Soldiers

  asked me if I would bury two of ‘your’ chaps killed a week ago in the attack on Cristot. Seemingly 4th/7th [Dragoon Guards] men lying in a ditch ever since. Really unpleasant – crawling. Scrounged some blankets and started to tie them up. DWs officer went away to be sick and did not return until I had finished. DWs had dug graves for me and I read funeral service – then violently sick myself.

  Other tasks, however, reflected the hideous realities of armoured warfare:

  Only ash and burnt metal in Birkett’s tank. Searched ash and found remains pelvic bones. At other tank three bodies still inside – partly burned and firmly welded together. Managed with difficulty to identify Lt Campbell. Unable to remove bodies after a long struggle – nasty business – sick.

  Soon afterwards he followed the line of a successful but costly attack:

  Went back to start line and then forward along C Squadron axis. Buried the 3 dead and then tried to reach the remaining dead in tanks still too hot and burning. Place absolute shambles. Infantry dead and some Germans lying around. Horrible mess. Fearful job picking up bits and pieces and re-assembling for identification and putting in blankets for burial … Squadron Leader offered to lend me some men to help. Refused. Less men who live and fight in tanks have to do with this side of things the better. They know it happens but to force it on their attention is not good. My job.59

  Church attendance had fallen off significantly between the wars: in 1911 almost 10 per cent of the population took Anglican communion on Easter Sunday, and this had shrunk to a little over 7 per cent by 1939. Michael Snape argues that ‘the promotion of morale based on religious conviction was necessarily hampered by widespread religious ignorance among the army’s citizen soldiers.’60 It was in an effort to meet this deficiency that ‘Padre’s Hour’ originated, in 1942, in 1st Airborne Division, then under the command of Major General ‘Boy’ Browning, and soon spread across the whole army. It was wholly unlike church parade. Soldiers, usually in company groups (without officers so as not to risk stifling debate) were allowed to sit comfortably and smoke, given a short talk, and then encouraged to ask questions or discuss contemporary issues. Some confident padres spoke about sexual morality, a relevant topic in view of the high rates of venereal disease in theatres like Italy and India, but many did not feel able to take the subject on. One did, however, go as far as to distribute pornography in his unit in an effort to make men less likely to visit brothels and thus to reduce the rate of infection.

  It became depressingly clear that wives left behind in Britain were prone to lapse, and one 1946 chaplains’ survey suggested that ‘after three years’ separation, one wife in five was unfaithful.’61 The task of helping men deal with the consequences of marriage breakdown often fell to padres, and one, writing home from Italy in 1945, recalled:

  Took a laddie 50 miles there and 50 miles back to file a petition for Divorce. His wife had a child by another man last summer. He forgave her although she continued to be unfaithful. Then an airman came along and started to terrify the two real children of the family, so they have gone to our own man’s parents. Now the wife is pregnant again with another man’s child, what a mess.62

  The padres of the post-war army divided their time between the United Kingdom, the British Army of the Rhine and a series of counter-insurgency campaigns across a diminishing empire. It was wholly in keeping with the mood sweeping the country after Labour’s election victory in 1945 that compulsory church services were abolished the following year. Although some traditionalists fought a stern rearguard action, there was widespread recognition that church parade had had little to do with spirituality. Indeed, many, both within the RAChD and outside it, believed that compulsion ‘was actually detrimental to the cause and interests of real religion’.63 Moreover, as padres’ duties were now so wide the disappearance of what had once been the major focus of their week made little difference to them.

  There were still times when chaplains had their courage, physical and moral, tested. Stanley James ‘Sam’ Davies was chaplain to 1/Gloucesters on the Imjin River in Korea in 1951. On the morning of 15 April he officiated at the traditional St George’s Day service with 1/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, and then held a communion service for members of his own battalion. When the Gloucesters’ position eventually became untenable, he and the battalion’s medical officer elected to stay behind and go into captivity. He was imprisoned at Pi-chong-in on the North Korean–Manchurian border, and endured harsh treatment, including solitary confinement. Padre Davies ended all his services with the couplet:

  Faith of our fathers, living still,

  In spite of dangers, fire and sword.

