial Military Cross since Mike Smith a generation before by dragging a wounded officer to safety in Basra in 2003. The TA is now emphatically a reserve for use, and nobody joining it can be in any doubt of that. There have been attendant casualties. The problem of ensuring that a reservist did not lose his civilian employment by being called up for full time service long pre-dates the TA. Liaison with employers was one of the tasks laid on County Associations, and since then first the National Employers’ Liaison Committee and then SaBRE (Supporting Britain’s Reserves and Employers) have striven to persuade employers that there are practical benefits to having reservists amongst their employees, for they acquire transferable skills like leadership and initiative. When the TA was first formed many employers were hugely supportive, granting their employees paid leave to attend annual camp. The Alliance Assurance Company and the Westminster Fire Office even insisted that their employees should be Territorials. It was always much harder for small firms, who could be seriously inconvenienced by the disappearance of, say, one of two plasterers at a busy time. Shifts in employment patterns have not necessarily helped the TA. Large, British-owned firms tended to take a more supportive view than multinationals with concerns about the uses to which reservists might be put in a complex world. When jobs are hard to come by, employees are disinclined to risk them, and a pattern of TA service that is now very likely to involve occasional periods of mobilisation makes it harder for professionals like lawyers, doctors, or university teachers to harmonise military and civilian identities. The TA, like the militia before it, was able to profit from the fact that many of its officers enjoyed high status in their civilian capacities, and these have been precisely the individuals squeezed most tightly by changing circumstances. Conversely, many of those attracted by the periods of Full Time Reserve Service (essentially short-term, often extendable contracts) made available by the 1996 Act had reached a dead end in their civilian careers. A 2007 study by the National Audit Office concluded that most reservists joined with the intention of serving on one mobilised tour, but that 16 per cent of those questioned intended to leave within a year, and just under half of this group had been called up. Most Territorials planning to leave blamed personal or family pressure, with a substantial minority attributing their decision to ‘lack of support’. There were difficulties where a reservist’s military pay fell short of his civilian salary, and in access to medical care after deployment. In particular, reservists were more likely than regulars to suffer from psychiatric problems on their return, not least because of their rapid transition from military life, with its supportive bonds of mateship, to the more humdrum world outside. These difficulties are exacerbated where there seems no clear mandate for the war, and by the practical problem of finding, within the immediate community, somebody who can begin to understand what it was really like in Al Amarah or Musa Qal’h. The TA remains under-recruited (in 2006 it was 19 per cent down on its established strength of just under 40,000), and the shortfall is at its most severe in the Royal Army Medical Corps, upon which the army relies so heavily. There is a worrying shortage of officers, not least because the very individuals with the qualities needed to encourage folk on a rainy Friday night on Salisbury Plain are exactly those most likely to be most in demand in the pressure-cooker of stressful civilian jobs. In his epilogue to the book marking the TA’s hundredth anniversary, Brigadier Greg Smith, then Deputy Inspector General of the TA and shortly to become Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, argued that one of the TA’s most important tasks lay in ‘effectively providing the essential link between the army and society’. It does so with increasing difficulty, and part of the price it has paid for increased military efficiency and tighter links with the regular army is to make it harder to retain its foothold in a society with other pressing concerns. II GALLANT GENTLEMEN AND OFFICERS CHAPTER 7 A NATIONAL ARMY: 1660–1914 FOR MOST OF its life the regular army was a volunteer force, its members, officers and soldiers alike, having decided to embrace the profession of arms. The decision to join was rarely simple. A man could be led to enlist for many reasons: a fit of pique, a brush with the law, that extra pint of porter, the vision conjured up by an eloquent recruiting sergeant, or unrelenting hardship in an age of social insecurity. Nor was it necessarily easier for officers, who might find family tradition, patriotic obligation or (especially for Scots or Irish youngsters with many hungry siblings but few paternal acres) the lack of alternative gentlemanly employment scarcely less compelling. The army had existed for two and a half centuries before the exigencies of the First World War forced it to adopt conscription, though there had been times, notably during the Napoleonic wars, when the voluntary principle was stretched to its very limit. The years between 1916–18 and 1939–60, when conscription was in force, do not fit into the broader pattern of Britain’s military development. Both world wars saw the transformation of a small, professional force into a massive national army, a process that helps account for early setbacks. It also explains the rise of a style of war-fighting in which the British army engaged ‘the enemy with the minimum of manpower in the front line and employ the maximum of machinery to generate the overwhelming firepower required to suppress enemy fire and so make possible movement across the battlefield.’ The process was cumulative, for the generals and political leaders of the Second World War – most of whom had fought on the Western Front as young men – knew very well that society would never again tolerate the sacrifice of life on such a scale. Their soldiers, who had grown up in the shadow of the Somme, were less deferential than their fathers. Field Marshal Montgomery’s predilection for letting metal, not flesh, do the business of battle was firmly rooted not only in his own military experience but also in the culture of the men he commanded. As I shuffle off to lunch after a morning spent lecturing newly promoted majors on the Intermediate Command and Staff Course, I am struck by that same mixture of continuity and change that characterises the whole of the army. There will be a few names that have been in the Army List since there was an Army List, with the same regimental connections. Introduce me to a Tollemache and I will confidently expect the cap-star of the Coldstream. The Winchester College–Oxbridge nexus that would once have taken a boy into the Rifle Brigade or the 60th Rifles, might now see him in the Rifles – arguably the most successful of the recent amalgamations. However, there will be many officers with no family connection with the army, who have arrived by way of comprehensive school and redbrick university, or indeed no university at all. There will be some who have risen through the ranks, being commissioned after making their mark as a private or junior NCO. Others will come up the hard way to a Late Entry commission by way of RSM. Whether on operations in Ulster, the Balkans, or Iraq, I have been struck by their grace under pressure; their constant determination to put the interests of their soldiers before their own; and that physical courage that gives this part of the book its title. This is not uncritical admiration – their moral courage is not always equal to their physical valour. The desire to succeed in one of the most hierarchical of professions occasionally leads an officer to scramble up the greasy pole without much regard for the boot-prints he leaves on the faces of those below him. Lunching with the Louts Club puts one at serious risk of either injury from flying bread-rolls, whizzing like grapeshot around the great breach at Badajoz, or short-onset cirrhosis. Their champagne/burgundy/ros? striped tie was designed