Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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of the new nation-state in the ‘post-Westphalia’ world that followed the 1648 treaty ending the Thirty Years War. Absolutist monarchs, with France’s Louis XIV (to whom both James II and Charles II looked with envy) as their exemplar, asserted themselves by ensuring central control of the armed forces. Royal iconography gradually replaced the crests or arms of individual noblemen; uniforms took on a prevailing national hue; and cannon glowed with symbolism reflecting the status of their master – their large-scale production in royal arsenals so symbolic of the power of new monarchical authority. Louis had the words ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ embossed on his cannon, and until the end of the First World War German field guns bore ‘Ultima Ratio Regis’, affirming that their sharp yap was indeed the king’s last argument. Royal ciphers and armorial bearings graced the new angular fortifications that helped define the period, for a state needed to protect its frontiers against armies or fleets equipped with modern artillery. Fortress gates routinely bear the confident stamp of the king.
In Britain this is most evident in coastal fortifications. Henry VIII’s arms still grace the gateways to the south-coast fortifications he built. Portsmouth was declared a Royal Dockyard by King John in 1212, and impressed Samuel Pepys during a visit in 1661; he found it ‘a very pleasant and strong place’. When Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, landed there in May 1662 she was less impressed, being offered beer, which she hated, and calling for tea instead. Portsmouth still bears the royal stamp in the form of a crown embossed above the keystone of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Portland stone Landport – the only surviving gate to the city’s demolished fortifications. Unicorn Gate, now the main entrance to the dockyard, is distinguished by its crown-collared unicorn. Its lion counterpart, once standing sentry on a gate of its own, has now come to rest at the base of Semaphore Tower. In 1779 the two beasts cost the Exchequer £203. 1s. 8d., a small price to pay for such an elegant affirmation of status.
In the fortress warfare that preoccupied engineers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries a trench dug towards an enemy-held fortress from the parallel lines of entrenchments surrounding it, zig-zagging so that shot would not rake murderously down its line, was called a sap, and the man who dug it was called, in what became the Royal Engineers’ word for private, a sapper. The engineers long used the rank of second corporal for their one-stripe junior NCO. The artillery had always called its own private soldiers gunners, and it soon scrapped the rank of matross, a kind of sub-private who did much of the heavy work associated with guns and gunnery. A petard was an explosive-filled container, shaped like the hat traditionally worn by Welsh ladies, which was screwed or propped (crown side outwards, as it were) to the gate of a fortress, its name derived from the same root that gives us the French verb péter for the emission of a more discreet personal bang. The grade of petardier, a soldier with the unenviable specialism of attaching the petard to the gate, disappeared early on. We still half-remember just how tricky the job was, though, for the petardier risked being ‘hoist with his own petard’ if its sputtering fuse was too short, or if enemy fire prevented him from scampering back the way he had come. The arrangement of rank applied to the redcoats did not, in the first instance, cover the ‘gentleman of the ordnance’, the artillery and engineers. They answered instead to the master-general of the ordnance, usually a peer with a seat on the cabinet, through eventually demoted to become a mere member of the Army Board. Until 1716 artillery and engineer officers were in theory a homogeneous group, though it was increasingly evident that their skill-sets were different, and gunner officers, their importance rising with the power of the weapons they controlled, resented their subordination to men preoccupied with running up the very fortifications that they themselves sought to knock down.
In 1716 the two branches were split, with a corps of engineers and a regiment of artillery. The engineers enjoyed their own rank structure, with one chief engineer, two directors, two sub-directors, and six apiece of engineers in ordinary, engineers extraordinary, sub-engineers, and practitioner engineers in Britain. There were three engineers, headed by a director, in Minorca, and two, with a sub-director in charge, in Gibraltar. This system gave rough equivalency with the rest of the army, with the chief engineer ranking as a brigadier and the practitioner engineers with ensigns, but led to endless difficulties. Engineers were not strictly speaking commissioned, although they might purchase or be granted commissions.
On campaign there were never enough of them to go round, and Marlborough (combining, in his august though overworked person, the offices of captain general and master general) was given to granting bright infantry officers warrants to act as engineers. In 1707 Captain Richard King of Lord Orrery’s Regiment of Foot was appointed an assistant engineer, with a useful £100 addition to his annual pay. There was also the problem of authority. Badges of rank were far from being standardised, and it might not be an easy matter for a young sub-engineer, supervising an infantry working-party, to persuade a grimy sergeant that he did indeed speak with an officer’s authority and it was not yet time for the men to knock off and return to camp. In 1757 the engineers at last adopted formal military ranks, though there long remained a tension between engineers, with their relatively high pay, and the infantry, invariably at the other end of the scale. In late 1915 Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard of the Dorsets was pleased to observe the scribbled work of a trench poet:
God made the bee
The bee makes honey
The Dorsets do the work
And the REs [Royal Engineers] get the money.8
The ranks of the Royal Artillery were simpler from the beginning, although the most junior commissioned rank of fireworker, was soon transformed to lieutenant-fireworker and later to second lieutenant. The rank of second lieutenant also crept into the infantry, first replacing ensign in fusilier regiments, and then used by rifle regiments from their formation in 1800. From 1871 it replaced ensign and cornet across the army as the most junior commissioned rank, although the army’s incurable resistance to standardisation means that the old ranks crop up from time to time. Dine with the Queen’s Guard in St James’s Palace and you will discover that the major commanding it is styled the captain, and his two commissioned subordinates are the subaltern and ensign, although one may actually be dressed as a captain and the other as a lieutenant. The old artillery rank of bombardier survived, and the bombardier was for many years the most junior NCO rank in the Royal Artillery, with corporal above it. When Corporal Ronald Skirth crossed an incompetent officer in 1917 (a process that drearily punctured his service) he found that the conversation had an immediate result on his battery’s notice-board:
As from April 23rd 1917 Corporal Skirth, J.R., reverts to the rank of Bombardier, as a disciplinary measure.
R. A. Snow, Major
Commanding 239 Siege Battery
Royal Garrison Artillery.
‘Partly from pique,’ he recalled, ‘I renounced the privilege of “messing” with the NCOs’. He wrote:
I told my three friends I would muck in with them. If in future if any of them addressed me by rank (which had been their way) I’d kick him in the shins. ‘My name is Ron,’ I said. ‘Not Corporal, of course, and not bloody Bombardier.’9
It was not until after the First World War that corporal disappeared from the Royal Artillery, with the two-stripe bombardier replacing him and the one-stripe lance bombardier close behind.
Non-commissioned ranks were not short of complexities of their own. At first most soldiers held the rank of private sentinel, soon abbreviated to private. John Marshall Deane of 1st Foot Guards and one of the few non-commissioned diarists of Marlborough’s time, always preferred the term in full. When his regiment helped storm the strongly fortified Schellenberg on its way to Blenheim in 1704, he recorded that it lost five officers ‘killed upon the spot’, and another seven wounded: ‘we had likewise in our regiment killed upon the spot and died of their wounds 172 private sentinels, besides above a hundred that was wounded and recovered again.’10 There were at first only two grades of non-commissioned officer. A man’s first step was corporal, derived from the Latin corpus for the small body of men the corporal led. It was ‘a rank which, however contemptible it may appear in some people’s eyes, brought me a clear twopence per diem, and put a very clever worsted knot upon my shoulder too’, wrote William Cobbett.11