  In the 1982 Falklands War, David Cooper was chaplain to 2/Para. His burial service for the dead of Goose Green was widely televised, and was extraordinarily poignant for him because, amongst the men he buried, were several whose marriages he had conducted or whose children he had baptised. At Goose Green his hip flask (filled with whisky to give men a nip and so ease ‘an unexpected visit from the vicar’) was smashed by a bullet, and after the battle his sleeping bag was used to keep a badly-burned Argentinian soldier warm, something he ‘didn’t mind at all, but thereafter whenever I got into it, all I could smell was burnt flesh’. In his service in Stanley Cathedral after the town’s liberation he

  asked our soldiers to remember how they felt at the time, remembering themselves without any sort of veneer as they were facing death, remembering what they were really like and what mattered to them.64

  Long after he had left the army, and was setting off to Baghdad as director of civil affairs for Aegis, a private security company, he told a journalist just how powerful the ties linking men in a combat unit were: ‘It is a bond passing the love of women, a bond stronger than that of man and wife.’65 With his robust faith, down-to-earth manner and remarkable marksmanship (he was not only a champion rifle shot at Bisley, but is one of the best game shots I have seen) David Cooper is light-years away from the clerical gentlemen of the age of the redcoat.

  Across the three and a half centuries of the army’s existence, the position of the established Church has been substantially eroded and attendance at its services has dwindled; Britain is unquestionably a secular society. Yet the military chaplain, his ranks widened, from 2005, by the addition of Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, and Sikh part-time chaplains, still plays a crucial role. In part this is because the non-spiritual aspects of his task remain as important as they were in both world wars. Moreover, chaplains, like medical officers, are in the army but not of it, and a wise padre can provide a commander with a useful sounding-board. Just because soldiers are less formally religious than their great-grandfathers does not mean that they are not spiritual. In 2004, when 1/PWRR took the bodies of Iraqis killed in a vicious firefight back to its base there was widespread recognition that their reception was properly the work of both doctor and chaplain. Padre Fran Myatt, a Liverpudlian who had worked as a club bouncer before he became a clergyman, enjoyed the respect of the battalion, not least because he kept himself in such good physical shape. ‘Body of a Greek god’, he would say, pointing at himself. And then, gesturing at a more pear-shaped individual, he would add: ‘Body of a Greek restaurant’.

  Fallen soldiers are no longer buried in the theatre of operations but are repatriated, and where possible some of their comrades will carry the coffin onto the aircraft, and most of them value a service to mark their respect for a brother soldier. For most young men and women death is something that snatches pets and grandparents until it reaches out, on hillside or in desert, to claim someone who was so very like them. At such moments the physical world has few answers, and a chaplain can often help provide consolation. David Cooper maintained that he believed in a God who might not turn away a bullet, but would never turn away a soul in need. In early 2011 the Army Rumour Service website opined that morale was not good in the RAChD. That was a pity, thought one correspondent, for: ‘Our Padre in Iraq was top bloke and kept everyone happy.??
?66 It is a judgement echoed far more widely than the secularisation of modern society might suggest.

  III

  RECRUITING A NATIONAL ARMY

  CHAPTER 11

  SOLDIER BOYS

  THE ARMY IS a huge, rumbling alimentary canal, inexorably processing men, and more recently women, from recruit to veteran. It is by nature a glutton, concerned primarily with the quantity of its diet, and in wartime its appetite for manpower is utterly insatiable. Once a major war ends it reduces in numbers, but no sooner has it reached its new target size than recruiting once again becomes an issue. This has tended to have a stop-go effect as soldiers, so eagerly signed up yesterday, are discharged today and then, as eagerly, courted tomorrow. Moreover, because one easy way of limiting the army’s short-term cost is by imposing a cap on recruiting and thus on pay, it has been easy, especially in recent years, to stop recruiting temporarily only to discover that, externally, the army loses its prominence in the employment market and, internally, its age structures become distorted. The business of recruiting has long been about flattery, seduction, persuasion, appeals to manly virtue or patriotic duty, deception and simple bribery, though the blend is complex. Its precise mixture owes much to recruiters, the individuals who persuade a man to leave a life where individual interests matter most and to enter a narrower world where collective values are dominant, and there is usually someone on hand to tell you when to get up – and what to wear.

