Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  whenever it is found that the clergy of the Roman Catholic church are in the habit of using seditious and inflammatory language to their congregation, officers commanding detachments will take their men to the Service of Mass only, marching them off when that is concluded.27

  When Major General Sir Colin Campbell addressed the Highland Brigade before it advanced at the Alma in 1854, he warned the men:

  Remember this: whoever is wounded – I don’t care what his rank is – whoever is wounded must lie where he falls till the bandsmen come to attend to him. No soldiers must go carrying off wounded men. If any soldier does such a thing, his name shall be stuck up in his parish church … Keep silence. Fire low.28

  Campbell’s threat might have rung hollow with some of the 93rd, however, because evangelical Presbyterians in the regiment had no sympathy with the established Church of Scotland. In 1848 they had refused to follow their officers into a church with a Church of Scotland minister, and when the commanding officer complained to a sergeant he was firmly told not to interfere. This directness was wholly in the 93rd’s tradition. At Balaclava Campbell warned the regiment that there could be no retreat and they must die where they stood. A soldier replied ‘Aye, Sir Colin. An needs be, we’ll do that’, and there was firm approval from the ranks.

  We have seen something of the process that converted highlanders from wild and bizarrely dressed potential rebels in the first half of the eighteenth century to stalwart linchpins of Queen and Empire a century later. Things were infinitely more complex for Irish regiments. The reign of James II, echoing folk memories of the fires of Smithfield and the threat of invasion from Catholic Europe, reinforced long-standing prejudices against Catholicism, and many Englishmen equated it with disloyalty. It was not until 1829 that the Catholic Relief Act removed most of the legal restraints on Catholics. Suspicions that most Irishmen were potential rebels were heightened by the great rebellion of 1798 and then again, by the Fenian agitation of the 1860s and beyond. In 1799 the 5th (Royal Irish) Dragoons was disbanded because of accusations that its ranks had been infiltrated by rebels. When the regiment was re-raised in 1858 it kept its old number but lost its seniority. Having been converted into lancers, it was amalgamated with the 16th Lancers in 1922 to form the 16th/5th, the apparent oddness of numbers being explained by the chequered history of the 5th. While the case against the 5th is far from proven, there was no doubt that several regiments were indeed affected by Fenianism: this may have been why the 76th Foot, despite recruiting in Scotland, was posted off to a long tour of duty in the Far East in 1867.

  The behaviour of Irish soldiers was inclined to polarise opinion. There could be no doubting their prodigious achievements on the battlefield. In 1810 the 88th Foot, the Connaught Rangers (or indeed, ‘The Devil’s Own’), threw the French off Busaco Ridge with a bayonet charge. The following year, grim-faced and silent, they took the charnel village of Fuentes de Oñoro, then in 1812 they clawed their way into Ciudad Rodrigo, helped take the castle at Badajoz by escalade, and played a leading part in Wellington’s great victory at Salamanca. The British captured five French regimental eagles in the Napoleonic wars. One was taken at Barossa in 1811 by Sergeant Patrick Masterson of the 87th (Prince of Wales’s Irish) Regiment, who celebrated with the deathless cry ‘By Jasus, boys, I have the cuckoo.’ At Waterloo the 27th Regiment (Inniskilling), drawn up in the centre of Wellington’s position, suffered 66 per cent casualties, the highest loss incurred by any British battalion that day. Sergeant Major Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars tells us how its men, ‘it may literally be said, were lying dead in square’.29 The case of the 27th shows how hard it is to make easy assumptions about religion. Perhaps two-thirds of its soldiers were Roman Catholics, and the remainder were Ulster Protestants.

  If the Irish got British generals out of trouble in battle, they got themselves into trouble in barracks, camps and on the line of march. Many of them enlisted into the forces of the Honourable East India Company, and Nathaniel Bancroft thought that three-quarters of the men in his troop of Bengal Horse Artillery were Irish:

  They were the first in mischief, merriment and devilment of all description, brave to temerity, never at a loss for an answer or an excuse, no matter how difficult the question or how grave the subject to be discussed … They certainly ruled the roost in the troop.

