Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Dragoon guards had nothing whatever to do with guarding the monarch, and the title’s introduction was no more than a sop to regimental pride. Dragoon guards were given precedence over other mounted units and their numbering was separate. Household troops, naturally enough, stood icily aloof from all this. In 1748, just after the conversion process had begun, there were three regiments of dragoon guards, four of horse – now a threatened species – and fourteen of dragoons. The same pressure that encouraged the infantry to look afresh at speed and mobility affected the cavalry too. This process began with the formation of a light troop in each regiment. The first full regiment of light dragoons, the 15th, was raised in 1759, wearing sombre blue uniforms as opposed to the red traditionally worn by horse and dragoons. Other light dragoon regiments quickly followed, including the 18th and 19th Light Dragoons. The wars of the second half of the eighteenth century suggested that light dragoons were more useful than their heavy cousins, and in 1776 the 8th and 14th dragoons were converted, with the 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 13th following suit in 1783. Higher-numbered light dragoon regiments were raised subsequently, but, on the ‘last in, first out’ principle, did not have long lives.

  The process did not stop there. British light dragoons combined new tactics with dressing down. This had some parallels elsewhere, for example in the French army where the chasseurs à cheval were clad in what their enemies would have called rifle-green. The overwhelming trend was to dress light cavalrymen up, not to dull them down. The hussar, originally modelled on the light horseman of the great plain of Hungary, quickly became the beau idéal. The British, ever sensitive to the demands of military fashion, changed the 7th, 10th, and 15th Light Dragoons to hussars in 1806 and converted the 18th the following year. For several years the titles of these new regiments were a mouthful – in 1815 they included the 10th (or Prince of Wales’s Own) Royal Regiment of Light Dragoons (Hussars) – and it took some of them a little time to convert from their workmanlike light dragoon garb to the full majesty of hussar kit, with short, braided, jackets, barrelled sashes, slung pelisses, and tasselled Hessian boots.

  Just as the idea for hussars had come from Hungary, so too the craze for lancers spread from Eastern Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century Polish lancers in Saxon service had worn a square-topped national cap called the czapka; the chevaux-légers-lanciers of the French Imperial army, based on the Polish-recruited Lancers of the Vistula, followed suit. As early as 1811, just after the lance had done such damage at Albuhera, some British light dragoons were instructed in the use of the lance. Interestingly, in view of the German contribution to light infantry tactics, the adjutant of the 15th Light Dragoons noted that Cornet Baron Leon, 1st Dragoons KGL, would attend for the purpose of teaching the exercise. In 1816 fifty men of the 9th Light Dragoons were selected to demonstrate the use of the lance to an invited audience, and that September the 9th, 12th, 16th, and 23rd Light Dragoons were converted into lancers. The new regiments wore a ‘lance cap’ based on the czapka, and even today officers and men of the two surviving lancer regiments wear piped ‘quarter welts’ on their forage caps. Those Lancers of the Vistula cast a long shadow.

  By the 1850s the distinctions between heavy cavalry (dragoons and dragoon guards), and light cavalry (hussars and lancers), were no longer practical, but they account for the cavalry division sent to the Crimea constituting two brigades. There was a heavy brigade of redcoated dragoons and dragoon guards with metal helmets, and a light brigade of lancers and hussars, as well as the sole surviving light dragoon regiment (the 4th) still wearing its old-fashioned blue faced with white, to be converted into hussars in 1861. At Balaklava in 1854 there was little real difference in their tactics: both charged shoulder to shoulder in the old style, although the Heavy Brigade taking on Russian cavalry, had a much easier time of it than the Light Brigade, with its long and costly ride for the Russian guns.

