Our trainees arrived, sailors in Navy uniforms which were quickly changed to Army uniform. The Royal Artillery became Infantry and none of these lads were used to Army discipline. The Navy lads had all been in small units with various types of assault craft, the RAs had all come from Bomb Alley where they had been shooting down flying bombs and, as this threat was over, they became redundant. I never realised what a challenge it would be to turn these lads into Infantry but what a shock I had when they took to their training like ducks to water, especially the Navy lads … They said they liked the training and the comradeship. In the Navy they were in small messes and the atmosphere was different.35
General Adam was a gunner by cap-badge, and may perhaps (or perhaps not) be forgiven for not understanding how strongly infantry officers and regular NCOs were bound by regimental ties. When Brigadier Robert Bridgeman was promoted major general in 1941 he reluctantly decided that he ought to swap his Rifle Brigade black buttons for a general’s brass ones, but his world was still shaped by the black and the green. He would have liked a rifleman as his military assistant, ‘but after the destruction of the 1st Battalion at Calais I could see nobody who looked likely to fit the bill.’ When, a month or two later, he was made director general of the Home Guard, he selected Colonel John Longmore as his deputy, giving him lunch at the Carlton Club before offering him the job with the words ‘You’re a Harrovian and a guardsman, I’m an Etonian and a rifleman. I’ll take the risk; will you?’36
In 1941 Major Bernard Fergusson of the Black Watch, serving on the staff in Cairo, heard that his regiment’s 1st Battalion had lost over 300 officers and men in an attack pressed with characteristic determination at Tobruk. General Sir Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, had been commissioned into the regiment in 1901. Fergusson had served him as aide-de-camp in 1935–7, and never forgot being told that ‘the Regiment is the foundation of everything’. He at once waylaid the great man’s chief of staff, Major General Arthur Smith, and told him what had happened. Smith gave Fergusson a written order ‘to collect all officers and men of the Black Watch, whatever their duties, who are fit for active service and take them up with him to rejoin 2BW in Tobruk … Major Fergusson and his party will be given top priority for all transport necessary to get them to Tobruk as soon as possible.’ ‘I’m sure the Chief will want to say goodbye to you’, added Smith. Within three days Fergusson was off with six officers and 64 men of the regiment in the overloaded and slow Chakdina. He found a battalion dreadfully wounded but still on its feet.
Two of the companies had no officers at all; one had fewer than ten men and was being commanded by its CSM, who had been a lance-corporal in my original platoon ten years earlier. ‘Big Jim’ Ewan, one of my corporals in those days, now a captain and a company commander, was one of the unwounded: his company and a handful of sappers took over the left flank; my first cousin Richard Boyle and the remnants of the other three rifle companies the right; HQ Company under Gerald Barry (a former Coldstreamer with a Military Cross from the First World War who had joined us from Rhodesia) the centre. Roy the Pipe-Major, my former platoon piper, had played the battalion into action, continuing to play despite three wounds. He had already been wounded and taken prisoner in Crete, but had escaped through Greece and Turkey and rejoined, refusing an offer to be repatriated to Britain … His younger brother Neil, also a piper, was to be killed with the 1st battalion in Korea in 1952.
Fergusson was given command of D Company, and stood-to on its position at dawn, ‘with two officers who had come up in the Chakdina with me; I was glad to find that I knew two of the NCOs of old. Among the killed was a Kilkerran man, Sergeant Andrew Scobie, with whom I had enlisted in 1932.’
There are few universally valid generalities. Thus far we have seen how the regimental system bent under the strain of major war, but Bernard Fergusson and 1/Black Watch show us, conversely, just how resilient it could be. If we look hard at the metallurgy we can see good reason for this. When Fergusson met five Eton friends at Waterloo station in January 1930 for the journey to Sandhurst, the party included ‘Patrick Campbell-Preston, destined like me for the Black Watch and to become by far my closest friend. Years later we were to marry sisters; he was to be my second-in-command and my successor in command in the Regiment.’ Fergusson’s father had been a Grenadier, but he had decided against the Foot Guards because of ‘the prospect of doing all my soldiering in or near London’ and when he joined 2/Black Watch at Colchester, although he began less than confidently by saluting the RSM and wearing his spats on the wrong feet,
there couldn’t have been a more welcoming family to join. We new boys were at once made at home in the mess, and within two weeks we had lunched or dined with every married officer. Patrick and I were appalled when we went to look up two Sandhurst friends who had joined an English Regiment in the same garrison, whose reception had been very different from ours, despite the fact that one of them had been brought up in that Regiment.
He thought that ‘three quarters of the fun of all regimental soldiering derived from the Jocks. Most of them were either farm-servants from Perthshire or Angus, or miners from Fife, and they were a constant joy: sometimes exasperating, always stimulating. And they would stand by “the officer” through thick and thin.’ Once, when Fergusson collected his company’s weekly pay, most of it in 10s. notes, he picked the tartan bag up by the wrong end and the money fell out and was blown away, across the parade ground and football field of Maryhill Barracks, Glasgow, in the high wind. ‘One by one the Jocks came back, each with a fistful of soiled or screwed-up paper: some had picked them off the windward wall of the officers’ mess,’ wrote Fergusson. ‘Jocks from every company in the Battalion filed into the company office, and laid their findings on the table.’ Eventually the colour sergeant reported that every penny was accounted for. And then the company soldiers, many of them married ‘off the strength’, and so drawing no marriage allowance but ‘living in penury’ came in to draw their pittance. ‘There was and is no possible comment for me to make,’ said Fergusson with justifiable pride.37 When he was ennobled, as Lord Ballantrae, in 1972, he chose, for one of the supporters to his arms, ‘a soldier of the 42nd Highlanders, the Black Watch’.
For all the smoke and mirrors that had helped to defend the system in the First World War, most senior infantry officers were convinced that there was real merit in it. The future Field Marshal Lord Slim had begun his working life as a primary school teacher and clerk, but was able to get a temporary commission in 1914 because he had been a member of Birmingham University OTC. He fought through the First World War as a junior infantry officer on the Western Front and knew, better than most, how the realities of rebadging affected the infantry. Just after giving up the post of CIGS in 1952 he reflected on the qualities that had defined the army of his day, concluding that they were discipline, comradeship and regimental pride.
The soldier’s pride and loyalty are not, first, to the Army as a whole, but to his own Corps or Regiment – to his own immediate comrades. The moral strength of the British Army is the sum of all these family or clan loyalties. They are the foundations of the British soldier’s stubborn valour. They hold him when more distant, wider loyalties could not. The Guards held Hougoumont at Waterloo, the Gloucesters stood on a hill in Korea, because in the last resort they remembered that they were the Guards, they were the Gloucesters.
In the First World War, with a battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, I took part in an assault on an enemy position. We advanced across the open, one long line behind the other, suffering heavily as we plodded forward. As we neared the enemy wire, salvos of shrapnel bust in our faces, blasting great gaps in our ranks. Men bowed their heads under this iron hail; some turned back; the leading line faltered. In another moment we should have broken. As we wavered, a private soldier beside me, a stolid man, whom one would have thought untouched by imagination, ran forward. In a voice of brass he roared, ‘Heads up the Warwicks! Show the blighters you
r cap badges! Above the din, half a dozen men each side heard him. Their heads came up. They had no cap badges – they were wearing steel helmets – but they had remembered their regiment. That one little group plunged forward again. The movement spread and, in a moment, the whole line surged through the broken wire and over the enemy parapet.38
It was not just senior officers who supported the system. John Masters was a regular Gurkha who, though strictly speaking its brigade major, commanded a Chindit brigade in Burma and then went on to be a best-selling novelist. He agreed that the regiment bound men where other ties might not. His history may be wrong but his sense of regimental focus is wholly right.
But in war it is necessary that all should pull together, and fight with a will, whatever their opinions of the rights and wrongs of the case. So, in the King’s armies men were shielded from disturbing doubts by the interposition of a smaller cause, which no one could cavil at, between themselves and the great national cause. The spirit was and is built in the regiment.39
Charles Wilson won the Military Cross as an infantry regimental medical officer in the First World War, and was ennobled while serving as Churchill’s doctor in the second. He believed that ‘Loyalty to a fine battalion may take hold of a man and stiffen his purpose,’ and many men found the regiment ‘the source of their strength, their abiding faith … the last of all the creeds that in historical times have steeled men against death.’40 A Second World War commanding officer told Major General Frank Richardson, a senior medical officer:
As descendants of the men who gained such splendid victories in so many battles from 1702 onwards we are simply unable to be cowardly. We’ve got to win our battle, whatever the cost, so that people will say ‘They were worthy descendants of the 32nd,’ and that’s saying a hell of a lot.41
Martin Lindsay served as second in command of 2/Gordon Highlanders from Normandy to the Baltic. He was convinced that
By far and away the greatest single factor in a soldier’s morale is regimental pride, based on centuries of tradition … For my part I have no doubt how the battalion faced the enemy’s fire sweeping across that wide, sullen river, the Rhine, on that dark night thirty years ago. We never wavered because, in the last resort, we were Gordon Highlanders, we were the Highland Division.42
These arguments owed little to those that had been used, by Edward Cardwell and Hugh Childers, to manufacture the regimental system in the 1870s and 1880s. Instead, they reflected a deep-seated human desire, arguably stronger in Britain than in some other countries, to belong to something that is not the work of a moment, but whose present performance is sanctified by the achievements of the past. When the eccentric Lieutenant Colonel Mainwaring led the 51st Light Infantry into action on Walcheren on 1 August 1809,
He told us that all the pleasure and happiness he had ever felt fell short of the pleasure he now felt at being at the head of that Corps, who on that day fifty years before had by their native valour repulsed and defeated the whole body of the enemy’s cavalry before Minden. He showed us the word Minden on our colours, and reminded us how it was inscribed on our belt plates. He said it was probable we should fall in with the enemy that day, and if we did not give them a good drubbing, how could we ever return home to our fathers, mothers etc. Our country expected much from us, the Regiment in its infant state had performed prodigies of valour in its day, and … would it not be expected we should eclipse them in their glory … In the course of this address he returned to his old maxim of firing low, you will then hit them in the legs and there will be three gone, for two will pick him up and run away with him.43
At Alexandria on 21 March 1801 the 28th Foot, in line two-deep, had come under attack from both sides and had been ordered: ‘Front rank stand fast, rear rank about turn.’ As a reward for its conduct that day the regiment was awarded a ‘back badge’, worn in miniature on the back of the headdress. This term has, over the years, defined things from a regimental club and journal to a Gloucester-based taxi company. At Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo, history came close to repeating itself, and the 28th, this time in square, was under heavy attack. Its divisional commander, the scruffy and foul-mouthed Sir Thomas Picton, feared it might break. He roared ‘Twenty-Eighth, remember Egypt!’ Very few of those present at Quatre Bras had actually been at Alexandria, but the appeal to ancient valour was well understood, and the battalion braced up. When the attacks had been repulsed, the brigade commander, Sir James Kempt, rode into the centre of the square, doffed his hat, and said ‘Bravo 28th. The 28th are still the 28th and your conduct this day shall never be forgotten.’
Robin Schlaefli was trained in the Essex Regiment, despite hailing from Croydon, and was given an emergency commission in the Queen’s Royal Regiment in May 1941. When he arrived at Stoughton Barracks it was made clear ‘that we were no ordinary English Line Regiment, but were the oldest and without doubt the greatest’. RSM Tasker warned new officers ‘Salutes is a two-way courtesy. If I see any of you tapping your ’at with your swagger stick, or a-scratching your eyebrow like the Wavy Navy, you’ll wish you’d joined the ’ome Guard.’ Schlaefli later mused that
Regimental pride has always been of enormous importance in the British army, and still is, despite the ravages of amalgamation. It was even – I might say particularly – true for wartime soldiers. We were therefore given a comprehensive and inspiring picture of the Regiment’s history. I knew some of it from the OTC at school, but in the Depot, there were still old soldiers around telling tales of Mons, Ypres and the Somme …
Within the bounds of loyalty to his Regiment in the Army is always the feeling of belonging to and identity with the smaller formations within it. So far as the infantry soldier is concerned, this means being part of his Battalion, his Company, his Platoon, and finally his Section of ten or so men with whom he eats, drinks, moves and fights alongside in battle.
From the soldier’s worm’s eye view, this could be like an upturned pyramid with him at the bottom; but like a man dangling beneath a parachute, everything above him is actually a support. And by turning the pyramid the right way up again, the chain of command from the Colonel downwards shows that the base of it – containing the soldiers who in the end win or lose battles – is the most important part.44
In both world wars the regiment helped prove the moral cement that held men together, however slender their initial connection with it. Lieutenant Colonel A. P. B. Irwin commanded a New Army battalion of the East Surreys. Although he thought that the huge drafts that arrived to replace casualties in 1917 were far inferior to the volunteers of 1914, he took the trouble to greet each new batch – the product of the dehumanising rebadging at Etaples – with a lecture on the regiment’s history and traditions, and of the battalion’s own achievements. In this way they ‘all became East Surreys in no time at all’, proud of their battalion and of the very good 18th Division, of which it formed part.45 John Lucy, a pre-war regular in the Royal Irish Rifles, was shocked to see how old standards were changed by the promotion of NCOs who called their men by their first names. What he called ‘We remnants’ held firm in ‘a form of freemasonry,’ that ‘preserved and passed on the diluted esprit de corps of our regiment.’46
James Jack was a regular Cameronian who commanded 2/West Yorkshire in 1916–17. Sidney Rogerson, commissioned into the West Yorkshires in 1914, was one of his company commanders, and wrote admiringly of how
so completely had he identified himself with us and incidentally endeared himself to us that his alien origin had been completely and quickly forgotten … As punctilious on the parade ground as he was regardless of his safety and unsparing of his energy in action, he had other and rarer qualities … In all ways he set us an example … No matter what the circumstances he was always spic and span, and it was typical of him that before any big attack he would be careful to see that his boots and buttons were polished, explaining with a slow smile that one could ‘always die like a gentleman – clean and properly dressed’.47
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bsp; Jack’s parent regiment wore black buttons, so the shining-up would not have come naturally. Recognising just what a mixed bag his officers were, he made a point of presenting each newly arrived subaltern with a regimental swagger cane. During the ten days of trench-holding that Rogerson describes so well, his company was a ‘mixed Yorkshire-Northumbrian contingent’ that owed little to pre-war regimental logic. But when, soon after coming out of the line, they met a guards battalion – ‘fine and soldierly they looked, all big men, carrying their marching order with an enviable ease, and with their khaki new and clean,’ the West Yorkshires at once braced up, ‘determined to uphold the prestige of a line regiment in the face of these picked troops’. Even the iron-hard Jack confided to his diary:
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