Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Trevor Royle suggests that if ‘Macdonald had been a person of influence in high places or indeed of more worldliness, or a guinea or two, then he would have taken legal or political advice and perhaps put a damper on the charges.’ His fall was occasioned by ‘the icy indifference of a class system that failed to stand by the hero of its own creation in his greatest hour of need’.77 There is more to it than that. The issue was not one of covert homosexuality, but of a serious lapse of judgement in a public place before civilian witnesses. It would certainly be fatal to an officer’s career today, in an age when attitudes to homosexuality are infinitely more enlightened. Brigadier Michael Calvert, who had an outstanding wartime career conducting irregular operations, winning a DSO and bar in the process, was court-martialled for gross indecency in 1951 and had to leave the army.78 It was not long after the end of the war, and the evidence against him was given by German youths. Calvert was a Woolwich-educated regular Royal Engineer officer whose reputation as a Chindit column commander was still fresh in the public memory, but none of this could save him.

  The broader point, on the treatment of ranker officers by brother officers of a more conventional background, merits serious consideration. The Duke of Wellington told the 1836 Royal Commission on Military Punishments that rankers

  do not make good officers … They are brought into a society to the manners of which they are not accustomed; they cannot bear at all being heated in wine or liquor … they are quarrelsome … And they are not persons that can be borne in the society of the officers of the army; they are different men altogether.79

  Sir Hugh Rose, commander-in-chief in India at the end of the Mutiny, took the same view, and argued that the process of transferring a man with no advantages of background or education to a much superior class was ‘a very disadvantageous anomaly’. In the mid-1880s, Wully Robertson, hoping for a recommendation, discovered that his commanding officer ‘held the view that promotion from the ranks was not to the benefit of either the man or the state’.80 Not long afterwards, Sir Redvers Buller, the adjutant general, expressed himself as

  strongly opposed to any scheme which tends to increase the number of candidates for commissions from the ranks … The gentleman who has enlisted has lost caste, and it cannot fail that a man who has deliberately adopted as companions men of a lower social and educational standard than himself must … have lowered his own standard by the associations he has cultivated.81

  This was not a universally held opinion. Thomas Hitchbone of the 12th Foot had served in the ranks for nineteen years before becoming adjutant in 1771, but could not obtain an ensigncy till 1778 because of the flood of ‘gentleman candidates’ for every vacancy. He succeeded only because the dying Lieutenant Sweetenham warmly recommended him for the ensigncy that would fall vacant on his death, and ‘the whole corps of officers’ at once made the same request to the commanding officer, who was delighted to support it. Fear of losing this admirable man to another regiment induced his colonel to make him a lieutenant in 1780. During the Boer War Lord Tullibardine, a regular officer in the Royal Horse Guards, had raised the irregular Scottish Horse, and told a Royal Commission in 1902 that

  Some of the most reliable officers I had were appointed through the ranks. They were of all classes, and were promoted purely on their merits. Many of them were not what is termed gentlemen by birth, but I never kept a man who did not behave himself. Perhaps almost the best officer I had in the corps had been a farm hand and was the son of a small farmer in Perthshire, while another had been a footman in civilian life. This last fact was, of course, only known to me.82

  What worked so well in a wartime-raised irregular unit was less acceptable in the staid ranks of the old army. Just after the 84th had commissioned its sergeant major and quartermaster in 1858, Hugh Pearson told his father that he was delighted to hear that Lieutenant Williams was to become adjutant, because it meant that ‘these “rankers” just raised have no chance. I much prefer a gentleman to a man who has risen.’ He was not at all pleased when Ensign George Lambert, who had been sergeant major, was appointed adjutant. ‘The fellows had all been congratulating themselves on having a gentleman as adjutant,’ he wrote,

  and Williams had actually been doing the duties of one for a fortnight, when the gazette overthrew all his hopes, and conferred a much prized appointment on a puny and undeserving snob. No one yet knows why, or for what he got the Victoria Cross. Certainly it was not for ‘distinguished conduct’, and I think even he himself would be puzzled to know why he got it.83

  Lambert had in fact been decorated, while sergeant major of the 84th, for repeated acts of bravery on three dates and distinguished conduct on another two. He bought a lieutenancy in 1858 (which itself dents conventional wisdom about impecunious rankers) and died of natural causes two years later.

