is a typical Holmes product, full of detail usefully comparing modern soldiering with the echoes of the past. His technique of bringing perspective to the events of today through the prism of history is always leavened by that inimitable wit for which he was renowned. Having been a private soldier in the yeomanry at an early age he acquired an inner knowledge of how the dynamics of the barrack room worked; this always made him instinctively sympathetic to the plight of the ‘Tom’. His trilogy, Redcoat, Sahib, and Tommy are masterpieces of the social history of the British Army but Soldiers adds spice to the mix. Although many will be aware of the ‘lives and loyalties’ of the British army, few of us are able to describe them in such an amusing and readable way.
As I write this, I am about to embark on another ride in the Borders; we are calling it the Reivers’ Ride and the choice of country and period were Richard’s. He was once more to be our companion and resident historian, as we fundraise for his favourite charity ABF, The Soldiers’ Charity, a charity for which he raised well over a quarter of a million pounds underlining, perhaps, this book’s theme: that all soldiers deserve our sympathy, praise, and ultimately a ‘hand up’. In the weeks before his death, it was this expedition which provided some sort of goal. He will be much in our thoughts as we relive the English victory at Flodden or Cromwell’s annihilation of the Scots at Dunbar. Jessie and Corinna, his daughters, will be with us for part of the ride, making it all the more poignant. I, for one, will miss those tales – perhaps even excerpts from this book – which would have been so much better heard than read, but the time lords will have to work their magic before I can enjoy that old familiar voice.
Evelyn Webb-Carter
INTRODUCTION
IT IS USELESS to deny it. I have loved Tommy Atkins, once a widely used term for the common soldier, since I first met him. And love is the right word, for my affection goes beyond all illusions. I know that he is capable of breaking any law imposed by God or man, and whenever I allow myself to feel easy with him, he smacks my comfortable preconceptions hard in the mouth: it is his nature to do so. Antony Beevor, cavalry officer turned best-selling historian, thought that ‘the British soldier’s unpredictable alternation between the odd bout of mindless violence when drunk, and spontaneous kindness when sober, is one of his most perplexing traits.’1 Another former officer described trying to find some soldiers who were late for duty one Sunday afternoon. He was tipped off that they had been seen entering the house of a local civilian:
The door was answered by a small, rather timid man who invited us in. ‘We’re looking for some soldiers’, my colleague explained, giving their names. ‘Oh yes, they’re here,’ the man told us, ‘upstairs, screwing my wife.’ A few moments later, nine rather shame-faced soldiers appeared with the fattest and ugliest woman I have ever seen. She was quite clearly drunk and farted noisily as she came into the room … Later I asked one of the boys what he could conceivably have found attractive in the woman. ‘The more gopping the slag is, Sir,’ he replied, ‘the better she is at it.’2
The same author identified the moment he decided to resign his commission:
At 2 a.m. the Duty Officer’s phone rang and I lifted it, half asleep, ‘Guardroom Sir, we’ve got a tech stores man down here – he says he’s beaten up his wife.’ I got there in a few minutes to find a very drunk man who had apparently ended an argument with his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. He had got drunk, he told me, because he was fed up with the job and ‘Anyway, that kid’s not mine.’ Neither the wife nor unborn child was seriously injured; but that night I decided to leave the Army.3
Some men look back on their time in uniform with huge satisfaction. One First World War veteran, Sergeant Adolphus ‘Dolph’ Jupe of the Hampshire Regiment, thought that:
I suppose that in our life we give our hearts unrestrainedly to very few things. I had given mine to the battalion and bore its three stripes on my arm with greater pride than I have ever experienced since. We had worn a proud uniform for over five years and with many others I was disconsolate at its putting off. For the sufferings, the sacrifice and the heroism of a million men of our generation whose bones lay at rest across the sea, had raised the prestige of our race to a height never before achieved, and even upon us, however faintly, was reflected the glory of their achievements.4
But another, Bombardier Ronald Skirth, like Jupe a wartime soldier, declared that:
My abhorrence of war equated with a detestation of the war-machine – the Army of which I was a member … it personified everything I despised. I was a cog in that machine, vastly more powerful than myself, so I was compelled to live a hypocrite’s existence5 … By the time the war ended, my prejudices had become so unreasoning and so deeply embedded that I resolved never to accept any honours, promotions, benefits or even monetary advantages from an Authority I both detested and despised.6
Author Colin MacInnes, who served in the Intelligence Corps in a later war, hated the whole thought of killing or being killed, but disliked military service itself almost as much:
Three-quarters of military discipline is mindless, obsolete and wastefully self-frustrating – apart, of course, from being highly irritating. No one can serve in any army for years without being to some extent an inbred malingerer and scrounger, irredeemably slothful.
Conversely, several of the National Servicemen interviewed by Trevor Royle for his book The Best Years of their Lives thought that military service had changed them for the better. ‘I sometimes wonder how different I’d have been without the discipline of National Service,’ asked one. I mean, what did a Teddy Boy graduate to? ‘Most if us did feel proud to be part of an army which had only recently won the war’, admitted another. ‘I feel sorry that modern youth cannot experience such feelings.’7
Tommy Atkins certainly has a capacity for extraordinary gentleness. Guardsman Gerald Kersh was abed in a Second World War Nissen hut when the rest of his squad of potential officers returned, heavy-footed, from the cinema:
Everybody clumped in … I breathed regularly, and kept my nose under the blankets. Then I heard a Potential Officer of a Rifle Brigade Sergeant say: ‘Take it easy. Have a little consideration. Man asleep here.’
Something clicked above my head. Looking out of the narrow slit of one partly-raised eyelid, I saw the Rifle Brigade Sergeant take my greatcoat off its hook, open it, shake it gently and approach me. He covered me with it, and then everybody went to bed.
It was not that I was ill, it was not that I was fragile and in need of protection. I was asleep.8
He has a harsh edge too. The capture of Goose Green in the Falklands by 2 Para in 1982 was a remarkable feat of low-level dogged courage, and earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones. Ken Lukowiak, who fought there as a private, admitted that one of his comrades carried a couple of pairs of dental pliers ‘to acquire gold’, and a handful of his comrades looking at a pretty girl’s photograph were soon speculating about her propensity for vigorous anal intercourse.9 The gallant victors neither expected nor received kid-glove handling, as Lukowiak, chided by Colour Sergeant Frank Pye for obeying an order to clear up after the battle, assures us:
‘What the fuck are you doing, you stupid cunt?’ said Frank.
‘If I told you I was sweeping the floor, Colour, would you believe me?’
‘Don’t get fucking gobby with me, you crow, or I’ll fucking drop you.’
‘Sorry, Colour.’10
Nor are officers always
