Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Cardwell’s infantry was not simply alienated from the counties it pretended to belong to, but was heavily preoccupied with furnishing colonial garrisons and was by no means balanced enough for the sort of conflicts that had recently marked the continent. In contrast, Prussian success in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, demonstrated just how easy it was to generate a large and effective army through conscription and regional organisation which brought conscripts and reservists together in the same framework. In March 1870 Cardwell explained that he proposed ‘in time of peace to maintain a force which shall be moderate in amount and susceptible of easy expansion, and the reserve of which shall be so within reach as to be immediately available on the occurrence of any public emergency.’9

  The process embodied a whole series of reforms, of which the abolition of the purchase of commissions, implemented in 1871, was one of the first. It outlasted Cardwell’s time as secretary of state for war (1868–74) and was concluded by Hugh Childers, who held the office from 1880 to 1882. As far as regimental restructuring was concerned, Cardwell began, in 1872–3, by joining the single-battalion regiments into pairs so that they retained their identity but their soldiers could be posted, as required, within the pair so as to reinforce the linked battalions. Next, the country was divided into sixty-six sub-districts, each of them allocated to a two-battalion regiment or a pair of linked battalions. These regular regiments would now have a depot within the sub-district, and a colonel as its commander. This colonel would also be responsible for the local militia and volunteer battalions, who would train alongside regulars and, Cardwell hoped, be more likely to opt for full-time service. This service was intended to be less onerous than it once was, for the Army Enlistment Act of 1870 had reduced the normal period of service from twenty-five years. Now recruits would sign on for twelve years, but would go into the reserve after spending only six years with the colours, and would remain liable to recall for another six years. The pension bill would be reduced because most soldiers would leave when still in their twenties and able to get another job, and the army would at last have the flexibility to meet major crises.

  Short service was not an immediate success. The annual requirement for recruits rose from 12,500 to around 28,800 a year, and although recruiting did indeed improve, it did not enable the army to cope with annual wastage, now swollen because desertion increased, thanks to the influx of young soldiers who found it hard to cope with army life. Moreover, the small wars of the 1870s and 1880s – the Ashanti War, the Zulu War, the second Afghan War, and the first Boer War – placed Cardwell’s new regimental system under severe pressure; in 1870 there were 59 battalions at home providing drafts for 82 abroad. Calling up the reserve was no answer. However, this was done on a limited scale in 1878 when there was a risk of war with Russia, and also for the invasion of Egypt in 1882. Cardwell made it clear that this would be only done in grave national emergency – something the Zulu War, say, could scarcely be deemed to constitute. Soldiers feared that by overdoing the call-up of reservists the government was simply making them an unattractive prospect for employers.

  Many reservists found it heavy going outside and, like Kipling’s ‘William Parsons, that used to be Edward Clay’, soon re-enlisted under an assumed name.

  I done my six years’ service. ’Er Majesty sez: ‘Good-day –

  You’ll please to come when you’re rung for, an’ ’ere’s your ’ole back-pay:

  An’ fourpence a day for baccy – an’ bloomin’ gen’rous too;

  An’ now you can make your fortune – the same as your orf’cers do.’

  […]

  A man o’ four-an’-twenty that ’asn’t learned of a trade –

  Beside ‘Reserve’ agin’ him – ’e’d better be never made.

  I tried my luck for a quarter, an’ that was enough for me,

  An’ I thought of ’Er Majesty’s barricks, an’ I thought I’d go an’ see.10

  Edward Roe, from Castlepollard in County Westmeath, joined the army in 1905. Dead set on the cavalry, he was told that although both the 16th and 5th Lancers were full up, there was happily a vacancy in the ‘East Lancers’. He briefly thought it odd that, although a great cavalry aficionado, he had not heard of the regiment. He duly signed on, was sent to Preston to draw his kit, and only then discovered that he was in the East Lancashire Regiment. After serving his time with the colours he was discharged from 2/East Lancashire in March 1914, then stationed in Wynberg, just outside Cape Town, and

  soon regretted leaving the army. Every weekend my mind was in Cape Town, Adderley Street, the Grand Parade, Buitengraft Street, Mick O’Grady’s pub of jovial memories, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the races at Newlands every Saturday, the first class rugby and cricket matches and other forms of amusement, I could visualise Mick Cunningham, ‘Spike’ West, ‘Paddy’ Wade, ‘Snowy’ Parsons and the ‘Bullock’ Masterson walking down Adderley Street, Yes! They’ve turned to the left on passing Van Riebeck’s statue, they’re making for ‘Mick’ O’Grady’s. I can imagine the night they will have.

  Instead, he found himself ‘on the borders of the Great Bog of Allan’, with nobody of any military experience to talk to apart from policemen, of whom he was not fond. He had decided to enlist in the American army (although he knew that he risked arrest as a deserter if he emigrated while still a reservist), but proposed to enjoy the perch-fishing season first. In the event, his mobilisation order arrived on 5 August, and he set of for his regimental depot in Preston.11

  When Childers came to office in 1880 he first increased Colour service to seven years and reduced reserve service to five, thereby establishing the terms of service that were to take the regular army through to the First World War. He improved pay and prospects, making it easier for NCOs to extend their service to pension. In 1881, he formalised the rank of warrant officer with ‘rates of pay … such as will give adequate remuneration for the very important duties performed’.12

  As far as regiments were concerned, Childers pushed the system introduced by Cardwell to its logical conclusion. Had he been starting with a clean sheet of paper he might have concluded that a regiment with two regular battalions was actually too small, and that the four-battalion rifle regiments, the 60th and the 95th, actually had the flexibility to keep battalions abroad topped up from those at home. But Cardwell’s scheme was now frozen in brick, asphalt, and wrought iron as the redbrick buildings with their great square mock-keeps – like Roussillon Barracks in Chichester, Stoughton Barracks in Guildford, Le Marchant Barracks in Devizes, and Brock Barracks on Reading’s Oxford Road – formed the new sub-district depots. In 1881 Childers accordingly converted the linkages of 1872 into regiments with two regular and two militia battalions, and also designated volunteer infantry units within the area as volunteer battalions. The senior twenty-five regiments who had started with two battalions found this relatively straightforward. For instance, the most senior regiment of foot, the Royal Scots, with its depot in Glencorse Barracks, swept up the Edinburgh (or Queen’s) Regiment of Militia Light Infantry as its militia battalion along with an assortment of volunteer units which became its volunteer battalions. These volunteers included the City of Edinburgh Rifle Volunteer Brigade and the 1st Linlithgowshire Rifle Volunteer Corps. The Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment, 2nd of Foot and the senior English line regiment, based at Stoughton Barracks, took on the 2nd Royal Surrey Militia and four battalions of the Surrey Rifle Volunteer Corps.

  The process was more complex elsewhere. There were many apparently natural alliances. The 37th (North Hampshire) and 67th (South Hampshire) came together in Lower Barracks at Winchester to form the Hampshire Regiment. They swept up the Royal Hampshire Militia and five battalions of the Hampshire Rifle Volunteer Corps, including one on the Isle of Wight. Even then, when bidden to the new regiment’s first dinner, a furious lieutenant colonel of the 67th, his face no doubt the colour of the table’s polished mahogany, declared that ‘damned names mean nothing’ because ‘from tim
e immemorial regiments had been numbered to reflect their status in the line.’ He refused ‘to come to anything called a Hampshire Regimental dinner. My compliments, Sir, and be damned.’13 Although the 43rd Foot was in theory attached to Montgomeryshire and the 52nd to Oxfordshire, their old Peninsula association made them happy bedfellows in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, soon to be rechristened the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Elsewhere, some arranged marriages settled down to happy relationships: the 35th (Royal Sussex) and the 107th (Bengal Infantry) – formerly a regiment of the ‘Company’s Europeans’ – became the Royal Sussex Regiment, while the 39th (Dorsetshire) and the 54th (West Norfolk) materialised as the Devonshire Regiment.

