© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The upwardly mobile Captain James Jack (right) with another officer of the 1st Cameronians, in the trenches at Bois Grenier, 5th January 1915. By 1918, he had been promoted to brigadier general.
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London (Q.51567)
‘An early lesson in marching’, c. 1794: cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson pokes fun at middle-class volunteers.
© Mary Evans Picture Library/Reform Club
Recruiting parties easily ran up debts by spending on new recruits, not least in ale houses: ‘Heroes recruiting at Kelsey’s, or Guard-Day at St James’s’ by James Gillray.
Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/Bridgeman Art Library
Harrow Officer Training Corps recruits, drilling in their famous straw boaters, 1927.
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The King’s Shilling by an unknown artist: a recruiting party of an officer, sergeant, drummer and fifer of an infantry regiment in a village street, c. 1770.
© National Army Museum, London/Bridgeman Art Library
Listed for the Connaught Rangers by Lady Butler. Enlistment was in many cases the only hope of escape from rural poverty.
© Bury Art Gallery and Museum, Lancashire/Bridgeman Art Library
Raising the colours – Sergeant Bernard McCabe at the Battle of Sobraon in 1846. The tradition of the ‘Sobraon Sergeant’ is still upheld by the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.
© Peter Newark Military Pictures/Bridgeman Art Library
‘Smart Men for the Tank Corps’: a recruitment poster for the newly created Tank Corps at the end of the First World War.
© Onslow Auctions Ltd./Mary Evans Picture Library
A ‘C’ Battalion tank, its colours proudly flying, with a captured naval gun at the Battle of Cambrai, in the woods east of Ribécourt in November 1917.
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London (Q.6354)
The army padre’s role has traditionally been as much about pastoral care as spiritual guidance: writing field postcards for wounded men near Carnos, July 1916.
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London (Q.4060)
The repatriation ceremony for the body of Private Lee O’Callahan of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, killed in Basra, Iraq in 2004.
Courtesy of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment
Foreign friends: soldiers of the King’s German legion (left) and Greek Light Infantry (right) from Costumes of the Army of the British Empire 1812. Of all the foreign units, the combat record of the KGL was consistently first-rate, while the Greeks were perhaps the most striking, with their fustanella kilts. They were considered too volatile to be issued with pistols as well as muskets.
Costumes of the Army of the British Empire, according to the last regulations 1812.© National Army Museum, London/Bridgeman Art Library
Private, drummers, piper and a bugler wearing the distinctive Highland uniforms of the Black Watch, 42nd Foot, c. 1912. The Black Watch has always balanced its proud Scottish roots with a willingness to welcome other nationalities: in 2004 it had soldiers from the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England, Wales, Gibraltar, and Fiji.
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Officers and men of the 3/3rd Gurkha Rifles, 75th Division, in the line in December 1917. The Gurkhas were retained as part of the British army after the partition of India in 1947 and continue today as the two battalion strong Royal Gurkha Rifles.
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London (Q.12936)
Men contracted into the Chinese Labour Corps at Proven, 21st August 1917. Over the course of the war over 2,000 Chinese labourers were killed by shells or died of wounds.
The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London (Q.2762)
The road to hell: British troops being transported to the front line in American army lorries during the Korean War, 16 September 1950.
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hannah Snell disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Regiment of Marines in the mid-eighteenth century. She was wounded several times during fighting, but her female identity was only revealed when she was discharged.
© Mary Evans Picture Library
Dr James (Miranda) Barry was appointed assistant surgeon in 1813, and rose to become inspector of the Army Medical Department. It was only after her death that she was discovered to be a woman.
© Mary Evans Picture Library
‘Every fit woman can release a fit man’: WAAC (Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps) recruitment poster c. 1916.
c. 1916. © Onslow Auctions Ltd./Mary Evans Picture Library
‘ATS at the Wheel’, c. 1942. Princess Elizabeth, now Elizabeth II, joined as a mechanic in 1945.
© Archive Photos/Getty Images
WAAC training for a public display, June 1919.
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Ambulance drivers of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, c. 1943. At the outbreak of the First World War FANY women were among the first units to arrive in France.
© Archive Photos/Getty Images
An officer of the 11th Hussars resplendent in the red trousers that gave them the nickname ‘Cherrybums’.
