Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Given that some young soldiers were executed by the military authorities, the issue of their recruitment and retention continues to generate as much heat as light. Abraham Bevistein, born in Warsaw to a Jewish family that emigrated to England in 1902, joined the Middlesex Regiment, as Abraham Harris, in September 1914 at the real age of 16½. In March 1915 he ‘reminded’ his mother that his 19th birthday was on 1 May, to prevent anything interfering with his imminent embarkation for France. He was wounded in January 1916, but after returning to his battalion the following month, he reported sick telling his CQMS that he had been shocked by the nearby explosion of a rifle grenade. On 13 February the battalion’s medical officer passed him fit for duty, and the quartermaster sent him back to the trenches with a note. Instead of returning to his battalion, under heavy attack at the time, he drifted to a farmhouse, where he warmed himself in front of the fire with soldiers from another unit. A corporal became suspicious, and Private Harris was arrested. On 23 February he wrote to tell his mother:

  We were in the trenches, and I was ill, so I went out and they took me to the prison, and I am in a bit of trouble now and won’t get any money for a long time. I will have to go in front of a Court. I will try to get out of it, so don’t worry.

  He was charged with desertion, remanded for court martial by his acting commanding officer, and tried by Field General Court Martial on 4 March. Private Harris was not represented (by no means unusual in such cases), and his declaration that ‘I did not intend to return until the Company came out of the trenches’ could scarcely have been more damning. The Manual of Military Law explained that ‘the criterion between desertion and absence without leave is intention’, and a man was guilty of the capital offence of desertion if he either intended not to return to his unit at all, or had absented himself ‘to escape some particularly important service’.27 For instance, a man who disappeared so as to miss his regiment’s departure on active service was a deserter, not simply an absentee. Harris’s platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Arthur Redford (who had joined as a private soldier a few days before him and had then been commissioned) told the court that Harris ‘bears a good character’, and had ‘begged to be allowed to come’ to France with the battalion although it ‘was intended to leave him behind’. But this was mitigation and did not deflect the court from sentencing Harris to death. Careful research into the files of Harris and Private Martin of 9/Essex, convicted by the same court, suggests that the negative comments of Lieutenant Colonel Ingle of 11/Middlesex (who reported on Harris’s conduct as ‘indifferent’ in general and ‘bad’ in the field) encouraged divisional, corps and army commanders to recommend that the death sentence be confirmed. The commander-in-chief took their advice, and Private Harris was duly shot at 5.29 a.m. on 20 March 1916. In early April his family received a starkly formal letter notifying them of his fate. The headstone in Labourse Communal Cemetery gives his official age of 19.28

  Once the war was over, the War Office reviewed the cases of all soldiers executed below the age of 21. They found that one 18-year-old was shot for murder (an offence for which he would have been liable to hanging in Britain); and eight 19-year-olds were executed for purely military offences. However, this reflected only the official age of the men concerned, and even this survey revealed that the youngest man knowingly executed was Private William Hunter of the Loyals, officially 20 years and 56 days old, but actually only 17 years, 9 months when he deserted. Passions were understandably aroused by the issue, making measured analysis difficult. Hunter, who had spent two years in the merchant navy, had been twice convicted for absence, and when previously tried by FGCM for desertion the court had not been persuaded of his intention to desert and had convicted him of being absent. A sentence of two years’ imprisonment at hard labour was commuted to one year and suspended. Hunter admitted that ‘If I had not been arrested I should have stayed absent’, and the court duly sentenced him to death, though with a strong recommendation to mercy ‘on grounds of extreme youth, service in the field and likelihood of being a good fighting man’. Commanding officer, brigadier, and divisional commander, all supported the death sentence, but his corps commander, Henry Wilson, was worried about his age and recommended that the sentence should be commuted to five years’ penal servitude. The army commander, Charles Monro, supported the death sentence – ‘The man is very young, but his commanding officer says he is no good as a fighting soldier’ – and Hunter was duly shot on 21 February 1916. In this case it was clear that the army was aware of Hunter’s real rather than his official age, and two factors led him to the firing party. First, his commanding officer maintained that his character as a fighting man was ‘NIL’, and second, his brigade commander recommended execution because the battalion’s state of discipline was unsatisfactory. An example had to be made, ‘and here was a man who was expendable since he had no value as a soldier. In that context his age became immaterial.’29

  The British army currently sets 16½ as the lower age limit for enlistment; young men and women below 18 require their parents’ written consent before they can sign on. In 2003 Britain acceded to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (which defines a ‘child soldier’ as simply being under 18), agreeing that it would not send under-18-year-olds on active service. But in 2005 the Ministry of Defence admitted that over the past two years it had sent fifteen 17-year-olds to Iraq because of pressures prior to deployment. Many of the traditional challenges posed by young soldiers remain. From the army’s point of view there is still a palpable tension between the desire to recruit high-quality youngsters as early as possible and the accusation that it is attracting child soldiers who are too young to have made up their own minds. Added to this is the practical difficulty of providing meaningful employment for under-18s who have completed their time in Army Training Regiments but are still too young to go on operations. This has to be balanced against the concern that many school leavers who might otherwise have become good soldiers, will either have entered the civilian job market or gained a criminal record and, in either case, be lost to the army.

