In Queen Elizabeth’s day a captain, be he a white-haired gentleman gravely stepping out at the head of his company of militia, or a braggadocio roaring back from the Spanish war, was an important man. His title derived from the Latin caput, head, and the slightly later captaneus, chief. His deputy, ready to take his place when the need arose, was the lieutenant, its French root meaning ‘place taker’; the same as the Latin locum tenens that now describes the replacement for our usual GP. The ensign (corrupted to give Shakespeare’s ‘Ancient Pistol’ his swaggering title) was the infantry company’s most junior officer, and carried its ensign or colour, just as his comrade in its counterpart, the cavalry troop, bore its distinguishing cornet or guidon.
The proud Spanish infantry, until its 1643 defeat by the French at Rocroi, was the cynosure of European armies. Its columns, each made up of several companies, were commanded by officers whose title derived from the colonello itself, and they too had deputies, lieutenant colonels, to take their place. The major, from the Latin magnus, great, and so on to the Italian maggiore, was indeed a major figure, who came to rank between the captains and the colonel’s stand-in. Until the 1680s his title in Britain was sergeant major, not to be confused with the later non-commissioned sergeant major. Captains and their subalterns constituted ‘company officers’, and majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels were soon known as ‘field officers’.
Above them came officers enjoying more general authority. Initially their most senior had been the captain general, Marlborough’s highest rank. Although that term fell out of use in the early eighteenth century, the Honourable Artillery Company, with its idiosyncratic ‘regimental fire’ toast, still drinks the health of ‘The Queen, our Captain General’. Field marshal, Britain’s highest military rank, currently in abeyance, was a relatively late arrival. It does not appear in the Army List till 1736, and in 1744 John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair, was the first army commander-in-chief to hold it. In the army’s early history the rank was granted sparingly, and there were no field marshals from 1773 to 1792, though there was plenty of fighting. Below this comes general, sometimes colloquially ‘full general’, just as colonels are ‘full colonels’ to distinguish them from their ‘half colonel’ subordinates. Next, for just the same reasons that give us lieutenant and lieutenant colonel, comes lieutenant general. This was, perversely, a senior rank to that of major general (the latter having been ‘sergeant major general’ in the armies of the Civil War). By the end of the nineteenth century one of generals’ dress distinctions was oak-leaf braid around the peak of their flat forage-cap; by the First World War this had given them the nickname ‘brass hats’. It is now conventional wisdom to see debates over the war’s strategy being carried on between the brass hats and the ‘frocks’ – the politicians in black coats – and one of the blood-and-thunder memoirs written by Brigadier General Frank Crozier was entitled A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land.
The British were long ambivalent about the rank between colonel and major general. Brigades of horse or foot, two to four regiments of each, could simply be commanded by whichever of their colonels was ‘eldest’ by date of rank: we can almost glimpse that anxious fumbling with commissions, followed by beams of satisfaction or growls of exasperation. Or they might be headed by a major general, the working rank for brigade command for much of the army’s life. Senior colonels stepping up to lead brigades might be invested with the local rank of brigadier to do so, or might receive formal commissions as brigadier general. In 1685 James II introduced a note of confusion by having ‘Colonels of Brigades’, ‘Brigadiers’ and ‘Brigadiers-General’. The rank had much in common with its naval equivalent, commodore, with brigadier generals resembling commodores of the first class, who looked very much like the admirals they yearned to be, and brigadiers mirroring commodores of the second class, who were most definitely captains briefly ‘acting up’. It was not generally substantive, and officers holding the rank gave it up when the relevant appointment ceased.5 In 1810 Henry Torrens, the adjutant general, described the rank as ‘inconvenient and temporary’, and thought that the answer was to make more major generals.
