Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  It is not unfair to classify the fight against Sexually Transmitted Diseases as the British army’s longest campaign, for it still goes on. Condoms remained a free issue in the post-war army, and ‘short-arm inspections’ continued. Soldiers were encouraged to visit Prophylactic Aid Centres, located in garrisons and camps, receiving a chit signed by a medical orderly testifying to the fact that they had, at least, done their best to avoid infection. But it was rarely a simple matter. The forms issued in Dusseldorf included the phrase ‘glans penis (knob)’, because ‘there were lads in the regiment who didn’t understand the word penis.’6 There remained a touching confidence in folk remedies. A soldier saw a comrade ‘bollock naked … with Old Spice poured on his tackle. You’ve never seen the like of the crabs on him … I asked him why he didn’t go to the MO. The gist of it was, he worked in the canteen with the German staff, could speak a bit of German, and he’d been shagging his head off. He wanted to keep it quiet.’7 Some enthusiasts really did their best to test venereologists’ skills. A doctor at Singapore remembered ‘one unfortunate who had achieved the grand slam, having syphilis, gonorrhoea, and lymphogranuloma inguinale’.8 National Servicemen were warned that they could not be discharged from the army while they were still being treated: ‘Blobby Knob Stops Demob’. The development of STDs that do not respond well to antibiotics takes the campaign on, and I have no doubt that if British soldiers form a branch of the Intergalactic Spaceship Troopers three hundred years from now, there will be young men and women nervously telling their medical officer that they have not felt tip-top since that last posting to Alpha Centauri.

  Sodomy, ‘when a male has carnal knowledge of an animal … or a human being per anum’ was made a felony in England and Wales in 1533, and remained a capital offence till 1861.9 Thereafter sodomy itself attracted a maximum penalty of penal servitude for life, and attempted sodomy for up ten years. Sexual activity between two adult males, with no other person present, was made legal in England and Wales in 1967, in Scotland in 1980, and in Northern Ireland in 1982.

  Until 2000, homosexuals were not allowed to serve in the British armed forces. There are strong arguments in favour of maintaining discreet areas where military regulations circumscribe the rights that service personnel would otherwise enjoy as citizens: few would argue, for instance, that soldiers should either be permitted to withdraw their labour or to disobey lawful commands. The opponents of removing the ban on homosexuality argued that trust and confidence within the unit would be weakened if it was felt that there might be a new source of patronage, and that young soldiers would be coerced into unwanted sexual activity by predatory gays. In 1952 the adjutant general affirmed that

  Once you get it started in a barrack room you get the whole lot corrupted, and we want to protect the individual. It is an offence that we have got to stop because otherwise you get corrupt barrack rooms, just like the vicious type of public school dormitory where vice spreads widely.10

  With the demand for change reaching the last surge of its triumphant momentum, in 1999, General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley argued that ‘the overwhelming majority of those in military service today find homosexuality abhorrent’, and it was feared that up to 10 per cent of serving personnel would leave rather than remain within in an organisation that had betrayed a deeply held conviction.11

  There had never been any doubt that there were homosexuals in the armed forces. Some officers argued that soldiers took to ‘detestable practices’ not because they were necessarily homosexual but because the conditions of their lives gave them no alternative to ‘masturbation and mercenary love’. In practice, the army was far less zealous in prosecuting men for homosexuality than one might expect, and sentences usually fell far below the maximum available to a court martial. Between 1796 and 1825 twenty soldiers were accused of crimes ranging from sodomy itself to ‘Indecent and disgusting conduct’. Four were acquitted and three were hanged: most of the remainder were given 500–1,000 lashes and discharged from the service. A soldier convicted of a homosexual act in 1863 was drummed out of the army in one of those rituals designed to show the unit’s collective disapproval.

  About noon on Friday the … battalion was mustered … The sentence upon the culprit was read out aloud and he was stripped of his buttons, facings, etc. The battalion formed a line on the other side of the roadway, and, preceded by a corporal and private and led by a rope attached to his neck by the smallest drummer boy, Smith marched to the gate, the band playing ‘The Rogue’s March’.12

  During the whole of the First World War, with the army at the largest in its history, eight officers and 153 men were court-martialled for ‘indecency’ on service abroad. One medical officer, after hearing two young officers on a leave train discussing the merits of ‘being caught red-handed in someone else’s bunk’ so as to avoid going up the line again, mentioned it to the assistant provost marshal at Poperinghe, who said that it was a well-known ruse. However, there was certainly a recognition in some units that monogamous homosexuals who got on with their lives as best they could should not be penalised. David Jones’s wonderful prose poem In Parenthesis tells of one of a pair of lovers being killed on the Somme, and

  … Bates without Coldpepper

  Digs like a Bunyan muck-raker for his weight of woe.

  Subsequent politicising has not made balanced discussion any easier. Captain Edward Brittain MC of the Sherwood Foresters, Vera Brittain’s brother, is a classic member of the sparkling generation swept away by the war. He was killed in Italy in 1918. Although we can never be sure of the circumstances of his death, there is at least an argument for saying that an impossible counter-attack was suicide by proxy. Mail was censored, and in a letter to a former officer of his company – opened in a random check – Brittain had described homosexual relationships with private soldiers. Brittain’s CO had been told that the assistant provost martial was investigating the matter. Possibly knowing that Brittain would choose death rather that the sentence of cashiering and imprisonment that would follow conviction, he warned him that he should be more cautious about what he wrote. Sexuality is not a matter of choice, and we would not blame Brittain for his. Yet relationships like this would, even today, fail ‘the service test’, designed to ensure that sexuality does not interfere with the military chain of command. Edward Brittain was a gallant officer, but his proclivities had encouraged him to impose a greater burden on the formal command structure than it could reasonably be expected to bear.

  After the war prosecutions for indecency remained uncommon, and between 1920 and 1937 they averaged forty a year. Although there were doubtless zealots who pursued the crime whenever they discerned it, one RSM admitted

  We knew what went on but we didn’t go out to look for it. Let me put it that way. Obviously it went on. You can’t have eight hundred troops living together and something of that not being practised. But so long as we didn’t stumble on it then we didn’t go looking for it.13

  The tribe was, in practice, prepared to take a relaxed view of behaviour that did not, whatever regulations might say, go as deeply to the core of its being as so many traditionalists argued. But it was not prepared to tolerate caste-breaking behaviour, and an officer or NCO who made advances to private soldiers in general and ‘band rats’ in particular could expect not only rigorous prosecution but an exemplary sentence on conviction. The issue was not sexuality, but the abuse of power.

  The legalisation of homosexuality in the British Armed Forces was not instantly followed by the blizzard of resignations as many (this author amongst them) had feared. The one brigadier who did resign is an old friend, and phoned me a few days before the news broke. He was quoted in the press as having ‘strongly held moral and military convictions’, about the issue. He told me that it had always been his policy not to try to explain something to the sergeants’ mess if he could not do so with a clear conscience. Although, as it happens, I had concluded that the army would not be wrecked by the legalisation of homosexuality, I tho
ught it commendable that an officer should have the moral courage to take a career-breaking path on a point of principle.

  In its important ‘Values and Standards’ pamphlet the army affirmed ‘Social misbehaviour can undermine trust and cohesion … misconduct involving abuse of power, trust or rank, or taking advantage of an individual’s separation will be viewed as being particularly serious.’ The same document introduced ‘The Service Test’, that would enable a commander contemplating disciplinary action to ask himself whether certain behaviour had damaged the army’s effectiveness. It did not talk specifically about sexuality, recognising that there would be times when either homosexual or heterosexual activity would breach the test. For a male officer to have a sexual relationship with a male or female under his command would indeed be potentially damaging, whereas for him to have a homosexual relationship with a civilian would not, all other things being equal, cause difficulties.

  There will inevitably be some finely judged points. Let us return to a Ladies’ night in the officers’ mess, to which one male subaltern has elected to bring his civil partner, not in an effort to affront but because he cannot see why his lover should not spend an amusing evening with his friends. There may come a moment when the night is far from young, band has been replaced by disco, and couples – including the homosexual pair – are smooching closely on a darkened dance floor. Does the service test stand unbroken? The quartermaster, the straightest of men who has given his life to the regiment, is visibly infuriated by what he sees as an insult to all that glorious iconography about him: he can hardly hold his temper in check. And one of the mess-waiters, conscripted for the evening but normally a rifleman in the homosexual subaltern’s platoon, takes his pleasures copiously, and whenever he can find them: he glances across to the dance floor and thinks … now there’s a thought.

  I am, for all my earlier reservations, delighted to see that the army has at last recognised that simple sexual preference does not disqualify an individual from practising the profession of arms, and lament all those officers and men who suffered criminal prosecution for their sexuality in the past or, more recently, found their careers curtailed. Throughout this chapter there has been a braided cord of fraternity, of evolving family bonds and of legal structures moderated by informal proceedings. Ultimately ‘Values and Standards’ is right because it targets the abuse of power. But it will not be the work of a moment for old beliefs, however wrong, to be expunged from view, and for the army to remember that all the best families have to subsume diverse opinion – and stay a family still.

  CHAPTER 29

  OFFICERS’ WIVES GET PUDDINGS AND PIES

  THE BRITISH ARMY was anything but celibate. In H. M. Bateman’s cartoon The Second Lieutenant who joined His Regiment with His Wife even the tiger rug on the ante-room floor is knotting its tail in sheer horror at the prospect of a married subaltern. Before the First World War it was affirmed that subalterns must not marry, captains could marry, majors should marry, and colonels must marry. When officers were granted marriage allowance in 1918 it was made clear that this would not be paid until an officer had reached the age of 30. It was common for officers to leave marriage and the raising of a family as long as they decently could: Douglas Haig married Dorothy Vivian in 1905 when he was 44, and their son and heir was born just before the great German offensive of 1918. In the past an officer or soldier required his commanding officer’s permission to marry, and today an officer will often, as a simple courtesy, tell the colonel of his regiment of his impending engagement.