to minimise stains from the fluids that might fall upon it. There can be surprises among the men in terms of their diverse interests and skills. Today’s officers are often as cavalier about reading worthy doctrinal manuals as their great-grandfathers were. At its 1917 Christmas party, the Doctrine and Training Branch in France sang a ditty with the words ‘We write books and pamphlets/Yes by the ton/But nobody reads them/No not bally one’, and I know how its members felt. Yet I also know a former Grenadier who can recite Chesterton’s Lepanto word-perfect, and who showed me the Moons of Jupiter; a Royal Signals officer who cuts the most perfect silhouettes; a Para who left the army after a very heavy landing and has become a successful artist; and an infantryman who combined being one of the most-be-medalled officers of his generation with knocking off a doctorate in his spare time and writing five good books. They are often irritating, but rarely less than engaging. The notion of a ‘national’ army has changed over time. Back in the seventeenth century, Charles II united the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland only in his royal person. The Union of Scotland and England did not take place till 1707, and that of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. However, even while the three kingdoms had their separate legislatures, there was no easy relationship between the overall size, either of Britain’s population as a whole, or of the army that defended it, and the national backgrounds of officers. The eighteenth-century army was dominated, in numbers though not always in influence, by the Scots and Irish. The army in Ireland, right up to 1800, had its own sharply reduced regimental establishment. In 1774, 41 per cent of officers were English, 32 per cent were Irish, and 25 per cent Scottish. In 1776 these proportions were 37 per cent, 33 per cent and 27 per cent, and in 1782: 36 per cent, 28 per cent, and 33 per cent. Foreigners, mainly Americans, made up 2–3 per cent, though this may reflect the fact that Americans serving in British regiments often reported themselves as English. In the mid-1770s a little over half the population of the British Isles was English or Welsh, just under a third Irish, and one-tenth Scots. British line infantry, regardless of any designation its regiments bore, was officered by a rather larger proportion of Irishmen than existed in the general population, and over twice as many Scots, while the English produced just two-thirds of the officers to which their share of the wider population should have entitled them. The proportions of rank and file were rather different, with around 60 per cent English, 24 per cent Scottish, and 16 per cent Irish, so it is not unfair to speak of a predominantly English army that was disproportionately officered by Scotsmen and Irishmen. Although the English content of the rank and file increased as the nineteenth century went on, with emigration to the United States replacing enlistment into the army as the preferred career choice for so many young Irishmen, the proportion of Scots and Irish officers remained high. Towards the beginning of the century it was said that if you walked into the officers’ mess of the 38th Foot (which boasted a Staffordshire connection) and yelled ‘Campbell’ a quarter of the officers present would turn round. The 22nd Foot had a proud affiliation to Cheshire but had a regimental agent in Dublin. In 1870, 71 per cent of the population of Great Britain hailed from England and Wales, with 17 per cent from Ireland and 11 per cent from Scotland. The birthplace of the 1914 generals is not necessarily an accurate index of their national background. Tommy Capper, killed at Loos in 1915, and William Birdwood, who went on to command the ANZACs, were both born in India. Only 63 per cent were born in England, with 13 per cent coming from Ireland and a remarkable 19 per cent from Scotland. Throughout the period, the minor gentry of Scotland and Ireland generated a disproportionate number of officers. Sir Walter Scott told the Duke of Wellington that Your Grace knows that Scotland is a breeding, not a feeding country, and we must send our sons abroad as we sent our black cattle to England; and, as old Lady Charlotte, of Ardkinglass, proposed to dispose of her nine sons, we have a strong tendency to put our young folks ‘a’ to the sword. What the junker squirearchy of East Prussia was to the German army, so Ireland was to the British. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey argue that the high proportion of Irish officers, even at the close of the nineteenth century, reflects a ‘shortage of other career options’. Of the five non-royal commanders-in-chief of the army in the nineteenth century, one (Dundas) was Scots, two (Hill and Hardinge) were English, and the remainder, Wellington, Wolseley, and Roberts, were Irish. The latter, although born in Cawnpore, came from a distinguished Waterford family. Wellington disliked being called Irish, observing that one could be born in a stable without being a horse, but much of his political attitude was shaped by growing up as a child of the ascendancy. His brother-in-law Ned Pakenham, killed at New Orleans in January 1815 (wholly unnecessarily, for peace terms had been agreed, but news had not yet reached North America), was Irish. Galbraith Lowry Cole, a divisional commander in the Peninsula was Irish too. He was described by a biographer coming from a class of energetic, masterful men, who interested themselves in local and public affairs and as such looked up to and respected by their neighbours; loving sport and country pursuits but with only a tepid interest in literature and art; careless about money, yet acutely aware of the need for it to make life pleasant; having a high sense of honour, but also a high temper and a lack of patience and caution. This might almost have been written to describe the family of the future field marshal Harold Alexander, born in London but descended from James Alexander, 1st Earl of Caledon, who had built a fine house on the borders of Tyrone in the late eighteenth century. Alexander grew up on the estate, where ‘his mother did not care what he did out of her sight’, and joined the army because it had never struck him to do anything else, and was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1911. His contemporary Alan Brooke was born in the French Pyrenees, where his parents spent their winters, but the family home was in Colebrooke, Co Fermanagh, held by the family since Major Thomas Brooke of Lord Drogheda’s Regiment of Horse gained it during the Williamite War. Sir Henry Brooke, 1st Baronet of Colebrooke, had three soldier sons fighting in the Napoleonic wars. One took over from Robert Ross, who burned Washington in 1812, another commanded the 4th Foot in Spain and took temporary command of his brigade when its commander was wounded at Waterloo, a battle in which his nephew, heir to the baronetcy, was killed. As David Fraser has pointed out, ‘Twenty-six Brookes of Colebrook served in [the First World War]: twenty-seven served in the war of 1939–45: and in those wars, or from wounds received in them, twelve died.’ The Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the Ulster Plantations have provided the army with many of its most distinguished senior officers. There has been a whole tribe of Goughs, from Hugh, 1st Viscount, who commanded in both Sikh Wars. His chief tactic was frontal assault, and on one occasion, having been told that his artillery had run out of ammunition, he replied gratefully ‘Thank God for that. Now I’ll be at them with the bayonet.’ The future field marshal Gerald Templer and the future general Richard O’Connor were both children of officers in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, while Field Marshal Sir John Dill, whose equestrian statue stands proudly in Arlington National Cemetery, was commissioned into the Leinster Regiment in 1901; he was the son of a bank manager in Lurgan, County Armagh. Yet to judge Ireland’s contribution simply by the senior officers it furnished is to miss the point. There was scarcely an engagement in which an Irish officer did not play a notable part, whether or not he happened to be in an Irish regiment. Joseph Dyas, ‘a young officer of very great promise, of a most excellent disposition, and beloved by every man in the corps – an Irishman whose only fortune was his sword’, was serving with the 51st Foot when he led the forlorn hope against Fort St Cristoval, at Badajoz, in 1811. Private William Wheeler saw him emerge from the first attempt ‘without cap, his sword was shot off close to the handle, the sword scabbard was gone, and the laps of his frock coat were perforated with balls.’ He promptly volunteered to lead a second fruitless attempt, from which only nineteen men of two hundred survived. Dyas was eventually made captain in the Ceylon Regiment, and ended his days as a resident magistrate in Ireland. Infinitely more controversial was John Nicholson, born in 1822 to a family of Scots Lowland stock who moved to Ulster in the early seventeenth century. Educated at the Royal School, Dungannon, he gained a commission in the East India Company’s army in 1839. Nicholson quickly showed aptitude for political work, and the discovery of his brother’s emasculated body in the Khyber Pass did much to harden an already tough character. He believed in the application of what he called ‘swift, stern justice’, and on one occasion politely apologised to the officers waiting in their ante-room: dinner would be delayed because he had been hanging the Indian cooks. There was something of the wholly unforgiving Old Testament deity in him. When he appeared in the British camp on Delhi Ridge in 1857, black-bearded, grey-eyed, and unshakeably convinced in the righteousness of his cause, one young officer thought that he was ‘by the grace of God … a king coming into his own.’ He was only a regimental captain but had just been appointed brigadier general to lead the Mobile Column down from Peshawar. When the British stormed Delhi, he was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, gut-shot in a sweltering tent, he thanked God that he still had the strength to pistol the British commander if he ordered a retreat. Whatever Charles II’s problems, financial or domestic, officer recruitment was not one of them. There was a glut of ex-officers who had fought for his father, as well as former members of the New Model who had adhered to George Monck. The problem was not so much finding officers as in accommodating even a fraction of the claimants on royal gratitude who already had impressive military credentials. John Gwyn had just missed Edgehill, the first major battle of the war, but was at the storm of Brentford a few weeks later, and fought on throughout the first civil war, becoming a captain. He was in arms in the second civil war, and then fought in Scotland before joining Charles II’s little army in Flanders, where he was captured at the battle of the Dunes in 1658. Gwyn had lost his commission by 1663 and was then serving as a gentleman trooper. His Military Memoirs, a vivid account ‘of all the field-fights and garrisons I have been in’, were written with a view to gaining the employment to which his service seemed to entitle him. There were thousands of John Gwyns about, but in 1665 only 210 officers in Charles’s regiments and another 134 in his garrisons. By 1684 the overall number of permanent commissions had risen to 613. This increase resulted from bringing the Tangier garrison and the Earl of Dumbarton’s regiment (later the Royal Scots) onto the English establishment, and the raising of one new regiment, the Royal Dragoons. Even at the height of the Dutch War in 1678 there were still under a thousand officers, many of whom lost their commissions when war-raised units were disbanded. Gwyn was right to stress his royalist background (though we cannot tell what good it did him) because this was an army wholly dominated by old cavaliers. In 1665, 65 per cent of officers had fought for Charles I or been in exile with his son, and only 10 per cent, most of them concentrated in the Coldstream Guards, had served the Protectorate. Rather more, a full 25 per cent, had held commissions in the English brigade in Dutch service. There was never a homogeneous officer corps. At this early stage, there were three broad groups of officers, a categorisation that would persist until well into the eighteenth century. First came the professionals, whom John Childs calls men ‘who were forced to look to their swords in order to earn a living’. Before the regular army came into existence there had been English families like the Cravens, Russells, Sidneys, and Veres who had traditionally sent their young men off to serve on the continent. Much the same thing happened in Scotland. Among the Scottish officers in Russian service in the early seventeenth century we find the names Crawford, Wemyss, and Hamilton. Alexander Crawford assured the tsar that he already had eight years experience as an officer in the Danish and Swedish armies, and was just the fellow to command a regiment. The Hapsburgs, with their long-running wars against the Turks, were always on the lookout for smart young men. Their charmingly credulous acceptance of self-devised genealogy (‘Descended from King Arthur: why then, your highness, that must make you a prince’) and eagerness to bestow titles of their own, made them attractive employers. Ireland, with its heartbreaking catalogue of rebellion and disappointment, was a fruitful source of officers. Field Marshal Maximilian Ulysses von Browne, one of the most competent Austrian commanders of the Seven Years War, was son and nephew of Irish gentlemen exiled after the failure of Tyrone’s rebellion in 1603. Over the years the royal and imperial Rangliste included the delightful composites Franz Moritz Graf von Lacy and Laval Graf Nugent von Westmeath. The Prussians could do as well when they put their minds to it, and when an English war correspondent, Lieutenant Colonel Ponsonby, got into difficulties at the battle of Rezonville in 1870 he was saved by Oberleutnant Campbell von Craigmillie. After 1660, though, there was at least a chance that some professionals could serve their own country. Professor Childs’ sample of forty-three of these officers shows them to have been a mixed bunch, with eight of them sons of peers, ten born to baronets or knights, and twenty to ordinary gentlemen, with just five from poor backgrounds. Most were second or third sons, underlining their dependence on military service. Until the army’s wartime expansion of 1672 there were simply not enough vacancies in the English establishment for all these men, and commissions cost money that they could rarely afford. Some served in foreign armies (as their fathers or uncles might have done before them) or in overseas garrisons, whose troops were not part of the establishment. Tangier, in particular, was a source of both regular employment and frequent combat. Two of Tangier’s paladins, admirable examples of the professional warrior, were Andrew Rutherford, Earl of Teviot and Sir Palmes Fairborne. We must not be misled by Teviot’s title. He was the impecunious fifth son of a junior branch of a great Scots family. Like many of his countrymen, Teviot learnt his trade abroad, becoming a lieutenant general in the French service where he earned a fine reputation for courage. In 1662 Charles made him governor of Tangier and an earl in the Scots peerage, but a misjudgement in the endemic irregular war against the Moors saw him caught outside the city’s walls in a savage little battle in which he was killed, with nineteen other officers and nearly 500 men. The ‘worthy and brave’ Fairborne was the son of Colonel Stafford Fairborne, royalist governor of Newark in the first civil war. This claim on royal patronage was not enough to get him a regular commission though, and he had already helped defend Crete against the Turks before he was made a captain in the Tangier Regiment in 1662. Fairborne spent much of his time as deputy governor of Tangier, not much helped by the fact that his master, the one-eyed William, 2nd Earl of Inchiquin (given the job because of his late father’s distinguished service to the royalist cause in Ireland) was incompetent and vindictive. In 1678 Fairborne slipped