Soldiers

  Passed Guards battalion on way to front. Very clean and smart. But 2 W. York. had got themselves marvellously straightened up in the two days of semi-peace under bad conditions. Very fine fellows indeed.48

  This process of cultural transference was not confined to the infantry. An artillery officer described how his battery, originally a Territorial Force unit recruited in Yorkshire, had suffered a casualty rate of 250 per cent for officers and 100 per cent for men in twenty-two months in action, but although replacements came in from all over Britain, they ‘assumed a Yorkshire defiant and stubborn quality that characterised the 62nd Division from its earliest days, and were proud of it. D/310 Battery, never with more than twenty Yorkshire born men, had now become Yorkshire to the core.’49

  There was a similar process in the Second World War. For instance, Martin Lindsay thought that by the summer of 1944 perhaps one-third of 2/Gordon Highlanders actually hailed from Scotland, but most of the battalion’s soldiers urgently sought that most essential element of walking-out dress: a kilt. 38th Infantry Brigade comprised 1/Royal Irish Fusiliers, 6/Royal Innisikilling Fusiliers, and 2/London Irish Rifles. Its losses in Tunisia were so heavy that London argued for the disbanding of the London Irish. The brigade commander, however, argued successfully that the battalion should be retained and the brigade kept up to strength by drafting in Irishmen. They did not need to be very Irish: an Irish stepfather would be good enough, and the spirit of his three wonderful battalions would do the rest.50 Peter White’s 4/King’s Own Scottish Borderers retained its Scottish character, although he himself was an Englishman brought up in South Africa. His platoon sergeant Sergeant Dickinson was a London docker and Taffie, also in platoon headquarters, was a ‘mature Welshman’. Corporal Parry was a Scot, but, as a Glaswegian, came from well outside the regiment’s home patch. It took White some time to find out that when he said ‘Th’onny-guid-yin’s-a-deed-yin’ he meant ‘The only good one’s a dead one.’51 A fellow platoon commander had been a regular officer in the Buffs, a regiment recruiting in theory from East Kent, but he had been cashiered after knocking his commanding officer though a plate-glass window on a lively mess-night, and then, as wisely as surprisingly, re-commissioned.

  Major John Hill was a company commander in 2/Royal Berkshires in Burma. At the start of the war his was still a homogeneous Berkshire battalion.

  Many were farm-hands or working in associated agricultural fields; a few were from small service trades in the towns. They came from Reading, Windsor, Maidenhead and Wokingham; from Aldermaston, Theale, Thatcham and Newbury; from the north Berkshire Downs, Lambourn, the Ilsleys, Buckelbury and Beenham; from Pangbourne and Twyford. In 1944 the Royal County of Berkshire also included Wallingford, Abingdon, Didcot and Wantage, now all parts of Oxfordshire.

  In 1944 the battalion received a major reinforcement

  from all parts of Great Britain: Geordies from the north-east, Yorkshiremen, Sherwood Foresters from Nottingham, and Scotsmen. We came to value their resilient and sterling qualities: humour, toughness, a spirit of comradeship and a will to work, especially from among those who had been miners … In a few months the regimental system began to make its value felt. We achieved as close a knit team of ‘Royal Berkshiremen’ as one could wish for. Teaching regimental history and past achievements to the newcomers, allied to the expected higher standards of soldiering, produced stalwart and staunch ‘regimental enthusiasts’ with a high degree of comradeship to stand us in good stead for the future.52

  Hill took stock of his company in March 1945. It had left Imphal the previous November with 196 men, all ranks, and now had only 23 of these originals left; Hill was the sole surviving officer. It had lost five officers, a warrant officer, and 96 men to enemy fire. By this time only about 10 per cent of the company were Berkshire men, and it was not until the war’s end that ‘drafts of Royal Berkshire soldiers began to arrive. It was good to see Reading, Maidenhead, Newbury and other Berkshire towns represented as they had been at the beginning.’ Hill, a regular officer, firmly believed

  it was the regimental tradition … that kept us going when times were hard … The knowledge that throughout the ages – at Maiwand, at Tofrek in Egypt in 1885, at Bourlon Wood in France in 1917 and at Kohima in 1944 – the regiment had, before the eyes of the world, fought according to the highest traditions of the service, both in victory and in defeat, was our foundation and inspiration.53

  Yet there were certainly limits to a regiment’s ability to cope with waves of outsiders. Major D. A. Philips of 7/Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry told his mother in March 1944,

  I wish we could be reinforced by officers and men from the Regiment; there must be plenty of Regimental Officers who could be sent out to us. I know that regimental esprit de corps is of tremendous value in keeping up the morale of the troops when they are tired and conditions are not too good; but the policy of treating officers and men like so many numbers and posting them hither and thither at random makes the task of keeping alive a regimental spirit well-nigh impossible. Some of the new officers do their best to conform to our habits and customs; others seem to make no efforts at all. Perhaps they are not to be blamed; they did not ask to leave their parent regiments.54

  Indeed they did not. Also in March 1944 Raleigh Trevelyan, with a wartime commission in the Rifle Brigade, found himself posted to 1/Green Howards in the Anzio beachhead. He was not received with much cordiality: ‘Oh, hallo. Good show. You’ve arrived’, said an officer. A Rifle Brigade comrade was soon ‘string-pulling to get me back to my own regiment’, a process that was eventually successful. In the meantime he was disgusted by what had happened to him:

  When I originally joined up, straight from school and therefore impressionable, I had it dinned into me day and night that I now belonged to a crack regiment; only Guards regiments and one or two others in the cavalry could be tolerated. As soon as I went abroad, what happened? Without the smallest apology I and a lot of my contemporaries were doled out as cannon folder to any mob that happened to be short of platoon commanders. No wonder at first we were unhappy, and no wonder that we are now bitter with the people that taught us that iniquitous rubbish.

  After recovering from a wound he was sent to the Infantry Reinforcements Training Depot – ‘the depot for lost souls’ – but when he eventually joined his own battalion he found that

  After so much string-pulling, so many hopes and fears, it is nothing but an anti-climax. Only the senior officers are at all congenial; the others are inconceivably stuffy and grand – mostly made up from sergeants in the Desert, and therefore jealous of their status. I have also been fobbed off with the dregs of the battalion for my platoon, one or two of the men being old sweats just out of the glasshouse.55

  Norman Craig also passed through the IRTD on his way from 4/5 Royal Sussex, where he had been an acting captain, to being a subaltern in 1/East Surreys. Although he was made very welcome to his new company’s mess in a big whitewashed Italian farmhouse, a spaghetti and vino dinner party depressed him: ‘something in the very conviviality of the occasion made me miss the old battalion more keenly than at any time since I had left, and nothing had quite the same sparkle anymore.’56

  CHAPTER 18

  IMPONDERABLE ENTITIES

  TREVELYAN TOUCHED A great truth when he wondered, at Anzio, if ‘my ties with the blokes in this platoon don’t outweigh any nebulous loyalty I may have felt towards the traditions of the regiment’.1 Real loyalty was to people – not to shapes or constuctions, stamped metal or embroidered cloth. There is widespread agreement that the primary group – infantry section, gun detachment or tank crew – lies at the very heart of motivation in combat. Charles Carrington hit the nail on the head:

  A Corporal and six men in a trench were like shipwrecked sailors on a raft, completely committed to their social grouping, so that nobody could have any doubts about the moral and physical failings of his pals since everyone’s life depended on the reliability of each.2

&nb
sp; C. E. Montague, who served, hopelessly over-age, in the ranks of the First World War infantry before he was commissioned, saw things just the same way:

  Our total host might be two million strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man’s world was his section – at most his platoon; all that mattered to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts.3

  There are certainly national variables, and both Russian and German soldiers in the Second World War were more influenced by both indoctrination and sheer compulsion than we sometimes recognise. This does not mean that the primary group and the larger regimental identity in which it nested were unimportant, simply that the precise mix was different. For armies sharing at least part of the cultural DNA of Marlborough’s redcoats, though, the links between man and man remain fundamental. Canadian Lieutenant Farley Mowat’s thoughts on his relationship with his own platoon in Second World War Italy could have been written by either a British or American officer:

  Leaving Seven Platoon in order to return to the intelligence officer’s job was a considerable wrench. The two months I had spent with the platoon seemed like a lifetime. Although I knew very little of the past lives and inner beings of those thirty men, I had been more firmly bound to them than many a man is to his own blood brothers.

  Mowat was surprised to discover that once he was away from his old platoon this loyalty faded:

  I was slow to comprehend the truth; that comrades-in-arms unconsciously create from their particular selves an imponderable identity which goes its own way and has its own existence, regardless of the comings and goings of the individuals who are its constituent parts. Individuals are of no more import to it than they were in the days of our beginnings when the band, the tribe, was the vehicle of human survival.4

  Between them, Trevelyan and Mowat describe what we might call the endpapers of regimental identity. As Trevelyan suggested, loyalty to immediate comrades – vertically, with relatively little regard for rank, within the section or platoon, and horizontally, amongst the members of the officers’ or sergeants’ mess, or between mates who swigged tea at the same end of the cookhouse – formed a network of close relationships that said more about human nature than about the bigger constructs of regimental identity. Sensible officers had known this for years. The charming and witty Patrick Ferguson was born in Edinburgh in 1744, and knew many of the important figures in the Scottish enlightenment. He served in the Scots Greys before buying a captaincy in the 70th Foot in 1768, and not only took a serious interest in light infantry training but also developed a successful breach-loading rifle. He became a major in the 71st in 1779, served as inspector-general of militia in South Carolina, and was probably the only British soldier killed at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780, fought between loyalists and a band of ‘over-the-mountain’ men whose behaviour in victory (they stripped and urinated on Ferguson’s corpse) tells us that not all ‘patriots’ were reluctant heroes in homespun. In the orders Ferguson wrote for his provincial unit, the American Volunteers, he recommended to the officers

  to promote among the soldiers of the several detachments a free choice of comrades, who ought never to be separated when it can be avoided; but … [who should instead] compose one file, to assist and defend each other, in action … to share in hardships as well as in danger for their mutual advantage and relief; to sleep and mess together; to take care of each other in sickness, and of one another’s arms and necessaries during absence. Three of these files, if afterwards so [fused] into one mess, would at all times easily rally and stand by each other, so as to add much to their own safety and increase the strength of the detachment. This fellowship will naturally be agreeable to men of good disposition and much increase their confidence in action. The man who at any times behaves unfaithfully by his comrade must be despised, and he who abandon[s] his friend in danger [must] become infamous.5

  These arrangements were echoed in the Regulations for the Rifle Corps prescribed by Colonel Coote Manningham in 1800 and published the following year. It was not until much later that the platoon was finally established as the standard subdivision of the company, although the term had long been used to describe the small fire-units into which a battalion might be divided before it fell to the smoky and dangerous business of volley-firing. Manningham told his company commanders to divide their commands into two equal parts (platoons), and then to split these into two again (half-platoons, or squads), spreading officers and NCOs equally between them. Although he recognised that subalterns might occasionally have to serve away from their companies, they should return to them as soon as possible. Once a captain had divided up his company, he

  will arrange comrades. Every Corporal, Private and Bugler will select a comrade of the rank differing from his own, e.g. the front and rear rank, and is never to change him without the permission of his Captain. Comrades are to have the same berth in quarters; and, that they may be as little separated as possible in either barracks or the field, will form the same file on parade and go on the same duties with arms … After this arrangement is made the captain will then establish his messes, which are to be invariably by squads. Ten is the best number for a mess to consist of; from that number to 18 the squad will still consist of but one mess. But whenever it amounts to that number it will be divided into two messes, at the head of one will be the Corporal, and of the other the acting Corporal or Chosen man …

  Officers were to mess together: anyone who objected was suggesting that he did not really wish to live with his brother officers, and ought to leave the regiment at once. Sergeants too were to mess together, and the commanding officer was to ensure that their mess was ‘as comfortable and economical as possible’.6

  This sort of formalised stability was an ideal that was rarely attained. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, regiments in Britain were regularly ‘drafted’, that is, raided for men who were packed off to reinforce regiments that were either on active service already, or about to embark. In September 1760 Lieutenant Colonel Edward Windus told our harassed friend Colonel Samuel Bagshawe that the men of his newly recruited regiment were beginning to grasp their trade. ‘I am teaching four pretty large squads, and the grenadiers, the method of firing, advancing and retreating,’ he wrote, ‘one in the rear of the other, with the officers superintending, and the sergeants and corporals paying attention to their own squads. So that, by this means, every squad is sure to do alike, to step together, and all must do it with the same signal of the drum, and keep the same time.’ They were even beginning to present a uniform appearance: ‘We begin to get their hair in tolerable order, which I see every morning that it be well combed, tied and oiled to make it look smooth and well, and before next review it will all be long enough to plait and turn up under their hats.’ But in November almost a hundred of the regiment’s best men were drafted into the Royal Scots and Handasyde’s, ‘which has indeed effectively demolished us.’ The recruiting officers toiled manfully, and in late March 1762 Windus reported that they were now ‘only one man wanting to complete to 630 rank and file.’ At the beginning of April, 297 men were drafted out to reinforce Colonel Armstrong’s Regiment, and Samuel Bagshawe, already mortally ill, died with his regiment under strength, worried about whose clothing account would bear the cost of the uniforms sent off with the drafted men.7

  The process did not merely play havoc with regimental identity, infuriating the officers who had tried so hard to recruit up to strength, but it also smashed the smaller loyalties forged amongst messmates and the broader bonds of regionality that played their own part in maintaining cohesion. Rebadging in two world wars had very much the same effect. So too, of course, did the losses that regiments suffered in action and through postings to unhealthy stations. The First World War provides enough dramatic examples of what might happen to battalions in battle. In the London-raised 56th Division, whose military identity was still h
eavily overlaid with peacetime allegiances, the Queen’s Westminster Rifles lost all its 28 officers on 1 July 1916 as well as 475 of 661 men; the London Scottish, in its hodden-grey kilts, 14 of 28 officers and 602 of 847 men; and the London Rifle Brigade 19 of 23 officers and 535 of 803 men.8

  But butcher’s bills had sometimes been as high in the past. When Marlborough stormed the Schellenberg, dominating the Bavarian town of Donauworth, in 1704, 1st Foot Guards lost 12 officers and 217 men, killed and wounded; two battalions of Orkney’s Regiment 30 officers and 418 men; and Ingoldsby’s Regiment 16 and 228 respectively. At Albuhera in 1811, the Buffs, caught by that ‘storm of lancers’ emerged with 7 officers and 85 men still standing in a battalion that had mustered 755 all ranks at the start of the day. The 48th was left with 109 of its initial strength of 452; the 66th lost 272 of its 441 men; and the 57th, soon to be nicknamed the Die-Hards, started the day with 647 all ranks and ended it with just 219. Officer casualties were so bad that one of the British brigades was brought off the field by a French émigré with the grimly appropriate name of Captain Cimetière.9

  The 24th Foot took 31 officers and 1,065 men into action against the redoubtable Sikhs at Chilianawala in 1849, and saw 13 officers killed, 9 wounded, and 255 men killed, 278 wounded: 525 in all. The day was all the more shocking because Brigadier John Pennycuick, commanding the brigade, and his son Ensign Alexander Pennycuick were both killed. The 24th had managed to take its 39-ft officers’ mess table on campaign with it, and Lieutenant McPherson recorded ‘In our mess tent, on the table at which they had so often sat in mirth and merriment, were reverently laid the bodies of 13 of our officers, together with the remains of Sergeant-Major Coffee (commissioned in death).’10