Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  They say that the officer did pass on without turning out the guard, and I know that Poynard was not confined or reported for neglect of duty to which he was liable or for insolence.42

  The guard commander would compile a guard roster, listing the names of his men and the posts they were to patrol, as soon as he came on duty, and ensured that prisoners in the cells adjacent to the guard-room were present and as correct as their situation allowed. Wully Roberston remembered the cell area in his Aldershot barracks as ‘about fifteen feet square … and with the most primitive arrangements for sanitation. No means of lighting it after dark was either provided or permitted.’ Prisoners were provided with no mattresses or bedding, and slept on a platform covered with their cloaks. There were single cells for the drunken or violent. Soldiers returning to barracks after a night out had to ensure that the guard commander had no reason to doubt their sobriety, or they too would find themselves enjoying his hospitality for the night.

  By the 1880s garrison towns outside barracks were patrolled by military policemen. In the Peninsula Wellington had been supported by a provost-marshal and twenty-four assistant provost-marshals, supported by members of the Staff Corps of Cavalry. This organisation had not survived the war, and there had been another short-lived body of military police during the Crimean War. In 1877 the Military Mounted Police were formed and the Military Foot Police joined them in 1885. The two bodies were unified in 1926 as the Corps of Military Police, and renamed the Royal Military Police in 1946. Like many other small corps, in 1992 they were swept up into the Adjutant General’s Corps. The military police dealt, within the military community, with the tasks carried out by civilian police forces outside it. They also had numerous operational tasks. Today, they are at their most visible dealing with route signing and traffic control. They wore red brassards with the letters MP in black, and the red covers on their khaki field-service caps gave them the affectionate nickname ‘redcaps’, the origin of their less pleasing sobriquet ‘monkeys’ is less clear.

  At first MPs were selected from soldiers with previous exemplary service, and all held the rank of at least lance corporal. They rarely appeared within barracks, however, because the commanding officer had his own police force, the Regimental Police. These were regimental soldiers, half a dozen or so, commanded by the Provost Sergeant, assisted by a corporal. They wore RP brassards, often carried canes of office, and were widely regarded as the RSM’s myrmidons. Yet a good provost sergeant was very valuable, as James Dunn was reminded when both RSM and provost sergeant were splashed by the same shellburst.

  [Sergeant] Butcher looked his part; and he was poacher turned gamekeeper. To his eye for useful things, and to his skill in fixing-in a window or building-in a good-drawing grate, HQ officers had owed much comfort. His personality, rather than character, made him eminent in the battalion, apart from his office. He never had to officiate at an execution, though it is easy to think of him reporting, as did another Provost Sergeant, ‘It went off champion, sir.’43

  At one level this process of social control reduced desertion, went some way towards reducing drunkenness, and ensured compliance with formal regulations and the unwritten codes of the clan. In a regiment whose officers took their responsibilities seriously it would go a great deal farther than that. Captain Cyril Wedderburn of the Royal Fusiliers, at Chatham Barracks before embarking for the Crimea, was wholly committed to his job.

  When not on guard or piquet, and when captain of the day, he had to make incessant inspections of the barrack-rooms, to see that the iron beds are turned up in the morning, and the ventilators open; also before and after, and at every meal, to ascertain that the messes were in order, wholesome and sufficient. Then came visits to the patients in hospital, to prisoners in the cells and the guardroom, the children in school, for the numbers of each and all were to be entered in his daily report. There were courts-martial and enquiries, committees of all kinds, mess and band; the foreign outfit for his company to be provided.44

  Indeed, it was precisely this sort of paternalistic supervision that was encouraged by Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley, one of the dominant figures in the late Victorian army. The muscular Christianity of the same era encouraged some officers to take a deeply personal interest in their soldiers. Henry Havelock, whose lack of means left him under-promoted until general’s rank and a knighthood caught up with him shortly before his death in the Mutiny, set up an all-ranks Bible class (‘Havelock’s saints’) as soon as he arrived in Burma with the 13th Foot in 1823. He told his missionary father-in-law that ‘instances of insobriety or neglect of duty amongst this body in the course of a year are very rare. The frequenters of the chapel are reckoned among the best behaved men in the regiment.’45

  CHAPTER 25

  BULLIES AND BEAST-MASTERS

  WE ARE ENTITLED to wonder how deeply the officer’s authority extended into the barrack room. While there can be no doubting that officers are superior to NCOs within the military hierarchy, crossing an NCO could have worse consequences than displeasing an officer, as helpful hints for soldiers in a 1918 diary observed:

  To drop your rifle onto foot of Second Lt

  Is bad luck – for him.

  To drop ditto onto foot of Sergeant Major

  Is bad luck – for you.1

  For most of the time, certainly after corporals replaced sergeants in those partitioned-off bunks, barrack rooms were actually run by junior NCOs or forceful private soldiers. Soldiers accused of offences against the group, such as dishonesty, or carelessness which had subjected the group to collective punishment or other inconvenience, were subjected to barrack-room courts martial, which meted out summary corporal punishment, like the whipping with a musket-sling described earlier. Officers certainly knew that such things went on. Indeed, our best description of the unofficial punishment of ‘cobbing’ comes from the pen of Captain Thomas Browne, who described what happened to a cook who had allowed his mess’s food to become tainted with smoke.

  The cook … throws himself on the mercy of the court. Feelings of mercy are out of the question, and show themselves only in sentencing the cook to be cobbed. This ceremony is performed by soldiers forming two ranks, facing inwards, and making the cook pass between them, cobbing him well about the head with their foraging caps; he is not allowed to run through them, but to march in slow time, and if he attempts to hurry his pace he is made to begin again.2

  There were other punishments, one levied when a man was accused of being dirty and helped into the ‘regimental bath’. ‘When a trooper got a bit on the smelly side,’ wrote Spike Mays,

  we took him to account in the cleaning water of a horse-trough; there to scrub his nakedness – good and hard – with body-brushes and dandy-brushes. Sometimes for good measure we cut his hair close to his scalp with manually operated horse-clippers. Ever afterwards he would remain clean and dragoon-like.3

  ‘Practical jokes’ abounded. The ever-enthusiastic John Shipp enjoyed ‘a good many tricks with my friends, such as filling their pipes with gunpowder, tying their great toes together and crying fire, sewing their shirts to their bedding when asleep, and fifty more’.4 The novelist Tom Sharpe, who went straight from Lancing College to do his National Service with the Royal Marines at Lympstone, recalled:

  There were a good number of Glaswegians in our squad … One of their favourite pranks was to fill a condom with water and put it down the top bunk of a bootneck [marine] who’d ‘gone on the piss’ in Exeter. The thing would burst when he climbed in, dripping on the fellow below, who would go out of his mind with rage.5

  Some of these jests were potentially lethal. Alexander Somerville, who joined the Royal Scots Greys in 1831, recounts how arriving late for first stables brought a recruit no end of trouble.

  If the recruit has not been active in getting downstairs to have his turn on the limited space, others will be there before him [and] if he be not yet beyond the point of having tricks played on him, he may be seen laying out his plaited b
ands and fancy straw on the stones, horses on each side kicking with their hindfeet within a yard of his head … A man tickles one of them to make him prance and strike the stones, or to toss back his litter on the recruit. As if in a rage, the man commands the horse to stand still, and asks if it means to knock Johnny Raw’s brains out?6

  Riding instructors could be guaranteed to behave more responsibly, and would sometimes whip a horse so that a recruit was thrown, to much mockery.

  Did you ever see such a sight! Leaving the bloody maidan! I told you ’e came off a farm – ’e’s looking for taters. I bet if I looked at the back of ’is neck I’d find some taters all right! Ride – ’e couldn’t ride a button-stick.7

  At the close of the nineteenth century, Horace Wyndham attacked the ‘popular fiction’ beloved of contemporary authors. A young man of good family joins the army as a private, thrashes the barrack-room bully in a fair fight, distinguishes himself in battle and is then, to universal applause, commissioned, marries the colonel’s daughter and lives happily ever after. Although many regiments did indeed allow supervised fist-fights between soldiers, more often than not the barrack-room bully won them, and the process simply upheld existing unofficial power-structures. Wully Robertson’s first night in a brawling barrack room was so utterly shocking that he seriously considered desertion. He thought that he still had his civilian clothes (they were to be parcelled up and sent home the following day) but a comrade promptly stole them, legged it, and was never seen again. The future broadcaster and author Ned Sherrin was much more fortunate: with the engaging whisper ‘Race yer, Ginge’ he was simply challenged to a first-past-the-post wanking contest by the soldier in the next bed. There was a certain amount of twanging and a satisfied grunt before Sherrin realised the rules of the game.8

  Educated men could find the whole process of barrack-room control exasperating because it turned their world upside down, leaving them at the mercy of the lords of misrule. ‘Look at us all,’ said one National Serviceman,

  A painter, four plumbers, a carpenter, two motor mechanics, a plasterer, two shopkeepers! … And what do we do? March about the square, stand in queues for kit every day, obey orders from stupid bastards who couldn’t get by in civvy street … walk round that rope, don’t trip over it, stamp your number on the lower left hand brace of your braces, not the right hand … We’re here saluting smartly idiots who don’t know whether their arsehole’s bored or punched.9

  A Royal Signals soldier found that his accent attracted an NCO’s hatred.

  The lance corporal in charge was a sadist and picked on me from the start in particular because I spoke nicely. I could do nothing about it and he harried me from pillar to post for about nineteen hours a day. I think that is the nearest I have even been to being a murderer.10

  Some men were indeed pushed over the edge by this sort of behaviour. Brigadier General Frank Crozier, author of hard-hitting (but not wholly accurate) accounts of his service in France in 1914–18 tells of a bullying NCO who was murdered by a small group of conspirators who shoved a hand grenade, pin duly withdrawn, down the back of his trousers and blew him to tatters. In February 1915 a private and a lance corporal of 2/Welch were executed for murdering their CSM, The poet Robert Graves, acknowledging that it was not his own battalion but ‘the story is true as the telling is frank’, blamed it on a conflict between the CSM’s ‘old army humour … so well-spiced and hearty that one poor sod shot himself and another lost his wits’.11

  Soldiers were frequently punched by comrades and NCOs. James Dunn, medical officer of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, had served in the ranks (albeit the atypical ranks of a yeomanry regiment in the South African War) and knew perfectly well what went on behind the stables, but also knew that soldiers would never speak of it. In May 1917 a groom had a badly-marked face. Before Dunn could raise the issue, the man immediately blamed an officer’s charger: ‘You know, sir, that Dolly kicks sometimes.’ At the same time another groom told his company commander ‘why his face was askew’, a horse had walked over him in his sleep.12 The kick of horse or rifle was as familiar an excuse for barrack-room injury as the unseen door edge or the missed stair is for the results of modern domestic violence.

  Roberston admitted that merciless men would use any opportunity to make strength and cunning count. Soldiers ‘classified’ by firing their personal weapons to gain an official ranking – marksman, first class shot, and so on. Lancers also ‘classified in the use of sword and lance’. Although whacking one another with the single-stick that represented a sword apparently caused little harm, when charging

  with a stout ash pole nine feet in length … the case was different. For the rider and his horse to be ridden down or rolled over was a common occurrence, and it was seldom that one or more of the competitors was not carried off to the hospital … [This] afforded a certain class of individual an opportunity of paying off old scores against any non-commissioned officer against whom he had a grudge.13

  He defended himself by being tougher and more adroit than his enemies.