  The absorption of the East India Company’s European regiments after the Mutiny brought the 19th and 20th Hussars and the 21st Lancers into the British army, taking the line cavalry to the twenty-eight regiments it would field in the First World War. To simplify recruiting and training, cavalry was grouped into four corps from 1893 – Household, Dragoons, Hussars, and Lancers. Regiments serving abroad were kept up to strength by transferring soldiers from British-based regiments of the same corps. The cavalry’s First World War performance was a good deal more creditable than was once suggested. The British Expeditionary Force could not have held the line at Ypres in 1914 had it not been for the Cavalry Corps, fighting dismounted on Messines Ridge. We also now know that the cavalry’s role in trench warfare was by no means insignificant. David Kenyon suggests that cavalry was indeed ‘effective in combat at the tactical level’, but that it was unable to mint operational currency from this tactical success, largely because of the unrealistic expectations of senior commanders and the communication difficulties that dogged operations on the Western Front.4 In Palestine and Syria, the cavalry was altogether more successful, involving not just British, but also Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troopers too. Lord Wavell, in his biography of Allenby, writes of the final advance on Damascus:

  The greatest exploit in history of horsed cavalry, and possibly their last success on a large scale, had ended within a short distance of the battlefield of Issus (333 BC), where Alexander the Great first showed how battles could be won by bold and well-handled horsemen.5

  Whatever the cavalry’s supporters said, there was evidently too much of it after the war. The first batch of cavalry amalgamations, in 1922, brought together regiments of the same type to create units like the 17th/21st Lancers. Shortly afterwards the cavalry began to convert from horsed to armoured regiments, a process beginning with the 11th Hussars in 1928 and ending with the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys) in 1941. There was already a specialist tank unit on the scene. In 1916 the new-fangled tank had been given to the Heavy Branch, Machine Gun Corps, which became the Tank Corps the following year, the Royal Tank Corps in 1923, and then the Royal Tank Regiment in 1939.

  When the army raised new armoured regiments in the Second World War it did not simply increase the size of the Royal Tank Regiment, but dug more deeply into its past to discover the 22nd Dragoons, 23rd Hussars, 24th Lancers, 25th Dragoons, and even a short-lived 26th Hussars. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, himself a former 4th Hussar (though at Omdurman in 1898 he had actually charged with the 21st Lancers), was not amused, and in 1941 he told the CGS:

  Surely it was a very odd thing to create these outlandish numbered regiments of Dragoons, Hussars and Lancers, none of which has carbines, swords or lances, when there exist already telescoped up the 18th, 20th and 19th Hussars, 5th and 21st Lancers. Surely all these titles should have been revived before creating these unreal and artificial titles. I wish you would explain to me what was moving in the minds of the War Office when they did this.6

  In fact the decision was a very sensible one, for ‘disamalgamating’ the 1922 regiments would have created difficulties, because they would inevitably have been re-amalgamated after the war. For a while some of the amalgamations had worked very well, others had not been comfortable. The union of the 15th and 19th Hussars had begun as an ‘amicable arranged marriage’, but when, thanks to the influence of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, it was decided in 1932 to call the regiment ‘15th The King’s Royal Hussars’, there was an immediate petition for divorce. Chetwode had assured the king that this was the regiment’s wish. In fact it was certainly not the wish of the former officers of the 19th Hussars, and when Chetwode, by then commander-in-chief India, went into the Cavalry Club, its genial members threw things at him just to make the position crystal clear. A petition was sent to the king and a question asked in the House of Commons, after which in 1936 the regiment was redesignated 15th/19th King’s Royal Hussars, and soldiered on happily under this name for nearly sixty years.

  The new regiments did not survive the war, and it is beyond doubt that any ‘disamalgamated’
ones would also have perished. Indeed, some that had survived the 1922 unions were culled by new amalgamations in the late 1950s. In 1992–3 a further round of mergers reduced the cavalry of the line to eight regiments: three of dragoon guards; two apiece of lancers and hussars; and the Light Dragoons; an amalgamation of two 1922 hussar regiments (13th/18th and 15th/19th Hussars), whose name is a delightful revival of a time-honoured title. Nicknames reflect regimental recruiting areas – the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, with its emphasis on Wales, Shropshire, and Herefordshire, is the ‘Welsh Cavalry’; and the Light Dragoons, ‘England’s Northern Cavalry’.