  It was often argued that soldiers themselves preferred ‘gentleman officers’. Rifleman Benjamin Harris of the 95th Rifles wrote:

  I know from experience that in our army the men like best to be officered by gentlemen, men whose education has rendered them to be more kind in their manners than your coarse officer, sprung from obscure origin, and whose style is brutal and overbearing.

  He went on to suggest that ranker officers were unpopular because of their concern for detail, and soldiers were ‘worried by these little-minded men for the veriest trifles, about which the gentleman never thinks of tormenting him’.84 When Lieutenant Thomas Blood, himself a ranker, proposed in 1836 that one-third of all officers should be commissioned from the ranks, he argued that such men would know their soldiers so well that they would not be deceived by malingering, thus giving some substance to suggestions that ranker officers were unpopular because they knew too much. The fiercely brave Bernard McCabe seems to have been unpopular with his soldiers because of his strict attention to detail, as evidenced by his conversation with a sentry, a fellow Irishman, who had not challenged him as he walked night rounds in besieged Lucknow:

  OFFICER: ‘Are you the sentry?’

  SENTRY: ‘I am, sir.’

  OFFICER: ‘And why the devil didn’t you challenge me?’

  SENTRY: ‘Because I knew it was you, sir, and that you would be coming this way.’

  OFFICER, VERY SEVERELY: ‘You should have fired, sir. You are not supposed to know anyone outside your post, especially at night.’

  SENTRY: ‘Then by Jesus Christ the next time you come the same way at night I will accommodate you. I will shoot you right enough.’ The officer took no further notice and did not trouble the same sentry again.85

  In fact the sentry was right not to challenge an officer he could recognise, and sentries had quite enough to put up with as it was. Not long afterwards, and only a few miles away, Lieutenant Poole of the 84th was shot dead by a sentry of 5th Fusiliers, ‘but he alone was to blame,’ thought Hugh Pearson,

  It was a dark night, and he wore a large turban round his cap … He was visiting the sentries, and to do so, had to expose himself to the enemy’s fire; in his anxiety to escape their observation by running along a hedge he neglected to answer the challenge and consequently was shot. He lived just long enough to free the sentry from all blame.86

  In 1900 W. E. Cairns, in a book aimed at future officers and their families, noted that some officers were indeed commissioned from the ranks, but ‘the fact remains that men will follow a “gentleman” much more readily than they will an officer whose social position is not so well assured.’ Much of his argument, however, concerned the sheer expense of sustaining commissioned rank, and the risk of being forever compromised by using the wrong military tailor: ‘the youngster will make a fatally false start if by any chance he go to the wrong outlet for the right article.’87 At precisely the time that Cairns was writing, Wully Robertson was making his way through the officer ranks and gaining a DSO in the 1895 Relief of Chitral. He made captain that year ‘in the course of ordinary regimental promotion, and was unusually lucky in reaching that rank in less than seven years a
fter being commissioned’.88 Significantly, he had decided to stay in the cavalry on commission, despite its expense (he thought that it required at least £300 a year and a subaltern was paid £120), by choosing the 3rd Dragoon Guards, a regiment that was stationed in India where living was relatively cheap. When he reported for duty he ‘received a most friendly welcome from all members of the officers’ mess.’ He avoided expense ‘by retiring early to bed and leading an abstemious life’. This helped him to stay awake during hot Indian days, and to work on qualifying in language examinations: Hindu, Urdu, Persian, Pushtu, Punjabi, and Gurkhali. All this brought him extra payment, which was ‘little more than sufficient to pay expenses, but this little was not to be despised for it helped to keep my head, financially, above water.’89