  Many officers scraped along on private means with little margin for error, very few wives worked, and all took it for granted that the happy home would have domestic servants. Early marriage could be personally awkward and, at least in some regiments, professionally damaging. Ensuring that an officer’s wife came from approved stock involved endless chatter as the commanding officer’s wife interrogated members of her own social circle. Fond mamas were just as busy on behalf of their own darlings. In 1830 Captain Philip Meadows-Taylor had just been made captain and adjutant in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s little army. This was not exactly the Grenadier Guards, but when he overheard a young lady ask her mother’s permission to dance with him, he was delighted to hear her reply that if he was an adjutant: ‘He is quite eligible now.’1 The Georgian army was relaxed about the private lives of its officers – Wellington had a string of mistresses – but it was far less forgiving of officers who married unsuitably. Captain Glanville Evelyn of the 4th King’s Own, took family servant Peggy Wright to North America with him. They never married, but when he made his will before Bunker Hill he left her ‘all my worldly substance’. An officer committed an even worse breach of caste (we might almost add ‘theft in breach of trust’ to our charge-sheet) by having an affair with the wife of a soldier or NCO. In 1814 a court martial suspended an officer of the 19th Foot from rank and pay for three months for visiting a soldier’s wife, and his general was furious. The sentence was wholly inadequate for a crime that went straight to the heart of the relationship between officers and soldiers.

  By marrying an officer, a lady joined a community she might never have encountered before, and was dependent on the advice of senior wives. If the regiment was serving in India – where Europeans constituted such a tiny drop in a huge ocean – she had become a citizen in a world ruled by precedent. She soon became aware that there was tension between her own affection for her husband and his duty to his men. She, just like her husband, was now part of the great caravanserai pulsing its way across the globe, furniture wrecked in successive moves, treasured trinkets broken by servants, and pathetic imitations of half-forgotten English gardens withering in another scorching summer. Until the Crimean War, wives routinely accompanied their regiments on campaign. Although it was far easier for an officer’s wife to secure passage and accommodation than it was for a private’s, social status was little protection against the vagaries of terrain and climate, shipwreck, piracy, and the assaults of fauna from bed bugs to polar bears.

  In a pre-contraception age, the Colonel’s Lady was just as likely to become pregnant as Mrs Judy O’Grady. Both were at risk of a difficult confinement as the monsoon bucketed down and the regiment was suddenly ordered off to suppress a rebellious tribe, and the baby of the family already had a worrying rash. Rank was no protection against mortality. Fred Roberts, that beau idéal of British India, lost his first daughter about a week after her birth, another died soon afterwards, and a boy at the age of three weeks. Although the family’s remaining son, Freddie, narrowly escaped death in 1871 he was killed in action at Colenso in 1900. Roberts’ peerage eventually went, by special remainder, to his surviving daughter. When it was time for a child to be educated, off to Britain it went. Those half-embarrassed farewells, faux-jolly letters, and sense of incomplete lives lived half a world away were part of the price paid for a glorious empire.

  On some of its ‘reports and returns’ the high Victorian army aligned the relative status of its members as follows: ‘Officers – Ladies; NCOs – Wives; Soldiers – Women.’ The process was later made marginally less offensive by designating a wife in her husband’s rank, as: ‘W/O Corporal’ for ‘Wife of Corporal.’ As society became less deferential, many women could not understand why their own status was so inextricably linked to that of their husband. Why should they be expected to eschew ‘officer type’ interests simply because their husbands were not commissioned? Conversely, as an increasing number of officers’ wives had jobs of their own (some of which paid more than their husband’s) they resented the damage done to their careers by the ‘accompanied postings’ that compelled them to follow their menfolk about the globe. One of the great strengths of the regimental system was the creation of a parallel universe in which the regiment looked after its own, with a panoply of Wives’ Clubs, Thrift Clubs, Playgroups and the like, precious little of it financed by public funds and so much of it depending on the unpaid labour of wives.

  The lethal little
wars of the early twenty-first century have shown just how much work is done where the formal structure of the battalion’s welfare team and the unofficial network of families and friends meet. Captain Chris Wright, who dealt with much of the heavy lifting on the home front during 1/PWRR’s 2004 Iraq tour, tells us about sustaining normality in a world where abnormality descends by unmarked car at an unpredictable hour. Even running a house is not simple when it is located in a complex that, just over a century ago, was chosen for its proximity to a training area.

  Many of the wives could not drive and Tidworth is no sprawling metropolis. Its high street contains a chemist, a NAAFI, an arts supply shop, a strange two-storey shop selling furniture and pornography, a tyre centre and two takeaways … The wives needed to be able to get into Salisbury or Andover to do most of the shopping and the welfare office provided coaches at least once week. Pregnant wives needed to be taken in for scans and health checks while their husbands were away …

  There would be a Sunday lunch where the wives could bring their children and chat with each other while the children ran riot in the battalion bouncy tiger, or attacked the clown. These were not only attended by the wives but by a few girlfriends and their children as well.2