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.16
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.17
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’.18
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.19
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.20
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.21
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.22 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.23
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.’24 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.25
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.’26 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.27
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.28
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.29
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’.30 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’.31 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.’32
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.’33 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.’34 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.’35 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.’36
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.’37 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.38
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.39
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.’40
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.41 It was a world full of men who understood the differe
nce 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.’42
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:
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