  The song ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, with its haunting melody, appeared in George Farquhar’s 1706 play, The Recruiting Officer, and was revived with slightly different words in the Napoleonic wars:

  Hark now the drums beat up again

  For all true soldier gentlemen

  Let us list and march I say

  Over the hills and far away.

  Farquhar had left Trinity College Dublin without a degree and became an actor, but quit the theatre after severely wounding a colleague in a stage duel. He then served as an officer in the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment of Foot and spent much of his time on recruiting duties, feeding the ravenous army of his day, and so his characters were drawn from life. The play centres upon events in Shrewsbury after the arrival of a recruiting party led by the amorous and swash-buckling Captain Plume, assisted by the hard-nosed Sergeant Kite. The party would have been empowered to set about its work by a ‘beating warrant’ given to the regiment’s colonel, authorising the recruitment of volunteers anywhere save in the City of London ‘by beat of drum’. It would typically have consisted of an officer, a sergeant, a corporal, a couple of privates, and a drummer or two. Sometimes recruiting was carried out as part of ‘an agreement between the Crown and some nobleman or gentleman, who has undertaken to raise a corps on receiving the nomination of some or all of the officers’, a system known as ‘raising for rank’. It was last used in 1854 to raise troops for the Crimean war.1 More often, though, recruiting parties were simply sent out to keep the ranks of an existing regiment filled, and in either case their procedure was the same.

  From 1661 to 1783, when recruiters came under the orders of the Director of Recruiting and Organisation at Horse Guards, officers had a direct pecuniary interest in this business of flesh and blood. Regiments received recruiting money from the government, and held it in a fund called the ‘stock purse’. At the end of the year the balance in the fund was divided up between the company commanders, and thus officers were concerned ‘in keeping down the expense of recruiting, both by obtaining men cheaply, and by prolonging the service of men enlisted, and so avoiding the necessity of obtaining recruits in their places’.2 The stock fund was not always equal to the demands placed on it, especially in wartime or if a regiment was posted to an unhealthy station like the West Indies, when there were constant demands for extra recruiting money. Officers often overspent, and on occasion the bankruptcy of a regiment’s agent (who managed its financial affairs on behalf of its colonel) could lead to officers being held personally liable for repaying money they had never had. In 1752 Lord Mark Kerr had his pay – as colonel of the 11th Dragoons, governor of Edinburgh Castle and major general – stopped until £1,191. 10s. 3½d. had been recovered to establish a stock fund with a new agent.

  In 1783 officers lost this direct financial interest in recruiting, and there was already perceived to be something deeply unsatisfactory in a gentleman holding his majesty’s commission and drumming up business like a huckster. Thereafter, officers rarely commanded recruiting parties in person. The Irish folk song Arthur McBride, of around 1840, describes the adventures of the eponymous hero and his cousin when confronted by

  Sergeant Harper and Corporal Cramp,

  Besides the wee drummer who beat up the camp

  With his row-dee-dow-dow in the morning.3

  But in September 1752 Corporal Matthew Todd of the 30th Foot, then stationed in Ireland, found himself in an old-style recruiting party:

  Lieutenant Teavil Appleton was ordered a’recruiting with Sergeant Barnsley, Corporal Todd and Drummer Jones for England … Disembarked the 26th at Liverpool, and marched to Warrington 14 miles. The 27th marched to Castleton 18 miles in the peaks of Derbyshire. 29th marched to Sheffield, 21 miles. Here the sergeant and drummer quartered and I marched, October 4th, to Doncaster, 12 miles. The 5th to Honden, and the 6th to Beverley [where I] received orders to hire a drummer at Hull and to recruit every market day at each place. Here I continued until February 27th 1753 when I was ordered up with the recruits to Sheffield … Marched into Liverpool on the 15th of March and embarked on the 22nd and sailed for Dublin.4