While lieutenant colonels and above were promoted by the buggins’s turn of seniority, brigadiers were appointed to fill specific vacancies, a process that inevitably caused mutterings. On the march to Blenheim, Marlborough promoted Colonel Archibald Rowe to command a brigade and, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the seniority roll, saw at once that this might cause difficulties:
He is the eldest colonel we have here, and a very diligent officer [he wrote], but this will give just occasion for Colonel Shrimpton of the Guards to desire the like commission, he being an elder Colonel than Rowe, so that I desire they [i.e. their new commissions] may be dated of the same day.6
Rowe solved the issue of long-term seniority by boldly ordering his brigade, attacking Blenheim village, not to fire until he had struck the French palisade with his sword; he was knocked over by the opening volley.
We remember Reginald Dyer, responsible for the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, as ‘General Dyer’. He was a brigadier general, commanding 45th Infantry Brigade, at the time of the shooting of perhaps 380 civilians in the town’s Jallianwalla Bagh. On retirement in 1920, he reverted to his substantive rank of colonel. Regulations contained a provision enabling the Army Council to recommend the grant of honorary rank to any officer who had held local or temporary general’s rank. It had taken the view that Dyer’s action constituted ‘an error of judgement’, but did not propose to take disciplinary action, and therefore there seemed ‘to be no reason why honorary rank should be withheld’. The Army Council asked the India Office to arrange for the publication of Dyer’s rank in the London Gazette, but the India Office, nervous of bad publicity, duly missed the publication date and the moment passed. When Dyer mounted a campaign for honorary rank he was able to marshal powerful support, but the fortuitous presence in London of General Sir Claude Jacob, Chief of the General Staff in India, revealed that senior Indian army officers were not in favour, least of all in view of the Prince of Wales’s imminent visit. The issue split the Army Council, but it no longer backed Dyer, whose application perished quietly amongst the files and ink-pots. Colonel Dyer had already been disabled by a stroke, and died in 1927.7
By the time that Reginald Dyer died the rank he craved had expired too. Brigadier generals were spoken of as ‘general’ tout court and their uniforms and badges of rank aligned them clearly with other generals. The army’s massive expansion during the First World War, and the burgeoning of senior officers in supporting arms and services, had led to an unprecedented expansion in the number of generals, with a recent survey identifying 1,253. They narrowly included Hugh Garvin Goligher Esq, financial adviser to the commander-in-chief in France, who capitalised on his precedence as temporary brigadier general by getting a uniform run up, and having his portrait painted in it. As part of its campaign to reduce the visible impact of generals and staff officers in the aftermath of the First World War, the army did away with the rank of brigadier general altogether, replacing it on 1 January 1921 with that of ‘colonel commandant’, as opposed to ‘colonel on the staff’.
This compromise soon foundered, and might prove untraceable today were it not for a memorial in the main hall of the old Staff College at Camberley, commemorating officers killed in Ireland in the 1920s. Two brigade commanders, killed as colonel commandants, are included. In 1928 the rank of brigadier reappeared, although it was not substantive till 1946, and its holders looked far more like colonels than major generals. Their red collar tabs lacked generals’ gold embroidery, and their epaulettes bore a crown and three stars, the latter so configured as to make it hard for officers from those regiments (like the Foot Guards) wearing oversize stars to squeeze them onto the epaulette. Today British brigadiers are one-star officers but not generals, though those on the staff of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps style themselves, by convention, ‘brigadier general’ in multinational correspondence. A
ll of these arrangements applied to the red-coated army controlled by the commander-in-chief.
Rank titles were standardised as armies evolved to become an essential part of the apparatus of the new nation-state in the ‘post-Westphalia’ world that followed the 1648 treaty ending the Thirty Years War. Absolutist monarchs, with France’s Louis XIV (to whom both James II and Charles II looked with envy) as their exemplar, asserted themselves by ensuring central control of the armed forces. Royal iconography gradually replaced the crests or arms of individual noblemen; uniforms took on a prevailing national hue; and cannon glowed with symbolism reflecting the status of their master – their large-scale production in royal arsenals so symbolic of the power of new monarchical authority. Louis had the words ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ embossed on his cannon, and until the end of the First World War German field guns bore ‘Ultima Ratio Regis’, affirming that their sharp yap was indeed the king’s last argument. Royal ciphers and armorial bearings graced the new angular fortifications that helped define the period, for a state needed to protect its frontiers against armies or fleets equipped with modern artillery. Fortress gates routinely bear the confident stamp of the king.