  There were some shotgun weddings too. Victorian Britain’s enthusiasm for all things Scots had led to the progressive tartanising of the Scottish infantry, first as Lowland regiments (hitherto largely indistinguishable from the rest of the line), with adopted pipers and tartan trews, and then on to pursue the coveted designation Highlanders. When the 74th became Highlanders in 1845 the adjutant general warned its commanding officer that the Duke of Wellington wondered if the change would really work. ‘His Grace cannot keep out of view,’ he wrote, ‘the fact that it is found very difficult to complete the Highland regiments already on the establishment of the army with Highland or even Scottish recruits.’ He was cautiously confident, though, that the regiment’s ‘local influence in Scotland’ would enable the 74th to transform itself.14 In 1881 there were not enough genuine Highlanders to go around. When the 75th (Stirlingshire) Regiment merged with the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders) the latter scooped the pool of kudos and the resultant Gordon Highlanders were glorious in kilt, sporran, and feather bonnet. One Scots officer saw what was now officially 1st Battalion The Gordon Highlanders, in action at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt in 1882, and admitted, ‘the 75th, a good regiment, were handicapped … by having just been turned into Highlanders. The battalion was full of Englishmen, and was the subject of much merriment.’15 Unusually, the 79th Cameron Highlanders soldiered on as a single-battalion regiment. They raised a second battalion in 1897 and moved into a new depot, Cameron Barracks, in Inverness.

  It is easy enough to point out the anomalies in the Cardwell– Childers regimental system. It affected only the line infantry. The Foot Guards and rifle regiments recruited nationally rather than regionally, and while the latter (with their depot in Peninsula Barracks, Winchester, just up the hill from the Hampshires) had associated militia and volunteers, the Guards did not. Unrest in Ireland meant there were no Irish volunteers, leaving Irish regiments without volunteer battalions. The descendants of the ‘gentlemen of the ordnance’ – the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers – lay outside the system, and recruited men for general service, posting them to units as the needs of the service dictated. Until 1920, the Royal Artillery did distinguish between the Royal Garrison Artillery who manned heavy guns, and the mounted branch, the Royal Field Artillery and the Royal Horse Artillery, who were trained separately. Then there were the Departmental Corps, which had come into being in the nineteenth century as the army’s supporting services were militarised. The biggest of them, the Army Ordnance Corps and the Army Service Corps, did not coalesce until 1896 and 1888 respectively. The Army Medical Corps, its physicians and surgeons now holding homogenised military ranks, followed in 1898. All recruited nationwide, although many of their soldiers transferred across from other arms, and trained their recruits centrally.

  It is also true that the relationship between counties and their regiments was not straightforward. Large counties like Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as the teeming capital, had several regiments within their boundaries. Smaller counties were swept up in regiments named for larger ones: Cambridgeshire was regimentally part of Suffolk. The responsible committee had concluded that a community needed an adult male population of 200,000 to sustain two regular battalions and two militia battalions, and counties that fell below this total – like little Dorset, with 95,500 – had to recruit elsewhere such as London. Likewise, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (its district comprising Berwickshire, Dumfriesshire, Selkirkshire, and Roxburghshire) took many Irish recruits who had enlisted in Glasgow.16 Between 1883 and 1900, just 19 regiments had more than half their recruits born in the regimental area.

  The infantry as a whole was usually under-recruited. In order to keep battalions on service abroad up to strength, home battalions often became little more than processing units that trained recruits fresh out of the regimental depot, and then drafted them off overseas. When Fritz Ponsonby, later to become private secretary to Edward VII and George V, joined 2/Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in the Citadel at Plymouth in 1888 he found it

  An ideal regiment. It had practically no men. There was an officers’ mess, a band, some charming officers, a certain number of excellent NCOs and a sprinkling of old soldiers, but otherwise nothing but recruits. It was what Lord Wolseley described as a ‘squeezed lemon’. As soon as a recruit was sufficiently trained, he was packed off to India to feed the other battalion. Of course, I had to spend the first few months doing recruits’ drill, but after that I had a wonderful time and was away practically every day merely attending a parade on Saturdays.17

  The 1881 system formed the basis for the structural changes introduced when R. B. Haldane reformed the army after the Boer War. Most regiments retained two regular battalions, apart from the two rifle regiments, as well as the Royal Fusiliers and the Middlesex Regiment – both recruiting in populous London – which had four. In other cases a regiment’s third battalion was now termed the ‘Special Reserve’ battalion. It was commanded by a regular lieutenant colonel based at the depot, and his soldiers, as we have seen in the case of George Ashurst of the Lancashire Fusiliers, signed on for six months’ full-time service. They would have a fortnight’s top-up training each year, a liability for call-up when the army was mobilised, and would be posted as required to the regiment’s regular battalions. Its Territorial battalions took seniority thereafter, sometimes retaining individual quirks that harked back to their days as volunteer units.

