Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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The Queen’s Royal Regiment’s battle honours began with ‘Tangier 1662–80’, and included scores of others, from ‘Dettingen’ to ‘Corunna’, ‘Cabool 1842’, ‘Sobraon’, ‘Sevastopol’, ‘Pekin 1860’ and ‘South Africa 1899–1902’. On 1 June 1794 a detachment of the regiment had served as marines aboard Lord Howe’s flagship Queen Charlotte at his victory over the French of Ushant, and this was commemorated as the regimental day. HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school on Whale Island, Portsmouth, inherited the traditions of Queen Charlotte, and there was a strong connection between the regiment and HMS Excellent, with an annual cricket week. Regimental treasure included a huge silver wine cooler, officially the Jerningham-Kandler wine cooler but known, to generations of irreverent young officers, predictably preoccupied by some of the female figures embodied in its rococo decoration, as ‘The Flying Tits’.
In 1902 1/Queen’s won the Punjab Open polo tournament, and five officers commemorated it with a silver horse statuette: two were wounded and two killed in action during the First World War. Another trophy, the Army in India Efficiency Prize, was won by 1/Queen’s in 1905. The competition required all soldiers in a battalion, except those actually in hospital, to compete. It was so savage, including a thirty-mile march in full kit (one veteran believed that he carried 150lbs in all), and with a variety of tests, that some men died. The event was not repeated, so the battalion was allowed to retain the trophy. Hardened drinkers took comfort from the fact that 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, the runners-up, lost five men on the march, all of them teetotallers.81
If the Queen’s could boast a longer history than most regiments, there was nothing genuinely unique about it, for the old army was a rich repository of history (real and invented), traditions and artefacts, making regiments social organisms as distinctive as Scots clans or Native American tribes. We must, though, guard against uncritical assumption that the sheer visibility of the regimental system, reinforced most poignantly by cap badges engraved on headstones in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, means that it was the main reason for men fighting. It certainly mattered hugely to pre-war regulars, especially to officers and senior NCOs, who might spend the whole of their working lives in the same peripatetic community, soldiering together from Catterick to Calcutta and from Kimberley to the Khyber. Herbert Wootton, a pre-war member of the Royal Horse Guards, told me that he fought for ‘the Regiment and its traditions, also my comrades’.82 Alan Hanbury-Sparrow was a thoroughly committed regimental officer – ‘I always felt it my duty to be with 1/Royal Berks at the front’ – but felt that the value of the regimental system diminished as the war went on. ‘The casualty lists put an enormous strain on these traditions,’ he wrote. ‘I became increasingly cynical about their value.’83
There were some things men were less proud of, for, as Frank Richards described it, ‘booze and fillies’ were a constant preoccupation for regular soldiers. It was a hard-drinking army: in 1912–13, 9,230 men were fined for drunkenness, and this does not include the many more given drills or other punishments by officers or NCOs. Lieutenant George Barrow, a cavalry officer carrying out a brief attachment to the infantry in 1884, found himself serving with the 88th Foot, the Devil’s Own, then properly known as The Connaught Rangers. ‘Drink was the besetting sin of the Connaught men,’ he wrote.84 In the dimly-lit regimental ‘wet canteen’ men could buy weak beer known as ‘swipes’: ‘one could drink a great many glasses of this sort of beer without feeling the effects of it’. Men drank steadily and sang songs of studied and refined vulgarity, such as ‘The Girl I nearly Wed’:
I wake up sweating every night to think what might have been, For in another corner, boys, she’d stored the Magazine, The Magazine, a barrel of snuff, and one or two things more, And in another corner, boys, was the Regiment forming fours.85
Philanthropists and reformers had done much, over the previous thirty years, to ensure that soldiers had some alternative to the ‘wet canteen’. The ‘Garrison Institute Coffee Shop’ and ‘Sandys Soldiers’ Home’ offered heat, light and daily papers, and cheap ‘char and a wad’ (tea and a sandwich).86 The Army Temperance Society encouraged men to give up alcohol altogether, and there was a strong thread of religious Nonconformity and temperance running through the army, especially amongst NCOs. But they were never more than a respectable minority, mocked as ‘tea busters’ or ‘bun wallahs’. Many soldiers would go to great lengths to get alcohol, whatever the risks. When the 11th Hussars arrived in France in August 1914 two zealous troopers discovered that the huge cotton warehouse that housed their brigade also contained the BEF’s rum casks. Their binge cost them three months’ imprisonment apiece.
Men brawled drunk, and they brawled sober. Within the regiment they were encouraged to settle matters with their fists, but when dealing with outsiders ‘the buckled ends of belts were used, also boots’. John Lucy’s Royal Irish Rifles had an ‘old and sworn enemy’ in a nearby English regiment, and he noticed how: ‘The Englishmen in our own regiment forgot nationality and beat up their own countrymen in the supposed defence of the honour of their chosen corps.’87 The Essex and Bedfordshire Regiments had a feud dating back to the Boer War, when an encircled Essex patrol had allegedly not been rescued by the nearby Bedfords, who were just falling in for church parade. Percy Croney, who served in 12/Essex, knew that: ‘when an Essex man sees a Bedford badge, in memory of that patrol he must call: “Thou shalt not kill,” and the Bedford man, in honour of his regiment, must fight.’88 Pubs in garrison towns were the scenes of large-scale inter-regmental fights. ‘Christmas always meant a damned good tuck-in,’ wrote Frank Richards, ‘with plenty of booze and scraps to follow.’ Inter-regimental brawls were common. Highland Regiments could be provoked (though for no easily-discernible historical reason) by asking for ‘’arf a pint o’ broken square’; a member of the York and Lancaster Regiment would respond vigorously to a cheery greeting of ‘The Cork and Doncaster, I presume’; and ‘scholars’ made insulting translations of high-sounding Latin mottoes and then ducked to avoid the bar stool.
The Welch Regiment had a long-running feud with the Royal Marines, its memory kept green in many a beery den. Frank Richards, as a soldier and Welshman bound to go to the aid of a brother in need, heard the traditional pre-fight patter in a Plymouth pub. A Welshman greeted a marine in ‘a friendly sort of tone’:
‘Pleased to meet you, Joey, let’s you and I have a talk about old times.’
‘What old times, Taffy?’ asked the marine, suspiciously.
‘That sea-battle long ago – I forget its name – where my regiment once served aboard a bloody flagship of the Royal Navy.’
‘What as? Ballast?’ asked the marine, finishing his beer before the trouble started.
‘No, as marines, whatever,’ answered the Welshman. ‘It was like this. The Admiral wanted a bit of fighting done, and the sailors were all busy with steering the bloody ship and looping up the bloody sails, see? And the marines said they didn’t feel like doing any bloody fighting that day, see? So of course he called in the Old Sixty-Ninth to undertake the job.’
‘Never heard tell before of a marine who didn’t feel like fighting,’ said the marine, setting down his empty mug and jumping forwards like a boxing kangaroo.
In a moment we were all at it, hammer and tongs, and the sides being even, a decent bit of blood flowed: fortunately the scrap ended before murder was done, by the landlord shouting that the picket was on the way.89
The subject of women was just as contentious. The army began to build quarters for married soldiers and their families towards the end of the nineteenth century, but soldiers required permission