the army, and good recruits being so difficult to get.20
It could mean death for a man to strike back. When guard was being mounted in the English enclave of Tangier in July 1677, one drummer was late with his stroke. Captain Carr promptly hit him, and the drummer went for his sword, almost as a reflex. He was sentenced to hang, but the garrison commander, well aware that he had few enough soldiers as it was, commuted the sentence so that the drummer had to stand at the foot of the gallows with a rope round his neck until the crime was expiated.21
Until relatively recently some soldiers would rather accept an illegal whack than undergo due process that would leave its mark on their official record. Young Spike Mays, who joined 1st Royal Dragoons as a band-boy in 1924, found that a moment’s inattention earned him ‘a cut across the backside’ from the bandmaster’s stick.22 When Lieutenant Peter Young transferred from his infantry battalion to a newly raised Commando unit in 1940, his NCOs assured him that soldiers far preferred this sort of discipline. Beevor described the army at what he thought was
the tail end of an illegal, though quietly ignored, system of justice as old as the army itself. In many regiments, a sergeant would offer the miscreant a choice: either ‘accept my punishment’ – usually a thump administered behind the vehicle sheds – ‘or the company commander’s’ – which almost certainly meant a fine. ‘I’ll take yours, sarge,’ was the usual resigned reply.23
He would certainly have drawn the line at striking the blow himself, but in May 1780 the thoughtful Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the Black Watch, confided to his diary ‘I knocked down Norman McKay on the parade not so much for being drunk as swearing he was not, and though he deserved it I am sorry for it, for we should never punish a soldier in a passion.’24 Peebles was neither a thug nor a martinet. When he returned home in February 1782 he made a moving farewell address to the men of his company, stressing the ‘satisfaction and pleasure’ of having been their commander, and commending them for ‘that good name you are so justly possessed of whether in quarters or the field.’ He remembered that he ‘could hardly make an end of this little speech, my voice faltered, and my knees shook under me.’ Evidently ‘the poor fellows were affected too.’ He promptly ordered them ‘five gallons of rum to make a drink of grog in the evening,’ effectively giving them nearly half a pint of rum a head, a gift no doubt destructive of the very sobriety he had urged upon them.25
Continuity and change lie at the very heart of my story. Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, has argued that different forms of military organisation were ‘ultimately rooted in political, social and economic structures … each of them was also partly the product of the technology then in use.’26 The British army that came into being with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 has evolved in myriad ways since then, with these political, social, economic and technological pressures all playing their part in the process. I have no doubt that the Duke of Marlborough, who oversaw the army’s transition from a scarlet puddle of ‘guards and garrisons’ in the late 1600s to the world-class force that helped dash the dynastic ambitions of Louis XIV, would recognise, in the tired heroes of Helmand, the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago. They wear loose camouflage fatigues, not red coats with bright facings; their professional knowledge would leave Marlborough’s men dazzled, and their rationality and scepticism would mark them off from an age coloured by belief and deference.
And yet their social organisation is so recognisably similar that we may doubt whether, in the British context, technology has really shaped structures quite as much as it has elsewhere. The major combat arms, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, have retained forms and terminologies that the men who fought at Blenheim – or Waterloo or the Somme, for that matter – would readily grasp. Lieutenant colonels, leading their regiments into action, have lost nothing of their pivotal importance in the hierarchy, and the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe of the Welsh Guards, killed in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, underlines the risks they still run. Regiments, with their elders and distinctive markings – as characteristic of the army as an ancient Briton’s woad, the cicatrices of an African warrior or a junker’s duelling scars – are still an enduring feature of the army, usually much misunderstood and endemically under threat, but thudding on like the beat of a distant drum.
Formal and informal structures continue to intermesh. Most modern soldiers would recognise the close and comradely world prescribed in the 1800 Regulations for the Rifle Corps, which stipulated that every corporal, private and bugler should select a comrade from a rank differing from his own. Comrades were to berth, drill and go on duties together, and comrades could not be changed without the permission of the captain.27
Although the technology would doubtless baffle a Wellingtonian footsoldier, Colour Sergeant ‘Stick’ Broome’s description of extracting the wounded Private Johnson Beharry from a Warrior armoured vehicle in Iraq shows the same bonds of comradeship that have helped hold men together for three centuries:
We hit the ground, and we came under contact from small arms immediately. Woody and Erv went left, myself and Cooper started to pull Beharry out of his seat. This was the first chance I had to see the badly lacerated face of Bee … I pulled him out with the help of big Erv and Jim Cooper and put him into my Warrior with his head in my lap.28
There is much in common between a rifleman like William Green of Lutterworth, whose ‘disposition to ramble’ took him into the army, and Dorset shepherd Benjamin Harris, carried away by the understated glory of a green jacket, and the likes of Lance Corporal Wood and Private Ervin. A modern recruiter would squirm at the Duke of Wellington’s assessment of the army of his own age:
A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class – no matter whether your son or my son – all must march; but our friends – I may say it in this room – are the very scum of the earth. People talk about enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.29
It remains true that the majority of infantry soldiers are recruited, as they always have been, from boys whose civilian futures do not seem bright. The modern army’s growing tendency to cream off the cleverest of its recruits for its technical corps has accentuated the process. In 1942 the army’s adjutant general, responsible for its manpower policies, admitted that the infantry ‘received in effect the rejects from the other arms of the service’.30 It is still easiest to recruit at times of economic depression. Just as Wellington could scarcely have beaten the French without the aid of men who had chosen to serve rather than starve, so the army of the early twenty-first century has been saved from a manning crisis by the shortage of jobs elsewhere.
In Scotland the issue has become heavily politicised, with Scottish National Party backbencher Christine Grahame maintaining that many Scots recruits were in fact ‘economic conscripts … turning to the Army as a way out of poverty and deprivation, brought on by the failed policies of London Labour’.31 The predictable furore aroused by these remarks cannot alter the fact that Scotland’s economic plight was a spur to recruitment from the army’s very earliest years. As historian Stephen Wood wrote of the Scottish soldiers who signed on to fight in Marlborough’s wars: ‘Many would be enlisted while drunk or have the edges of their doubts blunted with alcohol; some would enlist as an alternative to gaol, or starvation, or domestic responsibilities.’32
It is evident that economic compulsion was not restricted to Scotland. In 1859 Lieutenant General Sir George Weatherall, the adjutant general, told the Royal Commission on Recruiting ‘there are very few men who enlist for the love of being a soldier; it is a very rare exception … they are starving, or they have quarrelled
