Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
Whether on operations in Ulster, the Balkans, or Iraq, I have been struck by their grace under pressure; their constant determination to put the interests of their soldiers before their own; and that physical courage that gives this part of the book its title.
This is not uncritical admiration – their moral courage is not always equal to their physical valour. The desire to succeed in one of the most hierarchical of professions occasionally leads an officer to scramble up the greasy pole without much regard for the boot-prints he leaves on the faces of those below him. Lunching with the Louts Club puts one at serious risk of either injury from flying bread-rolls, whizzing like grapeshot around the great breach at Badajoz, or short-onset cirrhosis. Their champagne/burgundy/rosé striped tie was designed to minimise stains from the fluids that might fall upon it.
There can be surprises among the men in terms of their diverse interests and skills. Today’s officers are often as cavalier about reading worthy doctrinal manuals as their great-grandfathers were. At its 1917 Christmas party, the Doctrine and Training Branch in France sang a ditty with the words ‘We write books and pamphlets/Yes by the ton/But nobody reads them/No not bally one’, and I know how its members felt. Yet I also know a former Grenadier who can recite Chesterton’s Lepanto word-perfect, and who showed me the Moons of Jupiter; a Royal Signals officer who cuts the most perfect silhouettes; a Para who left the army after a very heavy landing and has become a successful artist; and an infantryman who combined being one of the most-be-medalled officers of his generation with knocking off a doctorate in his spare time and writing five good books. They are often irritating, but rarely less than engaging.
The notion of a ‘national’ army has changed over time. Back in the seventeenth century, Charles II united the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland only in his royal person. The Union of Scotland and England did not take place till 1707, and that of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. However, even while the three kingdoms had their separate legislatures, there was no easy relationship between the overall size, either of Britain’s population as a whole, or of the army that defended it, and the national backgrounds of officers. The eighteenth-century army was dominated, in numbers though not always in influence, by the Scots and Irish. The army in Ireland, right up to 1800, had its own sharply reduced regimental establishment. In 1774, 41 per cent of officers were English, 32 per cent were Irish, and 25 per cent Scottish. In 1776 these proportions were 37 per cent, 33 per cent and 27 per cent, and in 1782: 36 per cent, 28 per cent, and 33 per cent. Foreigners, mainly Americans, made up 2–3 per cent, though this may reflect the fact that Americans serving in British regiments often reported themselves as English. In the mid-1770s a little over half the population of the British Isles was English or Welsh, just under a third Irish, and one-tenth Scots. British line infantry, regardless of any designation its regiments bore, was officered by a rather larger proportion of Irishmen than existed in the general population, and over twice as many Scots, while the English produced just two-thirds of the officers to which their share of the wider population should have entitled them. The proportions of rank and file were rather different, with around 60 per cent English, 24 per cent Scottish, and 16 per cent Irish, so it is not unfair to speak of a predominantly English army that was disproportionately officered by Scotsmen and Irishmen.