  One of his Irish comrades:

  although a man of personal courage, was an utter desperado. He was known among his comrades by the sobriquet of ‘Bullock-horn’, in consequence of his back and shoulders having been discoloured and hardened by repeated floggings for making away with his regimental necessaries and drunkenness on duty. After his promotion … the first day he made his appearance in a sergeant’s uniform, he ‘tuk,’ as he expressed it, ‘a drop o’stuff, be way av wittin’ the shrtipes an his arum, an’ the goold band an his cap’.

  He was promptly court-martialled for drunkenness and selling his gold-braid chevrons and cap-band to buy liquor.30 Sir Thomas Picton had the Connaughts in his division in the Peninsula and admired their fighting qualities, but their endless thieving led him to call them the ‘Connaught Footpads’.

  When the Irish fought, it was not always against the monarch’s enemies. In India in 1885, Colour Sergeant John Fraser of the 5th Fusiliers heard his battalion’s duty bugler sounding for ‘picket’ and ‘double’, meaning that the duty picket was required double-quick. When he reached the scene he found that men of the 18th Royal Irish were smashing the windows of the garrison’s Nonconformist chapel. There was a major fight when the picket arrived, for ‘The Irish were annoyed at being interrupted, and we were annoyed at being turned out of barracks to deal with them. These facts provided motives for a certain amount of exuberance on both sides.’31 Irish charm occasionally assumed political proportions. Lieutenant Kelly of the 40th Regiment, attending Mass in Lisbon like a good Catholic, fell in love with a Portuguese lady and promptly ran away with her, getting the chaplain of a Portuguese battalion to formalise their union. Unfortunately the lady’s father was a general, and Wellington found himself embroiled in the resultant dispute, though the happy couple stayed together.

  Wellington maintained that, in the Peninsula, despite the large number of Irishmen in his army,

  nobody goes to Mass … I have not seen one soldier perform any one act of religious worship in these Catholic countries, excepting making the sign of the cross to induce the people of the country to give them wine.32

  John Owen, chaplain general at the time, thought that Irish soldiers often made their religion a pretext for idleness on Sundays. However, it was not until 1793 that men serving in Ireland were officially allowed to attend Mass, and only in 1806 that this right was extended to the army as a whole. Catholics still had to tread carefully, as in 1811 Private Charles O’Neill of the 28th Regiment was awarded 300 lashes for refusing to attend an Anglican church parade and demanding to be allowed to attend Mass instead. Nor can we necessarily equate attendance at Mass with a man’s belief, for until the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholicism in Ireland was not highly clericalised, and ‘the practice of the faith was centred not on the scattered priesthood and weekly Mass attendance at a distant chapel, but on family prayer and the local shrine or holy well and the pattern or pilgrimage, in a rural landscape which had not yet lost its sacred character.’33

  The East India Company was far more tolerant of Catholicism, and Roman Catholic soldiers serving in India were often able to obtain the services of a clergyman paid to minister to the Company’s Catholic soldiers. In 1808 one of the Company’s Anglican chaplains discovered that soldiers in the predominantly Catholic regiment in garrison at Dinapore had written to an Italian friar, asking him to visit them:

  When he came into the barracks, the Catholics crowded about him by hundreds, and in a tone of triumph pointed out his dress (that of a Franciscan friar) to the Protestants, contrasting it with that of a Clergyman of the Church of England, booted and spurred, ready for a hunt.34


  Catholic NCOs played an important role in arranging visits from priests and encouraging their fellow Catholics. In at least one sense their influence was analogous to that of Wesleyan NCOs, for literacy was a sine qua non of attaining sergeant’s rank, and a man who could read the scriptures, whatever construct he placed upon them, was likely to be selected for promotion.

