Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
Atholl
observed a poor fellow running to the hills as if for his life, hotly pursued by half a dozen human blood hounds. Turning to his guide, the gentleman anxiously inquired the meaning of what he saw. ‘Och,’ replied the imperturbable Celt, ‘it’s only the Duke raising the royal Athole volunteers.’40
In the British experience legal compulsion has been the exception not the rule. The first Military Service Act was passed in early 1916, as a response to losses in the first eighteen months of the First World War. This represented a sea-change in public policy. Conscription was in force from 1916 to 1919, and again in 1939–60; from 1948 this was in the guise of National Service. It was only during these years that the army was in any sense a genuinely national force, its members, serving and retired, strewn so liberally across society that there was no escaping them.
As a young Territorial private in the early 1960s I hitch-hiked in itchy battledress, getting lifts, without any real effort, from lorry-drivers who asked knowing questions about my ‘mob’; mothers whose boys had recently completed their National Service; and men whose conversation slid onto sangars and bocage, desert roses and PIATS – the well-burnished argot of folk who had done it, which I, most demonstrably, had not.41 It was a world full of men who understood the difference between a brigadier and a bombardier, a battalion and a brigade. They knew that you stepped off with the left foot and that although you assiduously called a warrant officer ‘sir’, you did yourself no favours by imagining that you might salute him.
In the early twenty-first century, as in the first decade of its existence, the army now constitutes a tiny proportion of the population; all the signs suggest that this proportion will decrease still further. About one in seventy of us has a close family member who has served or is still serving, and regular soldiers themselves account for just 0.087 per cent of the population. For good or ill, Britain is almost wholly demilitarised. Now, as the success of the charity Help for Heroes and the moving unofficial ceremonies that greet the bodies of those being repatriated in the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett demonstrate, there is a sympathy for servicemen and women that has little direct connection to the conflicts in either Iraq or Afghanistan. But as Horace Wyndham complained over a century ago, ‘Outside the pages of “popular fiction” the soldier as he really is, is scarcely heard of, and over his life hangs a veil of reserve that is but seldom lifted.’42
Changes in the system of military honours and awards, instituted towards the end of John Major’s administration, mean that acts of bravery are now rewarded with medals whose significance is scarcely grasped by the population as a whole. Successive changes in the regimental system, however good the case in their favour, have replaced the names and badges so familiar to my father’s generation with terminology that the nation has not taken readily to its heart. Somehow 1 Mercian (Cheshire) does not have quite the ring of the Cheshire Regiment. Things that loom large in a soldier’s intimate life – like the length of a tour or operational duty; the duration of rest and recreation (‘R and R’) during it; and the quality of single accommodation and married quarters – are rarely discussed in the press. In contrast, there are frequent articles about the poor quality of equipment. Steve Brooks, writing of his time in Iraq, resented this:
I hate nothing more than civvies taking the piss about the latest article in the Mail or the Mirror about the army where the rifles don’t fire and radios don’t work. Yes, comms are shit, but we are the calibre of soldiers … to work hard for comms … like all aspects of soldiering we had to fight for comms to remain effective.43
Not all the news is bad. The growing number of parades marking units’ return from overseas is welcome evidence that the army is beginning to emerge from beneath the cloak of invisibility that has shrouded it for so long. This cloak was woven in the long-running campaign in Northern Ireland. It is salutary to recall just how costly this was in terms of human life. In 1972, its worst year for casualties there, the army lost 102 officers and men killed in the province, and on 27 August 1979 two bombs at Warrenpoint left eighteen soldiers dead. There is a strong case for saying that the most serious damage that the IRA did to the army was not by killing its soldiers, but by attacking isolated uniformed soldiers outside the province which led the services to ban their members from wearing uniform in public, except on clearly specified occasions. I had grown up in a world full of uniforms, but by the time I attended Staff College in the 1980s things were very different. Most officers avoided the uniform ban by slipping on a civilian jacket over their military sweater, and downtown Camberley abounded with well-trimmed men in their early middle years. The subterfuge would have been unlikely to fool even the dimmest hit squad, but it was another step on the road to self-effacement. My first arrival as a staff officer at Headquarters Land Command at Wilton (wafted in by a gust of self-importance, for I had contrived to become a colonel) drew a polite rebuke from the MOD policeman on the gate. I had broken the rules by wearing uniform, and should take care to keep it covered up in future.
Reversing the uniform ban has not proved easy. In March 2008, shortly after the Government had commissioned a study that was to recommend that servicemen should be able to wear their uniforms as a matter of course, the station commander of Royal Air Force Wittering ordered that uniforms were not to be worn off-duty because of ‘persistent threats and abuse’ in nearby Peterborough.44 In January that year, 200 soldiers had their aircraft diverted, because of bad weather, from RAF Brize Norton to Birmingham. They were told to change from uniform to plain clothes on the tarmac before passing through public areas because, as a ministry spokesman put it ‘For security reasons, the MOD wishes to reduce the military profile on flights carried out on its behalf at civilian airports.’ There have been numerous cases of discrimination against service personnel in uniform. In November 2006 an army officer was refused entry into Harrods on the grounds that he was in ‘combat dress’; in September 2008 a hotel refused a room to a wounded soldier, who was forced to spend the night in his car; and in late 2009 four soldiers attending the funeral of a comrade killed in action in Afghanistan were banned from a Maidenhead nightclub: ‘You can all come in,’ said the helpful doorman, ‘apart from the squaddies.’
My regard for the soldier stems from a lifetime’s study as a military historian and almost as long a reserve infantry officer. For more than forty years I have read about soldiers, taught them at Sandhurst and Staff College, listened to them grumble or exult, watched them ply their trade in the Balkans and Iraq, visited them in hospital at Selly Oak and seen them arrive in flag-draped coffins at Royal Air Force Lyneham. It should already be very clear that this portrait will show Tommy Atkins warts and all. At one extreme there are those who prefer their pictures to have blemishes air-brushed out. Many years ago, a military reviewer was pained that the psychologist Norman Dixon (a former Royal Engineer officer, wounded and decorated for his work in bomb disposal) should ‘write so cynically about his former profession’ in his important book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. One of the few adverse reviews of my own book Firing Line appeared in the British Army Review. The converse is also true, for there are perhaps as many who focus on an image of unrelieved savagery, or who see the army as a boss-class tool for turning nice boys into layabouts and killers.
This is not a chronological history of the army and its achievements. There have been many published in my working lifetime, with Correlli Barnett’s Britain and Her Army (1970) wearing its judgements well even where recent scholarship has advanced our detailed knowledge. Allan Mallinson’s The Making of the British Army (2009) is the most recent easily accessible account. This book is instead a social history of the soldier. Its organisation is thematic rather than chronological, and its preoccupation not with big battles or frontier scrimmages, but with the myriad routine observances of military life. It is the story of a man as ancient as a redcoat in Charles II’s Tangier garrison and as modern as the gate-guard on Camp Bastion. It also concerns the women who followed him, anxiously watched his progress from afar or, more recently, soldiered with him. Given the immense change in Britain over the past three centuries, it would be inconceivable for the soldier not to have changed too. What surprises me, as I get ready to endure the fug of our first barrack room, is not how much he has changed: but how little.
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