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.21
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.22
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.23
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 jäger, hunter, is the same as a French chasseur, with keen eyes and quick step, and would have served, flat-shakoed, in a jäger 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.’24 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’.25
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.26
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’.27 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.28
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 immediat
e 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.’29 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 …’30 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.’31
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