Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  At Waterloo, Wheatley saw Ompteda receive the fatal order from the Prince of Orange:

  Colonel Ompteda ordered us instantly into line to charge, with a strong injunction to ‘walk’ forward until he gave the word. When within sixty yards he cried ‘charge’; we ran forward huzzaing … I ran by Colonel Ompteda who cried out ‘That’s right, Wheatley’.

  Captain Charles Berger watched Ompteda ride up to the French line, and although its soldiers aimed at him, the officers courteously used their swords to push up the mens’ muskets so as to prevent them from shooting. But when Ompteda jumped his horse over the garden hedge and Berger ‘clearly saw his sword strikes smite the shakos off’ chivalry had run its course. He watched the colonel ‘sink from his horse and vanish’. A concussed Wheatley regained consciousness to see him lying flat on his back, hatless, and open-mouthed, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. When the KGL was disbanded after the war, with most of its officers and men returning to Hanover, Wheatley had no option but to go onto half-pay. He duly married Eliza Brookes, who had never been far from his mind. The couple had four daughters before Wheatley died at Trèves in 1841.27

  By September 1813 the British army included some 54,000 foreigners, nearly one in five of its strength. In the post-Waterloo rundown, foreign units were disbanded first but British-recruited regiments followed suit, so when the army faced its next major challenge, the Crimean War, it was predictably short of soldiers. It fell back on the customary expedient of recruiting foreigners, and in 1855 began to raise the British German, British Swiss, and British Italian Legions. The German Legion, some 10,000 strong, had four regiments, with a little over 1,000 men apiece, stationed on the Bosphorus when the war ended, and the Swiss Legion, which raised just over 3,000 men, had a brigade at Smyrna. The Italians recruited over 3,500 men but, having been formed six months after the other two legions, never reached the theatre of war. As soon as the war was over the government was anxious to dispose of the legions as quickly as possible. Retaining them for garrison duties was politically unpopular, and the East India Company, which already included European regiments on its military establishment, declined to have them. There were also difficulties over repatriation: some governments were reluctant to re-admit men who had sworn allegiance to a foreign power.

  Eventually many legionaries were settled in the colonies, and 2,362 officers and men of the German Legion accepted an offer of land in what was then called ‘British Kaffaria’, on the borders of Cape Colony. Baron Richard von Stutterheim, a professional soldier with a weakness for gambling, had already served in the British Legion in the Carlist War in Spain, having left Germany after killing a brother officer in a duel. He accepted command of the British German Legion, as a major general, in 1855, and agreed to command it in the Cape. Those of his men with families were allowed to take them. They were liable to serve ‘as military settlers’ for seven years, had to carry out a limited amount of military training, and were paid (at reduced rates) for three years. Every man received a plot of land, with allocations based on rank. The experiment was not a success. Stutterheim lasted six months before going back to Germany, citing family obligations as his reason for departure: bankrupted by gambling debts, he eventually shot himself in 1872.

  Few of Stutterheim’s men were farmers by profession, and although more families from Germany were imported in an effort to reduce their disaffection, there were frequent desertions. When the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny offered a fresh opportunity for military service almost half the settlers went to India and served in the East India Company’s army. The 1858 Government of India Act transferred the company’s European establishment to the Crown, and a few of them became regular soldiers in the British army. The government had learnt little by its experience. When it was considering the size of the British garrison of post-Mutiny India, there were ‘several bizarre and barren proposals, that Maoris, Malays, “Tartars”, Italians, Arabs or Albanians would be recruited as mercenaries’.28 The Crimean legions have disappeared almost as if they had never been. In the cemetery at Alexandria, now part of Johannesberg, lies William Henry Gibbon, born at Acklington Park, Northumberland in 1832 and educated at the English school at Heidelberg. He joined the Austrian army as an ensign in 1848, fought with distinction against the Piedmontese at the battles of Custozza and Novara, was promoted captain and decorated. He became a captain in the German Legion in 1855, settled in the Cape, and styled himself ‘late Captain, German Legion’ for the rest of his life, dying in 1894. Although Baron von Stutterheim did not remain in South Africa for long, the town of Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape was named for him, and still proudly recalls its connection.

  At the time of the second Boer War of 1899–1902, the army was again faced with the need to expand quickly. It buttressed its ranks, not by traditional foreign enlistment, but by the use of British volunteers like the City Imperial Volunteers and the Imperial Yeomanry and, no less to the point, by accepting contingents from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as pro-British South Africans. Although colonial units were valued because they could ‘shoot and ride’, not all their soldiers conformed to the classic image of the sturdy frontiersman, and officers were often poorly trained. Nevertheless, without the 83,000 men from the colonies who served as part of a total British force of 448,435, it is difficult to see how the army could have coped. Colonial contingents were integrated within the British chain of command, and despite occasional friction over minutiae of dress and behaviour, or muttering about ‘colonial scallywag corps’, the experience of the war helped reinforce the image of sturdy offspring coming to the mother country’s aid in her hour of need.

  There was already an early warning of trouble to come. In February 1902, when peace negotiations were under way, two Australians, Lieutenants Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock of the Bushveldt Carbineers, were shot by firing squad after being convicted of murdering Boer prisoners. The issue is not whether the prisoners had been shot, for both men admitted this, but whether the court martial was properly conducted and whether the policy of taking no prisoners had actually been approved by Lord Kitchener, the commander-in-chief. In 2002 an Australian group travelled to the men’s graves in South Africa, emphasising that no Australian soldiers should ever be left to a foreign power for justice. What was a source of modest controversy in 1901 has come to reflect a growing conviction that dominion troops serving under British command were not mere auxiliaries, but soldiers of an independent nation with its own distinct identity.

  The issue is too complex to be dealt with in detail here, but the major lines of departure are clear enough. During the First World War both the Australian and Canadian corps in France, contained, by common consent, some of the very best troops in the allied armies. They started off being commanded by British officers, but ended under the command of native-born officers. Dominion governments made it clear that controversial military issues were to be referred to them, and the Australians resolutely refused to execute soldiers for military offences. By the Second World War the process had accelerated still further. When General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, ordered Lieutenant General Sir Leslie Morshead of 9th Australian Division to break up his division into brigade groups and send one to the front immediately, there was an unedifying spat. Not for nothing was Morshead, a schoolmaster by profession, known as ‘Ming the Merciless’.

  AUCHINLECK: I want that brigade right away.

  MORSHEAD: You can’t have that brigade.

  AUCHINLECK: Why?

  MORSHEAD: Because they are going to fight as a formation with the rest of the division.

  AUCHINLECK: Not if I give you orders?

  MORSHEAD: Give me the orders and you’ll see.29

  On 11 November 2004, New Zealand became the last of the dominions to bury an unknown warrior in home soil, selecting the body from the windy Caterpillar Valley Cemetery on the Somme, making the point that the soldier resting alone with his glory in Westminster Abbey could no
longer represent the rest of the Empire.

  The First World War did not simply present the British army with an unprecedented demand for fighting men, but with an unyielding requirement for the labour associated with industrialised war. A Military Works Corps had been formed for service in the Crimea, but it did not enjoy a good reputation and soon disappeared. Much local labour had been used in the Boer War, and Mohandas Gandhi, the conflict’s most famous stretcher-bearer, came from the Indian community in Natal. During the First World War labour came from a variety of sources. Some infantry battalions were converted into pioneers, retaining their small arms and their regimental identity. For example, the Oldham Pals (24/Manchester) was raised, albeit with some difficulty, in and around Oldham. Of the first 625 men to enlist about a third came from the cotton industry, with a sprinkling of labourers, some from the textile mills, but as many from the building trade. There was a handful of skilled men – joiners, plumbers, and painters – and rather more clerks, insurance agents, and shop assistants, 8 per cent of the whole. There were fewer foundry workers than might have been expected (9 per cent) and just 5 miners, possibly reflecting the fact that they had signed on in other regiments, while 27 recruits came from the local tram company.

  Oldham had already provided two Territorial battalions and, like so many New Army units, the Oldham Pals were desperately short of trained men. RSM Arnold Gartside, a 25-year-old fruiterer from the Mumps area of Oldham, had never served before, but had a brother who was a regular warrant officer; this may have helped him get promoted. The RQMS, Frank Entwistle, had been parcels superintendent at the post office. Senior NCOs were promoted for qualities noticed by their officers in the first days of the battalion’s existence. They would need a mixture of ‘tact and coercion’, for their men were ‘volunteers and many … would have been active trade unionists, used to disputing with those in authority.’30 The Oldham Pals began as a standard infantry battalion, and soon had their introduction to the trenches, losing a subaltern (a nephew of the borough coroner), the RSM, a company sergeant major and three privates to a single trench-mortar bomb on their first tour of trench duty. In early 1916 the Oldhams were told that they were to become a pioneer battalion, carrying out such tasks as trench-digging and road-making as the pioneer battalion of 7th Division. The Oldhams served in France and then accompanied the division to northern Italy, and were there when the war ended.

  Pioneer battalions like the Oldhams were the thin end of the wedge. Amongst the perspiring order of battle of army workers came Army Service Corps labour companies; infantry labour battalions recruited from amongst the medically downgraded; the Entrenching Battalions; and eventually the Labour Corps itself, which numbered 395,000 officers and men in December 1918. It was in the recruitment of foreign labour that the army reverted to type. There were Canadian forestry battalions; African, Chinese, Egyptian, Fijian, Indian, Macedonian, Maltese, and Serbian Labour Corps; and a sprinkling of idiosyncratic units like the Mauritius Labour Battalion, the Zion Mule Corps, and Russian labour battalions. In addition, German prisoners of war were formed into labour companies – there were 372 in France, with an establishment of 400 men apiece, by the Armistice. Some units contained properly enlisted soldiers, others comprised indentured labourers on a variety of terms of service.

  The Chinese Labour Corps, with nearly 96,000 labourers in France at the time of the Armistice, was the largest. Around 2,000 of its members died of sickness (Spanish Flu was a real killer), were killed by shelling or died of wounds. They lie buried beneath Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones, each of which bears the labourer’s name and one of four set proverbs. The cemetery at Noyelles sur Mer, the little town that housed the Chinese base depot, contains 838 Chinese graves. What was, to Chinese, an insistence on the terms of their contracts, was sometimes construed by their British officers and NCOs as ‘mutiny’, and there were a number of incidents where labourers were shot at. In December 1917 armed guards fired on members of 21 Company Chinese Labour Corps, killing four and wounding nine. Gambling was rife amongst the Chinese, and fifteen were sentenced to death for murder during a robbery or an argument over money. At the other extreme First Class Ganger Liu Dien Chen of 108 Company was recommended for the Military Medal in March 1918. He had been in charge of a party of 60 coolies at a goods yard, and repeatedly led them back to work during German shelling. Although it was decided that Chinese were not eligible for MMs, Liu Dien Chen was eventually awarded the Meritorious Service Medal, one of five given to Chinese labourers.31

  Labour units, uniformed or contract, all disappeared after the First World War, though not before 68 Company Labour Corps had produced the textbook procedures for the grim but necessary task of finding and exhuming the remains of men strewn about the battlefields. In 1939 the demand for a disciplined military labour force re-emerged, and the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps was formed, its title stemming from the fact that a revival of the term Labour Corps would have political implications. The corps soon had a striking cap-badge of crossed shovel and rifle and the more resonant name Pioneer Corps (later Royal Pioneer Corps), surviving until its amalgamation into the Royal Logistic Corps in 1993. During the Second World War over 10,000 ‘enemy aliens’, most of them Jewish refugees from Italy or Germany, served with the corps. From 1942 they were allowed to enlist in the combat arms, and amongst these men was the future Sir Ken Adam, the Berlin-born Klaus Hugo Adam, who served in the Pioneer corps before becoming an RAF pilot.

  Few careers were, however, more poignant than that of Herbert Sulzbach, born into a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1894 and commissioned into the kaiser’s artillery during the First World War, winning the Iron Cross first and second class. He fled abroad in 1937, just two years after the appearance of his memoirs that were eventually published in English as With the German Guns: Fifty Months on the Western Front 1914–1918. When war broke out in 1939 Sulzbach and his wife were interned, like many other aliens, on the Isle of Man. He volunteered for service in the Pioneer Corps, and spent three years building defences against German attack until he transferred to the interpreters’ pool and was posted to a prisoner-of-war camp at Comrie in Scotland. On 11 November 1945 he persuaded most of the 4,000 men in the camp to turn out for a ceremony of remembrance, and they stood to attention on the freezing football field as the ‘Last Post’ was sounded. Sulzbach received a British commission, and had British decorations to add to his First World War Iron Crosses.

  The contemporary army still recruits foreigners; given its history it would be surprising if it did not do so. Most noticeable are the Gurkhas, retained as part of the British army after the partition of India in 1947. Successive restructurings have reduced them to 3,760, mainly constituting the two-battalion-strong Royal Gurkha Rifles. Recruiting Gurkhas has many attractions. Not only are they fine natural soldiers, with a formidable record of service to the Crown, but they have always proved easy to recruit at times when British-born soldiers might be hard to come by. Moreover, Gurhkas could be used for tasks that might fit uncomfortably into the army’s pattern of postings. One of the Royal Gurkha Rifles’ battalions is permanently based in Brunei. Successive governments have profited from the fact that Gurkhas received neither pensions on the scale awarded to British soldiers nor right of abode in the United Kingdom once they had completed their service. In 2009 the actress Joanna Lumley, whose father served with the Gurkhas during the Second World War, was instrumental in forcing changes of policy that substantially improve the Gurkhas’ lot.

  In addition to the Gurkhas, there were over 6,600 soldiers from forty-two countries serving in the British army in 2010, constituting almost 7 per cent of its strength. The largest contingent, over 2,000 strong, hails from Fiji; Jamaica and Grenada produce over 600 each. Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, at the time of writing the only serving holder of the VC, was born in Grenada in 1977. He came to Britain in 1999 and enlisted into the army in 2001. On the London Underground he spotted an advertisement in a discarde
d newspaper: ‘Recruits don’t have to be British to apply; Foreign and Commonwealth applicants will be selected on their merits.’ He was sent away the first time he went to the recruiting office because the sergeant on duty spotted his marijuana leaf ear-stud, asked him if he smoked, and urged him not to return until ‘you … get yourself sorted out, stop smoking that shit … and get yourself fit …’. When he reappeared the sergeant introduced him to a Grenadian who was already serving, and Beharry decided to join the same unit, the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment: ‘If it’s good enough for you it’s good enough for me.’ Cutting off his dreadlocks was a visible sign of departure. ‘Now I know you’re joining the fuckin’ army,’ said his cousin Gavin.32 He earned his VC while driving a Warrior armoured vehicle in the Iraqi town of Al Amarah in 2004, saving the lives of his comrades in spite of personal injury and under intense direct attack. The Warrior’s gunner was the Jamaican Private Troy McNeill Samuels, who always called Beharry Paki.

  CHAPTER 16

  WOMEN SOLDIERS

  AS WE SHALL see in the stories of enterprising women that follow, no eighteenth-or early nineteenth-century army could have survived without women. Apart from bearing and rearing their children, washing and cooking, they helped carry and care for the sick and wounded at a time when nursing had neither the rudiments of respectability nor more than the thinnest veer of professionalism. Some women even went to war dressed as men, because it was only by looking male that they could go undetected and survive in a man’s world. In the haunting folk song ‘Polly Oliver’, the heroine decided to ‘list for a soldier and follow my love,’ using ‘my dead brother’s clothes’ as disguise. She was duly enlisted and was at her drill when her sergeant asked: ‘Now who’s good for nursing? Our captain, he’s ill.’ She cured him, and married him to return home to what nature always intended her to be, a nice young lady with a martial cut to her rig.