Although the English content of the rank and file increased as the nineteenth century went on, with emigration to the United States replacing enlistment into the army as the preferred career choice for so many young Irishmen, the proportion of Scots and Irish officers remained high. Towards the beginning of the century it was said that if you walked into the officers’ mess of the 38th Foot (which boasted a Staffordshire connection) and yelled ‘Campbell’ a quarter of the officers present would turn round. The 22nd Foot had a proud affiliation to Cheshire but had a regimental agent in Dublin. In 1870, 71 per cent of the population of Great Britain hailed from England and Wales, with 17 per cent from Ireland and 11 per cent from Scotland. The birthplace of the 1914 generals is not necessarily an accurate index of their national background. Tommy Capper, killed at Loos in 1915, and William Birdwood, who went on to command the ANZACs, were both born in India. Only 63 per cent were born in England, with 13 per cent coming from Ireland and a remarkable 19 per cent from Scotland. Throughout the period, the minor gentry of Scotland and Ireland generated a disproportionate number of officers. Sir Walter Scott told the Duke of Wellington that
Your Grace knows that Scotland is a breeding, not a feeding country, and we must send our sons abroad as we sent our black cattle to England; and, as old Lady Charlotte, of Ardkinglass, proposed to dispose of her nine sons, we have a strong tendency to put our young folks ‘a’ to the sword.2
What the junker squirearchy of East Prussia was to the German army, so Ireland was to the British. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey argue that the high proportion of Irish officers, even at the close of the nineteenth century, reflects a ‘shortage of other career options’.3 Of the five non-royal commanders-in-chief of the army in the nineteenth century, one (Dundas) was Scots, two (Hill and Hardinge) were English, and the remainder, Wellington, Wolseley, and Roberts, were Irish. The latter, although born in Cawnpore, came from a distinguished Waterford family. Wellington disliked being called Irish, observing that one could be born in a stable without being a horse, but much of his political attitude was shaped by growing up as a child of the ascendancy. His brother-in-law Ned Pakenham, killed at New Orleans in January 1815 (wholly unnecessarily, for peace terms had been agreed, but news had not yet reached North America), was Irish. Galbraith Lowry Cole, a divisional commander in the Peninsula was Irish too. He was described by a biographer coming from a class of
energetic, masterful men, who interested themselves in local and public affairs and as such looked up to and respected by their neighbours; loving sport and country pursuits but with only a tepid interest in literature and art; careless about money, yet acutely aware of the need for it to make life pleasant; having a high sense of honour, but also a high temper and a lack of patience and caution.4
This might almost have been written to describe the family of the future field marshal Harold Alexander, born in London but descended from James Alexander, 1st Earl of Caledon, who had built a fine house on the borders of Tyrone in the late eighteenth century. Alexander grew up on the estate, where ‘his mother did not care what he did out of her sight’, and joined the army because it had never struck him to do anything else, and was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1911.5 His contemporary Alan Brooke was born in the French Pyrenees, where his parents spent their winters, but the family home was in Colebrooke, Co Fermanagh, held by the family since Major Thomas Brooke of Lord Drogheda’s Regiment of Horse gained it during the Williamite War. Sir Henry Brooke, 1st Baronet of Colebrooke, had three soldier sons fighting in the Napoleonic wars. One took over from Robert Ross, who burned Washington in 1812, another commanded the 4th Foot in Spain and took temporary command of his brigade when its commander was wounded at Waterloo, a battle in which his nephew, heir to the baronetcy, was killed. As David Fraser has pointed out, ‘Twenty-six Brookes of Colebrook served in [the First World War]: twenty-seven served in the war of 1939–45: and in those wars, or from wounds received in them, twelve died.’6
The Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the Ulster Plantations have provided the army with many of its most distinguished senior officers. There has been a whole tribe of Goughs, from Hugh, 1st Viscount, who commanded in both Sikh Wars. His chief tactic was frontal assault, and on one occasion, having been told that his artillery had run out of ammunition, he replied gratefully ‘Thank God for that. Now I’ll be at them with the bayonet.’ The future field marshal Gerald Templer and the future general Richard O’Connor were both children of officers in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, while Field Marshal Sir John Dill, whose equestrian statue stands proudly in Arlington National Cemetery, was commissioned into the Leinster Regiment in 1901; he was the son of a bank manager in Lurgan, County Armagh. Yet to judge Ireland’s contribution simply by the senior officers it furnished is to miss the point. There was scarcely an engagement in which an Irish officer did not play a notable part, whether or not he happened to be in an Irish regiment. Joseph Dyas, ‘a young officer of very great promise, of a most excellent disposition, and beloved by every man in the corps – an Irishman whose only fortune was his sword’, was serving with the 51st Foot when he led the forlorn hope against Fort St Cristoval, at Badajoz, in 1811. Private William Wheeler saw him emerge from the first attempt ‘without