his eldest son Stafford into the governor’s regiment as an ensign. The lad was only twelve, and he would have been gratified by the fact that after eight years in the army, Stafford Fairborne shifted to the navy and died an admiral. Palmes Fairborne was mortally wounded in October 1680, but lived a day or two and so saw his soldiers mount the attack that ended the long siege of Tangier and enabled the English to conclude a three-year peace treaty. In the long term Tangier was untenable and was evacuated in 1684: the Tangier Regiment was taken onto the establishment as the Queen’s Regiment. Other professionals served in the English force in Portugal until its disbandment in 1668 or the Anglo-Dutch brigade in the Dutch service, whence several slipped back into the English army. In contrast, the six regiments of horse and foot on the English establishment were in the hands of ‘gentleman officers’: the second category of officers. A sample of 188 who served between 1661 and 1685 shows thirty-nine to have been the sons of peers, seventy-three of baronets or knights, fifty-eight of ordinary gentlemen: the remaining eighteen were low-born. It is striking to see that eighty of these officers were first sons, content to serve until they inherited. They were far happier to mount guard in Whitehall or Windsor than to fry their brains in Tangier. Most had bought their commissions. The classic arguments in favour of purchase had yet to be made, but public offices of all sorts – ‘places’ – were commonly bought and sold, so this practice ran comfortably with the venial tide of the times. A man who desired a first commission or promotion had first to obtain royal approval, and then find an officer prepared to sell, and agree a price with him. A set fee, according to a table laid down in 1667, had to be paid to the secretary at war for each transaction. The paucity of vacancies kept rates high, though the ?5,100 paid by one of Charles’s illegitimate sons, the Duke of Grafton, for the colonelcy of 1st Foot Guards was very steep: a captaincy in the guards might cost ?1,000. At the close of 1663 Pepys, a fast-rising civil servant with excellent connections, reckoned himself worth ?800 in cash. Many gentleman officers sat in parliament, beginning that process of military representation at Westminster that we saw earlier. Their regiments did not generally serve abroad, for expeditionary forces were recruited as required. The rigid channelling of royal patronage, via the Duke of Albemarle at the beginning of Charles’s reign and the Duke of York thereafter, ensured that there were tight circles of family loyalty and political allegiance, widened only on the three occasions that troops were raised for war against the Dutch or the French. Gentleman officers were Restoration England loud in all its privilege and affluence, and in contrast to the professionals, they were an unedifying crew. The MPs amongst them were allowed unlimited leave to attend Westminster when the House was sitting. Although regulations specified that only one-third of officers could be absent at any time, in 1679 Henry Sidney found only ‘a corporal and three files of musketeers’ at Tilbury fort, and ‘never a commissioned officer’ at Gravesend. Four years later Charles wrote crossly to the governor of Hull, warning him that officers absent without leave would face ‘absolute cashiering’. Not that cashiering was always absolute. Captain Thomas Stradling of 1st Guards lost his commission when he encouraged his soldiers to riot in Huntingdon. As he was a Stradling of St Donat’s, scion of a martial tribe that had done much for Charles I, he was soon reinstated. In 1678 Lord Gerard, captain of the King’s Troop of the Life Guard, accompanied by Lord Cornwallis, one of his officers, beat up the sentries at St James’s and then killed a footboy. Cornwallis (his father a royalist who had accompanied Charles into exile) was tried by his peers and acquitted: Gerard slipped abroad for a few months and then resumed his duties. He had bled for the king in the Civil War, and a cousin had been executed for treason under Parliament: Charles was not a man to punish an old friend for a vinous lapse. When Ralph Widdrington was blinded in a sea-battle against the Dutch, a grateful monarch gave him a pension of ?200 a year – and a captaincy in the army, which he retained till 1688. It was rarely a simple matter to get orders obeyed, especially if they were given to a gentleman of ancient lineage. Captain Sir Philip Howard was in the Queen’s Troop of the Life Guard, and brother to Charles Howard, the influential reformed Parliamentarian whom Charles had created Earl of Carlisle. In 1678, he fell out with James, Duke of Monmouth, not only one of Charles’ illegitimate brood but an experienced soldier to boot: To show military discipline, Sir Philip Howard was suspended his employment for not obeying some orders the Duke of Monmouth gave him in which, though his Grace be found in the wrong, it is thought fit the other should suffer for example’s sake to show that orders must be obeyed though never so foolish. In 1673 Charles hoped to make Frederick, Duke of Schomberg, a professional soldier of wide experience in the French and Portuguese service, commander-in-chief of his own army as it prepared for the Dutch War. But some officers behaved appallingly, with a contemporary admitting that they ‘daily offer him affronts’ on the grounds that he was a Frenchman; in fact his was an old Palatinate family. Matters were not helped by the legal nonsense that prevented him from ordering capital punishment while the army was still on home soil, without officially suspending common law within it. Officers treated him with disdain and men grumbled about the severities of French discipline: the experiment was not a success. The Earl of Feversham, James II’s commander in 1685 and 1688, was less competent than Schomberg, and he owed some of his difficulties to the fact that, as Louis de Duras, Marquis de Blanquefort, he was French-born, though he had come to England in James’s retinue in 1663 and lived there ever since. When the test came in 1688 he remained true to his oath, which is more thsn we can say for many of the milords who sent him up as a fop who ‘no spikka da lingo’. The gentleman officers drank and duelled, swore and swaggered, abused tavern-keepers, tumbled serving-girls, and set the worst possible example to their men. Even that satisfied royalist Samuel Pepys could not help comparing the quiet disbandment of Parliament’s old army to the noisy indiscipline of the king’s supporters, who ‘go with their belts and swords, swearing and cursing and stealing – running into people’s houses, by force oftentimes, to carry away something’. Public dislike of soldiers, already sharpened by civil war and the Interregnum, was revived by such conduct. We will see more examples of professionals and gentleman officers, though the contrast between them will never be as sharp as it was in those first two decades of the Restoration. The third category of officer – from the local gentry – left a less enduring mark. The Restoration army comprised the six standing regiments, overseas garrisons and expeditions, and individual garrison companies of locally-raised foot that had never been assembled into regiments and remained scattered in castles and forts across the land. Garrison companies were officered by local gentry who did not allow their military duties to weigh too heavily upon them. In the West Country the same tribal connections that had taken Bevil Grenville’s lads up Lansdown Hill ensured that the Arundells of Trerice ran Pendennis Castle, and the Godolphins the Scilly Isles as family fiefs. We will not be surprised to find Sir Bevil Grenville’s boy John, whom we last saw in his dead father’s saddle on Lansdown Hill, created Earl of Bath and made governor of Plymouth. These categories were never wholly distinct. Professionals were glad to get onto the establishment if they could manage it, and not all gentleman officers were drunken louts. John Churchill was given an ensign’s commission in 1st Guards in 1667. The young man went off to learn his trade in the Tangier garrison, and then fought aboard James’s