  In August 1914 the Hampshires had two regular battalions: the 1st at Colchester, ready to take the field as part of 11th Brigade in 4th Division; and the 2nd sweltering at Mhow in India. The 3rd (Special Reserve) battalion trained its recruits at Winchester, and the six Territorial battalions were scattered around the county. Of these, the 6th Battalion, from beery Portsmouth, was the Duke of Connaught’s Own. The cap-badge of the 7th, from the New Forest, depicted a ‘dog gauge’ – a stirrup-shaped device originally used by the king’s foresters to measure the paws of dogs coming into the Forest: those big enough to pull down the monarch’s deer would be killed. The 8th Battalion, The Isle of Wight Rifles, Princess Beatrice’s Own, perversely wore rifle green and sealskin busbies in full dress and drilled at a rifleman’s quickstep. And so, when the Isle of Wight Rifles were formed up to attack on Gallipoli in August 1915, it was Bugle Major Peachey (not the drum major, as he would have been in a line battalion) who sounded the charge. The ensuing battle cost them eight officers and more than 300 men killed or missing. The small town of Newport lost 32 of its boys that day: little Orchard Street alone lost four. The Hampshires had even raised a cyclist battalion, its companies spread out across the regimental area, just before the war. Adolphus ‘Dolph’ Jupe, then a Romsey Post Office clerk on 18s. a week, thought that it would be a better bet than the nearby 4/Hampshires (‘roguish characters’), and so duly joined the 9th Cyclist Battalion.

  During the First World War the system proved readily expandable. Wartime-raised ‘service’ battalions were added to the regiment although, as we saw earlier, these occasionally emphasised local identity by bearing their own insignia, like the four New Army battalions of the King’s Liverpools raised by the Earl of Derby. They wore the Earl’s ‘eagle and child’ crest – ‘bastard and bustard’ – as their cap-badge. In 1914 Territorial battalions were duplicated, with each sending a first
-line battalion (say 1/4th Hampshires) to the front, while a second-line battalion (2/4th Hampshires) formed up in its place, and even a third-line battalion (3/4th Hampshires). When the war ended, service battalions were quickly disbanded and Territorial battalions demobilised. Dolph Jupe, called up with 9th Hampshires in August 1914, had risen to the rank of sergeant and was with his battalion in Siberia when the war ended. He did not leave Vladivostok till 1 November 1919, and got home to be demobilised over a year after the war had ended.

  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones, speckling the Western Front in bone-white rank and file, bear the cap-badges of the men lying beneath them. The column after column of names on the memorials to the missing, like those at the Menin Gate, Tyne Cot, and Thiepval, are laid out by regiments, with the names taking stone by seniority as they would have taken ground when forming up on parade. At the top left of each memorial comes ‘Commands and Staff’: there are two generals on the memorial at Dud Corner at Loos, and the list at the Menin Gate is headed by Brigadier General Charles Fitzclarence VC, nicknamed ‘General Officer Commanding Menin Road’. Then comes the Royal Navy, because of the Royal Naval Division’s contribution, and then the army – Household Cavalry, Royal Artillery, Cavalry, Royal Engineers, Foot Guards, Infantry, Services, and then units that existed only in the Territorial Force, like the London Regiment. Within the infantry of the line, regiments are listed by their 1881 seniority. The visitor at the Arras Memorial searching (as so many do) for Second Lieutenant Walter Tull of the Middlesex, footballer turned well-regarded platoon commander, needs to remember that his regiment stood fifty-seventh in infantry seniority. ‘Die hard, 57th, die hard,’ its commanding officer had called across the smoky carnage at Albuhera in 1811, and the Middlesex, nicknamed the Die Hards, duly bore the battle’s name on their cap-badge.