Soldiers
Battles this costly were the exception rather than the rule, though as far as the Sikh Wars were concerned, General Sir Hugh Gough’s predilection for frontal attacks on strongly held positions tended to produce more dead redcoats than was strictly necessary. Across most of the army’s history microbes killed more soldiers than bullet or blade, and disease played its part in the erosion of military communities, big and small. The 68th Foot put a total of 2,330 men through its ranks from 1801 to 1806, when it was garrisoning St Lucia, and 1,588 of them died: the regiment did not fire a shot in anger. Lieutenant General Sir William Myers died as governor of the Windward and Leeward Islands in 1805. He had taken eighteen members of his family with him, and fourteen of them died there. His eldest son, William James Myers, inherited the family baronetcy, only to be mortally wounded commanding the Fusilier brigade at Albuera. One newly arrived young officer, chatting to a comely Barbadian lady (who was, though he did not yet know it, the town’s most notable madam) was nonplussed when she seized his regimental button to check its number, and cheerily assured him that he had plenty of comrades in the cemetery. In India, cholera slew more British soldiers than bearded Sikh or clattering Maratha: the 86th Foot had 410 cases of cholera and 328 deaths at Karachi in 1845; and in 1853 the 70th Foot lost two officers, 344 men, 37 wives, and 99 children to the same disease.
Nevertheless, it was – and remains – the soldier’s nature to rebuild his little world as best he can, however outrageous the treatment it receives. Bernard Livermore, posted to 2/20th London in 1916, saw how the process worked in a battalion that had begun life as a Territorial unit recruited in Blackheath and Woolwich, but was now an almost classless, nationwide amalgam of conscripts. In his case, loyalty to 2/20th London began with the small group. He
wondered if it was just a lucky chance that my bivvy mates were such fine friends – or whether a kindly Providence arranged things so expertly. Throughout my army life I was continually brought into contact with men who became very dear friends and very close companions. Considering the fact that they all hailed from many parts of the British Isles and were derived from all manner of classes, labourers, business men, clerks, professional men, they formed a true cross-section of the population. It was a very real privilege to have enjoyed their friendship.11
Captain Anthony Farrar-Hockley was adjutant of the Glosters, containing a mixture of regulars and National Servicemen, preparing to make what was to prove their last stand on the Imjin River in Korea in 1951. ‘I look round the small body of men in the trenches,’ he wrote,
Some of them are young men, hardly more than boys; some of them in their late thirties; most of them are somewhere inbetween. I see that it is a good lot of faces to be in a tight corner with; reliable faces, the faces of old friends.
He was touched to hear two signallers argue the merits of different beers: ‘A voice that surely came from Bristol was declaring: “I don’t care what you say about your fancy London beers, John. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no beer in the world like George’s Home Brewed.”’12 Sometimes it is the accent that strikes a chord, like a creamy West Country voice assuring a First World War officer ‘Doan e worry, zur, usn’ll beat they’, or a Scots Guards company commander, asking his company in the dangerous darkness of Tumbledown Mountain in 1982, whether it was still with him, only to hear an NCO roar back ‘Ay, Sir, we’re fuckin’ wi’ you!’
All manner of subtleties affected these relationships and the way they sat within broader loyalty towards the regiment. Comradeship rippled outwards. In both world wars infantry platoons might feel that company headquarters was remote. Norman Craig, preparing for what was to prove his last attack in Italy in 1944, recalled
I was suddenly angry and intolerant of all this safe, smug pressure from behind, urging my platoon on to destruction. It was always the same. They were in such a hell of a rush to write you off. I felt irrationally contemptuous of everyone in the army who was not taking part in this particular attack.13
From company headquarters, though, the commanding officer could seem a distant figure and battalion headquarters a source of fury sometimes laced with merriment. Captain Alexander Stewart was commanding a Cameronian company on the Somme in November 1916, and although his commanding officer was a man of ‘common sense and moral courage’, without which ‘he would have got his Brigade very much sooner than he did’, his headquarters was exasperating.
I am very much annoyed by the memos sent round by Headquarters that come in at all hours of the day and night; they stop me getting a full night’s rest and some of them are very silly and quite unnecessary. When I am very tired and just getting off to sleep with cold feet in comes an orderly with a chit asking how many pairs of socks my company had a week ago; I reply ‘141 and a half.’ I then go back to sleep; back comes a memo: ‘Please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock.’ I reply ‘man lost his leg.’ That’s how we make the Huns sit up.14
Alan Hanbury-Sparrow was a regular Royal Berkshire lieutenant in 1914 and was commanding a battalion, as a temporary lieutenant colonel, at Passchendaele three years later. He was only too well aware of the impact of rebadging on the infantry, and the fact that it finished up with hopeless cases like Private Ailey, ‘Feeble in body, he was feebler still in mind’, who lost touch with the man in front during a night move, splitting the battalion as it moved up to the line. Hanbury-Sparrow argued that what he called ‘regimental will’ held units together, bridging the crosscurrents of smaller loyalties. For him the regiment’s impact was partly ritualistic, for ‘The real enemy was Terror, and all this heel-clicking, saluting, bright brass and polish were our charms and incantations for keeping him at bay.’15 By this argument the costume jewellery of the regimental system – its buttons, collar-dogs, lanyards and patches – all played an important part in a process that was never wholly logical.
At its best the regiment met a man’s need for a sense of belonging, which helps explain its success in appealing to those who brought so little into the army with them. An extreme example of the way the process can work is the French Foreign Legion’s Max Mader, who emerged from the First World War as its most highly decorated NCO, although his military service had begun in the German army, whence he deserted after hitting a bullying NCO. When the golden thread of history and tradition shone bright, then a man could easily find himself seduced by the knowledge that he was very lucky indeed to have managed to become a member of such a club. When Robert Bridgeman was posted to 3/Rifle Brigade in 1914 he was conscious of having joined ‘a first-class battalion of a first-class regiment’, whose commanding officers were to prove ‘outstanding men, in whose hands the traditions of the regiment laid down in 1800 by Coote Manningham and William Stewart were entirely safe’. All four company commanders were regulars, who ‘knew their job perfectly, though the idea of being described as professionals … would have filled them with horror’. ‘So for most of us,’ he wrote,
our outlook was a simple one. We had our duty to do as good riflemen, we trusted and liked those who told us what it was, we had their example to follow, and we were there to do our best and in the words of the original regimental standing order, to do it first and complain, if need be, later.16
Although the term ‘battalion’ was not used in the cavalry, cavalry regiments behaved much like single-battalion infantry regiments. Francis Hereward Maitland, describing life in the ranks of the hussars in the early 1900s, maintained that regimental spirit was as much about comradeship as competence.
There is a clear esprit de corps, a great mutual admiration between commissioned and non-commissioned ranks. The men looking up to their officers, as epitomising everything meant and implied by the stock phrase ‘an officer and a gentleman’, the officers holding their men in esteem as the finest soldiers in the world … We are aware that many of our officers – recruited from the hunting shires and county families – lack military genius. We are aware that in the field-day they show more dash and courage than ac
tual knowledge of tactics. But wasn’t it always so?17
For fellow cavalryman Spike Mays, there was the unifying discipline of mucking out – ‘a smelly and revolting way to begin each day’ – and grooming. Lieutenant Whittle, his troop leader, mucked out with the men, and in the process ‘commanded from us common soldiers admiration and respect for a real man, which developed to that unsentimental affection known only to soldiers’. ‘Cavalry officers are the best in the world’, thought Mays. ‘They always inspired respect and confidence in their men, although in some cases courage exceeded wit and knowledge … There was friendship as well as discipline, and both were sure and certain.’18
In 1936 Bruce Shand, with two fellow cadets, was about to be commissioned from Sandhurst into ‘a certain well-known cavalry regiment’. Unfortunately, the regiment had an officer on the Sandhurst staff, and he, ‘for reasons only partly understandable, took a dislike to all three of us’. Because they were nearing the end of their last term, there was ‘some panic and confusion’ before they could be found places, but the system looked after its own.
