Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

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.’

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 infantry, sashes and sticks were essentials, the former often in the solid crimson worn by officers rather than the red cut with a stripe in the regiment’s facing colour used by sergeants. These sticks began life as a silver-headed cane, evolving over the years into the pace-stick – sometimes used to measure off a regulation pace of 30 inches, but more usually, in its glossy splendour of varnish and burnished brass, carried as a badge of rank, echoing the vine-staff of the Roman centurion. William Cobbett’s early promotion to sergeant major, straight from regimental clerk, shows that in these early days, the post was primarily administrative, and the sergeant major spent much of his time closeted with the adjutant, working on the rolls and returns that could wreck a man’s career as surely as a bullet.

In 1813 there was more significant change. The old cavalry rank of troop quartermaster, the senior non-commissioned member of the troop, was replaced by that of troop sergeant major. In the infantry the rank of colour sergeant was introduced, squarely between sergeant and sergeant major. There was to be one colour sergeant for each of the ten companies then found in a battalion, chosen from ‘the ten most meritorious sergeants in the regiment’. For the next century the colour sergeant was the captain’s right-hand man, his position equating to that of first sergeant in an American company. One of the company’s sergeants was responsible for its provisioning, and he was known as the company quartermaster sergeant (CQMS). Sergeants on the strength of battalion headquarters, grave and clerkly men concerned with pay and administration, ranked as staff sergeants, a term which still defines the senior sergeants’ rank in all arms except the infantry.

It is impossible to dwell too much on administrative detail here, for the quantity of troops and companies within units often changed. The most significant change, though, was the introduction of grenadier and light companies, one of each per battalion, into the infantry, and a compensating reduction to bring the ‘battalion companies’ to eight. Grenadier companies (‘tow-rows’) were traditionally composed of the sturdiest men in the battalion, just the fellows for rushing an enemy post or for waiting at the colonel’s supper-party, beery faces and big thumbs everywhere. The ‘light bobs’ of the light company were lithe and nimble and were specially trained in skirmishing – and, said their critics, apt at making off with other people’s property. It was common for these ‘flank companies’ to be swept together to form combined grenadier or light battalions. A commanding officer enjoyed having smart flank companies, but losing the best of his battalion to someone else’s command was wholly infuriating. Flank companies, officers and men alike, wore distinctive caps and short coats. While the grenadiers applied symbolic grenades to any vacant surface, the light companies were as fond of the corded bugle – their own badge of expertise. The flank companies went in 1862, as part of the post-Crimea reforms, to muted mourning.

The tactical revolution of the late nineteenth century, a reflection of the increased range and firepower of modern weapons, encouraged armies to seek larger groupings so as to place more combat power in the hands of individual commanders. The combination of cavalry troops into squadrons, not taken too seriously when Wully Robertson was an NCO, became standard towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1913 an infantry battalion’s eight companies were merged into four. These changes required the creation of, first, squadron sergeant majors (SSMs) in the cavalry, and then company sergeant majors (CSMs) in the infantry. In the latter process the four senior colour sergeants in each battalion were promoted, and the remaining four took over the function of quartermaster sergeant. This arrangement remains in use today, and Colour Sergeant Frank Pye, who makes his incisive appearance on this book’s first page, was responsible for keeping his company of 2 Para fed and watered in the Falklands in 1982. Promotion from sergeant to company sergeant major now takes a man through the rank of colour sergeant, but during the First World War it was felt that the qualities that made a man a good quartermaster sergeant did not necessarily make him a good sergeant major.

Ronald Skirth, whose account of his wretched time in the army is aptly titled The Reluctant Tommy, took over from his battery quartermaster sergeant when the latter contracted typhoid, although he himself was only a junior NCO. ‘The Q.M.’s job I would say is the most envied in the whole service’, he wrote,

and so there was both disappointment and consternation when I was appointed temporary, unpaid ‘Quarterbloke’… The Q.M. is in charge of stores – clothing, food and equipment and, most important to many, tobacco and rum. I think I made a reasonably efficient QM. Nobody ever ‘drew’ anything from my stores without a ‘chit’ bearing the duty officer’s signature. Nobody, that is, except ME! It didn’t seem right that I should do extra work without financial reward, so I used the opportunity to look after No 1.

