Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century the urgings of civilian fashion and the demands of operational service in hot climates, where tightly-fitting steel helmets were worn for much of the time, encouraged short hair-styles, with buzz-cuts or shaven scalps increasingly widespread. The young, whether commissioned or not, might indulge in streaks or gel off duty. There remains one clear line connecting the facial appearance of the army of 2010 with that of Marlborough’s day. Each infantry battalion had a section of pioneers, charged with clearing obstacles in the field and with a variety of tasks requiring simple engineering skills about camp. Pioneers had leather aprons to protect their uniforms and carried axes, picks, billhooks, and shovels – the tools of their trade. In 1856 they gained their own pattern of sword, with a brass stirrup guard and a double row of saw-teeth along the back of its blade: it was eventually declared obsolete in 1904.

  In the early eighteenth century, the pioneer sergeant wore a beard and bore an axe on parade, and once NCO stripes were in use he had a badge of crossed axes above his chevrons. There is no wholly persuasive explanation for the beard. It is sometimes said that it originated in the pioneer sergeant’s duties as the battalion’s blacksmith, and was intended to protect his face from the heat of the forge. That logic would have led to farriers in the cavalry being bearded, but they were not. The detailed structure of pioneers within the infantry changed over the years, and the term ‘assault pioneers’ is now used to describe them. Members of a modern assault pioneer platoon provide an infantry commanding officer with in-house engineering, and their skills include wiring, explosive demolitions and basic carpentry. The pioneer sergeant is still allowed a beard, and most units expect him to avail himself of the privilege. In the Coldstream Guards ‘The Pioneer Sergeant may wear a full set beard and is encouraged to do so,’ while in the Irish Guards ‘The Pioneer Sergeant is permitted to grow a full beard if he so wishes, and he invariably does.’23 Many commanding officers set much store by having a suitably hirsute pioneer sergeant. In Second World War Italy Sergeant Roscoe, pioneer sergeant of 3/Grenadier Guards, burnt his face in an accident with a cooker and so could not sport a beard. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel A. G. W. Heber Percy, directed his deputy, Lance Sergeant Alf Peters, to wear it in his place.24

  CHAPTER 22

  TUNES OF GLORY

  MUSIC PLAYED ITS own distinctive part in the bonding process. From the very beginning, regiments of horse had trumpeters and infantry regiments, drummers. These were properly enlisted soldiers who did duty alongside their comrades in peace and war. Both fulfilled important functions, transmitting and relaying calls in the field, and, in an age when clocks and watches were rare and telephones unknown, they regulated life in camp and barracks with routine calls and specific orders. Where drummers were concerned, the early seventeeth-century soldier Francis Markham tells us

  Valour and courage is necessary in all their employments, for the Drummer’s place is ever at his captain’s heels. It is he that brings the battles to join, he that stands in the midst when swords fly on all sides; he that brings them to pell mell and the fury of execution; and it is he that brings them both on and off, when they are either fortunate or abandoned and forsaken.1

  Captain Thomas Venn emphasised that a soldier needed to understand ‘the several beats of the drum, or he may often fall short of the captain’s commands’, and it was part of the captain’s duties to make sure his men knew what the different drumbeats meant.2 At this time drummers were also used for parleying with the enemy, and needed to be discreet and resourceful.

  In 1665 1st Foot Guards had a drum major and 36 drummers, but the Buffs had only one drummer for each of their twelve companies when they went to Flanders in 1692. The Buffs gained an extra drummer per company on active service but lost him when they came back to England six years later. Soon, however, two drummers were allotted to each company of infantry and troop of dragoons; it was not until 1765 that dragoons gained trumpeters instead. Cavalry regiments also had a pair of kettle-drums, cauldron-shaped instruments slung across the shoulders of a large and steady horse. They were covered with embroidered drum-banners, except in the 3rd Hussars, who were uniquely allowed to carry silver French drums captured by their ancestors, the King’s Own Dragoons, at Dettingen in 1743. From 1689 the Master General of the Ordnance had a pair of kettle-drums mounted on a carriage drawn by four grey horses and this extraordinary vehicle accompanied the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns.

  During the eighteenth century only the Foot Guards and Royal Artillery had drum majors financed by the public purse, other regiments paid for theirs from company funds. The post of drum-major was eventually established, but as an appointment, rather than a rank: today it can be held by a soldier holding the rank of sergeant, colour sergeant or Warrant Officer Class 2. Opinion varied as to whether the squealing of flute and fife were fitting accompaniments to the noble thudding of the drum, but woodwind music was widespread from early in the army’s history, whether played by drummers, as part of their normal duties, or by fifers. In 1753 ten drummers and five fifers of the Royal Artillery headed a royal review in Green Park.

  See drummers with the fifers come,

  And Carter with the massive drum;

  The grand drum-major first doth stalk

  With gold-knobbed stick and pompous walk,

  And as he marches o’er the ground

  He thinks he turns the world around.3

  Highland regiments, the oldest of them, the Black Watch, dating from 1739, had pipers as well as drummers from their foundation but it was not until 1854 that the pipers and a pipe major were made part of a battalion’s establishment. Until then vacancies for pipers were created by misemploying drummers or private soldiers.

  European military music owed a substantial debt to developments in the Middle East. The English word tabor and the French tambour both derive from the Persian taburak drum, and the Turkish janissary band has good reason to be seen as the grandfather of modern bands. When the Sultan of Turkey gave the King of Poland a janissary band in full fig in 1730 it gave new impetus to the fashion for making drummers look as Turkish as possible. In 1750 Sir Robert Rich’s Regiment of Dragoons had a black drummer called Toby Gill, ‘a very drunken and profligate fellow’, who was eventually hanged for murder. Because genuine Turks or Moors were hard to come by, many British regiments compromised by recruiting drummers in the West Indies. In 1759 Admiral Edward Boscawen brought ten boys back from the West Indies and presented them to his soldier brother Colonel George Boscawen of the 29th Foot, who took them on as drummers. The 29th continued to have some black drummers till 1843. In the 1820s 1st Foot Guards’ bass drummer wore a huge turban topped with a gilt crescent and red plume, with a short gold-laced red jacket and a scimitar at his side. The Royal Fusiliers went one better by giving their exotically dressed bass drummer strings of cowrie shells hanging from his ears, that rattled when he beat the drum.

  There were also negro drummers in the Peninsula. Nicolas Thorp, son of a wealthy Lancashire merchant, had run away from home to enlist in the army. By 1809 he was drum major of the 88th Foot – the Connaught Rangers – whose Lieutenant William Grattan thought him ‘quite a lad’. He fell in love with a Spanish girl, whose rich and influential father objected to the match and was permitted to inspect the regiment before it left town to ensure that she had not been hidden in its ranks. Thorpe had in fact slipped her into the band, blacked up as a negro cymbal player. The 88th set off to a quick march with Thorp flourishing his baton at the head of the band and his lover clashing her cymbals behind him. When the sergeant major was killed at Busaco in 1810 Thorp replaced him, and, although wounded four times, enjoyed a successful career and a happy marriage. He was recommended for a free ensigncy, but it had not arrived when he was killed at Toulouse in 1814 by a cannon-ball that took him squarely in the chest and ‘whirled his remains in the air’. The commission appeared the next day, and the fact that Mrs Thorp was now an officer’s widow was
‘the means of reconciling her father to the choice she had made’.4

  There was a distinction between infantry drummers and cavalry trumpeters, enlisted to carry out military functions, and other musicians, hired by the regiment’s officers. True, drummers and trumpeters had always been able to do more than just play routine calls: at Dettingen a trumpeter in the Earl of Crawford’s Troop of Life Guards stood up in his stirrups and sounded the popular Purcell tune ‘Britons Strike Home’ before the troop charged. But their repertoire was necessarily limited, and so regiments that sought more elaborate music employed civilian musicians. The Royal Artillery had the earliest British ensemble (pre-dating the London Philharmonic by half a century), formed at Minden in Germany in 1762, and shifting to the Royal Artillery’s depot at Woolwich the following year. It was small at first, with ten musicians playing trumpets, French horns, bassoons, oboes, and clarinets, with violins, cellos, double-bass, and flutes for use when the band played at dinners or receptions. Other regiments followed suit – the Royal Scots was reported as having ‘fifers and a band of music’ as early as 1763 – and, like the Royal Artillery, they favoured German or Italian musicians.

  It was not until the early nineteenth century that a ‘Band of Musick’ at last became part of a regiment’s establishment. Its size varied from time to time. In 1830 it numbered a bandmaster and fourteen musicians, though officers continued to pay for extra men, and soldiers were illicitly drafted across from the companies to increase the size of the band. An inspection report of 1813 on 4/Royal Scots affirmed that although the band played ‘very correct marching time’, its personnel ‘rather exceed the limited numbers’. There was still a preference for employing foreign civilian bandmasters. In 1847 Bandmaster Paolo Castaldini of 1/Royal Scots, noted for his intemperate treatment of bandsmen, was attacked by his subordinates, who first threw a sheet over him so that he could not identify any individuals, and then gave him a sound beating. Although sixteen bandsmen were court-martialled and imprisoned, it transpired that Castaldini had been driven out of three previous bands, and when he moved on to the 63rd Foot its band resigned en masse rather than put up with him. In 1857 the band of the 61st Foot struck up the Victorian favourite ‘Cheer, boys, cheer’, when it marched into the British camp on Delhi Ridge. A couple of days later Lieutenant Charles Griffiths was sitting in a tent with the bandmaster, Mr Sauer, when

  We were saluted with the sound of distant music, the most discordant I have ever heard. The bandmaster jumped up from his seat, exclaiming: ‘Mein Gott! Vat is dat? No regiment in camp can play such vile music.’ And closing his ears immediately rushed out of the tent.

  The Kashmir contingent was arriving in camp, and although its tough soldiers aroused admiration, ‘the shrill discord of their bands created great amusement among the assembled Europeans.’5

  It was not just the Kashmiris who could make a din. In 1854 the British army of the east, shortly to embark for the Crimea, held a grand review at Scutari, just across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. The troops looked splendid and drilled marvellously, but when it came to the National Anthem, the twenty or so bands played simultaneously in different arrangements, pitches and key signatures, and the result was a shocking cacophony. In 1857 the Duke of Cambridge, who had been dismayed by the Scutari debacle, set up the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall, in Twickenham, London. Kneller Hall was responsible for training bandmasters, who were now increasingly soldiers, as the practice of recruiting civilians was discouraged. This established a common standard in military music and, more recently, provides training for all the army’s musicians.

  The late Victorian army had one band for each regular infantry battalion and cavalry regiment, and their marches became part of the texture of a soldier’s life. Some regimental marches were ancient. The quick march of the Royal Scots, ‘Dumbarton’s Drums’, harks back to the days when the regiment’s colonel, Lord George Douglas, was created Earl of Dumbarton in 1675, and may very well be the same as the old Scots March that long pre-dates the regular army. When Samuel Pepys met Lord George in Rochester in 1667 he noted that ‘here in the streets I did hear the Scots March beat by the drums before the soldiers, which is very odd.’ Others were deeply fashionable. When the 11th Light Dragoons became the 11th (Prince Albert’s Own) Hussars in 1840 they adopted Joseph Haydn’s stately ‘Coburg’ as their slow march. The regiment also took the cherry-red of Prince Albert’s livery for their trousers, a sartorial distinction now perpetuated by the King’s Royal Hussars. No sooner had Johann Strauss composed the ‘Radetzky March’ in 1848 than the Austrian Bandmaster Schramm of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards took it up as a regimental march. The Emperor Franz Joseph became colonel-in-chief of the regiment in 1896, giving it permission to adopt the Austrian double-headed eagle as its cap-badge.

  There was the occasional compromise. The Queen’s Royal Regiment’s quick march, ‘The Old Queen’s’, incorporated the National Anthem, and when it was played in the presence of Queen Victoria in 1881 she frostily enquired whether special permission had been given for its use, adding that unless such permission had been granted the practice must cease. The Queen’s, much piqued, grimly marched past without a regimental march for the next few years, earning the nickname ‘The Silent Second’. The regiment made much of the fact that it had been formed to garrison Tangier, Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, and eventually discussions with the Portuguese embassy led to the adoption in 1903 of ‘Braganza’, itself a free arrangement of ‘O Patria’, the Portuguese National Anthem at the time.