© Malcolm Greensmith Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library
A cartoon by Henry Heath alludes to the difficulty of keeping up with military trends, c. 1830.
c.1830 © Mary Evans Picture Library
The Yeomanry Cavalry, by Giles: ‘No sergeant – no – I don’t see no enemy – not to speak of I don’t – But I do see as John Martin’s roots is terrible backward – wonderful backward they is – to be sure!’
Courtesy of the trustees of the Suffolk and Norfolk Yeomanry
One of the earliest wartime photographs: a bugler and drummer of the Royal Artillery during the Crimean War, 1856.
© National Army Museum, London/Bridgeman Art Library
The artillery today: a mortar section of 3 Para in the blistering heat of Sangin, Afghanistan in 2006.
Courtesy of Captain Euan Goodman
‘Loyal Souls, or A Peep into the Mess Room at St James’ by Gillray. Some aspects of the army will never change.
Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/Bridgeman Art Library
Integrated Images
Cartoons of the Yeomanry Cavalry by Giles in (Chapter 6: Weekend Warriors) reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Suffolk and Norfolk Cavalry (Fig 1 & Fig 2)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Richard died suddenly at the end of April, and although he had finished the book, the acknowledgements were still to be written. Unfortunately, I do not know the names of many of those who may have helped him with research or expert opinions, for which he would have been so very grateful. However, I can at least acknowledge the people who helped with the production of this book. First and foremost I must thank Arabella Pike, at HarperCollins, for her expert editorial guidance, and her calm encouragement and support during what must have been an unusually difficult time for her. Also at HarperCollins, Kerry Chapple, Melanie Haselden and Katharine Reeve; and Corinna Harrod, our daughter. Furthermore I am grateful to Sonia Land, Richard’s agent, and to Dr Alison Milne, his consultant, who allowed him to break out of hospital on at least two occasions in order to finish the book; and to his friends Lieutenant-General Sir Hew Pike, Major-General Sir Evelyn Webb-Carter and Stephen Wood. Finally I would like to acknowledge the hard work and the dedication to military history of my brave and truly delightful husband Richard Holmes.
Lizzie Holmes, July 2011
ENDNOTES
Introduction
1 Antony Beevor Inside the British Army (London 1990) p.35.
2 Michael Yardley and Dennis Sewell A New Model Army (London 1989) p.65.
3 Ibid. p.59.
4 Quoted in Richard Holmes Shots From the Front (London 2008) p.32 from a typescript memoir in the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum, Winchester.
5
Quoted in Lt Col J. C. M. Baynes The Soldier in Modern Society (London 1972) pp.66–7.
6 Ronald Skirth The Reluctant Tommy (London 2010) p.454.
7 Trevor Royle The Best Years of their Lives: The National Service Experience 1945–63 (London 1986) pp.253–4.
8 Gerald Kersh Clean, Bright and Slightly Oiled (London 1946) pp.67–8.
9 Ken Lukowiak A Soldier’s Song (London 1999) p.27.
10 Ibid. p.8.
11 Lieutenant Colonel Edward Windus to Colonel Samuel Bagshawe, 18 October 1761 in Alan J. Guy (ed.) Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the Army of George II 1731–1762 (London 1990) p.246.
12 Richard Holmes Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War (London 2006) p.218.
13 ‘Baha Mousa inquiry hears corporal accuse officer of abusing Iraqi detainees’ in The Guardian 16 November 2009.
14 George Orwell Rudyard Kipling: The Orwell Reader (New York 1956) p.278.
15 Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, Inclusive Edition (London 1933) p.397.
16 Horace Wyndham Soldiers of the Queen (London 1899) pp.120–1.
17 Field Marshal Sir William Roberston From Private to Field Marshal (London 1921) pp.3.
18 Commissioners on Military Punishments, Parliamentary papers, Reports Commissioners, 1836 Vol 1.
19 Ibid. p.11.
20 John Railton The Army Regulator: or, the Military Adventures of Mr John Railton (London 1738) p.17.
21 ‘Notes by Maj A. J. Smithers’ National Army Museum 2001-01-360-1.