Ernest Shephard, in contrast, simply leapfrogged quartermaster sergeant on his way on up. He happily copied the relevant extract from his own battalion’s daily orders into his diary:

Bn Orders by Major Radcliffe DSO commanding 1st Dorset Regiment … No 8817 Sgt Shephard: Appointed Acting CSM from 25.4.15 vice CSM Searle wounded 24.4.15, and promoted CSM on 1.5.15 vice CSM Searle, died of wounds.

In a process wholly typical of the army’s need to find a spare ‘line serial’ into which to promote a man, he had bypassed colour sergeant altogether, and replaced the three stripes on his arm (‘tapes’ in soldier’s jargon) with a crown on his forearm, leaving his company’s colour sergeant (three tapes with a crown above them) in his dusty world of tables: six-foot, and lamps: hurricane. The process of promoting to fill a vacancy echoed William Todd’s elevation to corporal in 1758:

Sergeant William Bennet of our company was broke by the major’s orders for being drunk when he should have attended the hospital … and that James Crawford, corporal, was appointed sergeant and that I was appointed corporal in the room of Corporal Crawford preferred.

When Shephard was promoted his company commander was the 28-year-old Captain W. B. Algeo MC, a clergyman’s son from Studland, Dorset. Their relationship typified the warmest of associations between figures who, at this crucial level, were headmen of their own distinct tribes. But on 17 May 1916 Algeo and the battalion’s intelligence officer crossed into a wood on the German side of the lines. There were shots, and they did not reappear. Shephard raced to battalion headquarters, where the commanding officer authorised him to send a follow-up patrol ‘but not to go myself on any account, although I wished to do so’. The pioneer sergeant, Sergeant Goodwillie – ‘very well liked by the captain’ – set off with Sergeant Rogers a little way behind. There was more shooting, and Rogers returned to report that he had lost Goodwillie and could not find the officers. Shephard was distraught:

The loss of my gallant Captain to the Battalion, my Company and myself cannot be estimated. He was the bravest officer I have ever met, his first and last thought was for the good and honour of the Bn, his Coy and his men. ‘An officer and a gentleman’.

We now know that Algeo and Goodwillie were both killed, and now rest, three long strides apart, in Miraumont Communal Cemetery.

The responsibilities of company commander and CSM remain distinct but interlocked. One friend told me of striding across to speak to his CSM who was chatting to the CQMS and the three platoon sergeants. He was greeted with a cracking salute, and the words ‘It’s all right, sir, you can fuck off: knobber.’ It seemed a bad moment for decisive confrontation, so he withdrew to his office, dignity narrowly preserved. When the sergeant major appeared later, the officer cautiously raised the issue of that last word. The sergeant major was aghast. It was the acronym NOBA: ‘Not Officers’ Business: Admin’. Another officer recalled how his own attempt to tinker with his company’s daily programme produced the as-if-by-magic materialisation of the CSM. ‘Sir,’ announced that worthy, ‘you command this company, but I run it.’ When the relationship works well there are few finer, as Major Justin Featherstone of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment tells when describing the way he and CSM Dale Norman used to conduct after-action discussions in the Iraqi town of Al Amarah, scene of fierce fighting in 2004:

We shared what became termed ‘DVD time’. During tactical pauses we would watch a DVD on his laptop and take the time to reflect on recent events and discuss our prevailing feelings, with unflinching and disarming honesty that would surprise anyone who had not shared similar experiences; such a friendship was critical in enabling us to function over such a tumultuous period.

Yet a steady support to his company commander can easily seem a tyrant to his subordinates. William St Clair joined the RAMC at the beginning of the First World War, and spent his time on the Western Front in a field ambulance forming part of the admirable 9th Scottish Division, seeing more action than most. His commitment to winning the war never wavered, but he was bitterly disillusioned with the standard of leadership, especially with a sergeant major who delayed his overdue leave and sent ‘passes for new chaps before their turn so that most of the boys are a bit disgusted at his attitude’. Less than two months before the Armistice he wrote:

Ach I am so tired of being away and the atmosphere of our unit is worse now than ever … It is a weary life this with so much in it that goes against the grain, perpetual discipline that any Tom, Dick and Harry can work against you if they feel inclined … I do not say it is unbearable, but oh my word, what a glorious day it will be when we are free and need take nothing from any man.