  For all the occasional unhappiness over enforced unions, the cavalry has managed to contract without too much misery, partly because it is swept up within the wider Royal Armoured Corps, which also subsumes the Royal Tank Regiment and the yeomanry regiments of the Territorial Army, and partly because the Council of Cavalry Colonels, an unofficial forum of the colonels of all the regiments, has been able to make common sense prevail. The infantry has been less fortunate. To understand why, we need to consider the most significant of the infantry restructurings, the Cardwell Reforms of 1881. These created the pattern of county regiments that just survived until the first decade of the twenty-first century. When the Cheshire Regiment (the 22nd Foot) was amalgamated into the Mercian Regiment in 2007 it proudly maintained that it was one of only five regiments that had never ever been amalgamated. The four others were the Royal Scots, the Green Howards, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. The Cheshire’s own history had begun in 1689, and the Royal Scots in 1660. Whatever the merits of this most recent bout of amalgamations, it represented a major break with the past.

  To understand the mechanism of 1881 we need, first of all, to grasp the relationship between battalion and regiment. The regiments raised since 1660 were owned by a regimental colonel, with a lieutenant colonel doing most of the practical work, and a major assisting him. The companies, eight or ten in number, were commanded by captains. It was easy, when expanding the army in time of war, to avoid creating new regiments by simply doubling up the fighting element of existing ones. This meant that instead of consisting of a single battalion – its fighting companies under the lieutenant colonel – it now consisted of two battalions, still with a single regimental colonel, but now with two distinct lieutenant colonels’ commands. Sometimes these second battalions broke away from their parent regiments to become regiments in their own right, which is what happened, for example to 2nd Battalion the Buffs when it became the 61st Foot in 1758. More usually, extra battalions disappeared in peacetime, leaving the regiment in being, but reducing its manpower and thus (no surprises here) its cost. To take an extreme example, the 60th emerged from the Napoleonic wars with eight battalions, but by 1819 it was down to two.

  In France, Germany or the United States it was the normal practice for battalions of the same regiment to serve together, and for rank structures to reflect this. From Napoleon’s time, a French regiment would have been commanded by a colonel. This colonel would be a hardworking officer, not the noble proprietor that we might have expected as regimental colonel under the old regime, and he would have a lieutenant colonel as his second in command. Each of his three battalions would have been commanded by a major; his rank, in the French infantry, the wholly descriptive chef de bataillon. In contrast, in the British army it was unusual for different battalions of the same regiment to serve together. But, being the British army, it was not unknown. During the Second World War the Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) uniquely produced two homogeneous brigades, 131 Queen’s Brigade containing 1/5th, 1/6th, and 1/7th Queens, and 169 Queen’s Brigade with 2/5th, 2/6th, and 2/7th Queens. Both fought in North Africa and Italy, and 131 Brigade went thence to North-West Europe.

  On the eve of the Cardwell Reforms the regular army contained 110 line infantry regiments, whose first twenty-five contained two battalions each. All the rest had a single battalion, apart from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the Rifle Brigade, which had four apiece. Regiments retained the cumbrous county titles they had received in 1782, like ‘6th or The 1st Warwickshire Regiment’; ‘20th or The East Devonshire Regiment’; and ‘77th or The East Middlesex Regiment’. Bennett Cuthbertson thought that regional recruiting made very good sense, for youngsters were ‘most desirous of enlisting into a corps, where they are certain of meeting many countrymen, and perhaps relations’.7 Regiments did not have a permanent foothold in their counties, and took their recruits wherever they could find them, though there were indeed many who were able to establish a solid local recruiting base. In 1782 Lord Cornwallis obtained the title ‘West Riding Regiment’ for the 33rd Foot, because it ‘has always recruited in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and has a very good interest and the general good will of the people in that part of the country’. When John Shaw, a Bradford lad who joined the 33rd in 1777, reached London he met ‘a Yorkshireman … who made it a constant rule to treat all the Yorkshire recruits enlisted for the 33rd Regiment, having himself been an old soldier, and served the King in that regiment formerly in Flanders’.8