  A number of factors helped create an environment in which the commissioned ranker found it harder to survive. The abolition of purchase and its replacement by education at the two fee-paying colleges, the increasing number of public school cadets, and the cost of buying necessary equipment and paying mess bills were all practical deterrents to taking a commission. Indeed, it could be hard for even the well-to-do to survive, especially in the cavalry. In the 1850s, Cornet Barrington of the 6th Dragoons, ‘a Bachelor of Arts of Oxford, a good oar, a first-class cricketer, a bold rider, and a pleasant companion’, was obliged to leave.90 Two young officers of the 4th Hussars were bullied in 1896 because they had little apart from their pay, and W. E. Cairns cheerfully reported that ‘officers have lived in the 10th [Hussars] with an allowance of only £500 a year apart from their pay, but they have rarely lasted long.’91 In his majestic study of the cavalry, Lord Anglesey suggests that in the 1870s recruits of ‘superior education’ tended to gravitate towards the cavalry. He noted that the 17th Lancers alone had seventeen such men in 1879, and in 1887 Wolseley was told by a colonel that ‘he had in his regiment some thirty sons of well-to-do gentlemen as privates, corporals, etc. and that they had done much to raise the tone of the men in barracks.’92 However, Sergeant Major Edward Mole of the 14th Hussars thought that their experiments usually ended in tears, for

  From three to six months seemed to satisfy them, for they nearly always found the game different to what they expected, and purchased their discharges … They were not born for the life … They soon recognised that without interest at their backs they could hope for nothing, and that in peace time only about one NCO in a hundred gets a commission and then very often by a fluke … A commission from the ranks is not always an unmixed blessing.93

  In 1873 John Edward Acland-Troyte, lieutenant in a volunteer battalion and an Oxford graduate, was anxious for a commission in the regular army but, at 25, he was just too old to obtain one by conventional means. He took the drastic step of signing on in an effort to make his way through the ranks, reached sergeant, and was eventually commissioned. He concluded that most of his fellow-NCOs were happy enough where they were:

  Can it be imagined that a man of the class our recruits came from would be comfortable in gentlemen’s society, and having to conform to ‘society manners?’… I do not believe that there was a man of any rank … during my time who would have taken a sub-lieutenant’s commission if it had been offered to him.94

  Francis Hereward Maitland signed up as a cavalry trooper not long before the First World War. He knew that his family had ‘managed to get me through a public school and I am aware that they could not afford to keep up a commission for me’. He coped well enough with the sweat and piss of the barrack room, but there were times when he reflected on what might have been:

  Stationed not far from us is another famous regiment. In it are two subalterns who were at school with me. Now and then, straying into civilian clothes, I am able to meet them. Surreptitiously if in the ’shot [Aldershot], quite openly if I go to the Smoke [London].95

  On the eve of the First World War it was still possible to rise through the ranks, but between 1870 and 1890 only 3 per cent of all combatant commissions were obtained this way, far fewer than in the days of purchase. One of the most impressive men to make his way at this time was Harry Finn, a tailor’s son from Kent, who enlisted into the 9th Lancers in 1871 and was awarded the DCM for bravery in the Third Afghan War. He was commissioned into 21st Hussars in 1881, and in 1898 commanded the left wing of his regiment, now converted into lancers, in its famous charge at Omdurman, emerging as a brevet lieutenant colonel. In 1900 Finn departed for Australia to take on a series of posts that saw him rise to inspector general of the Commonwealth’s military forces as a temporary major general. A recent assessment reckons that

  Finn’s breezy, informal and direct manner made him well liked by the troops he commanded. He did much to infuse enthusiasm into young and inexperienced troops and set an example of soldierly bearing and conduct. In this way he was prominent among the small group of professional officers who did much to lay the foundations upon which the reputation of the Australian Imperial Force was built.96

  The fact remains, though, that talent was squandered, and the high cost of living in the army deterred not only potential officers from within its ranks but young men who might have made excellent officers but whose families could not afford it. In 1903 a War Office committee considered the expenses incurred by officers, and concluded that an extremely careful cavalry subaltern could survive on a private income of £300 a year, but that most actually disposed of twice this sum. Officer casualties in the Boer War had forced the army to the desperate measure of sending out some ‘ordinary educated young gentlemen, quite untrained’. Even in 1905 untrained youngsters were being appointed probationary second lieutenants. When the First World War broke out there was already a marked shortage of officers, especially in the more expensive arms, and the outbreak of war would immediately compel the adoption of desperate measures.