With the creation of the new grade of SSM, a cavalry regiment’s original sergeant major had been renamed its regimental sergeant major to differentiate him from these lesser myrmidons. When CSMs appeared in the infantry the same rank title was adopted for the unit’s senior sergeant major, although ‘battalion sergeant major’ would have been a more accurate job description, for in the British infantry the battalion, rather than the regiment, has always been the key tactical grouping. And there was another important change. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the army took up the navy’s practice of emphasising the status of key individuals by awarding them warrants, issued by the Army Council, and looking not unlike officers’ commissions. This process had swept up sergeant majors, together with other folk, mostly specialists like the Ordnance Corps’ ‘Conductors of Stores and Supplies’. Warrant officers were now set apart from the NCOs from whose ranks they had risen. They were generally addressed as ‘Mr’ by their superiors, and even within the infantry tended to deplore the term ‘sergeant-major’, though Guards officers call their RSMs ‘sergeant major’ and CSMs ‘companys’ major’. For many years RSMs were spoken of as ‘the regimental’ and addressed, in the comfortable fug of the Warrant Officers’ and Sergeant’s Mess as ‘major’, although when stalking their domain they were ‘Sir’ to all their subordinates. But different tribes still have their own rituals, as a Guards RSM explains:

A sergeant’s mess in the Household Division would appear to be much more rigid than in other regiments. We never relax. Warrant officers are always called ‘sir’ … But everything is kept within the four walls. Any misbehaviour or indiscretion is never talked about outside. That would not happen in a line regiment.

In 1915 an army order brought SSMs and CSMs into the fold by making them warrant officers, though it elevated RSMs and their equivalents to ‘Warrant Officers Class One’ and created the rank of ‘Warrant Officer Class Two’ for CSMs. Warrant officers enjoyed valuable legal privileges, for the Army Act freed them from punishment by their commanding officer, and specified that even if they were reduced to the ranks by sentence of court martial they would not be required to serve as a private soldier. When he was a sergeant major, William Cobbett had feared that the officers he so despised would reduce him to the ranks if he crossed them: now, at least, sergeant majors were secure from the vagaries of summary punishment.

After the bruising experience of the First World War German army, the British were persuaded that their enemy’s practice of using selected senior NCOs to command platoons had much to recommend it. In 1938 the new rank of Warrant Officer Class Three was created, specifically to allow warrant officers to command infantry platoons or Royal Armoured Corps troops. The transplant failed to flourish. Only commissioned officers were allowed to handle official funds. At this time soldiers were paid in cash, and so WO3s could not pay their platoons, but had to get an officer to take pay parades on their behalf. Moreover, while officer platoon commanders were senior to the CSM, and thus in theory able (though it was seldom a simple business) to offer their men some protection against his voracious need for ‘bodies’ when fatigues were at hand, warrant officer platoon commanders were his juniors, and their men stood naked before his clip-board.

The rank was placed in abeyance in 1940, although those who held it already were allowed to remain WO3s until promoted or discharged. It has left at least one enduring mark on history. When 4th Royal Tank Regiment was hotly engaged in the Arras counter-attack of 21 May 1940, one of its tanks was commanded by an ex-circus ‘strong man’, WO3 ‘Muscle’ Armit. He had already destroyed two German anti-tank guns when his own gun was damaged, and the tank was hit several times as he tried to repair it. Eventually he reversed under cover, repaired the gun, whacked the jammed turret hatch open (an achievement for which his former profession had so well prepared him), and returned to the fray. ‘They must have thought I was finished,’ he recalled, ‘for I caught the guns limbering up … and revenge was sweet.’

Portsmouth-born George Hogan lived close enough to the Royal Marine barracks at Eastney to hear the bugles sing out the alarm on the morning of 4 August 1914, summoning married men who lived out of barracks to report immediately. The ever-helpful booklet Trumpet and Bugle Sounds for the Army gave words to help soldiers remember the various calls, and alarm was officially: ‘Larm is sounding, hark the sound/Fills the air for miles around/Arm! Turn out! And stand your ground.’ But young George already knew it as ‘Sergeant Major’s on the run! Sergeant Major’s on the run! Sergeant Major’s on the run.’ His father was a sergeant-cook in the Hampshires and he thought it ‘right and reasonable’ to join the regiment as a boy soldier, but it was not easy to get photographed with his father. ‘Non-commissioned officers and men were not allowed to walk out together,’ he remembered, ‘so I left home a few minutes before dad and we met at the photographers.’ He arrived in France just five days too late to gain the 1914–18 war medal, and a long career took him on through the Second World War. He was promoted WO3 – a rank he remembered in its infantry guise of Platoon Sergeant Major – and added a laurel wreath to the crown on his cuff.