  George Gleig became principal chaplain in 1844 and at once made it clear that he believed an active and committed chaplaincy to be fundamental to the maintenance of discipline and morale. He argued that officers set a poor moral example to their men, and soldiers were taken away from their villages to live in a world where

  [D]issolute talk, dissolute conduct – immorality, indecency, drunkenness, being considered as the mere outbreaks of youthful spirit … are certainly not discountenanced and condemned as they deserve; – and yet you lament that crime should be so common in the army, and wonder that the defaulters’ list should be so extensive, and that the provost prisons should be so crowded, and barrack-cells never without their full complement of occupants. Moreover, you know that the root of most of the soldier’s military offences is drunkenness, and yet if you do not entice him to spend his pay on strong liquors, you furnish him [through the canteen] with a very convenient opportunity for doing so.35

  He argued that all stations with more than two hundred men, home and overseas, should have a dedicated church with its own minister, provided by encouraging the local incumbent to employ an extra curate with a small stipend from the War Office. Gleig not only carried the day, and had the sale of spirits in canteens banned, but was appointed chaplain general, and inspector general of regimental schools to boot. The product of his twin appointments was the chapel-school, a dual-purpose unconsecrated building that became a standard feature in mid-nineteenth century barracks until its eventual conversion into a dedicated chapel in the 1880s.

  On the outbreak of the Crimean War Gleig had only seven staff chaplains: two Anglicans were hastily commissioned, and one Church of Scotland Minister and two Roman Catholics were appointed acting chaplains, though with contracts, not commissions. The allocation of one chaplain per division was inadequate from the outset, and the shocking conditions in the Crimea speedily killed one chaplain and incapacitated others. Just as the war highlighted so many failings in the army’s structure, thanks in part to the reportage of The Times’ William Howard Russell, so the shortage of chaplains caused much disquiet. Gleig recruited some assistant chaplains himself, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel found no shortage of volunteers. No less than seventy-two Anglican clergymen served in the east during the war, with nine Presbyterians, over twenty Roman Catholics and Peter Batchelor, a Wesleyan Methodist, who first found himself classified as a ‘camp follower’ before rising to the heights of ‘an accredited Wesleyan Missionary’.

  In the war’s aftermath there were lengthy discussions as to whether military chaplains would be helped or hindered by having the normal appurtenances of commissioned status. The issue was resolved in 1858 when the Chaplains’ Department was given a formalised structure with its members enjoying relative rank. Chaplains to the Forces Class 4 (CF4) ranked as captains, CF3 as majors, CF2 as lieutenant colonels, and CF1 as colonels: the chaplain general equated to a major general. Chaplains enjoyed what was, by ecclesiastical standards, comparatively generous pay. A CF4 earned twice the average stipend of a curate, and a CF1’s salary equated to the income from the very richest Church of England parish. Timed promotion would take a clergyman to CF1 after thirty years’ service; there were allowances to cover the cost of lodgings and a servant, as well as half-pay for the chaplains and pensions for their wives. Two years later chaplains were given a black uniform, and shortly afterwards a general order decreed that they were to be paid the compliments due to their relative rank.

  Chaplains were particularly active in promoting temperance, pressing for improved barrack accommodation, and cautioning men against those ‘improvident marriages’ that so often wrecked two lives – or more. Some helped set up and even run laundry and clothing contracts so that soldiers’ wives would have an honest source of income. Good intentions were not always a match for human nature. The Revd E. J. Hardy, stationed at Plymouth in the 1890s, organised a subscription to pay some wives, left behind when their husbands’ regiment had moved to Belfast, to travel to Northern Ireland. Sadly, a number of the ladies pocketed the money and then made alternative arrangements with men of the incoming regiment. Nineteenth-century chaplains understood the importance of ‘manly games’, and the evangelical Bishop John Taylor Smith, chaplain general from 1901 to 1925, made a point of recruiting keen sportsmen, amongst them the rugby international James Rowland Walkey, who went on to become chaplain-in-chief of the RAF in 1933–9.