  CHAPTER 8

  TEMPORARY GENTLEMEN: 1914–45

  ON 1 AUGUST 1914 there were 10,800 officers in the regular army, with just over 2,500 in the Special Reserve, 10,700 in the Territorial Force and a handful in other categories, totalling 24,896, an overall shortfall against establishment of just under two thousand. The Regular Army numbered 236,632 other ranks, a total easily exceeded by the 265,397 officers commissioned during the war. This stark statistic shows, at a stroke, the problem confronting Britain as she embarked upon a war of national survival in which she would confront, for one of the few times in her history, the army of a major power in that conflict’s main theatre.

  The war should have come as no surprise. Wully Roberston was serving in the War Office just after the Boer War, in an appointment which helped take him ‘from being one of the oldest lieutenants in the army in 1895 … in less than nine years [to] one of its youngest colonels.’1 He observed that during his time the official estimate of Britain’s most probable adversary shifted from France to Germany. Economic, naval and colonial rivalry, coupled with concern for the balance of power in Europe, left out of kilter by German victory over France in 1870–71, quickly outweighed personal and dynastic regard for Germany, and the 1904 Anglo-French entente cordiale was followed by the opening, two years later, of informal ‘staff conversations’ that saw Britain plan to send an expeditionary force to northern France in the event of war. That force was the product of one of the most significant bursts of military reform in British history. Between 1906 and 1909 R. B. Haldane, secretary of state for war in the new Liberal Government, instituted a range of reforms, creating an expeditionary force of six infantry divisions and one large cavalry division, fusing together the militia and the volunteers to establish the Territorial Force, and setting up the Imperial General Staff. Haldane had foreseen that there would be an enhanced need for trained officers, and the Ward Committee of 1906 recommended that the existing school cadet corps and university rifle volunteer units should be combined into the Officers’ Training Corps. The OTCs were established in 1908, and by the end of 1910 there were 19 contingents in the university-based ‘Senior Division’, and 152 in the ‘Junior
Division’ at schools. Some 27,700 cadets were enrolled at the beginning of 1912, and 830 former cadets had gone on to take Territorial commissions. Haldane had actually hoped that that the OTCs would play their part in a wider national military regeneration, and although he was to be disappointed here, there can be no doubting the contribution made by OTCs.

  Wolverhampton Grammar School, with its single cadet company, lost 116 of its old boys in the war, and the school magazine bravely charts the fate of a generation. Second Lieutenant Douglas William Armitage disappeared at Loos in 1915 ‘tired, cold and hungry, he was last seen fighting with his fists and since then no more has been heard of him.’ George Murphy had gone to Birmingham University to read medicine, but joined the infantry in 1914 and was killed at Passchendaele, when ‘most of his [machine] gunners were put out of action and he was seen serving a Lewis gun himself until he was shot through the head. It is interesting to recall that Lieutenant Murphy acted as judge in the House Squad Competition in our OTC in 1915.’2 At the other end of the scale, Eton College OTC was a full battalion strong and had a regular adjutant. Herbert Buckmaster remembered parading with the college’s rifle volunteer contingent when Queen Victoria reviewed the public school volunteers in Winsdor Great Park as part of her Jubilee celebrations: there were 3,679 boys on parade, and Eton, with 360, provided the largest detachment. Some 5,650 Etonians were to serve, and 1,150 of them were killed. The war slew masters as well as boys. An old boy of Reading school (Old Redigensian in insider’s jargon), Gordon Belcher was an assistant master at Brighton College and a lieutenant in its OTC. He joined the Royal Berkshires in 1914, was mentioned in dispatches that year and awarded the MC early in 1915, but was killed that May. Herbert Lee was a 1911 Cambridge modern languages graduate who went on to teach at Hurstpierpoint College in Sussex, where he helped run the OTC. He played in the masters versus boys football match of 1913. Four of the eleven masters were killed, amongst them Lee, mortally wounded leading his platoon of Suffolks in an attack on the Salonika front in November 1916.3