When officers took to wearing collar and tie with their khaki service dress in the early twentieth century, warrant officers, who already sported officer-style Sam Browne belts, followed suit. In 1915 a GHQ instruction still had them armed with sword and pistol, although there were few enough swords to be seen on the Western Front, save in the cavalry, by this time, and instructions had already been issued for sending them home. Nevertheless, a photograph of the RSM of 14/Welsh in 1917 shows an elegant figure with gently waxed moustache, officer-style cap with the stiffening removed, officer’s tunic with baggy ‘patch pockets’, Sam Browne and empty sword frog. It is only when you see the royal coat of arms on his forearm that you can tell that he is actually the RSM, rather than a much grander rank. Small wonder that newly-commissioned officers made awkward mistakes when confronted with such splendid figures, as the greatest of the war’s skits, The Song of Tiadatha, tells us:

Then at last my Tiadatha

Sallied forth to join the Dudshires

Dressed in khaki, quite a soldier

Floppy cap and baggy breeches

Round his waist the supple Sam Browne

At his side the sword and scabbard

Took salutes from private soldiers

And saluted Sergeant-Majors

(Who were very much embarrassed)

And reported at Headquarters

Of the 14th Royal Dudshires.

In contrast, CSM Jack Williams DCM MM and Bar (his VC still in the future) of 10/South Wales Borderers, serving in the same division as the 14/Welsh, is scarcely distinguishable from a private soldier save by the brass crown on his sleeve. Nothing could make the gulf between the two grades of warrant officer clearer.

The RSM of a battalion was part hero, part villain, and part shaman, encapsulating all the glory of his tribe and the status of his rank. John Jackson worked for a Glasgow railway company and enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders (‘a choice of regiment which I never regretted’) in August 1914. He fought at Loos with its 6th Battalion, and one of his lasting memories was of RSM Peter Scotland, upright and steady, though his battalion had lost both commanding officer (‘our brave old colonel’) and adjutant (‘cool and unruffled to the last’) as well as 700 of its 950 officers and men, reading the roll-call after the battle:

There were few responses as names were called, though what little information there was about missing men was given by friends … Another good friend, big ‘Jock’ Anderson was missing, and to this day his fate remains an unsolved mystery, but I have no doubt he did his bit, for Jock was a whole-hearted fighter.

Wounded, Jackson was posted to 1/Camerons on his return to France, and the battalion was paraded by RSM Sydney Axton, ‘known through all the Cameron ranks as “Old Joe”’:

As a new draft, we had come out wearing khaki kilt aprons, and I well remember the first order of the RSM was, ‘Take off your aprons and show your Cameron tartan.’ ‘Old Joe’ was the real old fashioned type of soldier, a smart man in every way, a terror for discipline when on duty, a thorough gentleman off duty. A man who would sing a song or dance with the best; who knew everything there was to know about soldiering, and took the greatest pride in his regiment. His decorations numbered 9, and included the Military Cross, won on the Aisne, and the Distinguished Conduct Medal, won in the South African War, so that he was a real old warrior. His word was law in the battalion, and he would give an officer a ‘lecture’ just the same as he would a private soldier, so all ranks looked up to him as a man to be respected. Personally I always got on well with him, my duty bringing me often in contact with him, and I soon learned that his bark was worse than his bite.

Doug Beattie was RSM of 1/Royal Irish in March 2003 when Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins made his famous pre-battle speech before the entry into Kuwait. Beattie feared that the message ‘had been rousing, but also sobering. It pulled no punches’, and there was a danger that the men would become morose and reflective. And so they

were going to stop thinking about Colonel Collins and start paying attention to their regimental sergeant major. And woe betide any who didn’t. I began to bollock them. I yelled at them about the pitiful state of their weapons. I laid into them over their poor state of dress, their abysmal personal hygiene, their failure to salute senior officers, their inability to get anywhere on time. I told them they were a disgrace to their uniform and weren’t fit to call themselves soldiers of 1 R IRISH. I accused the warrant officers of running slack companies … I called the CSMs to me. They sprang to attention … and marched forward, coming to a halt in a perfectly straight line, shoulders back, chests out. Beyond the earshot of the rest of the ranks I explained what I was trying to do … It is true that battalions are commanded by their officers. If 1 R IRISH was a car the driving would be done by them. But the engine that powers that car is to be found in the sergeants’ mess, with the five men now standing bolt upright in front of me.

Today’s non-commissioned hierarchy reflects other changes. The Wellingtonian army selected its corporals from trusted private soldiers known, by that most satisfying term, as chosen men. Chosen men soon became lance corporals (‘lance-jacks’), with a speculative etymology linking the word to the seventeenth century ‘lancepesade’. The word derives from the Italian lazzia spezzata or broken lance, because the soldier in question was a veteran, likely to have broken a spear or two in his day. Initially the post of lance corporal, its holder distinguished by a single stripe rather than the maturity of the full corporal’s two, was an appointment rather than a rank: easy come, easy go. Before long ‘lance’ became a prefix for junior sergeants too. Having lance sergeants was a matter of regimental preference, as First World War headstones demonstrate. The Foot Guards have retained the rank, although it really equates with corporal. Any Queen’s Birthday Parade will show that lance sergeants, with their three white stripes, are not quite the same as sergeants proper, whose gold braid tapes earn them the sobriquet of gold sergeants.

A short walk through a military cemetery tells one a good deal about an army’s character. A First World War German cemetery abounds with the specific ranks that say much about the man who lies beneath the greensward, even if he was only a private soldier. The rank of grenadier and fusilier shows that he served in a particular sort of regiment. A jäger, hunter, is the same as a French chasseur, with keen eyes and quick step, and would have served, flat-shakoed, in a jäger battalion. A gunner is a kanonier, and different sorts of cavalrymen get a proper job description: hussar, uhlan, kurassier or dragoner. A kriegsfreiwilliger had volunteered to serve in the war, a reservist was precisely that, and an ersatz reservist had contrived (probably through having a student deferment from conscription) to incur a reserve liability even though he had not done basic training.

In a British cemetery of the same era, in contrast, most unpromoted men are privates. Privates in Foot Guards regiments are described as ‘Guardsmen’, although this rank was granted retrospectively, for it did not exist till 1922. Although ordinary soldiers in the Household Cavalry were termed trooper, they were still called privates in the rest of the cavalry, and the 1922 change in terminology did not affect those who had died before this date. In consequence, the last British soldier killed in the war was Private George Ellison of the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers, a Leeds man, buried at St Symphorien, just east of the Belgian town of Mons. The rank of trooper first referred to privates in the cavalry, then spread into the Royal Tank Regiment, and has most recently appeared, as the evocative hybrid air trooper, in the Army Air Corps. Rifle regiments had called their soldiers riflemen very early on, and the notion of ‘the thinking, fighting rifleman’ was an attractive currency.

Fusilier regiments followed with ‘fusilier’. The Royal Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers selected the word ‘craftsman’ for its private soldiers; and the King’s Regiment, coming close to the end of its own independent existence in the 1980s, took up ‘kingsman’ for its private soldiers. The Queen’s Regiment considered ‘queensman’, but consultation with soldiers about to receive the new designation revealed that they were firmly against it, fearing that inter-regimental debates on the word’s precise meaning might have regrettable outcomes.

Rank is one thing and appointment another. In an infantry battalion or cavalry regiment the adjutant remains the commanding officer’s personal staff officer, responsible for what became known as ‘A’ matters: everything to do with personnel and discipline. An unrelenting stream of papers on postings, promotions, honours and awards, courses, and court martials surged across his desk. Adjutants usually held the rank of captain from the late nineteenth century, and the post is now an essential part of that cursus honorum that takes an officer to the highest ranks. But for the first two-thirds of the army’s life adjutants were sometimes ensigns and then, more usually, lieutenants, generally commissioned from the ranks, because any sensible commanding officer wanted an assistant who understood both drill and paperwork, and an ex-sergeant major was just the man.

It was not easy to make the step up, and sometimes colonels made the wrong call. When the Light Brigade spurred off to its rendezvous with immortality in the Crimea, Cornet John Yates was adjutant of the 11th Hussars. Troop Sergeant Major George Loy Smith of the 11th was not pleased about it: