Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Non-commissioned diarists, such a striking feature of the Napoleonic period, depict an army ‘composed’, as Sergeant William Wheeler of the 51st Light Infantry wrote, ‘of men of all grades of character’. Wheeler admitted that

  Owing to the difficulty of procuring men to keep the army effective, recruiting parties attended the [quarter] sessions and received men who had committed thefts, who if they had been put on trial would have been transported. Such men when they joined the army set about their old trades and corrupt men of weak minds. If you knew but the hundredth part of the atrocities committed by men calling themselves British soldiers it would chill your blood.11

  Regiments of the period had a hard core of ‘incorrigibles’, most of whom had been in trouble before they enlisted, and whose behaviour provided the advocates of corporal punishment with abundant support for their arguments. Then came a much larger quantity of labourers, often unemployed before they joined up. Next, their proportion depending on local economic circumstances, unemployed artisans and tradesmen. Any regiment could point to a small proportion of respectable men who had enlisted to make their way in the army and would work hard for promotion. In 1854 Timothy Gowing, already a corporal in the Royal Fusiliers soon after completing his basic training, departed for the Crimea ‘a proud man. I felt that the honour of our dear old isle hung upon my shoulders. I pictured myself coming home much higher in rank with my breast covered with honour, the gift of a grateful country.’12 He became a sergeant major, but declined the proffered commission on the grounds that he could not afford to live in the required style.

  There were always a few ‘decayed gentlemen’, some of whom had enlisted because they had been beggared by ill-luck or misjudgement, or had been crossed in love. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an undergraduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, joined the 15th Light Dragoons as a private (with the unwieldy alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberbatch) in 1793, either because he was in debt or because he had been rejected by the girl he loved. He was not a natural soldier. His brother, a serving captain, managed to arrange for his discharge on the grounds of ‘insanity’, and he returned to Cambridge, though he never took his degree. John Harcomb was a solicitor who squandered his fortune and enlisted. When he came into some money he bought a commission in the 10th Hussars, but lost his wealth, sold out and rejoined his old regiment as a private; he died in a Portsmouth workhouse in 1814. In 1885 Wully Robertson was promoted troop sergeant major to replace an ex-medical student who was given to heavy drinking and had got the troop’s accounts into a mess. The man reverted to sergeant but, well aware of what would happen when the accounts were investigated, shot himself. ‘Apparently he had felt unable at the last moment to face the ruin and disgrace which confronted him,’ wrote Robertson, ‘and a round of service ammunition and a carbine had done the rest.’13 In 1909 Private John Vivian Crowther of the 18th Hussars also shot himself. The inquest described him as ‘a cultured and educated Oxford graduate who had inherited a large property’. We can only guess at what had brought him to lonely despair in a barrack room.14

  Soldiers’ background is not necessarily a guide to their behaviour. At the end of the nineteenth century, Wully Robertson warned that it was never wise to assume that the incorrigibles were wholly worthless, for sometimes

  the worst characters were the best workmen – the best grooms and the best riders – when money was scarce; when it was plentiful, they would fall under the spell of drink, and this would lead to absence, insubordination and other military offences.15

  Nor, on the other hand, could officers be confident that a regiment’s ‘respectable’ soldiers would stay steady when faced by the lure of drink. There were moments when a combination of heavy casualties and the availability of alcohol swept away all civilised restraint. The army’s shocking behaviour after the storm of the Spanish town of Badajoz in 1812 is the most striking example of drink-fuelled savagery. Even the steady drinking that was a nightly feature of the ‘wet canteen’ in Victorian barracks could lead well-conducted men to lapses that saw them brawl with comrades, strike NCOs and resist arrest. Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander of the 93rd Highlanders remembered a ‘smart, clean and brave soldier’ who developed ‘a murderously violent temper’ when in drink. He was arrested for returning drunk to barracks, and in the course of the ensuing fight succeeded in crowning the sergeant of the guard with a tub of slops. After receiving the fifty lashes awarded by a regimental court martial he declared ‘Dae ye ca’ that a flogging? Hoots! I’ve got many a worse licking frae ma mither.’16

  Most serious of all were the ‘hot weather shootings’ that were a regular feature of garrison life in India. A combination of cheap and easily available rotgut drink, blazing heat and stultifying boredom led some soldiers to run amok through a barrack room or to deliberately settle old scores with musket or bayonet. In February 1848 Private James Mulcahey of 2nd Bengal Europeans stabbed his comrade Private James Rowe. Rowe died five days later, and Mulcahey was duly sentenced to death. He was hanged that May at the centre of a square formation of 1st and 2nd Bengal Europeans. He followed his coffin to the scaffold without betraying any emotion and nodding to friends in the various companies as he passed. The execution was botched, for the rope stretched as the trapdoor dropped, and Mulcahey’s desperate attempts to support himself on tip-toe caused many soldiers in both regiments to faint before the hangman shortened the rope and Mulcahey quickly strangled. The troops slow-marched past the dangling body and then broke into quick time, but their bands did not strike up till they were near barracks. Corporal John Ryder of the 32nd Foot, serving in India in the 1840s, listened to Lieutenant Colonel Hill of his regiment warn the men against drunken excesses ‘till tears ran down his face on the horse’s neck’.17 Robert Waterfield, of the same regiment, saw Gunner Richard Riley Atkins of the Bengal Artillery shot by a firing party of the 32nd, a process made more ghastly by the fact that the victim remained kneeling on his coffin after the volley and had to be pistolled by the provost marshal, and that he was a young man of good family and of excellent character till drink took him.

  Murder by drunken soldiers is now happily rare. However, the rape and murder of Danish tour guide Louise Jensen in the Cyprus village of Ayia Napa in 1994 shows what can go wrong when soldiers have little to do but avail themselves of cheap drink. There is still abundant evidence that good soldiers can behave foolishly when drink is in and wit is out. In May 2008 a captain in the Royal Dragoon Guards, at a party held three days after returning from Iraq, asked three NCOs to hunt for officers to carry on drinking. They pulled an officer ‘in a drunken stupor’ from his bed, trussed him up and carried him outside naked. The captain who made the request did not face disciplinary action and later left the service. The NCOs were fined by a court martial for what one of their defence counsel described as ‘a prank [that] started in good humour.’18

  In March that year eight commando-trained Royal Engineers, products of a demanding selection system, stripped off in a bar in the Norwegian town of Harstad and were reported to have urinated on each other. One local resident complained, ‘The Dutch like a drink and get a bit boisterous but they do not have that nasty edge that so many British troops display – once they have got some schnapps inside them.’ Amongst the comments generated by the online version of this report was one pointing out that ‘Commando forces are famous amongst the British military for “getting naked” when drunk.’ This is ‘strange behaviour for the average civilian to understand, but chances are these are the same men who were facing the Taliban and Al Quaida a few months ago – give them a break and don’t be so quick to criticise.’19 Criticism or tolerance apart, the point is a simple one: there is no easy connection between a man’s motives for enlistment, his military performance, and his propensity for heavy drinking.

  CHAPTER 14

  ALL PALS TOGETHER

  PATRIOTISM ON A grand scale, and local pride on a smaller one, often played their part in encouraging men to join the army, and there are many ex
amples of this. ‘I loved the king with a veneration which has no adequate term to express it’, admitted one young Georgian officer. When Colonel Alan Cameron of Erracht was raising the 79th Highlanders, a poster affirmed that he was doing so for the ‘pride of commanding a faithful and brave band of his warlike countrymen, in the service of a king, whose greatest happiness is to reign as the common father and protector of his people’.1 The connection between patriotic zeal and battlefield morale is complex, with big issues receding and smaller ones, like brave leadership and the ties of loyalty within the tribe, becoming more important as battle approaches. Even when, as Henry Newbolt was to put it, ‘England’s far, and Honour a name’, an appeal to patriotism might be answered. Sergeant Bill Gould recalled that when Major Rowland Smyth was about to order the 16th Lancers to charge the proverbially steady Sikhs at Aliwal in 1846 he shouted:

  ‘Now, I am going to give the word to charge, three cheers for the Queen.’ There was a terrific burst of cheering in reply, and down we swept upon the guns. Very soon they were in our possession. A more exciting job followed. We had to charge a square of infantry … When we got out on the other side of the square our troop had lost both lieutenants, the cornet, troop sergeant major and two sergeants. I was the only sergeant left. Some of the men shouted, ‘Bill, you’ve got command, they’re all down.’2

  In the Crimea, Colour Sergeant McAlister was hard hit and ordered to fall out of the line; he flatly refused, saying ‘I’ve done nothing for old England yet.’

  We should never underestimate the impact of the patriotic schoolmaster. James Marshall-Cornwall, commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery on the eve of the First World War, was educated at Rugby, and remembered how

  My early schooldays were … passed in an air of patriotic fervour and martial enthusiasm. We all wore in our buttonholes little souvenir portraits of our favourite [Boer War] generals – Roberts, Kitchener, Methuen, Baden-Powell, etc. … my early enthusiasm for a military career was stimulated by the books which I used to devour. They included Rudyard Kipling’s earlier works which were then appearing, G. A. Henty’s historical romances and W. H. Fitchett’s Deeds That Won the Empire.3

  Such passions were not confined to one class or background. J. W. Milne served in South Africa with the volunteer company of the Gordon Highlanders. In an article describing his experiences he wrote

  I have been frequently asked what made me think of going out to South Africa. Well, I believe it was partly due to my being a member of the last MIA [Mutual Improvement Association]. As a member I thus had access to the shelves of the Library and I took from them such books to read as Darkest Africa and Lord Clive in India. The stirring tales of his defence of Arcot, and other thrilling incidents imbued a spirit in me to see such things as they were told in those books for myself. Ever since the Jameson raid I had watched the trend of events in South Africa. On the call of Her Majesty’s Government for volunteers to serve in South Africa, I felt that now was the opportunity to see a bit of the world.

  He proudly recorded the full text of Queen Victoria’s last message to the troops in South Africa, and, although he had already seen more than his fair share of fighting, re-enlisted in 1914 and fought on the Somme.4

  Yet the real picture was more complicated. After the disasters of ‘Black Week’, a call for volunteers was put out in December 1899, resulting in 54,000 coming forward. There was a close correlation between unemployment and working-class recruiting (as the former went up, so too did the latter) but it is also probable that, at just the same time, patriotic newspapers like the Daily Mail and John Robert Seeley’s persuasive defence of empire, The Expansion of England, helped create a mood where middle-class men with secure jobs were inclined to sign up. Moreover, while organised labour was suspicious of the Boer War, the wider mass of unskilled workers, despite having no vested interest in imperialism, was easily blown by gusts of raw patriotism.

  The events of August 1914 brought a wholly unprecedented challenge. This time the conflict was not far away in South Africa, but in the very heart of Europe against a foe who had violated Belgian neutrality, and whose naval, colonial, and commercial ambitions seemed to pose a direct threat to Britain. Lord Kitchener, made secretary of state for war on the 5th, warned the Cabinet that the war would last for three years. He was deeply mistrustful of the Territorials and aware that conscription was politically unacceptable, so he set about raising the New Armies. These were duration-only volunteers who largely constituted ‘Service’ battalions of county regiments. On 6 August he called for 500,000 volunteers, releasing Alfred Leete’s drawing of the glaring field marshal, finger pointing squarely at the reader, above the legend ‘Your Country needs YOU’; this became one of the century’s most influential posters. On the best single day for recruiting, 3 September 1914, a staggering 33,204 men, one-third the strength of the British Expeditionary Force in France, and rather more than a third of Britain’s entire regular army at the time of writing, signed on. By the end of 1915 almost 2,500,000 men had volunteered, more than the country was able to obtain by conscription in 1916 and 1917 combined.