  For most of the post-1945 period the army drew a disproportionate amount of its NCOs (and in consequence many of its late-entry officers) from ‘junior leaders’ units, all of which enabled motivated and ambitious school leavers to join the army at the earliest opportunity. In the infantry, for example, these units had been variously termed the Infantry Boys’ Battalion, the Junior Infantry Battalion, the Junior Infantry Wing and latterly the Infantry Junior Leaders’ Battalion. Junior Leaders’ units were all disbanded in the early 1990s, but in 1998 the army recognised that it was missing a valuable source of recruits and opened the Army Foundation College on the site of the old Army Apprentices College at Harrogate in Yorkshire, taking school leavers between 16 and 17 years and 1 month. The success of Harrogate encouraged the army to open its Technical Foundation College at Winchester, also aimed at school leavers.

  The Duke of York’s Royal Military School has also survived. It became co-educational in 1994, and is now a secondary school open to children whose parents have served in any branch of the armed forces. Until 1999 its headmasters were serving officers, and it has a regimental sergeant major on its staff. The Ministry of Defence part-funded the school till September 2010, when it became an academy while retaining its military traditions. There are parades on Sunday mornings, the most important of them on Remembrance Day and Grand Day (at the end of each summer term), and the school’s monitorial system is modelled on the military rank structure, giving substantial influence to sixth formers. The school’s military band is larger than any other in the United Kingdom, including the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards. Its distinguished alumni include many servicemen such as General Sir Archibald Nye, vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War and subsequently high commissioner to both India and Canada, as the best-known. But there are also academics and actors, jazz musicians and classical clarinetists, bishops and rugby-players.


  Over the past twenty years there has been increased concern that recruits in general, and young recruits in particular, experience severe ‘culture shock’ during their training, and this results in high levels of failure leading to the early discharge that is now so easy to obtain. In 2003 Charles Kirke, artillery officer turned academic, described modern British youth culture as a process in which ‘external frameworks and order have been replaced by the primacy of individual experience and self-expression.’ He suggested that modern recruits

  have to make a considerable cultural leap, greater than their forebears who came from the most structured youth culture of the past and this leap concerns their basic expectations of life and their deeply held assumptions and attitudes. To make matters more difficult, they have to do this in an environment, the Army Training Regiment, which is controlled by staff who tend to be highly socialised into the culture that the recruits are trying to join.30

  Although some young soldiers have always wilted under the impact of recruit training, there is no doubt that the products of a harder, more deferential society found the process less difficult. George Ashurst had been brought up in rural Lancashire, but moved to Wigan with his parents and six siblings. He found that town boys, in comparison to country lads, were ‘more forward and lacked discipline and respect’. He was soon involved in petty crime and practical jokes: most of his gang had part-time work before they left school. Ashurst lost his job as a colliery clerk in 1912 and went to join the Lancashire Fusiliers with a chum:

  The recruiting sergeant spoke to the other fellow first and then he turned to me and asked how old I was. I told him I was sixteen and a half years. He said, ‘No, you are seventeen and a half. You are mistaken.’ ‘No, I am not,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, I am booking you down as seventeen like your pal here. How long do you want to sign up for?’ We both said ‘Seven years, Sir.’ But he said, ‘When you get into the army you might not like it, so I will tell you what to do. Join the Special Reserve, which means that you will do six months in the barracks and seven years on the reserve, with just a month’s camp every year.’ We thought that would be best.

  It was wise of the sergeant to suggest that both boys tried the Special Reserve (the descendant of the old militia) first, and indeed many special reservists opted for regular service once their first six months were over. Ashurst soon picked up the ropes:

  I soon learned what life was like in the army and that it paid to do as one was told smartly and quickly. At meal times there was no menu to choose from. What it did say on the menu was what you got, whether you liked it or not, and one serving only. If you didn’t like the dripping you got with your bread for tea you bought a twopenny pat of butter at the canteen …

  I got on very well as a soldier, except for little reminders by the sergeant major that I was a soldier now and ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, stick your chest out and your chin in’ as I walked across the barrack square. I felt really fit, too, with the cross-country running and the gym exercises we had daily, and I loved the musketry lessons and the shooting on the firing range with the .22 rifles.

  Caught by the orderly sergeant playing cards after lights out, Ashurst and three comrades were sentenced to ninety hours’ detention in ‘cold stone cells with a hard wooden bed and pillow’. They spent their days drilling in full kit, doing PT and polishing latrine buckets and cooking pots. ‘It certainly made me keep to the straight and narrow path afterwards’, admitted Ashurst. He was promoted to lance corporal at the end of his first period of annual training, just in time for the First World War: he was 19 years old.31

  By early 1918 half the infantrymen in the British army in France were 18 years old. In his poem ‘In Memoriam’, Lieutenant Ewart Mackintosh MC, killed at Cambrai in the autumn of 1917, wrote poignantly about the way young officers stood in loco parentis to their even younger soldiers: ‘You were only David’s father/But I had fifty sons …’

  He is buried in Orival Wood Cemetery, not far from an 18-year-old infantryman whose parents have had the words ‘School, War, Death’ inscribed on his headstone. The men of B Company 2 Para averaged 19 years old in the Falklands War of 1982, and three soldiers of 3 Para were not even 18 when they were killed in action on Mount Longdon. Although the British army of 2011 has a smaller proportion of young soldiers than at any time in its history, the average age in an infantry company on active service is strikingly low, as the details of soldiers killed in Afghanistan show with poignant clarity. In 1/Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment’s VC-winning 2004 Iraq tour the average age in the Warrior companies was around 20, while the soldiers in Y Company, who manned the battalion’s support weapons like mortars and anti-tank missiles, were mostly around 25. There has been a good deal of criticism within the army about the staying power of ‘Generation X’ or the ‘Millennium Kids’. There are also fears that the Army Training Regiments would be deterred by possible accusations of bullying, from ensuring that training was a proper preparation for the stressful conditions that soldiers would soon meet on operations. When I visited the regiment in Iraq, though, I was struck by the way that officers and NCOs alike wanted to tell me just how good the younger soldiers were. Corporal Si Gower, describing a brisk fire-fight in Basra, in which he himself was wounded, said that

  all the troops involved worked extremely hard and very well. They did their jobs with a small amount of guidance from me. All the lads were very young but worked to the best of their ability and produced the goods. As a commander who has been in the army from the dawn of time I would never change my job and I would never change my men.

  The battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Matt Maer, thought that the achievement of ‘the PlayStation generation’ was the real surprise of the tour.32

  CHAPTER 12

  THE KING’S SHILLING

  UNDER-AGE RECRUITS were not the only problem faced by Georgian recruiters. In 1760 the exasperated Lieutenant Colonel Windus complained that Lieutenant Charles Crawford had behaved in ‘an extraordinary manner’ by sending certificates signed, not by a Protestant clergyman, but ‘by Felix O’Neile … who keeps a bleach yard at Monstereven.’1 Lieutenant Crawford admitted that he was not finding it easy, for he was in competition with other recruiters, but was doing as well as he could ‘considering the badness of my party and that so small, as a sergeant, and the worst drum in the service’. He did not actually have a copy of recruiting instructions to hand, which did not help.2 The Catholic Relief Act of 1791 ended the requirement for the recruit to affirm that he was Protestant. A similar law was passed in Scotland in April 1793, though it took some time for all old enlistment forms to be phased out there. Sir James Grant of Grant turned down one Catholic recruit, saying ‘I cannot desire you to do an illegal act, although I am convinced many Roman Catholics are good subjects.’3

  Recruiting parties stood to gain if a man ‘passed the surgeon’ and was duly enlisted by a magistrate. In 1805 the ‘bringer’, often a landlord, received £2. 12s. 6d., the recruiting officer 16s., and the recruiting party shared 15s. between them. But if recruits were discharged when they joined their units because they were old or infirm, then ‘the officer who enlisted them will have no allowance for them, but will be charged a fortnight’s subsistence to carry them home.’4 Officers could easily run up debts by spending too much money on recruits, especially if they were in competition with other free-spending recruiters, and then discovered that their men were rejected when they reached the regiment. Sergeant Thomas Connolly, writing of the Napoleonic era, wrote of ‘recruiting extravagancies’ that left Sergeant Major Cutteridge of his regiment a staggering £900 in debt.

  Sharp practice abounded. Corporal Todd, recruiting around his home town of Preston in Holderness in 1758, was ‘set over a tankard of ale’ with a group of friends when a marine sergeant offered him half a guinea a man if he would enlist men for the marines, or ‘if I would let him trap some of them,’ for the party was now ‘merry with drink.’ Todd refused, but one of the serge
ant’s recruiters spotted a young man, a local gentleman’s servant, outside in the alley with a girl, called him to the door to shake his hand, palmed him the King’s shilling, the token of enlistment, and told the audience that the man had volunteered. The fellow was immediately brought into the pub, and although his master fetched the mayor and other gentlemen in an effort to rescue him, Todd told them that ‘the military law was in such force at this time that any man might easily be trepanned [i.e. conned into enlisting].’ He suggested to the rescuers that the only way to save the man was to pay the ‘smart money’ with which a recruit could buy himself out: this then amounted to ‘a guinea and a crown’, or 26s. The gentlemen paid up at once and took their man away. The sergeant of marines characteristically put the money to good use, and ‘called for a crown bowl of punch which we drank share of it and parted’. To be properly enlisted a man had to take the oath of attestation before a magistrate within twenty-four hours of accepting the shilling as a precaution against exactly this sort of practice. Even when Wellington’s Peninsula army enlisted local volunteers, mostly deserters or prisoners of war, into the foreign-recruited Chasseurs Britanniques, it was able to meet this strict legal requirement only because the judge advocate general, Francis Seymour Larpent, enjoyed the powers of a justice of the peace.