  Wise recruiters ensured that they only took on men who came within the strict limits of the current instructions. Those for the 93rd Foot, issued in early 1760, specified that all recruits were to be certified as Protestant, and ‘able bodied, sound in their limbs, free from ruptures, scald heads, ulcerous sores or any remarkable deformity’. A man could not be accepted if unable to ‘wear his hair, who is kneed in [knock-kneed] or subject to fits’ and all were to have surgeon’s certificates. Men of sixteen to twenty were to be at least 5ft 5ins in their stockinged feet, and those between 20 and 35 (the upper limit even for men with previous service) at least 5ft 6ins. ‘No strollers, vagabonds, tinkers, chimney sweepers, colliers, or sailors [were] to be enlisted, but such men only as were born in the neighbourhood’ and were well-reported on locally.5 Height limits were reduced as the need for soldiers increased, and a 1794 sample of a hundred recruits for the 98th Foot found four under 5ft 2ins and only five 5ft 9ins or over. In 1806 a man could enlist for ‘general service’ if he measured 5ft 4ins, but needed to be an inch higher if he wished to choose his own regiment, and taller still if he hoped for the cavalry or Guards. It is no surprise that potential recruits tried to bluff their way past the examining doctor by tricks like gluing buff-leather, naturally skin-toned, to the soles of their feet, just as disillusioned soldiers seeking discharge on the grounds that they were under-height when examined would bend the knees imperceptibly when being measured.

  Benjamin Harris observed that ‘tall men … bore fatigue much better than the small ones.’ His comrade Thomas Higgins, exceptionally tall at ‘six feet one and a half, and … lank and bony’ was

  dreadfully put to it to keep on … during a short halt of about ten minutes, he was reprimanded by one of our officers for the slovenly state of his clothing and accoutrements; his dress almost dropping from his lower limbs and his knapsack hanging by a strap or two down his waist. Higgins did not take it at all kind being quarrelled with at such a time, and, uttering sundry impertinences, desired to know … how he was to be very smart after what we had gone through.

  When punished with an extra guard he sloped off and was never seen again.6

  The Royal Artillery tried to recruit good-sized men to ensure that they could work its guns effectively, and in 1776 Captain Georg Pausch of the Hesse-Hanau artillery described British gunners as ‘the tallest, strongest, and best-looking troops which can be seen in the entire worl
d’. Two years later he noted that the thirty or so artillerymen killed or wounded at the battle of Freeman’s Farm were between 5ft 10ins and 6ft in height. By March 1779 Major General James Patterson’s 4th Battalion of Artillery was not only 250 men below its establishment, but recent drafts contained men so scrawny that Patterson called them ‘reptiles’ and complained that ‘such warriors of 5ft 5½ ins I never saw raised before for the service of artillery.’ When the Board of Ordnance unhelpfully declined to send out carbines for these men, Patterson sarcastically wondered if they could manage to handle cut-down muskets.7

  The army was already short of men on the outbreak of the First World War and the lower height limit for recruits stood at 5ft 3ins, though the Foot Guards demanded 5ft 10ins. When 1/Grenadier Guards took over trenches in the Ypres salient from the 60th Rifles in November 1914, Major ‘Ma’ Jeffreys saw that ‘Nos 1 and 2 [Companies] had to dig hard as the trenches of the little riflemen only covered them up to their waists!’8 In the first autumn of the war Alfred Bigland, MP for Birkenhead, was infuriated by the army’s rejection of stocky men, many of them miners, who failed to meet this requirement but seemed perfectly fit for service. He persuaded the War Office to permit the enlistment of ‘Bantams’, men who were at least 5ft tall. Initially the scheme worked well enough, and the whole of the 35th Division and part of the 40th Division were composed of Bantam battalions like 15/and 16/Cheshires, raised in Birkenhead by Bigland himself. Although the project began well, and attracted much press comment, by the autumn of 1916 the commander of 35th Division, Maj Gen J. H. S. Landon, was complaining that the replacements sent out to his division were not the sturdy but under-height fellows who had been enlisted early on, but were ‘physically underdeveloped and unfit men of a low moral standard’. That December the division’s twelve infantry battalions were inspected and 1,439 men were rejected as unfit: subsequently more were added to bring the total number of rejects to 2,784, around a quarter of the division’s infantry. No more Bantams were accepted, and the division lost its Bantam status.9