Читать книгу Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors - Richard Holmes - Страница 10

ARMIES ARE HIERARCHIES, their structure given daily prominence by costume jewellery and codes of behaviour. Even those that, in the white heat of revolutionary ferment, destroy the titles and badges associated with status tend to reinstate them once the tumult is over. The Red Army, which had gleefully done away with epaulettes – hated symbol of officership under the tsars – brought them back in 1943 to reinforce its identity at the height of the Great Patriotic War. Chinese officers, for so long dressed in drab and rankless Mao jackets, now sport big shoulder-boards modelled, for such are the ironies of military fashion, on the same tsarist pattern as Russian epaulettes. Although the detail of rank varies across ages and nations, the most crucial distinction has been between officers, who hold a commission signed by the head of state, and other personnel who lack this crucial document.

For most of the British army’s existence there was a rough congruence between social status and military rank, although this never prevented, on the one hand, the phenomenon of the gentleman ranker, serving as a private soldier against the grain of his background, or, on the other, the rise of the humble but talented. A striking example of the former is the Hon. Michael Francis Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle and formerly a lieutenant in the Scots Guards and 18th Hussars, killed as a private at Passchendaele in October 1917. Conversely, William Cobbett, that steadfast enemy of privilege, admitted that

When I was in the army, the adjutant-general, Sir William Fawcett, had been a private soldier; General Slater, who had recently commanded the Guards in London, had been a private soldier; Colonel Paton, who I saw at the head of his fine regiment (the 12th, at Chatham) had been a private soldier; Captain Green, who first had the command of me, had been a private soldier. In the garrison of Halifax there were no less than seventeen officers who had been private soldiers. In my regiment the quarter-master had been a private soldier; the adjutant, who was also a lieutenant, had been a private soldier.¹

Samuel Bagshawe, whose papers are a valuable resource on the army of George II, also blurred conventional distinctions. He was a young man with excellent prospects but ran away from his tutor in 1731 after being reproved for extravagant habits, and enlisted as a private in Colonel Philip Anstruther’s Regiment of Foot. He spent seven years in the ranks of the Gibraltar garrison, becoming a quartermaster sergeant. Bagshawe eventually restored himself to family favour by writing to his uncle and guardian, begging him to

Imagine a youth who for some fancied distaste flings himself into the sea, in his fall he sees his folly, but when he views the miseries that surround him (though sensible it is owing to compassion alone if he is taken in) with all his might he strives to regain his ship; you may easily conceive the earnest desire I have to repossess a happiness … which, the more I reflect upon the more I am confounded and the more I hope to recover.²

His uncle arranged for him to be bought out of the service. Two years later family connections secured him an ensign’s commission, and he died a colonel, a rank gained by raising a regiment at his own expense.

Nonetheless, these exceptions scarcely bend the general rule. Lieutenant General Sir John Keir, writing in 1919, emphasised that Britain was at that moment ‘a nation in Arms’, with the chance of creating, for the first time in its history, ‘a real National Army.’ Hitherto, he argued,

The regular army consisted of two main groups, patricians and proletarians. The officers were patricians, or patricianists; the men almost entirely proletarians. Between these two extreme poles of the social system there was no shading off. A gulf separated the two classes.³

Some of the army’s friends, and even more of its critics, see a similar gulf today: the Irish writer Tom Paulin condemned British soldiers as ‘thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people’.⁴

The British have never used the American terminology of officers and ‘enlisted men’, having initially differentiated between officers, standing outside the formed body of the unit, and the ‘rank and file’ within it. They then preferred officers and ‘other ranks’, wisely jettisoning the latter term, with its demeaning overtones, for ‘soldiers’ in the 1960s. The line of cleavage became evident from the regular army’s earliest days. Sergeant Nehemiah Wharton was an earnest puritan and former London apprentice who served in Denzil Holles’s Regiment of Foot, fighting for parliament in the Civil War. He wrote his last surviving letter before his regiment was destroyed at Brentford on 12 November 1642. When Wharton wrote of ‘we officers’ he meant both officers and sergeants, drawing his own line between sergeants, with their sashes and halberds, and corporals, armed and equipped just like the men. From 1660, though, the army was clear in its distinction between ‘commission-officers’, until the end of the eighteenth century, whose ranks began with cornet (for cavalry) and ensign (for infantry), and non-commissioned officers, who then constituted sergeants and corporals.

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. All 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.

The half-pike was not to be despised. A sergeant in 3/1st Foot Guards at Waterloo recalled how his comrades put their pikes to good use at the battle’s climax: ‘the line was held up by the sergeants’ pikes against the rear – not from want of courage on the men’s part (for they were desperate) only for the moment the loss so unsteadied our line.’¹² The pike went in 1830, and sergeants then carried a shorter version of the infantry musket. When the breech-loading Martini-Henry rifle came into service in 1871 sergeants generally carried a sword bayonet rather than the socket bayonet used by corporals and privates. Soldiers habitually wore their sidearms when walking out. The sword-bayonet, metalwork and leather duly buffed up, sat comfortably on the rear of the left hip, dividing the fringes of a sergeant’s shoulder-sash like a bridge-pier splitting the shining torrent. There is a good deal of undiluted dandyism to soldiering, and the small satisfactions of a new step up the hierarchy’s long ladder should never be ignored.

The sergeant major, having started life in the officers’ mess, reappeared as a non-commissioned officer in the eighteenth century. The rank had been in existence for some time before it was formalised in 1797 to mark the most senior of the NCOs. There was one for each infantry battalion and cavalry regiment, and sergeant majors were branded by a style of dress that put them, rather like their rank, somewhere between officers and sergeants. In William Cobbett’s regiment, for example, the sergeant major wore a fur bearskin cap like the officers and men of the grenadier company; Cobbett hated his. In the infantry, sashes and sticks were essentials, the former often in the solid crimson worn by officers rather than the red cut with a stripe in the regiment’s facing colour used by sergeants. These sticks began life as a silver-headed cane, evolving over the years into the pace-stick – sometimes used to measure off a regulation pace of 30 inches, but more usually, in its glossy splendour of varnish and burnished brass, carried as a badge of rank, echoing the vine-staff of the Roman centurion. William Cobbett’s early promotion to sergeant major, straight from regimental clerk, shows that in these early days, the post was primarily administrative, and the sergeant major spent much of his time closeted with the adjutant, working on the rolls and returns that could wreck a man’s career as surely as a bullet.

In 1813 there was more significant change. The old cavalry rank of troop quartermaster, the senior non-commissioned member of the troop, was replaced by that of troop sergeant major. In the infantry the rank of colour sergeant was introduced, squarely between sergeant and sergeant major. There was to be one colour sergeant for each of the ten companies then found in a battalion, chosen from ‘the ten most meritorious sergeants in the regiment’. For the next century the colour sergeant was the captain’s right-hand man, his position equating to that of first sergeant in an American company. One of the company’s sergeants was responsible for its provisioning, and he was known as the company quartermaster sergeant (CQMS). Sergeants on the strength of battalion headquarters, grave and clerkly men concerned with pay and administration, ranked as staff sergeants, a term which still defines the senior sergeants’ rank in all arms except the infantry.

It is impossible to dwell too much on administrative detail here, for the quantity of troops and companies within units often changed. The most significant change, though, was the introduction of grenadier and light companies, one of each per battalion, into the infantry, and a compensating reduction to bring the ‘battalion companies’ to eight. Grenadier companies (‘tow-rows’) were traditionally composed of the sturdiest men in the battalion, just the fellows for rushing an enemy post or for waiting at the colonel’s supper-party, beery faces and big thumbs everywhere. The ‘light bobs’ of the light company were lithe and nimble and were specially trained in skirmishing – and, said their critics, apt at making off with other people’s property. It was common for these ‘flank companies’ to be swept together to form combined grenadier or light battalions. A commanding officer enjoyed having smart flank companies, but losing the best of his battalion to someone else’s command was wholly infuriating. Flank companies, officers and men alike, wore distinctive caps and short coats. While the grenadiers applied symbolic grenades to any vacant surface, the light companies were as fond of the corded bugle – their own badge of expertise. The flank companies went in 1862, as part of the post-Crimea reforms, to muted mourning.

The tactical revolution of the late nineteenth century, a reflection of the increased range and firepower of modern weapons, encouraged armies to seek larger groupings so as to place more combat power in the hands of individual commanders. The combination of cavalry troops into squadrons, not taken too seriously when Wully Robertson was an NCO, became standard towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1913 an infantry battalion’s eight companies were merged into four. These changes required the creation of, first, squadron sergeant majors (SSMs) in the cavalry, and then company sergeant majors (CSMs) in the infantry. In the latter process the four senior colour sergeants in each battalion were promoted, and the remaining four took over the function of quartermaster sergeant. This arrangement remains in use today, and Colour Sergeant Frank Pye, who makes his incisive appearance on this book’s first page, was responsible for keeping his company of 2 Para fed and watered in the Falklands in 1982. Promotion from sergeant to company sergeant major now takes a man through the rank of colour sergeant, but during the First World War it was felt that the qualities that made a man a good quartermaster sergeant did not necessarily make him a good sergeant major.

Ronald Skirth, whose account of his wretched time in the army is aptly titled The Reluctant Tommy, took over from his battery quartermaster sergeant when the latter contracted typhoid, although he himself was only a junior NCO. ‘The Q.M.’s job I would say is the most envied in the whole service’, he wrote,

and so there was both disappointment and consternation when I was appointed temporary, unpaid ‘Quarterbloke’… The Q.M. is in charge of stores – clothing, food and equipment and, most important to many, tobacco and rum. I think I made a reasonably efficient QM. Nobody ever ‘drew’ anything from my stores without a ‘chit’ bearing the duty officer’s signature. Nobody, that is, except ME! It didn’t seem right that I should do extra work without financial reward, so I used the opportunity to look after No 1.¹³

Ernest Shephard, in contrast, simply leapfrogged quartermaster sergeant on his way on up. He happily copied the relevant extract from his own battalion’s daily orders into his diary:

Bn Orders by Major Radcliffe DSO commanding 1st Dorset Regiment … No 8817 Sgt Shephard: Appointed Acting CSM from 25.4.15 vice CSM Searle wounded 24.4.15, and promoted CSM on 1.5.15 vice CSM Searle, died of wounds.¹⁴

In a process wholly typical of the army’s need to find a spare ‘line serial’ into which to promote a man, he had bypassed colour sergeant altogether, and replaced the three stripes on his arm (‘tapes’ in soldier’s jargon) with a crown on his forearm, leaving his company’s colour sergeant (three tapes with a crown above them) in his dusty world of tables: six-foot, and lamps: hurricane. The process of promoting to fill a vacancy echoed William Todd’s elevation to corporal in 1758:

Sergeant William Bennet of our company was broke by the major’s orders for being drunk when he should have attended the hospital … and that James Crawford, corporal, was appointed sergeant and that I was appointed corporal in the room of Corporal Crawford preferred.¹⁵

When Shephard was promoted his company commander was the 28-year-old Captain W. B. Algeo MC, a clergyman’s son from Studland, Dorset. Their relationship typified the warmest of associations between figures who, at this crucial level, were headmen of their own distinct tribes. But on 17 May 1916 Algeo and the battalion’s intelligence officer crossed into a wood on the German side of the lines. There were shots, and they did not reappear. Shephard raced to battalion headquarters, where the commanding officer authorised him to send a follow-up patrol ‘but not to go myself on any account, although I wished to do so’. The pioneer sergeant, Sergeant Goodwillie – ‘very well liked by the captain’ – set off with Sergeant Rogers a little way behind. There was more shooting, and Rogers returned to report that he had lost Goodwillie and could not find the officers. Shephard was distraught:

The loss of my gallant Captain to the Battalion, my Company and myself cannot be estimated. He was the bravest officer I have ever met, his first and last thought was for the good and honour of the Bn, his Coy and his men. ‘An officer and a gentleman’.

We now know that Algeo and Goodwillie were both killed, and now rest, three long strides apart, in Miraumont Communal Cemetery.

The responsibilities of company commander and CSM remain distinct but interlocked. One friend told me of striding across to speak to his CSM who was chatting to the CQMS and the three platoon sergeants. He was greeted with a cracking salute, and the words ‘It’s all right, sir, you can fuck off: knobber.’ It seemed a bad moment for decisive confrontation, so he withdrew to his office, dignity narrowly preserved. When the sergeant major appeared later, the officer cautiously raised the issue of that last word. The sergeant major was aghast. It was the acronym NOBA: ‘Not Officers’ Business: Admin’. Another officer recalled how his own attempt to tinker with his company’s daily programme produced the as-if-by-magic materialisation of the CSM. ‘Sir,’ announced that worthy, ‘you command this company, but I run it.’ When the relationship works well there are few finer, as Major Justin Featherstone of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment tells when describing the way he and CSM Dale Norman used to conduct after-action discussions in the Iraqi town of Al Amarah, scene of fierce fighting in 2004:

We shared what became termed ‘DVD time’. During tactical pauses we would watch a DVD on his laptop and take the time to reflect on recent events and discuss our prevailing feelings, with unflinching and disarming honesty that would surprise anyone who had not shared similar experiences; such a friendship was critical in enabling us to function over such a tumultuous period.¹⁶

Yet a steady support to his company commander can easily seem a tyrant to his subordinates. William St Clair joined the RAMC at the beginning of the First World War, and spent his time on the Western Front in a field ambulance forming part of the admirable 9th Scottish Division, seeing more action than most. His commitment to winning the war never wavered, but he was bitterly disillusioned with the standard of leadership, especially with a sergeant major who delayed his overdue leave and sent ‘passes for new chaps before their turn so that most of the boys are a bit disgusted at his attitude’. Less than two months before the Armistice he wrote:

Ach I am so tired of being away and the atmosphere of our unit is worse now than ever … It is a weary life this with so much in it that goes against the grain, perpetual discipline that any Tom, Dick and Harry can work against you if they feel inclined … I do not say it is unbearable, but oh my word, what a glorious day it will be when we are free and need take nothing from any man.¹⁷

With the creation of the new grade of SSM, a cavalry regiment’s original sergeant major had been renamed its regimental sergeant major to differentiate him from these lesser myrmidons. When CSMs appeared in the infantry the same rank title was adopted for the unit’s senior sergeant major, although ‘battalion sergeant major’ would have been a more accurate job description, for in the British infantry the battalion, rather than the regiment, has always been the key tactical grouping. And there was another important change. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the army took up the navy’s practice of emphasising the status of key individuals by awarding them warrants, issued by the Army Council, and looking not unlike officers’ commissions. This process had swept up sergeant majors, together with other folk, mostly specialists like the Ordnance Corps’ ‘Conductors of Stores and Supplies’. Warrant officers were now set apart from the NCOs from whose ranks they had risen. They were generally addressed as ‘Mr’ by their superiors, and even within the infantry tended to deplore the term ‘sergeant-major’, though Guards officers call their RSMs ‘sergeant major’ and CSMs ‘companys’ major’. For many years RSMs were spoken of as ‘the regimental’ and addressed, in the comfortable fug of the Warrant Officers’ and Sergeant’s Mess as ‘major’, although when stalking their domain they were ‘Sir’ to all their subordinates. But different tribes still have their own rituals, as a Guards RSM explains:

A sergeant’s mess in the Household Division would appear to be much more rigid than in other regiments. We never relax. Warrant officers are always called ‘sir’ … But everything is kept within the four walls. Any misbehaviour or indiscretion is never talked about outside. That would not happen in a line regiment.¹⁸

In 1915 an army order brought SSMs and CSMs into the fold by making them warrant officers, though it elevated RSMs and their equivalents to ‘Warrant Officers Class One’ and created the rank of ‘Warrant Officer Class Two’ for CSMs. Warrant officers enjoyed valuable legal privileges, for the Army Act freed them from punishment by their commanding officer, and specified that even if they were reduced to the ranks by sentence of court martial they would not be required to serve as a private soldier. When he was a sergeant major, William Cobbett had feared that the officers he so despised would reduce him to the ranks if he crossed them: now, at least, sergeant majors were secure from the vagaries of summary punishment.

After the bruising experience of the First World War German army, the British were persuaded that their enemy’s practice of using selected senior NCOs to command platoons had much to recommend it. In 1938 the new rank of Warrant Officer Class Three was created, specifically to allow warrant officers to command infantry platoons or Royal Armoured Corps troops. The transplant failed to flourish. Only commissioned officers were allowed to handle official funds. At this time soldiers were paid in cash, and so WO3s could not pay their platoons, but had to get an officer to take pay parades on their behalf. Moreover, while officer platoon commanders were senior to the CSM, and thus in theory able (though it was seldom a simple business) to offer their men some protection against his voracious need for ‘bodies’ when fatigues were at hand, warrant officer platoon commanders were his juniors, and their men stood naked before his clip-board.

The rank was placed in abeyance in 1940, although those who held it already were allowed to remain WO3s until promoted or discharged. It has left at least one enduring mark on history. When 4th Royal Tank Regiment was hotly engaged in the Arras counter-attack of 21 May 1940, one of its tanks was commanded by an ex-circus ‘strong man’, WO3 ‘Muscle’ Armit. He had already destroyed two German anti-tank guns when his own gun was damaged, and the tank was hit several times as he tried to repair it. Eventually he reversed under cover, repaired the gun, whacked the jammed turret hatch open (an achievement for which his former profession had so well prepared him), and returned to the fray. ‘They must have thought I was finished,’ he recalled, ‘for I caught the guns limbering up … and revenge was sweet.’¹⁹

Portsmouth-born George Hogan lived close enough to the Royal Marine barracks at Eastney to hear the bugles sing out the alarm on the morning of 4 August 1914, summoning married men who lived out of barracks to report immediately. The ever-helpful booklet Trumpet and Bugle Sounds for the Army gave words to help soldiers remember the various calls, and alarm was officially: ‘Larm is sounding, hark the sound/Fills the air for miles around/Arm! Turn out! And stand your ground.’ But young George already knew it as ‘Sergeant Major’s on the run! Sergeant Major’s on the run! Sergeant Major’s on the run.’ His father was a sergeant-cook in the Hampshires and he thought it ‘right and reasonable’ to join the regiment as a boy soldier, but it was not easy to get photographed with his father. ‘Non-commissioned officers and men were not allowed to walk out together,’ he remembered, ‘so I left home a few minutes before dad and we met at the photographers.’ He arrived in France just five days too late to gain the 1914–18 war medal, and a long career took him on through the Second World War. He was promoted WO3 – a rank he remembered in its infantry guise of Platoon Sergeant Major – and added a laurel wreath to the crown on his cuff.²⁰

When officers took to wearing collar and tie with their khaki service dress in the early twentieth century, warrant officers, who already sported officer-style Sam Browne belts, followed suit. In 1915 a GHQ instruction still had them armed with sword and pistol, although there were few enough swords to be seen on the Western Front, save in the cavalry, by this time, and instructions had already been issued for sending them home. Nevertheless, a photograph of the RSM of 14/Welsh in 1917 shows an elegant figure with gently waxed moustache, officer-style cap with the stiffening removed, officer’s tunic with baggy ‘patch pockets’, Sam Browne and empty sword frog. It is only when you see the royal coat of arms on his forearm that you can tell that he is actually the RSM, rather than a much grander rank. Small wonder that newly-commissioned officers made awkward mistakes when confronted with such splendid figures, as the greatest of the war’s skits, The Song of Tiadatha, tells us:

Then at last my Tiadatha

Sallied forth to join the Dudshires

Dressed in khaki, quite a soldier

Floppy cap and baggy breeches

Round his waist the supple Sam Browne

At his side the sword and scabbard

Took salutes from private soldiers

And saluted Sergeant-Majors

(Who were very much embarrassed)

And reported at Headquarters

Of the 14th Royal Dudshires.²¹

In contrast, CSM Jack Williams DCM MM and Bar (his VC still in the future) of 10/South Wales Borderers, serving in the same division as the 14/Welsh, is scarcely distinguishable from a private soldier save by the brass crown on his sleeve. Nothing could make the gulf between the two grades of warrant officer clearer.

The RSM of a battalion was part hero, part villain, and part shaman, encapsulating all the glory of his tribe and the status of his rank. John Jackson worked for a Glasgow railway company and enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders (‘a choice of regiment which I never regretted’) in August 1914. He fought at Loos with its 6th Battalion, and one of his lasting memories was of RSM Peter Scotland, upright and steady, though his battalion had lost both commanding officer (‘our brave old colonel’) and adjutant (‘cool and unruffled to the last’) as well as 700 of its 950 officers and men, reading the roll-call after the battle:

There were few responses as names were called, though what little information there was about missing men was given by friends … Another good friend, big ‘Jock’ Anderson was missing, and to this day his fate remains an unsolved mystery, but I have no doubt he did his bit, for Jock was a whole-hearted fighter.

Wounded, Jackson was posted to 1/Camerons on his return to France, and the battalion was paraded by RSM Sydney Axton, ‘known through all the Cameron ranks as “Old Joe”’:

As a new draft, we had come out wearing khaki kilt aprons, and I well remember the first order of the RSM was, ‘Take off your aprons and show your Cameron tartan.’ ‘Old Joe’ was the real old fashioned type of soldier, a smart man in every way, a terror for discipline when on duty, a thorough gentleman off duty. A man who would sing a song or dance with the best; who knew everything there was to know about soldiering, and took the greatest pride in his regiment. His decorations numbered 9, and included the Military Cross, won on the Aisne, and the Distinguished Conduct Medal, won in the South African War, so that he was a real old warrior. His word was law in the battalion, and he would give an officer a ‘lecture’ just the same as he would a private soldier, so all ranks looked up to him as a man to be respected. Personally I always got on well with him, my duty bringing me often in contact with him, and I soon learned that his bark was worse than his bite.²²

Doug Beattie was RSM of 1/Royal Irish in March 2003 when Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins made his famous pre-battle speech before the entry into Kuwait. Beattie feared that the message ‘had been rousing, but also sobering. It pulled no punches’, and there was a danger that the men would become morose and reflective. And so they

were going to stop thinking about Colonel Collins and start paying attention to their regimental sergeant major. And woe betide any who didn’t. I began to bollock them. I yelled at them about the pitiful state of their weapons. I laid into them over their poor state of dress, their abysmal personal hygiene, their failure to salute senior officers, their inability to get anywhere on time. I told them they were a disgrace to their uniform and weren’t fit to call themselves soldiers of 1 R IRISH. I accused the warrant officers of running slack companies … I called the CSMs to me. They sprang to attention … and marched forward, coming to a halt in a perfectly straight line, shoulders back, chests out. Beyond the earshot of the rest of the ranks I explained what I was trying to do … It is true that battalions are commanded by their officers. If 1 R IRISH was a car the driving would be done by them. But the engine that powers that car is to be found in the sergeants’ mess, with the five men now standing bolt upright in front of me.²³

Today’s non-commissioned hierarchy reflects other changes. The Wellingtonian army selected its corporals from trusted private soldiers known, by that most satisfying term, as chosen men. Chosen men soon became lance corporals (‘lance-jacks’), with a speculative etymology linking the word to the seventeenth century ‘lancepesade’. The word derives from the Italian lazzia spezzata or broken lance, because the soldier in question was a veteran, likely to have broken a spear or two in his day. Initially the post of lance corporal, its holder distinguished by a single stripe rather than the maturity of the full corporal’s two, was an appointment rather than a rank: easy come, easy go. Before long ‘lance’ became a prefix for junior sergeants too. Having lance sergeants was a matter of regimental preference, as First World War headstones demonstrate. The Foot Guards have retained the rank, although it really equates with corporal. Any Queen’s Birthday Parade will show that lance sergeants, with their three white stripes, are not quite the same as sergeants proper, whose gold braid tapes earn them the sobriquet of gold sergeants.

A short walk through a military cemetery tells one a good deal about an army’s character. A First World War German cemetery abounds with the specific ranks that say much about the man who lies beneath the greensward, even if he was only a private soldier. The rank of grenadier and fusilier shows that he served in a particular sort of regiment. A jäger, hunter, is the same as a French chasseur, with keen eyes and quick step, and would have served, flat-shakoed, in a jäger battalion. A gunner is a kanonier, and different sorts of cavalrymen get a proper job description: hussar, uhlan, kurassier or dragoner. A kriegsfreiwilliger had volunteered to serve in the war, a reservist was precisely that, and an ersatz reservist had contrived (probably through having a student deferment from conscription) to incur a reserve liability even though he had not done basic training.

In a British cemetery of the same era, in contrast, most unpromoted men are privates. Privates in Foot Guards regiments are described as ‘Guardsmen’, although this rank was granted retrospectively, for it did not exist till 1922. Although ordinary soldiers in the Household Cavalry were termed trooper, they were still called privates in the rest of the cavalry, and the 1922 change in terminology did not affect those who had died before this date. In consequence, the last British soldier killed in the war was Private George Ellison of the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers, a Leeds man, buried at St Symphorien, just east of the Belgian town of Mons. The rank of trooper first referred to privates in the cavalry, then spread into the Royal Tank Regiment, and has most recently appeared, as the evocative hybrid air trooper, in the Army Air Corps. Rifle regiments had called their soldiers riflemen very early on, and the notion of ‘the thinking, fighting rifleman’ was an attractive currency.

Fusilier regiments followed with ‘fusilier’. The Royal Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers selected the word ‘craftsman’ for its private soldiers; and the King’s Regiment, coming close to the end of its own independent existence in the 1980s, took up ‘kingsman’ for its private soldiers. The Queen’s Regiment considered ‘queensman’, but consultation with soldiers about to receive the new designation revealed that they were firmly against it, fearing that inter-regimental debates on the word’s precise meaning might have regrettable outcomes.

Rank is one thing and appointment another. In an infantry battalion or cavalry regiment the adjutant remains the commanding officer’s personal staff officer, responsible for what became known as ‘A’ matters: everything to do with personnel and discipline. An unrelenting stream of papers on postings, promotions, honours and awards, courses, and court martials surged across his desk. Adjutants usually held the rank of captain from the late nineteenth century, and the post is now an essential part of that cursus honorum that takes an officer to the highest ranks. But for the first two-thirds of the army’s life adjutants were sometimes ensigns and then, more usually, lieutenants, generally commissioned from the ranks, because any sensible commanding officer wanted an assistant who understood both drill and paperwork, and an ex-sergeant major was just the man.

It was not easy to make the step up, and sometimes colonels made the wrong call. When the Light Brigade spurred off to its rendezvous with immortality in the Crimea, Cornet John Yates was adjutant of the 11th Hussars. Troop Sergeant Major George Loy Smith of the 11th was not pleased about it:

Unfortunately for us Colonel Douglas allowed Colonel Lawrenson of the 17th Lancers to persuade him that his quartermaster [-sergeant] would make us an excellent adjutant – although at the time our two senior sergeant-majors were both eligible … I have heard on good authority that Colonel Douglas deeply regretted this act. If he did not I know the whole regiment did, for a worse rider, a worse drill, a greater humbug never before held the rank of adjutant in the British army. The 17th might well be glad to get rid of him; they certainly got the laugh of us.

Cornet Yates (nicknamed ‘Joey’ by the troopers) had been standing in for a sick staff officer who returned to duty on the day of the battle, but he still managed to avoid the charge. Smith heard a soldier call out ‘There goes Joey’, and sure enough ‘in the distance could be seen the adjutant galloping back towards the encampment. This caused great amusement and laughter – he had only been with us a month and had made himself thoroughly obnoxious to everyone.’²⁴ Adjutants were generally ex-rankers until well on in the nineteenth century, for, as Lord Panmure, Secretary at War 1846–52, observed, it was hard to get a gentleman subaltern ‘to take the office of adjutant from the arduous character of its duties and the constant confinement it requires to barracks’.²⁵

What the adjutant did for an individual unit, so the adjutant general did for the army as a whole. He was based alongside the commander-in-chief in Horse Guards, before crossing Whitehall to the Old War Office, then moving to the MOD’s Main Building and eventually having his own headquarters at Upavon in Wiltshire before being swept up into the army’s new headquarters, Marlborough Lines near Andover. The best adjutant generals combined regimental experience (giving them an understanding of the impact of bureaucracy on the army in the field) with a sharp brain and a thirst for the administrative flood that drenched their regimental counterparts. Henry Torrens, a Londonderry man, was commissioned under-age into the 52nd Foot in 1793, and did a good deal of regimental duty in the West Indies, Portugal, and India. By 1805 he was appointed assistant adjutant general for the Kent district. Another interlude of regimental duty saw him wounded at Buenos Aires, where a musket ball ‘shattered a small writing apparatus which was slung to his side’. He became Assistant Adjutant General at Horse Guards, and then Assistant Military Secretary there, with a brief period in the Peninsula. A major general and a knight, Torrens became adjutant general in 1820. He managed to write a drill-book, Regulations for the Exercise and Field Movements of the Infantry of the Army, and played an important part in rebalancing the army as it ran down for a long period of peace. Contemporaries thought that his ‘excessive labours’ had weakened his health, and he died suddenly in 1828.

Individual armies in the field had their own adjutant generals, their tasks mirroring those of regimental adjutants on the one hand and the army’s adjutant general on the other. From February 1916 until the end of the war Lieutenant General Sir George Fowke was adjutant general in France. He had gone to war as the BEF’s senior Royal Engineer, and his promotion partly reflected GHQ’s discomfort with this big, clever man whose influence had grown inexorably with the importance of engineering. As adjutant general he left the routine of office work to others, but retained a penetrating overview, sharpened by a remarkable memory for detail. The scale and diversity of his branch’s work emerges from the digest of administrative routine orders issued to help all officers in the adjutantal line. Fowke’s branch warned individuals of the danger of being struck by the propellers of low-flying aircraft; established the grounds for reporting a man ‘missing, believed killed’; directed units to send the originals of their war diaries up to the Deputy Adjutant General on the last day of each month, and decreed that the only vehicle allowed to fly the Union Jack was the commander-in-chief’s.²⁶

A commanding officer was no less dependent upon his quartermaster than his adjutant. Quartermasters were originally ex-NCOs given warrants to act in that appointment. When Charles Jones was reviewing officers’ duties in 1811 he observed that the quartermaster of the Blues was unusual in that he held a proper commission, but although quartermasters as a group ‘stand, in front, at the head of their class, [they] can never be on a level with the youngest cornet’.²⁷ It was not a status that always made for comfortable relations between veteran quartermasters and less experienced junior officers. In July 1811, Quartermaster John Foster Kingsley of the 30th Foot was court-martialled at Campo Mayor for taking possession of bullock carts reserved, by Wellington’s orders, for ammunition and supplies, and using them for his own battalion’s equipment. One of the charges against him was that he had disobeyed the orders of Lieutenant Rae of the Royal Scots, who claimed use of the carts. It transpired that Rae had detained two members of the 30th’s cart-escort, alleging that they were drunk and insolent. When Kingsley declined to hand over the carts there was a quarrel in the street: Kingsley not only refused to acknowledge Rae’s authority but, when Rae threatened to take the carts by force, pointed out that he too had armed men at hand. If Rae demurred, suggested the quartermaster helpfully, then they should step aside and settle the issue ‘in a private manner’. Matters were not improved by Kingsley’s offer to return the carts when he had finished with them, for the commissariat official with Rae said ‘I would not take your word for you are no gentleman’, serving only to remind Kingsley of his position. Moreover, as commissariat officials did not hold commissions themselves, it was exasperating for one to lay claim to status that was by no means evident.

Most of the witnesses supported Rae, apart from Hospital Mate Evans, who was about to be appointed assistant surgeon to the 30th, and had good reason for not antagonising its quartermaster. The court martial found Kingsley guilty on two of the three charges against him, agreeing that Rae was indeed his senior officer. Kingsley was suspended from rank and pay for three months, a modest sentence in the circumstances, and earned a surprisingly gentle reproof from Wellington, who reminded him that ‘inconvenience may be felt at some time by individuals’ but the general interest had to take precedence. A modern quartermaster, shown the court-martial papers, concluded that he would have done exactly the same in Kingsley’s place, and put his own battalion first.²⁸

After 1871 quartermasters were granted honorary commissions as lieutenants or captains, and the Manual of Military Law emphasised that, even though they still held substantive warrant rank, this made them officers within the meaning of the Army Act. They were invariably promoted from the ranks, usually moving on to be their battalion’s quartermaster after having served as its RSM. It was not until after the First World War that they were given full commissions, and not until later that the concept of a ‘Late Entry’ commission was introduced, enabling commissioned ex-warrant officers to do a wide variety of jobs. The post of quartermaster had never been the only outlet for officers commissioned from the ranks. There was the adjutant’s appointment until it became the preserve of mainstream officers. The regimental post of paymaster, once thought highly suitable for an ex-NCO, had become attractive to gentleman officers rather earlier, because it was seen to be ‘one of the best appointments in the service’ from a financial point of view. Riding masters in the cavalry were commissioned from the ranks, and the post still exists in the Household Cavalry. Later, directors of music (senior to bandmasters, who are warrant officers) and masters at arms in the Army Physical Training Corps were also ex-rankers. However, the concept of the Late Entry commission enabled such officers to do a wider variety of jobs than ever before, perhaps commanding headquarters companies in infantry battalions or furnishing the Royal Army Medical Corps with the non-medical administrative officers it needs.

Doug Beattie was commissioned in 2005 after his tour as RSM of 1/R Irish and twenty-two years’ service, and acknowledged that while this gave him the opportunity to stay in the army ‘for the immediate future and well beyond’, there was a catch. The army thought him ‘best suited to a training and logistical role’. After a training job he would then be likely to return to his old battalion where ‘I would probably become a welfare officer, looking after the families of those going off to fight.’ It was not for him, and he decided to resign. Before his resignation took effect, though, he was posted to Afghanistan, where he won a Military Cross in a burst of desperate fighting alongside the Afghan National Army and police at Garmsir in 2006. Although still determined to leave the army, he was unable to resist the opportunity of helping his own battalion prepare for its Afghanistan tour, and accompanying them when it deployed. ‘Soldiering was what I did and what I knew’, he wrote. ‘It was in my blood.’²⁹ His unhappiness with the sorts of jobs on offer after commissioning is not untypical. It reflects a slow transition, not yet completed, between old army and new.

It is impossible to overemphasise either the importance of quartermasters or their impact on superiors and subordinates alike. Some might indeed have deserved the description given the quartermaster of a cavalry regiment in the Indian Mutiny as ‘old, excessively conceited, disobliging and ungentlemanly …’³⁰ Their passage through the ranks will not have imbued them with profound confidence in human nature; they will be older than most officers of their rank, and, although the selection of mainstream officers from a broader background continues to reduce the social differences between quartermasters and their brother officers, they will certainly not be graduates in a largely graduate officers’ mess. At their best they are sources of wise advice as well as solid professional expertise, and are often remembered long after most other officers are forgotten.

In his Sherston’s Progress trilogy, Siegfried Sassoon modelled that ‘husky-voiced old campaigner’, the gruff but kindly Joe Dottrell, quartermaster of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, on its real quartermaster, Captain Yates. He also appears to no less advantage in The War the Infantry Knew, the battalion’s unofficial history, compiled by Captain James Churchill Dunn, its medical officer for much of the war. Yates met the battalion as it stumbled back from Le Cateau in 1914. ‘The Quartermaster had some stew and tea ready, and we had an issue of rum, and, what was still better, some letters from home.’ He got the men away, a platoon at a time, to have a bath – ‘badly needed’ – when the battalion held autumnal trenches above the Aisne. On St David’s Day 1916 (sacred to the Royal Welch) he secured, though we can only guess how, ‘a leek for everyone’s cap.’ He saved time and trouble by keeping his transport close behind the battalion on the Somme, though everyone else’s was sent further back. When the battalion ran dangerously short of ammunition in the German spring offensive of 1918 ‘Yates has made up, although scrounging is not so easy as formerly.’ When the war ended he not only took home ‘a complete Mobilisation Store for a battalion, down to the last horseshoe and strap,’ but a complete German mortar acquired by the brigadier and ‘innumerable brass shell-cases’ that Yates and the adjutant had collected. And at last, when the battalion paraded through Wrexham on its arrival in Britain, he astonished those who had no notion of there having been a Mrs Yates by spotting her amongst the crowd: ‘forty years of army discipline were forgotten, he dashed from the ranks, and greeted her heartily and unblushingly.’³¹

The quartermaster’s subordinates were headed by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, from 1913 a warrant officer, and included an assortment of storemen, with cooks, grooms, and transport-men often coming under his command too. He had a particular lien on company quartermaster sergeants who, like him, were known as quarter-blokes. Although his post was not the most martial, RQMS T.W. Fitzpatrick of 2/Royal Irish did more than most to save the BEF on 23 August 1914, assembling a scratch force (including the battalion’s armourer, Sergeant Redmond, with that useful asset, a newly-repaired machine gun) to hold the Bascule crossroads near Mons. He was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal and a commission for the day’s work, and ended the war a lieutenant colonel.

