Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Despite the intention of the 1803 order, it took some time for the army to develop a comprehensive policy on the employment of bandsmen when their regiments went on active service. When the 75th Foot was ordered to join the attack on Delhi in 1857 Colonel Herbert wanted to leave his bandsmen behind, but as Captain Richard Barter, the adjutant, discovered, ‘the men came up in a body and pleaded so hard to be allowed to go with their comrades as duty soldiers in the ranks’ that the colonel gave way, and ‘all the best players were killed or disabled’. One bandsman, with his right hand shot off, begged to be allowed to soldier on: ‘I could play the trombone, sir. I could fix a hook to my stump and play it first rate.’19 For the second half of the nineteenth century bandsmen were taken on campaign to play music when they could, but to act as stretcher-bearers in action. By 1914 however, policy had changed once more, and on mobilisation bandsmen over the age of 18 were posted to squadrons or companies, and the bandmaster remained behind at the regimental depot to supervise the band boys. However, some regiments, not content with the music provided by their Corps of Drums, tried to create small bands in France where, whatever the miseries of trench warfare, men spent longer out of the line than in it. In Quarry Cemetery, just below Montauban ridge on the Somme, lies the German-born Sergeant Major W. G. Kleinstuber of 9/Cameronians, killed on 14 July 1916, and perhaps the last example of a foreign bandmaster.

  There is another irony. Edward Thomas was born in India, where his father was serving in the Durham Light Infantry. He joined the Royal Horse Artillery as a trumpeter at Kirkee at the age of 14, and transferred to the band of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards two years later. In the summer of 1914 he was a corporal of 29, but already had fifteen years’ service. He knew

  every bandsman has got to do his military duties in addition to his musical ones, and the moment war comes he has to turn from his musical instrument to his weapon of battle. It was a big change for me and my pals of the band … who were playing at Southampton on August 4 1914, when we suddenly had to return to headquarters and prepare for the stern business of war.

  Thomas was posted to his regiment’s C Squadron, commanded by Major Tom Bridges. On the morning of 22 August 1914, the day before the battle of Mons, Bridges had posted two of his troops in ambush on the Brussels road with the remaining two, mounted, out of sight behind them. When an approaching German cavalry patrol smelt a rat before the ambush could be sprung one of the mounted troops charged – one German was wounded by a sword thrust and others were captured – and then Thomas’s troop galloped up and was sent into action on foot. Thomas ducked into some cover behind a wall. ‘I could see a German cavalry officer some four hundred yards away, standing mounted in full view of me,’ he remembered. ‘Immediately I saw him I took aim, pressed the trigger, and automatically, almost instantaneously, he fell to the ground.’ The British army’s first shot of the war had been fired by a bandsman.

  Bands are best known for their contribution to military spectacle. Cornet Sir William Fraser of the Life Guards describes the Duke of Wellington’s last appearance at the Queen’s birthday parade.

  No military spectacle … has equalled that of the Duke’s coming on to the Parade … on the morning of the Queen’s birthday … At the first stroke of the Horse Guards’ clock, the Duke appeared on the left flank of the line. At the moment that his horse passed the extreme left, the word was given by the Commanding Officer to stand to ‘Attention’, then ‘Present Arms’; instantly the magnificent band of the three Regiments of the Guards, with their drums and fifes, numbering together 200 instruments, played the first note of Handel’s glorious air (‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’) … The Duke, on arms being presented, instantly and slowly raised his right hand, nearly touching the lower right edge of his bearskin with two fingers. He rode slowly across the parade; and the ceremony of ‘Trooping the Colours’ was gone through. During this time some well chosen air, not infrequently the ‘Benediction des Poignards’ from ‘Les Huguenots’, was played. The March Past followed. The united bands played Mozart’s noble ‘Non pui andrai’, the finest march for slow time that was ever composed.

  Afterwards the Guards marched past in quick time; the Grenadiers playing ‘The British Grenadiers’; the Coldstream Guards a beautiful march known as ‘The Milanollo’, the most perfect in as regards time that I have heard; the Scots Guards the national, but mediocre melody ‘Will ye go to Inverness?’ The line then advanced and presented arms; the Duke again saluted, leaving the ground amidst tumultuous cheering.20

  Bands played at all sorts of other military events, sometimes fielding smaller ensembles when the full majesty of drum and brass was too much, weaving a bright braid into the texture of life. They were busy in the summer months at the covered bandstands that formed a distinctive feature of London’s parks, British cities, and seaside towns. In the pre-radio era they provided listeners with a welcome repertoire, from martial airs to operatic favourites and music-hall hits. There were now opportunities for successful bandmasters to move on to the commissioned post of director of music (this can at present take a musician as far as lieutenant colonel), but many bandsmen grew grey in the service, with slow promotion tempered by the comfortable routines of regimental life.

  New intakes of teenage ‘band rats’ were taught their trade by the bandmaster, a process that sometimes shunned the best in musical pedagogy, as a Rifle Brigade bandsman of the early twentieth century remembered:

  Unfortunately I found that I had bound myself to a man, who, as bandmaster, was to dominate my life for quite a long time to come. To my mind, he was nothing less than a criminal brute to Band Boys. He had one method of instruction only: bash it into them.

  His name was Mr Chas H. Barry.21

  In the 1920s bandboy Spike Mays of the Royal Dragoons occasionally received ‘a cut across the backside’ from the bandmaster’s stick. Like most soldiers he particularly appreciated a well-sounded ‘Last Post’, the call that brought the long military day to its end: ‘and the repetition of the penultimate notes, “Sleep on, sleep on”, was followed by his top note. One which trailed away into the nothingness that all men die in.’ The first time he put on his full dress – plumed helmet, scarlet tunic, tight ‘overalls’, boots and spurs, he thought that ‘kingfishers are drab compared with me’. But his real admiration was reserved for Coronet,

  our magnificent drum horse … Seventeen and a half hands, as proud as the proudest Royal Dragoon, Coronet was a sight to behold when dressed for ceremonials, with silver kettledrums, all the trappings and drummers Simpson or Barnes aboard, he would lift up his forelegs to prance and dance along as if to say, ‘Just look at me’.22

  There was the glory of formal parades, and the pride that came with lifting a weary battalion along its line of march with those tunes of glory, even if musical logic was not clear to all listeners. Sergeant Shawyer was with the Rifle Brigade band in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in 1920.

  Change of routine when the Band headed the battalion on a route march for two hours. I spent most of the journey, inbetween playing marches, trying to explain to CSM Tom Selway MC DCM, why that I, a six foot man, plays a small instrument like a clarinet, whilst bandsman Brown, several inches shorter, plays a huge brass bass. I doubt if I succeeded in persuading the CSM who forwarded the policy of the biggest men playing the heaviest and largest instrument, in which case I should be the bass drummer.23

  Until the army began its slow post-1945 recessional there were bands aplenty, with one for every line infantry battalion and cavalry regiment. There were also staff bands for the departmental corps like the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, Royal Army Medical Corps, and Royal Army Service Corps; a Chatham-based Royal Engineers band (with a second band at Aldershot from 1949–1985); and large ‘State Bands’ for the regiments of Household Cavalry, Foot Guards, and for the Royal Artillery. Bands, so easy to cost and so hard for outsiders to value, were steadily reduced. In 1994, after the ‘Options for Change’ defence review had announced the reduct
ion from sixty-nine to twenty-nine regular bands, the Corps of Army Music was formed. Centred on Kneller Hall, it is the corps into which all bandsmen and women now enlist. The traditional cap-badges and full dress associated with their regiment or corps are still worn. Their musicians – around 1,100 all told – are all members of the Corps of Army Music. There are twenty-three regular army bands at the time of writing, the most recently formed the Band and Bugles of the Rifles that replaced the Light Division Band in 2007. It consists of a band of thirty-five musicians reinforced with a platoon of buglers drawn from the five regular battalions of The Rifles.

  There can be few better examples of the links between ancient and modern than its recent recording of the haunting eighteenth-century air ‘Love Farewell’.

  I thought I heard the colonel crying

  March brave boys there’s no denying

  Cannon roaring – drums a-beating

  March brave boys there’s no retreating

  Love Farewell.24

  The song was ‘extraordinarily well received’ by soldiers awaiting departure for Afghanistan or returning from operations there. ‘It’s by soldiers and for soldiers’, thought Captain Mark Purvey, the Rifles’ director of music. ‘It’s about the horrors of war but it’s also about leaving the people you love behind, and looks at both sides.’25

  Bandsmen have seen horrors of their own, and on two occasions have been bombed by the IRA whilst giving a recital. In 1921 the band of 2/Hampshires was at Youghall in Ireland, playing the march ‘Lord Nelson’ when a bomb went off, killing seven members of the band and wounding seventeen: the march was never again played by the Hampshires. The Green Jackets band was bombed in 1982 at Regent’s Park when seven bandsmen were killed. Shortly before this another bomb exploded alongside a mounted detachment of the Blues and Royals in Hyde Park: three cavalrymen were killed and a fourth died later.

  When I was visiting 1/PWRR in the Iraqi town of Al Amara in 2004, I poked my head into soldiers’ accommodation – transport containers, roofs reinforced with sandbags, and mercifully fitted with air conditioning. The place was silent but for the subdued hiss of pop music from a dozen iPods: the soldiers, knackered and comatose, were young men with modern tastes. Two months earlier I had attended the repatriation of Private Chris ‘Ray’ Rayment at RAF Lyneham. He had been the best sort of South London soldier. He never let the fact that he was a private deter him from forcefully advising his commanding officer on how to run the battalion. His comrades were anxious to know how the ceremony had gone. Who was in the bearer party that brought him, alone with his glory, out of the C 17 transport aircraft that had flown him home? Who had sounded the ‘Last Post’ for him? I said that 2/PWRR had provided bearer party and drummer, and that the veteran RAF Warrant Officer in charge of the event said that he had rarely seen things better done. I told them that I will always remember that ‘Last Post’, eased out with lots of lip and spit to hold that last high note. Accountants can say what they like about military music, but it goes straight to a man’s heart.

  V

  HABITS AND HABITAT

  CHAPTER 23

  THE RAMBLING SOLDIER

  THERE HAS ALWAYS been something of the smoky whiff of the nomad about the soldier. His life alternates between the measured routine of barracks and the jolting transfer from one garrison to the next; the urgent demands of an unexpected campaign or the long, dour slog of major war. In one sense he is defined by what General Sir John Hackett called ‘the contract of unlimited liability’, for he is bound to kill or be killed for a purpose in which he may have no personal interest whatever. In another way, though, soldiers are moulded by their world: collective, structured, and introspective; comfortably habit-forming for some and infuriatingly intrusive for others. Alfred de Vigny, an early nineteenth-century French soldier and man of letters, believed that ‘regiments are moving monasteries’, with their colours as objects of devotion and a daily routine as rigidly prescribed as the liturgy of matins, terce, vespers, and compline, with drum or bugle replacing the great bell or the monophonic rhythm of plainsong. Osbert Sitwell, an officer in the Grenadiers on the eve of the First World War, thought that after the daily Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace:

  The performers in this ceremony cease to exist when they have marched away; and so I propose to give … an account of the very individual life led by officers on this duty who, after the manner of monks … are immured in the seclusion of a brick building from which, though situated in the very centre of the capital, you can scarcely hear the passing of the traffic.1

  There is, of course, at least one striking contrast between monk and soldier: the latter rarely embarks willingly on sexual abstinence, although its enforcement sometimes becomes a salient feature of his life. The analogy hints at deep truths, not least in the way that fraternal terminology so often describes the relationship between soldiers. Shakespeare put ‘band of brothers’ into the mouth of Henry V, Horatio Nelson used it to define his relationship with his captains, Stephen Ambrose took it as the title of his 1992 story of an American parachute infantry company that in turn went on to become the subject of Steven Spielberg’s television series. The Confederate song ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag’ catches the phrase in its own jaunty way.