  Although Irishmen were disproportionately represented in the British army of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were occasional perversities. In 1775 the 27th Foot (Inniskilling) actually had only 175 Irishmen amongst its 374 soldiers – but twenty-five of the thirty officers were Irish. A century later emigration to the United States had replaced enlistment into the British army as the first choice of young Irishmen anxious for a better future, but the infantry, whatever its regional affiliation, still relied heavily on Irish recruits. Forbury Gardens in Reading is home to George Blackall Simonds’ sculpture, the Maiwand Lion, commemorating the 11 officers and 318 men of the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment killed in Afghanistan in 1879–80. The names of the dead are on panels around its plinth, and looking at them it is evident that more of the 66th’s soldiers hailed from distant Cork than from nearby Caversham.

  The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had shown how hard it was to suddenly expand the army to meet a crisis. Although the success of the 1860s volunteer movement had suggested that it was possible to persuade middle-class men and artisans to wear their county’s uniform, it was evident that they did not want to serve as regulars. Moreover, at any one time a large proportion of the regular army served abroad, especially its infantry. In January 1840 twenty-nine British regiments of foot were stationed in India, constituting about a third of all troops in overseas garrisons and just under a quarter of the infantry as a whole. Thirteen regiments had been there for over fifteen years: the 6th and 49th had been there since 1819 and 1843 respectively. Service in India left its mark on regimental symbolism. Colonel Adlercron’s Regiment (39th Foot), with the sickly and unhappy Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Bagshawe in it, was the first British regiment to serve in India. This earned it the motto Primus in Indis, which then featured on the cap-badge of the Dorsetshire Regiment, along with the castle of Gibraltar and a sphinx with the battle honour ‘Marabout’ commemorating its 1801 service in Egypt. The Devons amalgamated with the Dorsets in 1958, and formed a regiment that radiated a quiet, unstuffy competence throughout its too-short life; Primus in Indis survived onto the new regimental badge.

  Just as a sphinx pays tribute to achievements in Egypt at the turn of the eighteenth century, long service in India is normally marked by the appearance, on a regiment’s ‘colours and appointments’, of the Bengal tiger. The 67th or South Hampshire Regiment was there from 1805 to 1826, and when Cardwell brought it together with the 37th or North Hampshire Regiment the tiger was added to the Hampshire rose to give them their ‘cat and cabbage’ cap-badge. When the Hampshires were amalgamated with the Queen’s in 1992 the tiger became an arm badge, and gave the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment its nickname, the Tigers. At the time of amalgamation there had been some thought of adopting the original Queen’s badge, the paschal lamb, which would have been familiar to Percy Kirke’s men in the Tangier garrison, for th
ey had worn it there in the heat and stink. Discussions with the regiment’s soldiers, however, made it very clear that a tiger, red in tooth and claw, had merits that a gentle herbivore did not. The charming simplicity of the old Queen’s badge might induce members of other regiments to venture on easily misunderstood bleating. The Hampshires’ tiger was certainly not unique. Both the Royal Leicesters, tracing their origins to Colonel Solomon Richards’ Regiment, raised in 1688, and the York and Lancaster Regiment, dating back to the 1758 65th Foot, bore Bengal tigers on their cap-badges. This was supplemented for the Leicesters by the word ‘HINDOOSTAN’. In 1880, even as Cardwell was at work, the 5th Foot was sent off to India. It returned in 1894, now styled the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, and contained only eleven of those who had made that original journey. Most of the men had returned to Britain when their time with the army expired, and had been replaced by new drafts; 232 had died in India.