In Britain this is most evident in coastal fortifications. Henry VIII’s arms still grace the gateways to the south-coast fortifications he built. Portsmouth was declared a Royal Dockyard by King John in 1212, and impressed Samuel Pepys during a visit in 1661; he found it ‘a very pleasant and strong place’. When Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, landed there in May 1662 she was less impressed, being offered beer, which she hated, and calling for tea instead. Portsmouth still bears the royal stamp in the form of a crown embossed above the keystone of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Portland stone Landport – the only surviving gate to the city’s demolished fortifications. Unicorn Gate, now the main entrance to the dockyard, is distinguished by its crown-collared unicorn. Its lion counterpart, once standing sentry on a gate of its own, has now come to rest at the base of Semaphore Tower. In 1779 the two beasts cost the Exchequer £203. 1s. 8d., a small price to pay for such an elegant affirmation of status.
In the fortress warfare that preoccupied engineers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries a trench dug towards an enemy-held fortress from the parallel lines of entrenchments surrounding it, zig-zagging so that shot would not rake murderously down its line, was called a sap, and the man who dug it was called, in what became the Royal Engineers’ word for private, a sapper. The engineers long used the rank of second corporal for their one-stripe junior NCO. The artillery had always called its own private soldiers gunners, and it soon scrapped the rank of matross, a kind of sub-private who did much of the heavy work associated with guns and gunnery. A petard was an explosive-filled container, shaped like the hat traditionally worn by Welsh ladies, which was screwed or propped (crown side outwards, as it were) to the gate of a fortress, its name derived from the same root that gives us the French verb péter for the emission of a more discreet personal bang. The grade of petardier, a soldier with the unenviable specialism of attaching the petard to the gate, disappeared early on. We still half-remember just how tricky the job was, though, for the petardier risked being ‘hoist with his own petard’ if its sputtering fuse was too short, or if enemy fire prevented him from scampering back the way he had come. The arrangement of rank applied to the redcoats did not, in the first instance, cover the ‘gentleman of the ordnance’, the artillery and engineers. They answered instead to the master-general of the ordnance, usually a peer with a seat on the cabinet, through eventually demoted to become a mere member of the Army Board. Until 1716 artillery and engineer officers were in theory a homogeneous group, though it was increasingly evident that their skill-sets were different, and gunner officers, their importance rising with the power of the weapons they controlled, resented their subordination to men preoccupied with running up the very fortifications that they themselves sought to knock down.
In 1716 the two branches were split, with a corps of engineers and a regiment of artillery. The engineers enjoyed their own rank structure, with one chief engineer, two directors, two sub-directors, and six apiece of engineers in ordinary, engineers extraordinary, sub-engineers, and practitioner engineers in Britain. There were three engineers, headed by a director, in Minorca, and two, with a sub-director in charge, in Gibraltar. This system gave rough equivalency with the rest of the army, with the chief engineer ranking as a brigadier and the practitioner engineers with ensigns, but led to endless difficulties. Engineers were not strictly speaking commissioned, although they might purchase or be granted commissions.