  Regimental marches often pointed to a unit’s recruiting ground. The Irish Guards, the 8th Hussars, and then the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars had the rollicking ‘St Patrick’s Day’. General John Reid’s fine 1770 composition ‘The Garb of Old Gaul’ was popular with Scottish infantry regiments and with the 7th Hussars, which had begun life as a Scots-raised dragoon regiment. Reid himself was a proficient flautist who left his substantial fortune to Edinburgh University to endow a chair of music. The Black Watch, the Royal Scots Greys and the Scots Guards swung along to the stirring ‘Hielan Laddie’, and the traditional ‘Brian Boru’s March’ was a favourite with the Connaught Rangers and, from their formation in 1900, the Irish Guards. When the Connaughts were feeling the strain after a ‘hot and heavy march’ the commanding officer would order the band to play ‘Brian Boru’, and the sergeant major would order a ‘Connaught Yell’ at appropriate moments, after which the band would pause for a beat or two. This practice continued into the rumbustious ‘Killaloe’, written around 1887, and developed by Lieutenant Charles Martin of the Connaughts. It became very popular with them, and went on to be the regimental quick march of the Royal Irish Rangers and then, on its formation in 1992, the Royal Irish Regiment. Welsh regiments were fond of ‘Men of Harlech’, used as both a quick and slow march. But (despite the best endeavours of the film Zulu) it is unlikely that soldiers of the 24th Regiment sang it at the battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879 because, although there were indeed five men named Jones and four named Williams in B Company 2/24th that held the little outpost on the Buffalo River, the proportion of Welshmen there was only marginally higher that was usual in the army at the time. Until Cardwell transformed the 24th into the South Wales Borderers it still bore the bracketed title 2nd Warwickshire, and its regimental quick-march was ‘The Warwickshire Lads’.

  Many English county regiments had versions of folk songs as their regimental marches. The Wessex Regiment marched past to ‘The Farmer’s Boy’, whose words tell the story, so common in folk songs, of a poor but honest lad who eventually marries the farmer’s daughter and inherits the farm. It has a remarkable poignancy.

  The sun had set beyond yon hill,

  Across yon dreary moor.

  When weary and lame, a boy there came,

  Up to the farmer’s door,

  ‘Can you tell me where ere I be,

  And one that will me employ,

  To plough and sow, to reap and mow,

&
nbsp; And be a farmer’s boy,

  And be a farmer’s boy?’6

  Officers might sing these words after dinner in the mess, but there was (as is so often the case) a less polite version, beginning

  The vicar of a country church

  One Sunday morning said,

  Some dirty bastard’s shat himself,

  I’ll punch his fucking head …

  Jolly Jack got up, walked down the aisle,

  With his organ on his back,

  And the vicar from the pulpit said,

  ‘You can walk that bastard back,

  You can walk that bastard back, Jack’.

  The Staffordshire Regiment, a 1959 amalgamation of the North and South Staffordshires, brought both ends of the county together with ‘Come Lasses and Lads’ and ‘The Days We Went a-Gypsying’. The Wiltshire regiment had the definitively rustic ‘The Vly’, properly ‘The Vly be on the Turmut’ or ‘Turmut Hoeing’:

  ’Twas on a jolly summer’s morn, the twenty-first of May,

  Giles Scroggins took his turmut hoe, with which he trudged away,

  For the vly, the vly, the vly be on the turmut

  And it’s all my eye for we to try to keep vly off the turmut …

  The Border Regiment had the measured ‘John Peel’, with the lively ‘Corn Rigs are Bonnie’ tucked into it, and the Green Howards celebrated the white rose of Yorkshire with ‘Bonnie English Rose’. The West Yorkshires banished gentle airs from home with ‘Ça Ira’, the only regimental march to be ‘won’ in battle. ‘Ça Ira – It’ll be fine’ – was a dance air that became the signature tune of the French Revolution, and versions of its lyrics ranged from the piously patriotic: