Soldiers
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Zugbach’s work, and the studies it was based on, pointed to ‘an increasing widening of the social base from which officers are drawn’, and when he revisited the subject in 1999 he identified a substantial fall in the proportion of Sandhurst cadets who had attended what he termed ‘elite public schools’.6 Overall, though, the officer corps remained largely recruited from public schools. In 2005, 53 per cent of cadets had attended them, leading the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee to worry that the army was still not appealing to people who had officer potential. Zugbach’s study portrayed an officer corps dominated by public school boys and, in particular, by public school boys who had chosen to serve in specific regiments. The distinguished military historian Sir John Keegan, a Sandhurst lecturer for many years, was right to compare the process of selecting a regiment with courting. Some cadets fall in love at first sight, before they even go to Sandhurst, with family tradition, regional origin or technical speciality colouring their affection.
Regimental headquarters (called ‘home headquarters’ by the cavalry) are the offices that support regimental colonels and deal with the detail of the regiment’s institutional existence. One of their staff of retired officers will be responsible for liaising with potential officers, and the best of them develop an uncanny ability to keep in touch with schools and families that have done the regiment well in the past, and to identify youngsters who may prove an asset in the future. The Royal Green Jackets, which came into existence with regimental amalgamations in 1966 and was itself amalgamated into The Rifles in 2007, had an uncanny (and no less irritating) ability to find an apparently never-ending supply of bright, self-assured and generally unpompous young men. Other cadets form bonds while they are at Sandhurst, perhaps because they hope to follow a close friend into his regiment, or are so impressed by their platoon commander or platoon colour sergeant that they wish to join his tribe. Regiments have a representative amongst the officers on the staff of Sandhurst, and although there is no guarantee that he will wear its cap-badge, for there are times when a regiment may not have an officer serving there, he will act as a point of contact with the potential officer.
However, the path of true love does not always run smooth. A cadet has to list three prospective regiments. Each will have a limited number of vacancies (say two or three for a two-battalion regiment on each of two annual boards), and some decline to be nominated as second or third choices, though they may well not say as much. Others will establish invisible but adamantine selection criteria. Until relatively recently a nice and efficient cavalry regiment expected its young officers to have a serious interest in one of the field sports, though this requirement appeared nowhere in its literature. Although the reports furnished by Sandhurst to regiments are now not as frank as they once were, because of the fear, in a litigious age, that a cadet’s future career might be blighted by a flash of less than objective honesty, regiments will pay careful attention to the cadet’s positioning in his platoon, and may take the view that it is better to select too few officers than to accept somebody rubbing along in the bottom third of his intake. They will also send candidates off for at least one ‘battalion visit’. When conducted badly, as they sometimes are, these can consist of letting a pack of subalterns loose on the visitor to test his drinking skills, or driving him at high speed across Salisbury Plain in a Warrior. These processes often have the same copious result, especially if the latter takes place the morning after the former. Well-conducted visits, with an opportunity for the cadet to meet some of the soldiers he may one day command, provide the regimental selection board (perhaps consisting of the regimental colonel, regimental secretary, a captain and a major) with valuable evidence when it sees the cadet towards the end of his time at the Academy.
There are sometimes broken hearts. A cadet who sets his sights too high, perhaps by nominating three sought-after infantry regiments and falling just short of getting into any of them, may finish up in a corps, which was not his first love. A candidate who had seemed an obvious choice, and had been on RHQ’s list for years, might get back-termed (a fatal objection for some regiments) or simply interview badly on a board when another, perhaps less favoured candidate, came across surprisingly well. There is just a little room for manoeuvre as the marriage-brokers (regimental colonels and perhaps the Commandant of Sandhurst) try to ensure that, say, a natural infantryman does not finish up as a logistician. It is generally possible to be rescued from an unhappy marriage by divorce. Mike Jackson did well at Sandhurst, becoming a junior under officer in the ‘cadet government’. He was very much interested in joining the Parachute Regiment, but eventually concluded that his flair for languages made the Intelligence Corps a better choice. The corps requires its officers to spend some time with a ‘teeth arm’ unit so as to gain experience of the mainstream army, and Jackson was attached to the Paras, who reported on him as ‘by inclination, character and physique’ being better suited to the infantry than the Intelligence Corps.7 The Intelligence Corps was not wholly delighted to lose him, but in 1970 he transferred to the Parachute Regiment.
