the same root that gives us the French verb péter for the emission of a more discreet personal bang. The grade of petardier, a soldier with the unenviable specialism of attaching the petard to the gate, disappeared early on. We still half-remember just how tricky the job was, though, for the petardier risked being ‘hoist with his own petard’ if its sputtering fuse was too short, or if enemy fire prevented him from scampering back the way he had come. The arrangement of rank applied to the redcoats did not, in the first instance, cover the ‘gentleman of the ordnance’, the artillery and engineers. They answered instead to the master-general of the ordnance, usually a peer with a seat on the cabinet, through eventually demoted to become a mere member of the Army Board. Until 1716 artillery and engineer officers were in theory a homogeneous group, though it was increasingly evident that their skill-sets were different, and gunner officers, their importance rising with the power of the weapons they controlled, resented their subordination to men preoccupied with running up the very fortifications that they themselves sought to knock down.
In 1716 the two branches were split, with a corps of engineers and a regiment of artillery. The engineers enjoyed their own rank structure, with one chief engineer, two directors, two sub-directors, and six apiece of engineers in ordinary, engineers extraordinary, sub-engineers, and practitioner engineers in Britain. There were three engineers, headed by a director, in Minorca, and two, with a sub-director in charge, in Gibraltar. This system gave rough equivalency with the rest of the army, with the chief engineer ranking as a brigadier and the practitioner engineers with ensigns, but led to endless difficulties. Engineers were not strictly speaking commissioned, although they might purchase or be granted commissions.
On campaign there were never enough of them to go round, and Marlborough (combining, in his august though overworked person, the offices of captain general and master general) was given to granting bright infantry officers warrants to act as engineers. In 1707 Captain Richard King of Lord Orrery’s Regiment of Foot was appointed an assistant engineer, with a useful £100 addition to his annual pay. There was also the problem of authority. Badges of rank were far from being standardised, and it might not be an easy matter for a young sub-engineer, supervising an infantry working-party, to persuade a grimy sergeant that he did indeed speak with an officer’s authority and it was not yet time for the men to knock off and return to camp. In 1757 the engineers at last adopted formal military ranks, though there long remained a tension between engineers, with their relatively high pay, and the infantry, invariably at the other end of the scale. In late 1915 Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard of the Dorsets was pleased to observe the scribbled work of a trench poet:
God made the bee
The bee makes honey
The Dorsets do the work
And the REs [Royal Engineers] get the money.8
The ranks of the Royal Artillery were simpler from the beginning, although the most junior commissioned rank of fireworker, was soon transformed to lieutenant-fireworker and later to second lieutenant. The rank of second lieutenant also crept into the infantry, first replacing ensign in fusilier regiments, and then used by rifle regiments from their formation in 1800. From 1871 it replaced ensign and cornet across the army as the most junior commissioned rank, although the army’s incurable resistance to standardisation means that the old ranks crop up from time to time. Dine with the Queen’s Guard in St James’s Palace and you will discover that the major commanding it is styled the captain, and his two commissioned subordinates are the subaltern and ensign, although one may actually be dressed as a captain and the other as a lieutenant. The old artillery rank of bombardier survived, and the bombardier was for many years the most junior NCO rank in the Royal Artillery, with corporal above it. When Corporal Ronald Skirth crossed an incompetent officer in 1917 (a process that drearily punctured his service) he found that the conversation had an immediate result on his battery’s notice-board:
As from April 23rd 1917 Corporal Skirth, J.R., reverts to the rank of Bombardier, as a disciplinary measure.
R. A. Snow, Major
Commanding 239 Siege Battery
Royal Garrison Artillery.
‘Partly from pique,’ he recalled, ‘I renounced the privilege of “messing” with the NCOs’. He wrote:
I told my three friends I would muck in with them. If in future if any of them addressed me by rank (which had been their way) I’d kick him in the shins. ‘My name is Ron,’ I said. ‘Not Corporal, of course, and not bloody Bombardier.’9
It was not until after the First World War that corporal disappeared from the Royal Artillery, with the two-stripe bombardier replacing him and the one-stripe lance bombardier close behind.
Non-commissioned ranks were not short of complexities of their own. At first most soldiers held the rank of private sentinel, soon abbreviated to private. John Marshall Deane of 1st Foot Guards and one of the few non-commissioned diarists of Marlborough’s time, always preferred the term in full. When his regiment helped storm the strongly fortified Schellenberg on its way to Blenheim in 1704, he recorded that it lost five officers ‘killed upon the spot’, and another seven wounded: ‘we had likewise in our regiment killed upon the spot and died of their wounds 172 private sentinels, besides above a hundred that was wounded and recovered again.’10 There were at first only two grades of non-commissioned officer. A man’s first step was corporal, derived from the Latin corpus for the small body of men the corporal led. It was ‘a rank which, however contemptible it may appear in some people’s eyes, brought me a clear twopence per diem, and put a very clever worsted knot upon my shoulder too’, wrote William Cobbett.11 His second, took him to sergeant – dating back to the Latin serviens, servant, but widely used in the Middle Ages to 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