22 Spike Mays Fall Out the Officers (London 1969) p.13.
23 Beevor British Army p.19.
24 Ira D. Gruber (ed.) John Peebles’ American War 1776–1782 (Stroud, Gloucestershire 1998) p.368
25 Peebles’ American War p.507.
26 Martin van Creveld ‘A Short History of the Management of Violence’ The Quarterly Journal of Military History Autumn 1988 p.56.
27 Arthur Bryant Jackets of Green (London 1972) p.24.
28 Richard Holmes Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War (London 2006) p.248.
29 Notes for 11 November 1831 in Philip Henry Stanhope Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington (London 1886) p.250.
30 Quoted in David French Military Identities (Oxford 2005) p.37.
31 http://news.stv.tv/scotland/143262-msp-under-fire-over-army-recruit-remark/accessed 31 December 2009.
32 Stephen Wood The Scottish Soldier (Urmston, Manchester 1987) p.27.
33 Alan Ramsay Skelley The Victorian Army at Home (London 1977) p.248.
34 Sergeant Major J. White ‘Reminiscences of my Army Life’ National Army Museum pp.94–5, 181.
35 Robert Edmondson John Bull’s Army from Within: Facts, Figures and a Human Document … (London 1907) p.3. Edmondson rose to the rank of sergeant, and after his discharge supported the Social Democratic Foundation, which was eventually to evolve into the Labour Party, arguing in favour of a national militia-style army.
36 Mays Fall Out p.2.
37 Joseph Gregg ‘The Charge of the Six Hundred’ in E. Milton Small (ed.) Told from the Ranks (London 1897) p.61.
38 Richard Holmes Riding the Retreat (London 1995) p.32. Based on unpublished questionnaires circulated during research for Firing Line (London 1985).
39 Doug Beattie An Ordinary Soldier (London 2008) p.19.
40 Helen McCorry (ed.) The Thistle at War (Edinburgh 1997) p.32.
41 A sangar, deriving from the North-West Frontier of British India, is a stone breastwork; bocage is the distinctive field-pattern of northwest Normandy, lethal to men whose job it was to fight through it; a Desert Rose is a field urinal; and PIAT is the acronym for Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, a Second World War spring-loaded bomb-thrower with short range and the trajectory of a gently lobbed turnip.
42 Wyndham Soldiers p.8.
43 Holmes Dusty Warriors p.94.
44 ‘Row over military uniforms in public’ The Times 7 March 2008.
PART I
Chapter 1: Chuck Him Out, the Brute
1 Robertson Private to Field Marshal p.382.
2 Kipling Inclusive Edition p.392.
3 Charles Carlton Going to the Wars (London 1992) p.348.
4 Ibid. p.348.
5 Cromwell to Sir William Spring, September 1643, in Thomas Carlyle (ed.) Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Vol. 1 (London 1846) p.135.
6 Lois G. Schwoerer No Standing Armies (London 1974) p.168.
7 Sheldon Richmond ‘America’s Anti-Militarist Tradition’ in Freedom Daily 21 March 2008.
8 Quoted in John Childs The Army of Charles II (London 1976) p.8.
9 Henry Hanning The British Grenadiers (Barnsley 2006) p.13.
Chapter 2: King’s Army
1 Mrs Ward ‘Reflections of an Old Soldier, by his Daughter’ in United Services Journal 1840 Vol II p.217.
2 Samuel Ancell and ‘Jack Careless’, A Circumstantial Account of the Long and Tedious Siege of Gibraltar (Liverpool 1785) p.58.
3 Jolyon Jackson (ed.) A World Apart: The Foljambe Family at War (London 2010).
4 J.C.M. Baynes The Soldier in Modern Society (London 1972) p.50
5 Robertson Private to Field Marshal p.17.
6 Ibid. p.17.
7 Peebles American War p.482.
8 Philip Ziegler King William IV (London 1971) p.59.
9 Quoted in Hew Strachan The Politics of the British Army (Oxford 1997) pp.204–5.
10 Quoted in Strachan Politics pp.68–9.
11 Sir George Barrow, The Life of General Sir Charles Carmichael Monro (London 1931) p.47.
12 Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds.) Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke: War Diaries 1939–45 (London 2001) p.504.
13 Typescript by Lord Selborne, Bodleian Library Selborne MSS 93.
Chapter 3: Parliament’s Army
1 John Childs The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution (Manchester 1980) p.xvii.
2 Manual of Military Law 1914 (London 1914) p.14.
3 Henry L. Snyder (ed) The Marlborough–Godolphin Correspondence 3 Vols (Oxford 1975) II p.268.
4 Beevor Inside the British Army p.139.
5 The author served in the MOD for three years as a brigadier in the late 1990s. It is always dangerous to let personal experience intrude too much upon what one writes, but nothing had prepared me for the MOD. Few things have gratified me more than to stand, after a farewell lunch with my delightful colleagues, on the pavement outside a London club and to know that I would never need to enter Main Building ever again. I will long recall the Treasury’s input into the Strategic Defence Review process: insufferably cocky, breathtakingly ignorant and as unstoppable as a charging rhino.
6 Childs The Army, James II … p.107.
7 Quoted in Childs The Army, James II … p.47. Being on the wrong side of James had its advantages when Dutch William arrived in 1688, and Charles Bertie found himself commissioned a captain in the Coldstream Guards.
8 Gwyn Harries Jenkins The Victorian Army in Society (London 1977) p.220.
9 Strachan Politics p.27.
10 Edward Smith William Cobbett: A Biography (London 1878) pp.7, 43, 47, 48.
11 Smith Cobbett p.18.
12 Gerald Gliddon The Aristocracy and the Great War (Norwich 2002) p.xix.
13 Philip Abrams ‘Democracy, Technology and the British Retired Officer’, in Samuel P. Huntington (ed.) Changing Patterns of Military Politics (New York 1962).
14 Sir Neil Thorne to Colonel Tony Scriven, 14 October 2008, on the website of Dr Julian Lewis MP, accessed 19 January 2009.
15 Star count relates to the stars worn by US generals and the ‘star plates’ once displayed on senior officers’ staff cars. Brigadiers and their equivalents in the other services are one-star officers, major generals rate two stars, lieutenant generals three, and generals four. The rank of field marshal, now in abeyance but still held by a dwindling number of officers, is five-star.
16 Tony Hayter (ed.) An Eighteenth Century Secretary at War: The Papers of William, Viscount Barrington (London 1988)
p.285.
17 Barrington Papers pp.316–17.
18 Strachan Politics p.28.
19 Bellamy Partridge Sir Billy Howe (London 1922) pp.6–7.
20 Elizabeth Longford Wellington: Pillar of the Sate (London 1972) p.333.
21 Quoted in Strachan Politics p.82.
22 William Napier History of the War in the Peninsula 6 Vols (London 1851) IV p.317.
23 Ibid. II p.401.
24 Harries-Jenkins p.22.
25 J. H. Stocqueler A Personal History of the Horse Guards (London 1873) pp.121, 156–7.
26 Harold Nicolson King George V (London 1952) p.226.
27 French to Stamfordham 25 September 1914 Royal Archives GV K2553.
28 Field Marshal Lord Carver Out of Step (London 1989) pp.230, 312.
29 The Times 4 August 1997.
30 BBC News Online Network 2 December 1988, accessed 20 January 2010.
31 Independent 14 January 1999.
32 Hansard 9 December 1998 Cols 296–8.
33 Text of resignation letter in Channel 4 News 3 September 2009, accessed 19 January 2010.
Chapter 4: Brass and Tapes
1 Quoted in Smith Cobbett pp.44–5.
2 Alan J. Guy (ed.) Colonel Samuel Bagshawe and the Army of George II, 1731–1762 (London 1990) p.31.
3 Lt Gen Sir John Keir A Soldier’s Eye View of Our Armies (London 1919) pp.v, 7.
4 ‘Irish History is Over Now’ The Times 24 January 2010.
5 The best study of this troublesome rank is Lt Col W. B. R. Neave-Hill ‘The Rank Titles of Brigadier and Brigadier-General’ in Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (1969) Vol 47.
6 Marlborough to Godolphin 24 May/4 June 1704 in Snyder Marlborough-Godolphin I pp.310–12
7 Nigel Collett The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London 2005). For the contentious figure of victims see p.263, and for the honorary rank issue pp.408–13.
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