Had Mike Jackson not transferred it would have been inconceivable for him to have risen beyond brigadier, for the army was then, and is now, dominated by its teeth arms. Over the period of Zugbach’s first study it was not simply a question of the teeth arms in general, but of some regiments in particular. A remarkable 46 per cent of generals came from the Royal Green Jackets, the Foot Guards, the Household Cavalry, the Cavalry and the Parachute Regiment, with the Green Jackets alone providing 8.58 per cent of the army’s general officers. A more detailed breakdown of the Green Jackets concluded that
The cadets show a high proportion of Etonians, etc. and amongst the generals the proportion is very high … The social location is upper middle-class, with some indication that this may spill over into the upper classes rather than downward. The Royal Green Jackets represents a professional elite, taking cadets from high in the Order of Merit [at Sandhurst], rejecting the back-squadded and producing proportions of generals far in excess of the expected share of the ranks concerned. So extreme is this tendency to dominate the senior ranks of the army that the regiment is nicknamed the ‘Black Mafia’ (black being the colour of the regiment’s buttons).8
This was an exceptional period, for two successive Chiefs of the General Staff, Sir Roland Gibbs (1976–9) and Sir Edwin Bramall (1979–82) were Green Jackets. By 1999 though, not only had the Green Jackets lost their dominant position, though they remained very influential, but the proportion of public school-educated generals had declined from 100 per cent to 83 per cent, just as the proportion of generals educated at Oxford and Cambridge had shrunk from 50 per cent to 33 per cent. Moreover, the change is more marked amongst junior generals, with 77 per cent of the 1974 major generals public school educated as against 54 per cent of the 1996 sample. Zugbach concluded that ‘the graduate from a non elite university background is beginning to displace the [public school] educated officer at the senior levels of the British military system.’9
When Antony Beevor wrote about his old service in 1990 this process seemed to be gaining momentum rapidly, with fears of ‘a collapse in the ethos of public service’ as more and more young men seemed to regard the army as a poor investment for their time when there were glittering prizes to be won in the City. The economic crisis of the noughties seems to have checked the movement, and there are currently fewer worries about an officer shortfall. I gave up my post on the academic staff at Sandhurst in 1983, and did not return there till 1999 for my first stint on the selection board as colonel of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, the infantry regiment of southeast England. Graduates outnumbered non-graduates, and the range of universities, and the degrees obtained at them, by subject and quality, was very wide indeed. Some familiar public schools still sent us officers from time to time, but the close relationships that had once linked schools to the county regiments from which my own was created in 1992 was a thing of the past. Family connections s
till mattered, and I was delighted to welcome the grandson of an officer who had been colonel of one of our predecessor regiments when I was a young officer, but secretly relieved that he had interviewed so well that nobody could accuse me of nepotism. A sense of regionality helped, and there was a steady trickle of applicants who had served, either as officers or soldiers, in our Territorial battalion.
Wise regimental boards will try to give serious consideration to candidates who are likely to pass out in the top third of their Sandhurst platoon, were well reported on their battalion visit, and are unequivocally committed to their arm of service. I never worried about the cut of a cadet’s suit or the sound of his voice, and was always pleased, when I remembered a nervous young man sitting opposite the board in the upstairs ante-room of the officers’ mess at Sandhurst, to see how much he had developed after his first tour of duty.
CHAPTER 10
CHURCH MILITANT
SOLDIERS HAVE TENDED to judge religion by the quality of its advocates, and the concept of army chaplains is an old one. There were regimental preachers on both sides during the Civil War. Perhaps the best known was the Parliamentarian Hugh Peters, an eloquent and strong-minded Puritan who combined giving inspirational sermons with taking messages from the field armies to parliament, raising troops and even laying hands on artillery to conduct the siege of Pembroke in 1648. George Monck argued that one of a general’s main tasks was to ‘settle an opinion of right in the minds of his Officers and Soldiers: the which can no better way be done than by the Chaplains of an Army.’1 Chaplains were appointed by regimental commanders, who took care to select men whose opinions agreed with their own. When Colonel John Okey of the New Model Army’s dragoon regiment fell out with some of his officers over knotty theological points, he was vexed to find that his chaplain, Mr Close, supported the dissidents. Okey at once dismissed Close, telling him that he might soldier on as a private trooper but not as chaplain. Close retorted that ‘if he were not fit to be chaplain to the regiment, he was not fit to ride in any troop.’2
Parliamentarian chaplains had to contend with a soldiery holding firm theological views. Despite the fact that preaching was in theory restricted to ordained ministers of a reformed church, some officers and men interrupted sermons, set up their own conventicles, and spoke from the pulpit. Captain Pretty of Ireton’s regiment told a chaplain to be silent, saying that he had been drunk on Saturday night and was therefore not fit to preach on Sunday morning, and a trooper of Cromwell’s regiment of horse stood up in church when the minister had finished speaking, ‘pretending to question something delivered, but indeed fell upon venting to the people the doctrine of universal grace, that no man was condemned for anything but unbelief’.3 Chaplains enjoyed officer status, were paid about the same as captains of foot, and in the New Model, had commissions signed by the commander-in-chief.
The Restoration army inherited the concept of regimental chaplains, who were expected to ‘every day read the common prayers of the Church of England to the soldiers … and preach to them as often as shall be thought fit’.4 They were commissioned on the recommendation of the regiment’s colonel. Fortresses and garrisons had their own chaplains, generally appointed with the approval of the governor, and the Board of Ordnance maintained a few chaplains to minister to the Royal Artillery.
Contemporaries had sharply differing opinions on the value of chaplains. In 1708, satirist Ned Ward reckoned that the average regimental colonel ‘usually keeps a chaplain for the battalion he commands, as he does a led horse, more for show than for service’.5 The Revd Peter Vatass, chaplain to the 14th Light Dragoons, had been on unpaid leave for 52 years in 1796, without successive colonels feeling his absence too keenly, not least because they pocketed the money allocated for his pay. There were some officers, like Captain Bennett Cuthbertson, who thought that soldiers were ‘bumbling rustics of child-like simplicity’ who would genuinely profit from the guidance offered by chaplains, whose sermons ought to be readily comprehensible to simple souls and should identify prevalent moral failings.6
A committed chaplain would not only read prayers and hold services, but would also conduct baptisms, marriages, and funerals; visit the sick; attend the dying; and offer consolation to the condemned, treating his regiment for all the world like an itinerant parish. However, the army chaplain was exposed to severe temptations, and Ned Ward maintained that although battles and sieges made him unusually devout, as soon as the danger was past he was
in his old pickle of profaneness; for no sooner is the storm over, or the regiment marching into winter quarters, but off goes the glass, and up go madam’s fine petticoats; ’tis handle your arms, and to the left about as you were … He is far from being a scandal to his profession: he may drink and wench to the end of the chapter, yet he may plead with the missionary Jesuits in China that he permits himself those liberties with a design to render his person acceptable to the people … He seldom swears, but when he’s full of brandy wine, or good Burgundy, and then the flesh yields to the spirit: and he carries himself in such a manner, as you’d imagine him, by his dress and behaviour, rather an Irish grenadier or dragoon, than the soldier of a crucified master.7