As adjutant generals were to adjutants, so quartermaster generals were to quartermasters. Yet there was one big difference. Although a quartermaster general and his Q staff were responsible for accommodation and quartering, supplies of all sorts, remounts and accounting, neither the army’s quartermaster general, nor the quartermaster general of a deployed force, would ever have been a battalion quartermaster. Wully Robertson, the BEF’s quartermaster general in 1914, had indeed served in the ranks, though he had been commissioned long before he was eligible to be quartermaster. It is a reflection of the army’s relationship with its own logisticians that Lieutenant General Sir Paul Travers, who had spent much of his career in the Royal Corps of Transport, was the first professional logistician to become quartermaster general, in 1982. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the army’s logistic services were militarised, and even then there was more than a little disdain, on the part of what became known as the ‘teeth arms’, for the supporting services.

This did not prevent some quartermaster generals from being very competent. Perhaps the most outstanding of them was General Sir John Cowans, in post for the whole of the First World War and according to Asquith ‘the best quartermaster since Moses’. He combined regimental service in the Rifle Brigade, into which he had been commissioned in 1881, with a series of logistic staff jobs. He was urbane and tireless, and, unusually amongst officers who had grown up in a small army, had the capacity to think big. He got on well with ministers – not always a simple task in that uneasy world of frocks and brass-hats – and his ‘penchant for other men’s wives’ may have endeared him to Lloyd George.³²

When Wully Robertson stepped up from being QMG in France to take over as the BEF’s chief of staff in 1915, the post went to Ronald Maxwell. But he was replaced in December 1917 because of political pressure, and against Haig’s wishes, by Travers Clarke. Maxwell had been good but Clarke was even better, an extraordinary administrator who coped with both the haemorrhaging of resources after the slashing cut of the German 1918 offensive and the unprecedented demands of the mobile warfare of the last Hundred Days. It says something of the way that history is written (for we scribblers prefer warriors to logisticians) that few, even amongst the war’s more serious historians, give him the attention he deserves. Major General Hubert Essame likened him to Lazare Carnot, who had done so much to keep the threadbare warriors of revolutionary France in the field, and called him the ‘Carnot of Haig’s armies’.

Clarke’s department worried about the allowances in lieu of billets available to French and Belgian interpreters; the relationship between ammunition parks at corps level and their satellite divisional sub-parks; and the process of compensating landowners for damage to trees and other property. It had a comprehensive policy on the recycling of damaged equipment, advising that ‘any boot which is not badly cut in the uppers can be repaired, and if doubt exists it is better to err on the safe side, and class the boot as repairable.’ When the Machine Gun Corps was formed in 1915, the QMG’s branch had to devise new scales of equipment, so that cavalry machine gun squadrons received, inter alia, two chisels, one plane, one bench vice, and a saddletree-maker (to equip the horses with the packs used to transport ammuntion and the guns themselves). It issued instruction on correspondence, from ordinary letters, through express delivery and on to weekend letter telegrams, which could be sent from France to certain colonies or dependencies provided that they were written in plain English or French and included no code-words.

Rations were a major preoccupation, with a complex shopping list of entitlements and alternatives for man and beast. Men working in arduous conditions could receive extra tea and sugar daily, and two ounces of pea soup or two Oxo cubes twice weekly during the winter months. Indian rations included ghee, ghur, ginger, chillies, and turmeric; and Africans were entitled to a pound and a half of mealie meal per man per day. Transport of all sorts was the responsibility of Q Branch: spares, spark-plugs and speeding all merited entries in routine orders. Finally, the branch even ventured into matters adjutantal, warning that officers had been seen returning from France to the United Kingdom wearing Sam Browne belts from which the braces and frog had been removed. At least one of the braces should be worn at all times, although (generous concession) the frog need only be worn with the sword itself.³³

Historically, the quartermaster general of a field army was its commander’s chief staff officer, for military operations were so intimately concerned with supply and movement that it was natural for the QMG’s branch to take the lead. Both Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, and Wellington’s, George Murray, were formally entitled quartermaster general, and Richard Airey, who made his own imprecise contribution to the misunderstandings that led to the Charge of the Light Brigade, held the same title, although he was effectively Lord Raglan’s chief of staff. The title chief of staff did not appear till the end of the nineteenth century, and by the First World War he was defined as the commander’s ‘responsible adviser for all matters affecting all matters of military operations … by whom all orders to field units will be signed.’³⁴ The general staff (G Branch) was primus inter pares, with overriding responsibility for all orders, operations, communication, censorship and legal issues.

Until the British adopted the NATO staff system in the 1980s, their staff officers had titles prefixed with GSO (for General Staff Officer). A number indicated their ranks, with GSO1 for lieutenant colonels, ‘2’ for majors and ‘3’ for captains. The chief of staff of a brigade had long been its brigade major, assisted, as the First World War went on, by two staff captains, A and Q. Terminology changed, within NATO, to the prefix SO (for Staff Officer) and a number for rank, mirroring the old British system, and then a designation that places the officer precisely within the appropriate general staff branch, with its G prefix: thus SO2 G3 Training is a major in the training branch of a headquarters. The old GOC, for General Officer Commanding, is now replaced by ‘commander’, and brigade majors, like their equivalents at higher levels, are now chiefs of staff. Adding acronyms stirs that alphabet soup which itself contributes to a military sense of identity by helping form a language all but impenetrable to outsiders. The British commander of the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps is COMARRC, and his chief of staff (with a whiff of the steppe) COSARRC. Chief of staff survives, at least conversationally, unabbreviated, but his deputy is generally clipped down to the unlovely Dee-Cos.