flagship at the Battle of Solebay in 1672, gaining a captaincy in the Lord Admiral’s Regiment. The following year he accompanied the Duke of Monmouth to the siege of Maastricht as a gentleman volunteer. Not only could he learn more of his trade but, given that the Lord Admiral’s was unlikely to outlast the war, there was much to be said for getting into a regiment that would. Volunteers might be serving officers whose own regiments were not engaged in the campaign, or civilians who hoped that their conspicuous bravery might help ease them into a commission. When the besieged Dutch put in a brisk counter-attack on a captured work, Monmouth dashed back into action accompanied by ‘Mr Charles O’Brien, Mr Villiers, Lord Rockingham’s two sons, and Captain Watson their kinsman, Sir Tho Armstrong, Capt Churchill, Capt Godfrey, Mr Roe and myself, with the duke’s two pages and three or more of his servants …’ Mr O’Brien was shot through both legs for his pains, but the little affair did the survivors no harm: O’Brien secured a French commission for a kinsman, and Edward Villiers got an English one, secured a regiment in 1688 and died a brigadier. Monmouth’s favourable report to his royal father helped persuade the king to forgive Churchill for the oversight of impregnating Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, who was one of his mistresses. Captain Charles Godfrey went on to marry Arabella Churchill, and to serve under Churchill after he had become, as Duke of Marlborough, the most illustrious British soldier of his age. If John Churchill is the best example of the gradual blurring of boundaries between professional and gentleman officers he is certainly not the only one. As civil war veterans outlasted their military usefulness, a series of wars against first the Dutch and then the French made it increasingly hard to maintain a standing army that only did duty at home and increased the demand for competent officers. Percy Kirke spelt his first name Piercy and probably pronounced it that way. He was the son of a court official and commanded enough interest to get commissioned into the (rather fragile) Lord Admiral’s Regiment in 1666 and then to go on into the (wholly more robust) Blues and to serve as a volunteer at Maastricht. He became colonel of the Tangier Regiment in 1682, and was made governor two years later. His behaviour shocked Pepys – there on a fact-finding mission with Lord Dartmouth. Kirke tolerated the drunken behaviour of soldiers and generously offered to find a conveniently sized whore for a vertically-challenged member of Dartmouth’s retinue, warning the young man that he needed to strike fast before all the ladies had gone aboard the fleet to accommodate the sailors. Kirke brought his regiment into English service, and was a brigadier for the Sedgemoor campaign. His regiment’s paschal lamb insignia and less than mild behaviour to the rebels earned it the nickname Kirke’s Lambs. He assured James II that he had no interest in becoming Roman Catholic. If he was to change his religious opinion he had already given the Emperor of Morocco first refusal and would become Muslim. He defected to William of Orange in 1688 and died a lieutenant general, in 1691. In contrast, Theophilus Oglethorpe, scion of a Yorkshire Catholic family, served under Marshal Turenne in France. He was commissioned into the Tangier Horse, which came onto the English establishment as the Royal Dragoons in 1684, and then moved on to the Life Guards. In 1685, while commanding a flanking force of Feversham’s army as it marched west, he stumbled into a smoky little clash at Keynsham bridge. He was so well regarded by Feversham that Churchill, just ahead of him in the hierarchy, feared that he would scoop the campaign’s honours. In the event Churchill not only made the right dispositions at Sedgemoor but also profited from the widespread criticism of Feversham afterwards. Whereas Churchill changed sides in 1688, Oglethorpe did not, although the victors courted him assiduously and he knew that opposition to William of Orange must inevitably cost him his commission, and so it did. He is another good example of the well-connected officer with enough money to sustain himself in the army but a keen interest in his profession. The contrast between Churchill and Oglethorpe in 1688 illustrates one of the dangers of the growing professionalisation of officers. The line of cleavage in 1688 was complex, for personal ambition and genuine political and religious conviction were often so closely interwoven it might have been difficult for a man to tell us just how he arrived at his decision. Although both Charles II and James II were Roman Catholic – the former fully reconciled to the Church only on his deathbed and the latter a proclaimed Catholic – theirs was in theory a Protestant army. Parliament, perennially nervous about Catholic plots that could imperil the whole Restoration settlement, pressed the king to require officers and men to swear the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy. In 1667 those who had not taken the oaths were turned out, a process which swept up just two officers in the ex-Cromwellian Royal Horse Guards but seventeen from the four regiments of foot. Some crept back in almost at once and others went off to raise troops to serve in France. When parliament passed the Test Act in 1673, Charles sweetly observed it applied to troops on land and not at sea, and quickly parcelled off lots of infantry to serve aboard the fleet. This royal prevarication could not go on forever, and although Charles used his dispensing power to free some Catholic officers from the Act, after the Popish Plot in 1678 he was forced to order the dismissal of all known Catholic officers and soldiers as well as those who had not taken the oath. Ninety-one soldiers and sixteen officers were dismissed from Monmouth’s Regiment of Foot alone. James, disinclined to take his brother’s more serpentine approach, forced the issue. Sir Edward Hales, a baronet from Kent, stood high in royal favour, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1685. As colonel of a regiment of foot, he was obliged to take the oath yet did not do so. His coachman Arthur Godden (collusively acting on his master’s orders) brought an action against Hales, who was convicted at Rochester assizes in March the following year. Hales appealed to the Court of the King’s Bench, arguing that he had letters patent from the king that dispensed him from the need to take the oath. The judges found in his favour by a majority of eleven to one. The Lord Chief Justice affirmed that it was ‘an inseparable prerogative’ springing from ‘the ancient remains of the sovereign power’ for the monarch to ‘dispense with penal laws in particular cases and upon particular necessary reasons’. We may now doubt whether James seriously proposed to convert England to Catholicism, as was widely alleged at the time. But his action in favouring Catholics and sacking anyone who crossed him, in the army or any other branch of public life, aroused widespread fear. Worse, it was evident that Lord Tyrconnell, James’s lord lieutenant of Ireland, was indeed engaged in the comprehensive catholicisation of the Irish army, which might then come across to coerce England. As the last straw, in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed freedom of worship to Huguenots; thousands of dispossessed French Protestants duly arrived in England with horrid tales of the rack, breaking-wheel and pyre. Many officers disapproved of James’s policy. Captain Sandys of the Blues gruffly told him to his face that ‘I understand Your Majesty well enough. I fear God and honour the King, as I ought, but I am not a man that is given to change.’ Many, including those who, like Churchill, knew him well, feared that he was riding for a fall and his destruction must inevitably encompass those of his adherents. Churchill admitted that his own experience of growing up on the losing side after the Civil War had given him a hatred of ‘poverty and dependence’. His wife Sarah was the prime confidante of Princess Anne, James’s youngest daughter. Anne’s sister Mary was married to William of Orange, head of the Dutch state and leader of the European opposition to Louis XIV’s dynastic and religious ambitions. The details of the military conspiracy against James II are necessarily vague, for the conspirators took good care to keep their tracks covered. The so-called ‘Treason Club’ met in the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, and the ‘Tangerines’, a loose association of officers who had served there – many of them of a whiggish persuasion in any event – discussed how they might help unseat James. They were kept in contact with the English officers in William’s service by one of the latter’s lieutenant colonels, John Cutts. He had served as a volunteer against the Turks in Hungary, establishing an early claim to the reputation that was to give him the nickname ‘Salamander’ – after the mythical creature that lived in fire – by placing the Imperial standard on the ramparts of Buda. Cutts had no private fortune. Indeed, even after he had been made an Irish peer with a seat in the House of Commons and the governorship of the Isle of Wight he was never free of money worries. A professional rather than a gentleman officer by our earlier categorisation, Cutts had much to gain by a radical shift in patronage in England. We talk lightly about the Curragh affair of 1914 being a ‘mutiny’. In fact the 1688 conspiracy was a genuine mutiny, which succeeded by depriving the army of its leadership in its hour of greatest need. Amidst all the smoke and shadow two things are evident. William would never have launched his expedition against the grain of autumn weather, with Lord Dartmouth’s royal fleet close at hand, to land in the West Country where Monmouth had been so easily bottled up in 1685, without being certain that James’s army would not fight. The stakes were very high, for the French tide lapped at the borders of Holland, and failure in England might compromise all William’s ambitions. Second, there was every chance that James’s rank and file would indeed have fought. Although we know annoyingly little about the men who plied their pikes and muskets in James’s regiments, this was now, with around 20,000 men, a much bigger army than anything his brother had dreamt of. It was well trained, and nothing in its past suggested that it would not follow its officers. Too many officers, however, declined to lead and those who did try to fight, like the Duke of Berwick, one of James’s sons by Arabella Churchill, and Lieutenant Patrick Sarsfield (big, brave, and not over-bright) found that too many senior officers had defected to William to give the loyalists the least chance of success. James had been a gallant soldier in his youth, and was eventually to face a lingering death through illness with an uncompromising courage that impressed Louis XIV. But a combination of nosebleeds and the defection of his favourite Churchill, his son-in-law Prince George of Denmark, and even the flight of his daughter Anne from Whitehall, unmanned him: he abandoned his men to their fate. The army inherited by William and Mary needed radical remodelling. A few of James’s supporters (including Edward Hales) followed him into exile, and more, like Oglethorpe and Dartmouth, were imprisoned for plotting against the new regime. Some of William’s irregular adherents, like the volunteers who had seized Nottingham, were given the option of joining the regular army, and others were thanked and sent home, rather promptly. Roman Catholic soldiers, many of them Irish, were disbanded, although a few were packed off to join the Imperial army, deserting in droves (often to join the French) as soon as they reached Hamburg. It was more difficult for William to be sure what to do with his officers. He immediately sent all his English regiments off to the provinces; the Foot Guards were exiled to Portsmouth, Tilbury, Rochester, Dover, and Maidstone. The Dutch and German regiments that had come over with him assumed responsibility for the capital. Politically reliable colonels, even if they were men of little experience, were appointed. The untried Lord Delamere took over Lieutenant General Werden’s Regiment of Horse and set about turfing out suspect officers and men as well as improving efficiency. But his lordship’s lack of knowledge told against him, and he was soon replaced by the veteran Theodore Russell. The experienced Lieutenant Colonel John Coy was given Colonel Richard Hamilton’s regiment when Hamilton, an Irish Catholic, was clapped into the Tower. Perhaps most surprising was the resurgence of Colonel Solomon Richards, once lieutenant colonel of Oliver Cromwell’s own regiment of foot, appointed by James in September 1688 and then reappointed by William. Richards immediately sacked five suspect officers, but did not last long. In 1698 he brought his regiment away from Londonderry at the beginning of its famous siege, glumly reporting that the place was doomed, and William duly sacked him, not for political unreliability but for incompetence. Charles Trelawney was a Cornishman whose military career, with spells in the English regiment in French service and the garrison of Tangier, was classically that of the cash-strapped professional. He had been Percy Kirke’s lieutenant colonel, and took over the Queen’s Regiment from him. In 1688 he deserted to William, and returned to his regiment to get rid of his lieutenant colonel, major and eleven other officers. These measures took some time to take effect. In April 1689 John Evelyn, who had just heard that James had landed in Ireland ‘and was become master of that kingdom’, feared that ‘This is a terrible beginning of more troubles, especially should an army come thence into Scotland, people being generally disaffected here and everywhere else, so that the sea and land men would scarce serve without compulsion.’ There were mass desertions, at least as much because of the disruption caused by the new postings and William’s decision to send some of his English regiments to fight in the Low Countries while many Dutch remained in Britain. Some units mutinied on their way to Harwich and Ipswich for embarkation. The poor reputation of the English may have encouraged Marshal d’Humi?res to attack the Prince of Waldeck’s allied force at Walcourt that April, but he received a sharp rebuff, not least because the newly created Earl of Marlborough had his English contingent well in hand. A commission ‘for reforming the abuses in the army’ was appointed in May, but the commissioners discovered that there were by now few Jacobite officers left, although there were abuses aplenty, like incomplete clothing, pay in arrears, and the familiar racket of colonels pocketing the pay for men who did not exist. William’s policy of appointing Dutchmen to senior commands (and giving them peerages, albeit Irish ones) exasperated his senior officers. Friction between the professional and gentleman officers remained. Although some of the former vanished – Hugh Mackay and John Lanier were killed at the shockingly bloody battle of Steenkirk in 1692 and Percy Kirke died of fever – others, like Marlborough and his brother Charles, Salamander Cutts, and Thomas Tollemache were rising stars. Trailing in their wide slipstream were the new professionals, no longer men who had to serve abroad because there were no vacancies in a small force dominated by court interest, but young men, often from the middling gentry or commerce, who sought to make a long-term career in the army. They served alongside men who would have been comfortable enough roistering with Charles II’s red-heeled gallants but did not intend to soldier forever. Although William hated the practice of buying commissions, and would happily have adopted the Dutch custom of promoting men on merit, purchase was by now too deeply entrenched for him to expunge it. It remained central to providing officers for an army that, in the reigns of William and his successor Anne, grew in size and self-esteem to become a force of European stature. It expanded, but not steadily, as wartime growth was usually matched by peacetime contraction. James II’s army of around 20,000 rose to some 70,000 in 1709, up to 134,500 in 1762 at the height of the Seven Years War, down to around 40,000 in 1793 and then up to a staggering quarter-million in 1814. In Victoria’s long reign it bottomed out at 91,300 in 1839, and then rose again to exceed 200,000 by 1861. By this time, despite the strictures of Liberal politicians and the complaints of economists, the old pattern of expansion and contraction was constrained by the need to defend the empire and fight a series of small wars, some of which, like the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the second Boer War of 1899–1902, had the uncomfortable ability to morph into big ones. Whatever the system’s purely military defects, it did have the political advantage of producing an officer corps which, while far from homogeneous, was composed largely of men with the proverbial ‘stake in the country’. Regimental rolls were filled with officers who wanted stability. Charles Clode, writing in 1871, argued that the system attracted ‘men of independent means – not merely professional officers,’ and added that Wellington had approved of purchase because ‘it brings into the service men of fortune and character – men who have some connection with the interests or fortunes of the country.’ The historian Sir John Fortescue maintained that the whole system was economical: for an officer’s pay rarely exceeded the interest on the price of his commission; secure: because officers were bound over for good behaviour on the price of their commissions; and convenient: because sales ensured a steady flow of promotion. Across the whole period 1660–1871 about two-thirds of commissions were purchased. In peacetime the great majority were bought, but in wartime it was difficult to ensure a steady flow of young men whose relatives were prepared to disgorge a substantial sum to give the lad an early chance of death or dismemberment. In 1810, for instance, about four-fifths of all commissions – whether on first appointment or promotion – had been given without purchase. Purchase was never universal. It did not apply in the artillery or engineers, where officers advanced by remorseless seniority, and there were always non-purchase vacancies that could be given to NCOs promoted to adjutants’ posts or deserving young men able to generate sufficient interest to get a free ensigncy, perhaps by serving as a gentleman volunteer. Once the system was fully established, vacancies left as a result of death, retirement or promotion were filled by the next most senior officer on the regimental list, so ‘a bloody war or a sickly season’ helped the impecunious to rise. In William’s day the rules had not solidified and abuses were common: Percy Kirke’s son, inconveniently also named Percy, was made an ensign at the age of twelve months in 1684, a captain on his sixth birthday in 1689 and by the time he reported for duty he was his regiment’s senior captain. He went on to be colonel of the Queen’s, like his father and, like him died a lieutenant general. The practice of commissioned well-connected children went on well into the eighteenth century. Lord George Lennox, second son of the Duke of Richmond, was made an ensign at the age of thirteen in 1751 and was lieutenant colonel commanding the 33rd Foot just seven years later at the age of 20. If some officers were too young, others were too old, for there was no way of forcing a man to retire. In 1699 Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Compton, who had survived being pistolled in the chest in the first confused clash on Sedgemoor, was seventy years old, three years younger than his colonel, the Earl of Oxford. Compton evidently had some life left in him, for he had just married a 17-year-old. Although the detail of purchase varied between 1660 and its abolition in 1871, its general principles are so clear that this is a good moment to explain how it worked. A young man purchasing a commission made an investment, and the pay of his new rank provided him with a dividend. As he bought successive promotions his investment increased, and when he eventually retired he ‘sold out’ and cashed in his shares. The regulation price of his commission might not increase greatly since the initial purchase – in 1766 a lieutenant colonelcy in an infantry regiment cost ?3,500 and had only gone up to ?4,500 by 1858. But the fact that the purchaser would have to add a non-regulation premium, varying according to the desirability of the regiment in question, meant that that he could expect to make a profit on his investment to support his old age. In 1745 Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert Ellison sold his commission in the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers for ?3,500, saying that his poor health was the ‘great motion’ behind his selling. His estate in County Durham was hopelessly encumbered with debt, but he hoped the proceeds of selling his commission would, with another annuity left him by his uncle, ‘support me with decency, in the decline of life.’ This ‘delightful old hypochondriac’ then proceeded to live for another forty years, dying in 1785 at the age of eighty-seven. Like most investments a commission was never wholly secure. If an officer was killed in action or died of natural causes its value was usually lost, although there were times when a grateful government might waive the rules. In 1780 Major John Andr?, adjutant general to Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief in North America, was caught in civilian clothes carrying letters to Benedict Arnold, a major general in the Continental Army who was about to betray West Point to the British. An American court-martial sentenced him to death as a spy, and George Washington, stiffly adhering to the letter of the law, declined to vary the mode of his execution from hanging to shooting. He died bravely, declaring ‘I am reconciled to my death, but I detest the mode.’ Andr? commended his widowed mother and his three sisters to Clinton, pointing out that bad investments had left them impoverished, and asking that they might receive the value of his commission. The circumstances of Andr?’s capture and death made him a popular hero: the Government gave his family a pension, and George III made his brother a baronet. The value of a commission was also lost if an officer was cashiered. The word is a borrowing from the German kassiert, broken. Its financial implications were serious in themselves, for the sentence usually deprived the victim of the right to hold any office of profit under the Crown. When Lord George Sackville was court-martialled for failure to charge at Minden in 1760, the court found him ‘unfit to serve his Majesty in any military capacity whatsoever.’ He lost his lucrative regimental colonelcy and was struck from the roll of the Privy Council. None of this, however, prevented him from emerging in 1775 as Secretary of State for North America, where he made a significant contribution to Burgoyne’s ill-starred Saratoga campaign. Sometimes an officer would sell out rather than face a court martial that might cost him the value of his investment. In 1833 Captain John Orrock of the 33rd Foot told a friend that ‘our senior captain, Jefferies got into a scrape and Colonel Gore has forced him to sell out or stand a court martial; he preferred the former.’ In 1858 Captain William du Vernet of the 84th Foot, on campaign in north India, was as Lieutenant Hugh Pearson aptly put it ‘“up a gum tree” … under arrest (with a sentry over him) for being drunk while Field Officer of the day.’ Du Vernet had a long record of similar misbehaviour, and when the papers in the case were sent on to the commander-in-chief Pearson wrote: ‘I think it is all “up” with him.’ Although Pearson believed that there was only a slight chance of his being permitted to sell out, du Vernet was generously allowed to do so, creating a vacancy instantly filled by purchase. If an officer was cashiered after a trial, the vacancy was allocated to an officer from another regiment to ensure that there could be no suggestion that evidence against him might have been given by those who stood to profit from his conviction. Even if it did not cashier him, a court martial might suspend an officer from rank and pay for a specified period. While suspended he was unable to purchase if a vacancy became available, and would miss any free promotions, so it was by no means a derisory punishment. In 1779 Lieutenant Thomas Eyre of the 35th, while in drink, beat the surgeon’s mate of his regiment with the flat of his sword, and was suspended from rank and pay for six months. He was lucky, because an ‘unseemly quarrel’ might get an officer cashiered, and a surgeon’s mate was scarcely a gentleman’s legitimate adversary. The career of that serious-minded soldier Samuel Bagshawe shows how interest and purchase combined to advance an officer’s career at a time when the system was still open to manipulation. He enlisted as a private soldier in 1731 and was bought out of the army by his uncle in 1738. He gained his first commission without purchase in 1740 when the Duke of Devonshire, lord lieutenant of Ireland and the most notable magnate in Derbyshire, where the Bagshawes owned land, procured him a commission in Colonel Andrew Bissett’s 30th Foot. This was on the Irish establishment, and so had fewer officers and men on its strength than regiments on the English establishment, but even so a free commission was not to be scorned. Thomas Fletcher, Dean of Down, and Devonshire’s private secretary, wrote to Bagshawe’s uncle in the approved style: His Grace intending to give your nephew a pair of colours, desires you will send him his Christian name in a letter directed to His Grace the Duke of Devonshire Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the Castle in Dublin. I congratulate you upon this, and am Sir Your most humble servant Tho Fletcher Just a year later he was promoted to lieutenant, again thanks to the duke’s influence, this time in the very desirable Royal Scots. Bagshawe travelled to London in April 1742 in search of preferment, but although the army was being increased for the War of Austrian Succession, captaincies, at ?1,500, were beyond his reach. The duke generously secured him a captaincy without purchase, albeit in Colonel John Battereau’s 62nd Foot. As this was a ‘new corps’, recently raised, it faced early disbandment when peace came, and so the duke secured his transfer to the 39th Foot, on the Irish establishment, which had been raised in 1702 and was a copper-bottomed investment. In 1745 the regiment’s majority came up, and the Duke of Devonshire pressed Bagshawe’s uncle to stump up the purchase money: a loan of just ?800 would suffice, because Bagshawe ‘had been so far a prudent manager as to be able to produce the other two hundred himself without troubling you.’ This ?1,000 reflected the difference between the value of Bagshawe’s captaincy, which he was to be allowed to sell, and the majority’s full cost of around ?2,500. Bagshawe acknowledged that the promotion would be particularly advantageous, admitting (in a sentence through which he wisely struck his pen) that ‘I am the youngest captain save one in the regiment.’ The project was certainly not proper, for the vacancy should have been offered to the regiment’s captains in order of seniority. It collapsed because Colonel Edward Richbell, the regimental commander, was unaware of it, and before he heard that Bagshawe had the money to hand ‘the senior captain had borrowed money for the purchase which effectively overturned my scheme’. In 1746 Richbell managed to obtain Bagshawe the appointment of brigade major for an expedition against L’Orient, but his leg was smashed by a roundshot and he was very lucky to survive its amputation. In October 1747, on hearing that the major of the 39th was near death, he pressed Richbell ‘to have your approbation and recommendation to succeed him … I can ride sufficiently to discharge the duty and only expect to be continued on the service on those terms.’ The application failed, probably because Bagshawe’s missing leg raised concerns, and Matthew Sewell, who had held the lieutenant colonelcy in a short-lived regiment raised for the suppression of the ’45, was brought back from half-pay to be major of the 39th. The regimental agent warned Bagshawe that Sewell had irresistible interest in his favour. The 39th was stationed in Portsmouth, and Sewell ‘has been recommended by the gentlemen of Hampshire, and in particular by Mr Bridges, one of the members [of parliament] for Winchester, who personally asked the king’. In 1749 Lieutenant Colonel James Cotes of the 39th announced his intention of selling out, and offered Sewell his commission ‘on the same terms that I had purchased’. Sewell asked for time to consult his friends, and decided against purchase, though he would have accepted better terms. Cotes then offered to sell to Bagshawe: I am to receive ?3,360, and to have my personal account and the non effective account of my company made up to the day you succeed me. I am to give the company complete, and if you will take my tent, and field bed on the same terms, that I bought them. My trunk containing two suits of regimental clothes, linen, etc. are at your service. A regiment’s field officers – its colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major – all commanded companies, and the colonel had an officer, called the captain lieutenant, to do the work for him. Here Cotes offers to sell his company and his lieutenant colonelcy, and takes care to specify that the profit he made from the non-existent soldiers in his company whose pay he drew (‘the non effective account’) should be made up on the day the transaction took place. Bagshawe borrowed ?1,000 from his uncle, got the regimental agent to advance him the rest of the money, and duly became a lieutenant colonel. His friend Lieutenant Archie Grant wrote at once to ‘most sincerely congratulate not only you but the whole Corps upon your affairs being at last done’. Apparently, Sewell had doubted if the commissions would be signed, and ‘seemed very much surprised and disappointed when he heard they were’. Having become a lieutenant colonel at last, Bagshawe could expect promotion by seniority. His health was ruined by service in India, he fell out with his colonel, and on his return to England he found himself on half-pay, living the life of a country gentleman, but he was still anxious for advancement. In 1758 he told Lord Barrington, Secretary at War, that he believed that he had been unfairly passed over when new regiments were being raised: I have done my duty punctually, I have been as ready to serve and I have run as great hazards and I have suffered as much as any lieutenant colonel in the service … I think there are only eight lieutenant colonels who are seniors and there has been eleven junior officers … promoted to the rank of colonel … Barrington replied that he had indeed considered Bagshawe when ‘the regiments were disposed of,’ and ‘I do not see that any one here has been put over your head, except the Duke of Richmond’s and the King’s aides de camp, whom his Majesty has always chose without a strict regard for rank.’ In 1759, with more troops being enlisted, Bagshawe wrote to the Duke of Bedford, lord lieutenant of Ireland, offering ‘to raise a regiment of infantry at his own expense.’ By this procedure, known as ‘raising for rank’, Bagshawe would recruit the regiment and furnish its swords and accoutrements at his own expense, although if the regiment was disbanded in less than three years the public purse would refund the cost of these items. The government accepted the offer, and his commission as colonel was dated 17 January 1760. No sooner had Colonel Bagshawe set about raising his regiment, the 93rd Foot, than he found himself the target of just the sort of pleas that powerful men had once made on his behalf. Lieutenant Francis Flood was the nephew of Warden Flood, attorney general for Ireland, and Bagshawe thought that part of the agreement for Flood’s commission was that his uncle would provide sufficient money for Flood to raise ten men. The attorney general loudly denied that any such agreement existed, and young Flood was soon in financial difficulties, for he could not balance his recruiting account. ‘My family is in distress,’ he lamented, ‘being concerned with a contested election’, so no money was to be had there. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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