  We are a band of brothers

  Native to the Soil

  Fighting for the property

  We gained by honest toil …

  In 1763 the diarist James Boswell went off for a rowdy night on the town dressed in shabby-genteel costume topped by an officer’s round hat with tarnished braid, and found a young prostitute who charged him sixpence and ‘allowed me entrance … but refused me performance.’ When Boswell pressed the issue she called for help, and in the ensuing fracas he gained the support of nearby soldiers by shouting ‘Brother soldiers … should not a half-pay officer r-g-r for sixpence?’2

  The paternalistic streak so often present in trusted commanders is remembered in nicknames like Daddy Hill for Wellington’s lieutenant and Daddy Plumer for the painstaking commander of Second Army on the Western Front. In 1870 Emily Wonnacott, whose husband William was schoolmaster to the 8th Foot, then serving in India, wrote ‘Dear old Col Woods is coming back on Sunday. We are all so glad. He is like a father to the regiment.’3 Major General James Wolfe described himself as a ‘military parent’. When he was commanding the 20th Foot in 1750 and one of his grenadiers was suspected of murder, he wrote to the Lord Justice Clerk, the second most senior judge in Scotland, saying that he had ‘not been able to observe either in his look, conduct or demeanour, any symptom of so black a villainy’. Moreover, he had recently undergone ‘a very violent remedy’ for venereal disease, and Wolfe was sure that ‘he could never have borne it if the guilt of murder had hung upon him.’4

  Field Marshal Lord Wolseley fondly recalled General Sir John Lysaght Pennefather, the Irish-born ‘swearing general’ who had held his division together at Inkerman by sheer strength of leadership. As the historian A. W. Kinglake wrote, even when his rubicund countenance could not be seen there was comfort in his voice, with ‘the “Grand Old Boy’s” favourite oaths roaring cheerfully down through the smoke.’ ‘Blood and ’ounds, boys, blood and ’ounds’ was his favourite expression. Pennefather had transferred to the 22nd Foot as a captain in 1826, made his way by seniority, and finished as colonel of the regiment. ‘His regiment was his love,’ wrote Wolseley, ‘and all ranks in it were to him as his children.’5 A regimental family might have black sheep and prodigal sons, wayward teenagers, randy uncles and scatty aunts, but family it was, its behaviour powerfully influenced by the circumstances of its collective life.

  Today’s public house may be anything from a spit-and-sawdust bar with the Gents’ making its subtle presence felt, through a beamed tribute to Merrie England, and on to a low-lit gastropub. But for the first half of the army’s life its officers and men lived in the public houses that were precisely what their names implied: houses, big and small, where food and accommodation were at le
ast as important as drink. They had originated in the alehouses of Saxon England, and became increasingly important after the dissolution of the monasteries deprived travellers of monastic hospitality. Public houses provided travellers with small beer with a low alcohol content, little more than water brewed sufficiently to make it safe to drink, with stronger ales like porter becoming more popular, for those who could afford them, from the eighteenth century. Private Thomas Thetcher of the grenadier company of the North Hampshire Militia died in 1764 ‘of a violent Fever contracted by drinking Small Beer when hot’ and lies buried just outside Winchester Cathedral, his headstone urging:

  Soldiers be warned by my untimely fall

  And when ye’re hot drink Strong or not at all.

  When an infantryman, standing on that low ridge at Waterloo, told his mate that he did not much like to see their own cavalry scurrying back with the French in hot pursuit, he was told not to worry his head about it. ‘We must blow the froth away before we come to the porter.’ The French would soon find that a solid square had rather more weight than a scampering hussar.

  Gin-shops became popular when cheap gin was introduced to England after 1688 – the use of genever as a pre-battle stimulant had already spawned the expression ‘Dutch courage’. These were never the same as alehouses, and even some temperance movements did not regard sipping small beer as drinking at all. In 1392 Richard II ordered those who brewed with the intention of selling to hang a sign outside their premises, and the early symbols of brewing – like a bunch of hops or a malt-shovel – gave illiterate customers a firm steer towards the available product. The painted inn-sign, its symbolism often reflecting the heraldry of prominent local families, came later. When ex-sailors bought pubs they often named them after the commander whose success had brought them the prize-money that made the venture possible, and portraits of white-wigged, blue-coated admirals still swing outside many a pub. John Manners, Marquess of Granby (1721–1770) combined military virtue – when he led the charge at Warburg in 1760 hat and wig blew off, leaving him ‘going at it bald-headed’ – with genuine concern for the private soldier. Edward Penny’s painting The Marquess of Granby Relieving a Sick Soldier helped the Marquess into a political career that proceeded to go badly wrong. Many grateful subordinates set up alehouses that still, from London’s Shaftesbury Avenue to Waltham on the Wolds, from Hoveringham to Knaresborough, testify to his liberality.