Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors - Richard  Holmes


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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


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