  There were times when unofficial punishment met formal discipline head-on. Captain Dunn knew X, a private soldier who was ‘a dirty and unhopeful recruit,’ but in the line ‘showed he had a great heart in his small body.’ In contrast, Corporal Z, once a champion boxer, was a ‘smart-looking man but a poor NCO’. A company quartermaster sergeant ‘found the boxer knocking X about, told him to stop it, got some “lip” from him, so he laid him out.’ Corporal Z ‘reported, whining, that the QMS had struck him … Under Military Law … the QMS could not well escape a court martial. It was decided, however, that if he knocked Corporal Z down again, round the corner, justice would be done – and was.’14 The application of what can so easily seem natural justice takes officers onto dangerous ground when they condone, for reasons they think are perfectly valid, acts that they know to be illegal. The issue of ‘beasting’ highlights the question of officers’ responsibility for illegal acts carried out, perhaps without their formal knowledge, but certainly within their real cognisance.

  A contemporary, and decidedly unofficial, definition describes ‘Motivational Beasting’ as a process in which:

  A group or individuals are pushed to their limits or to see how far they go before they jack. Not always nice to watch and a real bummer if you are the beastee. One reason for Beasting is to make sure that the person or group will be able to carry out a harder than usual task and it sorts the men out from the boys.

  A group that has been Beasted and survived will have developed a comradeship between them, morale will be high.

  Beasting or to Beast is probably not PC in the forces anymore.

  One who administers Beasting is known as a Beast Master.15

  Putting military groups under pressure during training can indeed have a beneficial effect, binding them together and often showing that they can achieve things that they might never have believed possible. Amyas Godfrey, a Royal Welch Fusilier officer who spent two years training recruits at Harrogate and then served on a trying tour in Iraq, argued that beasting

  was simply a term for being pushed, pushing oneself, very hard. It’s often misused, it really has to be separated from the criminal act which is bullying …

  The Army, if anything, is extraordinarily strict in what rules it follows and you are not allowed to give any physical punishment. The old classic like ‘get down and give me 10 press ups’ can be used in training, but the officer giving that out as sentence has to record the reason and pass it to the next up commander … You might feel like you are being punished when you are told, ‘that wasn’t good enough, do it again’, it’s part of the training package.16

  One prominent anti-bullying campaigner recognised that ‘The training has to be robust because their lives will depend on it at some point. There’s such a fine line between that and abuse – beastings are not part of training.’17 A former National Serviceman argued that kit inspections, bearing down most heavily upon the maladroit, ensured that t
he group swung in to support a man who was in difficulties:

  Did someone have to ‘show clean’? Then we cleaned his boots or his small pack for him. If the room’s total incompetent … could not lay out his kit in other than a jumble, we all rallied round to make sure he passed muster when our troop sergeant came prowling.18

  In November 2005 a former Royal Marine NCO, who had served in the Falklands and the Gulf, described the brutality shown in a controversial video of training on the Green Beret course at Lympstone as an extreme form of ‘beasting’.

  There is a fine line between character-building and humiliation. This video seems to have crossed the line and appears to be more gladiatorial.

  The officers go through even harder training than the ordinary guys when they join up so they know what the NCOs dish out and how far it goes. But you always have one or two people who take things too far and that’s what has happened here. There have been court martials in the past involving NCO trainers who were found out taking things too far.

  But a lot of that sort of thing happened in the past before society became much more politically correct and bullying was not under such constant focus. Having said that, recruits and marines have to be pushed to the extreme because the corps wants to stay the best, the elite, and you cannot do that with kid gloves. We have all dished it out and been on the receiving end of stuff which would make civilians cringe.19

  If motivational beasting already risks blurring a fine line, what the same contemporary source calls ‘Punishment Beasting’ begins on the wrong side of it. This is

  A punishment ritual, usually involving physical violence to some degree but can be verbal, carried out by one person or more and used to intimidate or reinforce hierarchical status within a group. Can be anything from a Regimental Bath to a good shoeing.