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.’1 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/rosé 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.2
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’.3 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 plea
sant; having a high sense of honour, but also a high temper and a lack of patience and caution.4
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 1911.5 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.’6
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.’7 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.’8 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.9 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.10 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.
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