  There were challenges aplenty. The Chaplains’ Department had a High Church bias, and many of its chaplains objected to the work done around barracks by civilian Methodist clergymen. It was not until 1862 that a compromise allowed soldiers to register their religion as Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian or – to include the Methodists at last – as ‘Other Protestant’. Occasionally the High Church bias went too far: there were senior officers who disliked what they saw as the ritualistic style adopted by some chaplains. The devout and hirsute Lieutenant General Sir James Hope Grant was a hero of the Indian Mutiny. He had been raised as a Scots Presbyterian and had become an Anglican communicant but could not bear a hint of ‘bells and smells’, and when commanding at Aldershot in 1873 he sent a Royal Engineers carpenter along to one of the garrison churches to summarily reduce the height of the communion table. In the ensuing spat with Chaplain General Gleig, now two years away from retirement, Grant was backed by the Duke of Cambridge, and went on to warn all the chaplains in his district that they were as much under his command as any other officers, and he expected to have his orders obeyed.

  There remained the suspicion that the commissioned rank of chaplains was actually an obstacle to their ministry. At the Church Congress of 1885 a Royal Artillery officer asked:

  Did Jesus Chris have any official rank? Did the apostles have any official rank? Were men bound to spring up and salute them[?] How can a man unfold what is nearest to his heart to one who he feels is his official superior and whom he cannot approach without giving a military salute?36

  Horace Wyndham, writing from the private soldier’s viewpoint, believed that chaplains felt ‘a certain diffidence about visiting barrack rooms – thinking, perhaps, that in doing so, they would be unduly intruding’. He also suggested that chaplains were better paid and had less work to do than the average Anglican clergyman, and ‘in fact in many stations the chaplain’s proficiency at tennis is uncharitably ascribed to his having such ample opportunities for practice!’37 He affirmed that

  The right sort of chaplain is the man who is not imbued with the impression that his duties are confined solely to officiating at two services on Sunday, and that for the rest of the week his flock have no real claim upon him. On the contrary, he will remember that the barrack-room is almost as much his province as is the garrison chapel, and will, accordingly, not be above visiting the men in their quarters … the power for good that – should he be so minded – an army chaplain can exercise is a very real and wide one.38

  Yet there was no doubting the fact that most Anglican chaplains were set apart, by background and education, from the men they ministered to. Francis Hereward Maitland saw his padre bowled out at regimental cricket. He walked back from the crease lamenting that he ‘ought to have bashed it for four’, giving the watching soldiery an unmissable opportunity to mimic his Oxford accent: ‘Bally hard luck, sir! Absolutely bally, what?’39

  On Sunday mornings, in home stations and overseas garrisons, regiments fell in at about 10.30 a.m for church parade. Wyndham describes how, in an English regiment, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and Wesleyans were marched off to their respective places of worship before the remainder set off to church, in the glory of
full dress. Many soldiers enjoyed the tribal ritual, especially in a big garrison town like Aldershot, where there would be quick-stepping riflemen, bespurred cavalry, and infantry of the line in their scarlet tunics, all strutting their stuff:

  With the band at their head, playing a selection of popular melodies, the men step out smartly, and their progress through the streets forms a highly attractive spectacle to the civilian population, with particular reference to its female portion. This the rank and file appreciate to the full, for the soldier is the most susceptible of all mortals to flattery of even the mildest description.40

  In fact the rank and file were less warm in their appreciation of the process of getting ready for the parade, with boots and brasses shone up and every chance of being ‘crimed’ by a liverish sergeant major for lack of attention to detail. Most soldiers spent the rest of the day ‘in bed or out of barracks’, and Francis Hereward Maitland remembered his Aldershot Sundays as a time of ‘infinite boredom’.41 Wully Roberston thought it only natural that ‘the men should resent being hustled about and made to do unnecessary work on the one day of the week observed by everybody else in the country as a day of rest.’42