Kim Muir, charming, dashing and far too rich, went to the 10th Hussars to be killed in France in 1940. He was a great steeplechaser and there is a race in his memory at Cheltenham. Tim Llewellen-Palmer, the youngest of four splendid brothers, two of whom were also to be killed, joined the 7th Hussars, where he had a very distinguished and highly individual career before too early a death.
Shand was told that Lieutenant Colonel Dick McCreery of the 12th Lancers would come to interview him, and after a conversation ‘which included a question from him on the delicate subject of “means” it was settled that I should join the regiment at Tidworth early in the New Year (1937) subject to my passing out adequately.’
Although many officers were on leave, as the regiment had just returned from six years in Egypt, Shand found that everyone ‘was very welcoming’. He was particularly grateful to the adjutant, Frank Arkwright, ‘as nice a man as ever lived and a quietly efficient soldier,’ who ‘not only pulled me out of various scrapes … but also judiciously handed me over to certain senior NCOs who took my education in hand and tactfully but firmly directed my floundering steps.’ The quartermaster, Uncle Lawrence, had won a DCM on the retreat from Mons, and was ‘deeply versed in regimental history’. He was succeeded by the then regimental sergeant major, Mr Mabbott, who ‘was to be a godsend to the regiment and its commanding officers’. Shand quickly discovered that the regiment had become ‘a highly efficient entity’ after converting from horses to armoured cars in 1928, but it had previously been through ‘a bad patch’.
This ‘had been rectified when “Bloody” Mike Blakiston-Houston was brought in from the 11th Hussars, making Dick McCreery his adjutant and sacking half a dozen over-lighthearted officers.’ A decade on from mechanisation, horses still played a large part in the lives of the officers, who were still provided with two chargers at government expense. Although the regiment had not served in India since the beginning of the century, a corruption of jaldi (to hurry), lived on in its vocabulary as: get a ‘jillo on’, meaning that soldiers were to move rapidly in whatever they were doing. And so, as the last months of peace spun by, the regiment soldiered in its comfortable, understated, self-assured way. A couple of nights before it went to France in 1939 one young officer invited his father, himself a distinguished 12th Lancer, who recalled his departure to the South African war, from the same Aldershot barracks, in 1899. He had been at a party in London and missed the last train home, and so
he had gone to the nearest hansom-cab stand, which was apparently in Park Lane, and found a driver with a good horse to take him back to Aldershot for a fiver, provided that the horse could be put up until the next day. There had been no problem and he had bowled into barracks in a tailcoat as the dawn was coming up and first and second servants had horses and baggage and uniform ready for the march out an hour or two later.19
When Bruce Shand was given temporary command of a squadron after his predecessor was accidentally killed he was comfortable, because ‘All the subalterns and most of the senior NCOs I already knew, as I had started my service in C Squadron five years before.’ Wounded and captured as a major after Alamein, he suffered from ‘appalling remorse’ because the two NCOs in his armoured car, Sergeant Francis and Corporal Platt, had both been killed. ‘They had both been with me for some months,’ he wrote, ‘and we had lived intimately as one did in the desert. Obviously they had considerable trust in me, a trust that had been betrayed even if their deaths were blessedly instant … They are not forgotten by me.’ A prisoner of war, he was sitting on a bollard on Derna quay, awaiting the boat that was to take him to Greece, when a German major ‘disporting one of the higher grades of the Iron Cross and … yellow cavalry shoulder badges’ – a fellow warrior across the chasm of hostility – took him under his wing, ensuring that he sailed in the same vessel as wounded from the major’s own regiment. He shared a cabin with a German lieutenant who lent him washing gear. Later, when he was recovering in hospital, the officer, whose arm had by then been amputated, dropped in to bid him farewell, leaving him with several cartons of cigarettes. There was something international about the cavalry spirit. And, for all the ebb and flow of war, the regiment was still a recognisable entity. While Shand was in a prison camp in Germany,
