Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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his own line between sergeants, with their sashes and halberds, and corporals, armed and equipped just like the men. From 1660, though, the army was clear in its distinction between ‘commission-officers’, until the end of the eighteenth century, whose ranks began with cornet (for cavalry) and ensign (for infantry), and non-commissioned officers, who then constituted sergeants and corporals.
In Queen Elizabeth’s day a captain, be he a white-haired gentleman gravely stepping out at the head of his company of militia, or a braggadocio roaring back from the Spanish war, was an important man. His title derived from the Latin caput, head, and the slightly later captaneus, chief. His deputy, ready to take his place when the need arose, was the lieutenant, its French root meaning ‘place taker’; the same as the Latin locum tenens that now describes the replacement for our usual GP. The ensign (corrupted to give Shakespeare’s ‘Ancient Pistol’ his swaggering title) was the infantry company’s most junior officer, and carried its ensign or colour, just as his comrade in its counterpart, the cavalry troop, bore its distinguishing cornet or guidon.
The proud Spanish infantry, until its 1643 defeat by the French at Rocroi, was the cynosure of European armies. Its columns, each made up of several companies, were commanded by officers whose title derived from the colonello itself, and they too had deputies, lieutenant colonels, to take their place. The major, from the Latin magnus, great, and so on to the Italian maggiore, was indeed a major figure, who came to rank between the captains and the colonel’s stand-in. Until the 1680s his title in Britain was sergeant major, not to be confused with the later non-commissioned sergeant major. Captains and their subalterns constituted ‘company officers’, and majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels were soon known as ‘field officers’.
Above them came officers enjoying more general authority. Initially their most senior had been the captain general, Marlborough’s highest rank. Although that term fell out of use in the early eighteenth century, the Honourable Artillery Company, with its idiosyncratic ‘regimental fire’ toast, still drinks the health of ‘The Queen, our Captain General’. Field marshal, Britain’s highest military rank, currently in abeyance, was a relatively late arrival. It does not appear in the Army List till 1736, and in 1744 John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair, was the first army commander-in-chief to hold it. In the army’s early history the rank was granted sparingly, and there were no field marshals from 1773 to 1792, though there was plenty of fighting. Below this comes general, sometimes colloquially ‘full general’, just as colonels are ‘full colonels’ to distinguish them from their ‘half colonel’ subordinates. Next, for just the same reasons that give us lieutenant and lieutenant colonel, comes lieutenant general. This was, perversely, a senior rank to that of major general (the latter having been ‘sergeant major general’ in the armies of the Civil War). By the end of the nineteenth century one of generals’ dress distinctions was oak-leaf braid around the peak of their flat forage-cap; by the First World War this had given them the nickname ‘brass hats’. It is now conventional wisdom to see debates over the war’s strategy being carried on between the brass hats and the ‘frocks’ – the politicians in black coats – and one of the blood-and-thunder memoirs written by Brigadier General Frank Crozier was entitled A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land.
The British were long ambivalent about the rank between colonel and major general. Brigades of horse or foot, two to four regiments of each, could simply be commanded by whichever of their colonels was ‘eldest’ by date of rank: we can almost glimpse that anxious fumbling with commissions, followed by beams of satisfaction or growls of exasperation. Or they might be headed by a major general, the working rank for brigade command for much of the army’s life. Senior colonels stepping up to lead brigades might be invested with the local rank of brigadier to do so, or might receive formal commissions as brigadier general. In 1685 James II introduced a note of confusion by having ‘Colonels of Brigades’, ‘Brigadiers’ and ‘Brigadiers-General’. The rank had much in common with its naval equivalent, commodore, with brigadier generals resembling commodores of the first class, who looked very much like the admirals they yearned to be, and brigadiers mirroring commodores of the second class, who were most definitely captains briefly ‘acting up’. It was not generally substantive, and officers holding the rank gave it up when the relevant appointment ceased.5 In 1810 Henry Torrens, the adjutant general, described the rank as ‘inconvenient and temporary’, and thought that the answer was to make more major generals.
While lieutenant colonels and above were promoted by the buggins’s turn of seniority, brigadiers were appointed to fill specific vacancies, a process that inevitably caused mutterings. On the march to Blenheim, Marlborough promoted Colonel Archibald Rowe to command a brigade and, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the seniority roll, saw at once that this might cause difficulties:
He is the eldest colonel we have here, and a very diligent officer [he wrote], but this will give just occasion for Colonel Shrimpton of the Guards to desire the like commission, he being an elder Colonel than Rowe, so that I desire they [i.e. their new commissions] may be dated of the same day.6
Rowe solved the issue of long-term seniority by boldly ordering his brigade, attacking Blenheim village, not to fire until he had struck the French palisade with his sword; he was knocked over by the opening volley.
We remember Reginald Dyer, responsible for the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, as ‘General Dyer’. He was a brigadier general, commanding 45th Infantry Brigade, at the time of the shooting of perhaps 380 civilians in the town’s Jallianwalla Bagh. On retirement in 1920, he reverted to his substantive rank of colonel. Regulations contained a provision enabling the Army Council to recommend the grant of honorary rank to any officer who had held local or temporary general’s rank. It had taken the view that Dyer’s action constituted ‘an error of judgement’, but did not propose to take disciplinary action, and therefore there seemed ‘to be no reason why honorary rank should be withheld’. The Army Council asked the India Office to arrange for the publication of Dyer’s rank in the London Gazette, but the India Office, nervous of bad publicity, duly missed the publication date and the moment passed. When Dyer mounted a campaign for honorary rank he was able to marshal powerful support, but the fortuitous presence in London of General Sir Claude Jacob, Chief of the General Staff in India, revealed that senior Indian army officers were not in favour, least of all in view of the Prince of Wales’s imminent visit. The issue split the Army Council, but it no longer backed Dyer, whose application perished quietly amongst the files and ink-pots. Colonel Dyer had already been disabled by a stroke, and died in 1927.7
By the time that Reginald Dyer died the rank he craved had expired too. Brigadier generals were spoken of as ‘general’ tout court and their uniforms and badges of rank aligned them clearly with other generals. The army’s massive expansion during the First World War, and the burgeoning of senior officers in supporting arms and services, had led to an unprecedented expansion in the number of generals, with a recent survey identifying 1,253. They narrowly included Hugh Garvin Goligher Esq, financial adviser to the commander-in-chief in France, who capitalised on his precedence as temporary brigadier general by getting a uniform run up, and having his portrait painted in it. As part of its campaign to reduce the visible impact of generals and staff officers in the aftermath of the First World War, the army did away with the rank of brigadier general altogether, replacing it on 1 January 1921 with that of ‘colonel commandant’, as opposed to ‘colonel on the staff’.
This compromise soon foundered, and might prove untraceable today were it not for a memorial in the main hall of the old Staff College at Camberley, commemorating officers killed in Ireland in the 1920s. Two brigade commanders, killed as colonel commandants, are included. In 1928 the rank of brigadier reappeared, although it was not substantive till 1946, and its holders looked far more like colonels than major generals. Their red collar tabs lacked generals’ gold embroidery, and their epaulettes bore a crown and three stars, the latter so configured as to make it hard for officers from those regiments (like the Foot Guards) wearing oversize stars to squeeze them onto the epaulette. Today British brigadiers are one-star officers but not generals, though those on the staff of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps style themselves, by convention, ‘brigadier general’ in multinational correspondence. All of these arrangements applied to the red-coated army controlled by the commander-in-chief.
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