Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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been impossible to secure because of ‘a more or less obvious closing of the ranks’. After his release from prison, former corporal Donald Payne, who had pleaded guilty to the inhumane treatment of Mousa, maintained that he had seen several of his comrades ‘forcefully kick and/or punch the detainees,’ and added that ‘he had previously covered up the extent of abuse by British troops out of misguided loyalty.’13 Part of the difference between the behaviour of two groups of soldiers, in Iraq at different times and places, is circumstantial. It owes a good deal to local mood, regimental and small-group culture, and the tone set by commanders, senior and junior alike. In a deep and abiding sense there is less real difference than we might hope for. Atkins retains the chameleon-like ability to be both hero and villain.
Rudyard Kipling, the first writer to get to grips with the British private soldier, could be penetratingly honest about the man’s complexity. His own research was carried out in the 1880s with the help of soldiers of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the East Surreys at Mian Mir – the great military cantonment outside Lahore. This allowed him to glimpse a world rarely seen by middle-class outsiders:
The red-coats, the pipe-clayed belts and the pill-box hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of the oats and horse-piss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mishandled, the crowded troop-ships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse.14
Alongside his heroes, like Captain Crook O’Neil of the ‘Black Tyrone’, stand tragic figures like Private Simmons, mercilessly bullied by Private Losson, who eventually shoots his tormentor and duly hangs for it. In the poem ‘Cells’, the narrator, locked up yet again for being drunk and resisting the guard, regrets that ‘my wife she cries on the barrack-gate, my kid in the barrack-yard’ but knows that ‘as soon as I’m in with a mate and gin, I know I’ll do it again.’15
It was a portrait drawn from life, as we can see from Horace Wyndham’s description of a commanding officer’s orders – the meting out of summary jurisdiction – in an infantry battalion at Aldershot in the 1890s:
At first sight, one would scarcely imagine that the pasty-faced, feeble-looking youth in the centre had, a few hours ago, required the united efforts of four of the regimental police to carry him, striking, blaspheming and madly drunk, from the canteen to the guard-room … The burly scoundrel at the end of the row is now to answer as he may for making a savage assault on a non-commissioned officer. He has ‘ex-Whitechapel rough’ writ large all over his evil countenance, and although he knows perfectly well that trial by court-martial will be his fate, he does not appear to be in the least concerned thereby.16
William Roberston was the only man in British military history to rise through the ranks from private to field-marshal. When he arrived to join the 16th Lancers in 1877, the orderly officer warned him that he was entering a world where private property no longer existed: ‘Give your watch to the sergeant-major of your troop, my lad … for it is unsafe to leave it lying about, and there is nowhere you can carry it with safety.’ His barrack room was peopled with folk
addicted to rough behaviour, heavy drinking, and hard swearing … treated like machines – of an inferior kind – and having little expectation of finding decent employment on the expiration of their twenty-one years’ engagement, they lived only for the present … These rugged veterans exacted full deference from the recruit, who was assigned the worst bed in the room, given the smallest amount of food and the least palatable, and had to ‘lend’ them articles of kit which they had lost or sold.17
This deference was enforced with the aid of unofficial punishment. In 1836 a private of 1st Foot Guards told the Royal Commission on Military Punishments that his battalion had company courts-martial, in which soldiers judged their own kind. Offences like ‘thieving from his comrades or … or dirty tricks’ could result in a man being sling-belted, held down trouserless across a bench and lashed with the leather sling of a musket. It was a disgraceful punishment, and a man thus treated was thereafter ‘never thought anything of’.18
When Roberston joined the army, every military offence, no matter how trivial, was regarded as a crime, for which the offender was flung in the unit’s guard-room until he could be dealt with by his commanding officer. The guard-room
in the case of the cavalry barracks at Aldershot, was about fifteen feet square, indifferently ventilated, and with the most primitive arrangements for sanitation. No means of lighting it after dark were either provided or permitted. Running along one of its sides was a sloping wooden stage, measuring about six feet from top to bottom, which served as a bed for all the occupants, sometimes a dozen or more in number … no blankets (except in very cold weather) or mattresses were allowed, except for prisoners who had been interned for more than seven days. Until then their only covering, besides their ordinary clothes – which were never taken off – consisted of their cloaks, and they had to endure as best they could the sore hips and shoulders caused by lying on the hard boards.19
Life in military prisons was infinitely worse. Flogging remained despite having been abolished in the army generally in 1881. By 1895 the cato’-nine-tails was rarely used, and had been replaced by the birch, which was applied across the bare buttocks so sharply that most victims cried out with pain. In 1895 Private Jones of the 16th Lancers, found guilty of idleness at the crank and reporting sick without cause, received eighteen strokes, and the eighteen-year-old Private Dansie of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was awarded eighteen strokes in Dublin Military Prison for repeated idleness. At Gosport, assaulting a warder brought Private Murphy of the West Riding twenty-five strokes.
Not all violence has been formal. From the very beginning, the process of converting civilian into soldier was entrusted to NCOs who used fists or sticks to help things along. In 1738 an ex-soldier maintained that his comrades had to
stand to be beat like dogs; which, indeed, is generally the case if a man does not speak or look contrary to some officer’s humours. I have known men beat with canes and horse-whips till the blood run from their heads into their shoes, only for speaking in their own defence, and very often laid in irons in some dungeon afterwards … These frequent liberties taken by certain officers, in extending their authorities to use unsufferable severities, is the reason of the best men’s avoiding the army, and good recruits being so difficult to get.20
It could mean death for a man to strike back. When guard was being mounted in the English enclave of Tangier in July 1677, one drummer was late with his stroke. Captain Carr promptly hit him, and the drummer went for his sword, almost as a reflex. He was sentenced to hang, but the garrison commander, well aware that he had few enough soldiers as it was, commuted the sentence so that the drummer had to stand at the foot of the gallows with a rope round his neck until the crime was expiated.21
Until relatively recently some soldiers would rather accept an illegal whack than undergo due process that would leave its mark on their official record. Young Spike Mays, who joined 1st Royal Dragoons as a band-boy in 1924, found that a moment’s inattention earned him ‘a cut across the backside’ from the bandmaster’s stick.22 When Lieutenant Peter Young transferred from his infantry battalion to a newly raised Commando unit in 1940, his NCOs assured him that soldiers far preferred this sort of discipline. Beevor described the army at what he thought was
the tail end of an illegal, though quietly ignored, system of justice as old as the army itself. In many regiments, a sergeant would offer the miscreant a choice: either ‘accept my punishment’ – usually a thump administered behind the vehicle sheds – ‘or the company commander’s’ – which almost certainly meant a fine. ‘I’ll take yours, sarge,’ was the usual resigned reply.23
He would certainly have drawn the line at striking the blow himself, but in May 1780 the thoughtful Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the Black Watch, confided to his diary ‘I knocked down Norman McKay on the parade not so much for being drunk as swearing he was not, and though he deserved it I am sorry for it, for we should never punish a soldier in a passion.’24 Peebles was neither a thug nor a martinet. When