There were certainly scandals enough. In 1774 the Revd Robert Newburgh of the 47th Regiment was accused of sodomy, and in 1797 the Revd Mr Blunt of the 33rd Regiment, while at sea on an expedition to the Philippines, got ‘abominably drunk, and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry’. His commanding officer, the future Duke of Wellington, tried to cheer him up, assuring him that ‘what had passed was not of the least consequence, as no one would think the worse of him for little irregularities committed in a moment of forgetfulness.’ Sadly Blunt could not be consoled, fell into a depression and ‘actually fretted himself to death’.8 Drink was also the undoing of the 3rd Light Dragoons’ chaplain in India in the 1840s. Sergeant John Pearman recalled that the night patrol of the officers’ lines ‘would often come across our parson dead drunk. We would have him carried to his bungalow or dwelling house.’9
The chaplain’s most spectacular duty was the pre-battle service. Blenheim was fought on a Sunday. The fact that the British wing of the allied army had to wait until the Imperialist wing was ready to attack, gave the thirteen clergymen with the British contingent ample time to complete their business. They prayed, under sporadic artillery fire, on the line of the Nebel brook, before battle commenced in earnest. One of the best-recorded pre-battle services was conducted by Father Francis Gleeson for 2/Royal Munster Fusiliers on the evening of 8 May 1915 – the day before the battle of Aubers Ridge. The Munsters halted at a wayside shrine and formed up on three sides of a square. Father Gleeson, mounted and with a stole over his uniform, gave general absolution and the battalion sang Te Deum before continuing its advance to the front: it lost 19 officers and 374 men the next day. Fortunino Matania painted The Last Absolution of the Munsters for Sphere magazine using information provided by the widow of the battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel V. G. H. Rickard, who was killed in the battle.
Gleeson served a one-year engagement as a chaplain from November 1914 to November 1915, departing after seeing his battalion badly mauled again, this time at Loos. He told the army’s senior Roman Catholic chaplain
I am sorry to be leaving the dear old Munster lads, but I really can’t stand it any longer. I do not like the life … though I love the poor men ever so much … will you please send me the papers regarding my discharge.
However, he went out to France for another year from May 1917 to May 1918. After the war Gleeson incurred the hostility of the Bishop of Cork, an enthusiastic republican who resented his association with the British army. He died in 1959 as a parish priest in Dublin and a member of the Metropolitan chapter. Gleeson’s reputation spread beyond his own battalion. Robert Graves, a special reserve officer in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, wrote admiringly of Father Gleeson, and maintained that, when the b
attalion lost all its officers at First Ypres, Gleeson had removed his black badges of rank, taken command of the survivors, and held the line.10
Pre-combat services were common in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. ‘In Afghanistan we did services for groups of soldiers before they went on planned ops,’ recalled a senior chaplain. ‘I remember a group of non-church-going soldiers coming and asking me if I would bless them before they deployed because they knew they would most likely get into some heavy fire fights, which they subsequently did.’ Another chaplain told him of his experience in going forward to a patrol base to visit the troops and hold a memorial service for a soldier who had been killed. No sooner had the service begun than the base came under attack:
I remember him telling me about the incident a few days after it happened. Apart from those in the sangars, the whole company was on parade and it had formed up in an open square, with the chaplain out in front. Whenever the rounds started coming in and landing all around the place (with RPGs exploding, etc.) the chaplain wasn’t sure whether he should run for cover or continue with the service. He looked at the OC and the CSM and those standing on parade and apart from a few that had peeled off to the sides to support the sangars the rest stood firm. The mortars and the heavy weapons in the sangars engaged the enemy attackers, while the chaplain carried on with the service. However, when it came to the minute’s silence, all firing from inside the base stopped. Later the mortar sergeant told the padre that he had counted the minute and signalled the end by resuming firing, which was needless to say accompanied by a heavy rate of fire from the sangars. To me this just typifies both the role of the chaplain on modern ops and the attitude of the British soldier. Even in the midst of a heavy attack, the desire to remember and pay their respects out-weighed other considerations.11