Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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been their commander, and commending them for ‘that good name you are so justly possessed of whether in quarters or the field.’ He remembered that he ‘could hardly make an end of this little speech, my voice faltered, and my knees shook under me.’ Evidently ‘the poor fellows were affected too.’ He promptly ordered them ‘five gallons of rum to make a drink of grog in the evening,’ effectively giving them nearly half a pint of rum a head, a gift no doubt destructive of the very sobriety he had urged upon them.25
Continuity and change lie at the very heart of my story. Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, has argued that different forms of military organisation were ‘ultimately rooted in political, social and economic structures … each of them was also partly the product of the technology then in use.’26 The British army that came into being with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 has evolved in myriad ways since then, with these political, social, economic and technological pressures all playing their part in the process. I have no doubt that the Duke of Marlborough, who oversaw the army’s transition from a scarlet puddle of ‘guards and garrisons’ in the late 1600s to the world-class force that helped dash the dynastic ambitions of Louis XIV, would recognise, in the tired heroes of Helmand, the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago. They wear loose camouflage fatigues, not red coats with bright facings; their professional knowledge would leave Marlborough’s men dazzled, and their rationality and scepticism would mark them off from an age coloured by belief and deference.
And yet their social organisation is so recognisably similar that we may doubt whether, in the British context, technology has really shaped structures quite as much as it has elsewhere. The major combat arms, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, have retained forms and terminologies that the men who fought at Blenheim – or Waterloo or the Somme, for that matter – would readily grasp. Lieutenant colonels, leading their regiments into action, have lost nothing of their pivotal importance in the hierarchy, and the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe of the Welsh Guards, killed in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, underlines the risks they still run. Regiments, with their elders and distinctive markings – as characteristic of the army as an ancient Briton’s woad, the cicatrices of an African warrior or a junker’s duelling scars – are still an enduring feature of the army, usually much misunderstood and endemically under threat, but thudding on like the beat of a distant drum.
Formal and informal structures continue to intermesh. Most modern soldiers would recognise the close and comradely world prescribed in the 1800 Regulations for the Rifle Corps, which stipulated that every corporal, private and bugler should select a comrade from a rank differing from his own. Comrades were to berth, drill and go on duties together, and comrades could not be changed without the permission of the captain.27
Although the technology would doubtless baffle a Wellingtonian footsoldier, Colour Sergeant ‘Stick’ Broome’s description of extracting the wounded Private Johnson Beharry from a Warrior armoured vehicle in Iraq shows the same bonds of comradeship that have helped hold men together for three centuries:
We hit the ground, and we came under contact from small arms immediately. Woody and Erv went left, myself and Cooper started to pull Beharry out of his seat. This was the first chance I had to see the badly lacerated face of Bee … I pulled him out with the help of big Erv and Jim Cooper and put him into my Warrior with his head in my lap.28
There is much in common between a rifleman like William Green of Lutterworth, whose ‘disposition to ramble’ took him into the army, and Dorset shepherd Benjamin Harris, carried away by the understated glory of a green jacket, and the likes of Lance Corporal Wood and Private Ervin. A modern recruiter would squirm at the Duke of Wellington’s assessment of the army of his own age:
A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class – no matter whether your son or my son – all must march; but our friends – I may say it in this room – are the very scum of the earth. People talk about enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.29
It remains true that the majority of infantry soldiers are recruited, as they always have been, from boys whose civilian futures do not seem bright. The modern army’s growing tendency to cream off the cleverest of its recruits for its technical corps has accentuated the process. In 1942 the army’s adjutant general, responsible for its manpower policies, admitted that the infantry ‘received in effect the rejects from the other arms of the service’.30 It is still easiest to recruit at times of economic depression. Just as Wellington could scarcely have beaten the French without the aid of men who had chosen to serve rather than starve, so the army of the early twenty-first century has been saved from a manning crisis by the shortage of jobs elsewhere.
In Scotland the issue has become heavily politicised, with Scottish National Party backbencher Christine Grahame maintaining that many Scots recruits were in fact ‘economic conscripts … turning to the Army as a way out of poverty and deprivation, brought on by the failed policies of London Labour’.31 The predictable furore aroused by these remarks cannot alter the fact that Scotland’s economic plight was a spur to recruitment from the army’s very earliest years. As historian Stephen Wood wrote of the Scottish soldiers who signed on to fight in Marlborough’s wars: ‘Many would be enlisted while drunk or have the edges of their doubts blunted with alcohol; some would enlist as an alternative to gaol, or starvation, or domestic responsibilities.’32
It is evident that economic compulsion was not restricted to Scotland. In 1859 Lieutenant General Sir George Weatherall, the adjutant general, told the Royal Commission on Recruiting ‘there are very few men who enlist for the love of being a soldier; it is a very rare exception … they are starving, or they have quarrelled with their friends, or there are cases of bastardy, and all sorts of things.’33 In 1877 the sergeant major of the 77th Foot asked a Geordie recruit if he had served in the army before, only to be told ‘No. Aw were niver hard enough up, to list, afoor.’34 Robert Edmondson, who signed on as a private in the late 1880s, suggested that up to 80 per cent of the army was drawn from the unemployed, adding ‘Empty pockets and hungry stomachs are the most eloquent and persuasive of recruiting sergeants.’35 The First World War made comparatively little difference, and in 1926 The Times reported that 60 per cent of recruits from the London area were unemployed when they signed on. When Spike Mays arrived at Canterbury to begin his basic training, he was received with a cheery greeting from Mitch, a fellow recruit ‘Wotcher, mate. Ain’t ’arf ’ungry. Could scoff a scabby-’eaded ape.’36
There were always some genuine enthusiasts. Joseph Gregg, who was to take part in the charge of the Light Brigade, wrote, ‘My father was a soldier at the time of the battle of Waterloo … As a boy, I always had a desire to see a battlefield, and made up my mind to enlist in a cavalry regiment.’37 Herbert Wootton, who joined up on the eve of the First World War, agreed that he too
was very keen on becoming a soldier. I had two uncles, both regulars, who served through the South African war of 1899–1902. As a youngster I was thrilled with their stories. I became a keen reader of G. A. Henty’s books on war, and later read Rudyard Kipling’s books. I loved to be in the company of old soldiers.38
Captain Doug Beattie’s assessment of his own predilection for a military career (he signed on as a 16-year-old in 1981) has many answering echoes:
I suppose soldiering was in my blood. My dad was a serviceman. My grandfathers had fought in World War Two, one with the Royal Artillery, the other with the Irish Fusiliers. I entered the world in England, a result of the posting system of the army that dad – then a colour sergeant in the Royal Ulster rifles – was subject to.39
Wellington’s point about conscription is fundamental to understanding the British army. For most of its history it was recruited by voluntary enlistment, although economic necessity, judicial compulsion, and the gulling of drunken youths all blurred the definition