On campaign there were never enough of them to go round, and Marlborough (combining, in his august though overworked person, the offices of captain general and master general) was given to granting bright infantry officers warrants to act as engineers. In 1707 Captain Richard King of Lord Orrery’s Regiment of Foot was appointed an assistant engineer, with a useful £100 addition to his annual pay. There was also the problem of authority. Badges of rank were far from being standardised, and it might not be an easy matter for a young sub-engineer, supervising an infantry working-party, to persuade a grimy sergeant that he did indeed speak with an officer’s authority and it was not yet time for the men to knock off and return to camp. In 1757 the engineers at last adopted formal military ranks, though there long remained a tension between engineers, with their relatively high pay, and the infantry, invariably at the other end of the scale. In late 1915 Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard of the Dorsets was pleased to observe the scribbled work of a trench poet:
God made the bee
The bee makes honey
The Dorsets do the work
And the REs [Royal Engineers] get the money.8
The ranks of the Royal Artillery were simpler from the beginning, although the most junior commissioned rank of fireworker, was soon transformed to lieutenant-fireworker and later to second lieutenant. The rank of second lieutenant also crept into the infantry, first replacing ensign in fusilier regiments, and then used by rifle regiments from their formation in 1800. From 1871 it replaced ensign and cornet across the army as the most junior commissioned rank, although the army’s incurable resistance to standardisation means that the old ranks crop up from time to time. Dine with the Queen’s Guard in St James’s Palace and you will discover that the major commanding it is styled the captain, and his two commissioned subordinates are the subaltern and ensign, although one may actually be dressed as a captain and the other as a lieutenant. The old artillery rank of bombardier survived, and the bombardier was for many years the most junior NCO rank in the Royal Artillery, with corporal above it. When Corporal Ronald Skirth crossed an incompetent officer in 1917 (a process that drearily punctured his service) he found that the conversation had an immediate result on his battery’s notice-board:
As from April 23rd 1917 Corporal Skirth, J.R., reverts to the rank of Bombardier, as a disciplinary measure.
R. A. Snow, Major
Commanding 239 Siege Battery
Royal Garrison Artillery.
‘Partly from pique,’ he recalled, ‘I renounced the privilege of “messing” with the NCOs’. He wrote:
I told my three friends I would muck in with them. If in future if any of them addressed me by rank (which had been their way) I’d kick him in the shins. ‘My name is Ron,’ I said. ‘Not Corporal, of course, and not bloody Bombardier.’9
It was not until after the First World War that corporal disappeared from the Royal Artillery, with the two-stripe bombardier replacing him and the one-stripe lance bombardier close behind.
Non-commissioned ranks were not short of complexities of their own. At first most soldiers held the rank of private sentinel, soon abbreviated to private. John Marshall Deane of 1st Foot Guards and one of the few non-commissioned diarists of Marlborough’s time, always preferred the term in full. When his regiment helped storm the strongly fortified Schellenberg on its way to Blenheim in 1704, he recorded that it lost five officers
‘killed upon the spot’, and another seven wounded: ‘we had likewise in our regiment killed upon the spot and died of their wounds 172 private sentinels, besides above a hundred that was wounded and recovered again.’10 There were at first only two grades of non-commissioned officer. A man’s first step was corporal, derived from the Latin corpus for the small body of men the corporal led. It was ‘a rank which, however contemptible it may appear in some people’s eyes, brought me a clear twopence per diem, and put a very clever worsted knot upon my shoulder too’, wrote William Cobbett.11 His second, took him to sergeant – dating back to the Latin serviens, servant, but widely used in the Middle Ages to describe a mounted man-at-arms who was not actually a knight. Self-styled ‘Captain’ Peter Drake served in several armies during the War of Spanish Succession. He did this, often without completing the tiresome necessities which should have accompanied his discharge from one army prior to his enlistment into another. He spoke of the ‘brethren of the halberd’, an archaic weapon with its spiked axe-blade mounted on a long haft, and carried by infantry sergeants. The halberd was useful for aligning ranks, laying firmly across the rear rank of a unit that was beginning to give way, or forming the ‘triangle’ to which soldiers were tied for flogging. Halberds were officially replaced by nine-foot half-pikes in 1791, although units in North America had laid theirs aside long before.