the army’s history its officer corps was closely aligned to the social class that sent members of parliament to Westminster. The proportion of serving officers sitting in parliament fell away substantially as the nineteenth century went on, but the two world wars of the twentieth century packed both houses with an unusually high number of folk with wartime service. That generation has now moved on, though in the second decade of the twenty-first century there are again MPs with direct links to the military. Modern wars have never been more political and senior officers are inevitably politically ensnared.
CHAPTER 4
BRASS AND TAPES
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