News filtered in of the 12th Lancers and I was able to obtain a fair idea of where everyone was and what had happened to them … it ended the war in a blaze of glory and excitement when, in its true armoured car role, it was pushed far ahead of the 8th Army, now commanded by Dick McCreery, to liberate and occupy Venice and Trieste … Most of my friends and companions were still there, though [Lieutenant Colonel] George Kidston, who had done outstandingly well, had been invalided home after the German defeat in Tunisia, to be succeeded by Kate Savill who commanded with equal panache until the end of the war.20
The 12th Lancers had avoided cataclysms like the fall of Singapore or, on a smaller scale, the loss of Tobruk. Although the regiment experienced a busy war, it was never shot to pieces and reconstituted, and retained sufficient pre-war officers and NCOs to maintain its character and identity. Its First World War story had been much the same: it had 166 officers and men killed from start to finish. In contrast, the Royal Berkshire Regiment, without as populous a recruiting area as many line regiments, lost 353 officers and 6,375 men killed in the first war; 93 officers and 974 men died in the second. Many infantry battalions were repeatedly hollowed out and rebuilt. Sometimes, when brigades reduced from four battalions to three in the winter of 1917–18, or divisions had to be broken up in 1944 because there was not enough manpower to keep them in being, battalions were disbanded altogether and their officers and men posted elsewhere. This is what happened to Geoffrey Picot when 50th Division was disbanded, and 1/Hampshires with it. The disappearance of a particular battalion did not mean the end of its parent regiment, and a wise commanding officer might succeed in using regimental spirit, as expressed through its signs, symbols, and traditions, to infuse a reconstituted unit.
But it was seldom easy, and there were sad failures as well as heartening successes. Amongst the former is the case of 1/6th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel A. J. D. Turner, himself posted in from the Suffolks, reported that its losses in the grim bludgeon-work of Normandy in late June 1944 – 23 officers and 350 men were killed or wounded in fourteen days – made the battalion unmanageable. His blunt report went straight to the desk of Montgomery, who sacked him at once. The battalion was brought back to England and disbanded; its officers and men posted off as drafts. Although Turner had acknowledged that such honesty would be fatal to his career, he was soon promoted and awarded the DSO, and died a brigadier. Whatever Montgomery’s view of the business, it is clear that there were many experienced staff officers who knew that there were moments when all the traditions in the world would not stop terrified youngsters from running away.
The system
based on county regiments was at its best in peacetime, when the primary groups within it, those that formed the immediate focus of men’s loyalties, were not subjected to the disruption that came from ‘a bloody war or a sickly season’. In the two major wars of the twentieth century it quickly lost much of the sense of regionality that had helped sustain it, but was still often capable of fostering that sense of what Farley Mowat called ‘imponderable identity’ that helped strangers to knit together. By and large it mattered more to regulars, officers, and NCOs alike, than it did to temporary soldiers. Donald Featherstone, a wartime Royal Tank Regiment NCO, certainly put the regiment into his own hierarchy of duty and obedience, and there were many like him:
Consciously, I kept a low profile, did not project myself into any situations I considered dangerous or foolhardy – while admiring and envying those who were able to perform more creditably. At the same time I obeyed orders, did what I was told, and never ran – although often tempted! Conscious of being a minute cog in a huge wheel, I tried in my own timid way to do my duty, support my comrades and, through them, the regiment and the country.
He added that he fought,
Certainly for my country – a deep sense of patriotism and chauvinism has always sustained me. I was immensely proud and sustained by being in the Royal Tank Regiment, and my own group were good. The lads around me – with whom I am still in regular contact – were first class.21
Jack Chaffer, who won the MM with the Grenadier Guards at Anzio thought that ‘I was fighting for my country, and always doing the best of my ability not to let down my Regiment and Comrades.’22
CHAPTER 19