  The rush of volunteering broke many rules. Hundreds of men, not all of them young, who would never have considered joining that old, hard army of beery moustaches and stubby pipes were content to sign on as privates. R. H. Tawney, already a distinguished economic historian, had joined the Manchesters, declined a commission and was a sergeant by the time he was wounded on the Somme. The short story writer H. H. Monro (‘Saki’) joined the Royal Fusiliers at the age of 43, and died as a lance sergeant on the Somme, with ‘put that bloody light out’ as his famous last words. Some battalions deliberately attracted middle-class men. The Sportsmen’s Battalion, 23rd Royal Fusiliers, included two England cricketers, the nation’s lightweight boxing champion and a former lord mayor of Exeter. One of its privates described his own accommodation:

  In this hut the first bed was occupied by the brother of a peer. In the second the man who formerly drove his motor-car. Both had enlisted at the same time at the Hotel Cecil … Other beds in the hut were occupied by a mechanical engineer, an old Blundell School boy, planters, a mine overseer from Scotland … a photographer, a poultry farmer, an old sea dog who had rounded Cape Horn on no fewer than nine occasions, a man who had hunted seals, a bank clerk, and so on. It must not be thought that this hut was an exceptional one. Every hut was the same, and every hut was jealous of its reputation.5

  Regiments had never been as successful in raising men within their recruiting areas as contemporary theorists or modern friends of the regimental system suggest. But the 1914 call to arms tapped directly into the bowler-hatted dignity of mock-Gothic town halls, the tight loyalties of back-to-back houses and corner shops, and the burgeoning self-confidence of workplaces at last beginning to flex their muscles. Communities raised battalions of their own. The New Army 31st Division had three brigades of infantry. The first, 92nd Brigade, contained what were, strictly speaking, 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th Battalions the East Yorkshire Regiment, though all were raised in Hull. They were known to their many friends as the Hull Commercials, the Hull Tradesmen, the Hull Sportsmen, and the Hull T’Others. In 93rd Brigade were 15th, 16th, and 18th Battalions, the West Yorkshire Regiment, colloquially the Leeds Pals and 1st and 2nd Bradford Pals, along with 18th Battalion, the Durham Light Infantry, or the Durham Pals. The third brigade, 94th, had 12th, 13th, and 14th Battalions, the York and Lancaster Regiment, or the Sheffield City Battalion, and 1st and 2nd Barnsley Pals. Last, but not least, the 11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment, whose nickname, the Accrington Pals, somehow encapsulates the agonising pride of it all.

  The divisional pioneer battalion was 12/King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, sometimes known as T’owd Twelfth, or sometimes – because it was full of men from Charlesworth Pit who had streamed into Leeds to enlist – as the Leeds Miners. Not all Pals’ battalions were from the Midlands and the North. Three battalions of Highland Light Infantry were raised in central Gla
sgow, and although they had official numbers, they were always the Tramways Battalion, the Boys Brigade Battalion and the Glasgow Commercials. Just where the little road from Longueval curls northwards to skirt High Wood (‘Ghastly by day, ghostly by night, the rottenest place on the Somme’) a simple wooden cross remembers 12/Gloucesters. Whatever successive amalgamations might have done to cap-badges and traditions, it will always be remembered, on this broad-shouldered landscape that leeched its blood, as Bristol’s Own.

  Other New Army units recruited, not in specified areas but, like Public Schools and Sportmen’s battalions, from amongst particular interest groups. One of the most idiosyncratic was 17/Middlesex Regiment (1st Football). There had been growing complaints that football was not doing its bit for the country, and in December 1914 the flamboyant politician William Joynson-Hicks (‘Jix’) set about raising a battalion of footballers. On 15 December 1914 Fred ‘Spider’ Parker, captain of Clapton Orient, became the first to enlist. A week later Walter Tull, a mixed-race professional who had to move from Tottenham Hotspur to Northampton Town because of racist abuse, joined the battalion. Tull rose to the rank of sergeant and was commissioned in May 1917, becoming the army’s first black officer. Attached to 25/Middlesex, he was killed on 25 March 1918; his body was never found, and he is commemorated on the Arras Memorial to the Missing. The battalion suffered appallingly on the Somme, losing over 500 officers and men between 24 July and 11 August, and another 300 in the autumn. Somehow it managed to retain its identity, until it was disbanded in early 1918 as the army simply ran out of men to maintain its existing infantry structure. In 1917 Captain Percy Barnfather had played for Croydon Common, making more appearances and scoring more goals than any other player in the club’s short history. In May 1917 he reported: