Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

Unfortunately for us Colonel Douglas allowed Colonel Lawrenson of the 17th Lancers to persuade him that his quartermaster [-sergeant] would make us an excellent adjutant – although at the time our two senior sergeant-majors were both eligible … I have heard on good authority that Colonel Douglas deeply regretted this act. If he did not I know the whole regiment did, for a worse rider, a worse drill, a greater humbug never before held the rank of adjutant in the British army. The 17th might well be glad to get rid of him; they certainly got the laugh of us.

Cornet Yates (nicknamed ‘Joey’ by the troopers) had been standing in for a sick staff officer who returned to duty on the day of the battle, but he still managed to avoid the charge. Smith heard a soldier call out ‘There goes Joey’, and sure enough ‘in the distance could be seen the adjutant galloping back towards the encampment. This caused great amusement and laughter – he had only been with us a month and had made himself thoroughly obnoxious to everyone.’

Adjutants were generally ex-rankers until well on in the nineteenth century, for, as Lord Panmure, Secretary at War 1846–52, observed, it was hard to get a gentleman subaltern ‘to take the office of adjutant from the arduous character of its duties and the constant confinement it requires to barracks’.

What the adjutant did for an individual unit, so the adjutant general did for the army as a whole. He was based alongside the commander-in-chief in Horse Guards, before crossing Whitehall to the Old War Office, then moving to the MOD’s Main Building and eventually having his own headquarters at Upavon in Wiltshire before being swept up into the army’s new headquarters, Marlborough Lines near Andover. The best adjutant generals combined regimental experience (giving them an understanding of the impact of bureaucracy on the army in the field) with a sharp brain and a thirst for the administrative flood that drenched their regimental counterparts. Henry Torrens, a Londonderry man, was commissioned under-age into the 52nd Foot in 1793, and did a good deal of regimental duty in the West Indies, Portugal, and India. By 1805 he was appointed assistant adjutant general for the Kent district. Another interlude of regimental duty saw him wounded at Buenos Aires, where a musket ball ‘shattered a small writing apparatus which was slung to his side’. He became Assistant Adjutant General at Horse Guards, and then Assistant Military Secretary there, with a brief period in the Peninsula. A major general and a knight, Torrens became adjutant general in 1820. He managed to write a drill-book, Regulations for the Exercise and Field Movements of the Infantry of the Army, and played an important part in rebalancing the army as it ran down for a long period of peace. Contemporaries thought that his ‘excessive labours’ had weakened his health, and he died suddenly in 1828.

Individual armies in the field had their own adjutant generals, their tasks mirroring those of regimental adjutants on the one hand and the army’s adjutant general on the other. From February 1916 until the end of the war Lieutenant General Sir George Fowke was adjutant general in France. He had gone to war as the BEF’s senior Royal Engineer, and his promotion partly reflected GHQ’s discomfort with this big, clever man whose influence had grown inexorably with the importance of engineering. As adjutant general he left the routine of office work to others, but retained a penetrating overview, sharpened by a remarkable memory for detail. The scale and diversity of his branch’s work emerges from the digest of administrative routine orders issued to help all officers in the adjutantal line. Fowke’s branch warned individuals of the danger of being struck by the propellers of low-flying aircraft; established the grounds for reporting a man ‘missing, believed killed’; directed units to send the originals of their war diaries up to the Deputy Adjutant General on the last day of each month, and decreed that the only vehicle allowed to fly the Union Jack was the commander-in-chief’s.

A commanding officer was no less dependent upon his quartermaster than his adjutant. Quartermasters were originally ex-NCOs given warrants to act in that appointment. When Charles Jones was reviewing officers’ duties in 1811 he observed that the quartermaster of the Blues was unusual in that he held a proper commission, but although quartermasters as a group ‘stand, in front, at the head of their class, [they] can never be on a level with the youngest cornet’.

It was not a status that always made for comfortable relations between veteran quartermasters and less experienced junior officers. In July 1811, Quartermaster John Foster Kingsley of the 30th Foot was court-martialled at Campo Mayor for taking possession of bullock carts reserved, by Wellington’s orders, for ammunition and supplies, and using them for his own battalion’s equipment. One of the charges against him was that he had disobeyed the orders of Lieutenant Rae of the Royal Scots, who claimed use of the carts. It transpired that Rae had detained two members of the 30th’s cart-escort, alleging that they were drunk and insolent. When Kingsley declined to hand over the carts there was a quarrel in the street: Kingsley not only refused to acknowledge Rae’s authority but, when Rae threatened to take the carts by force, pointed out that he too had armed men at hand. If Rae demurred, suggested the quartermaster helpfully, then they should step aside and settle the issue ‘in a private manner’. Matters were not improved by Kingsley’s offer to return the carts when he had finished with them, for the commissariat official with Rae said ‘I would not take your word for you are no gentleman’, serving only to remind Kingsley of his position. Moreover, as commissariat officials did not hold commissions themselves, it was exasperating for one to lay claim to status that was by no means evident.

Most of the witnesses supported Rae, apart from Hospital Mate Evans, who was about to be appointed assistant surgeon to the 30th, and had good reason for not antagonising its quartermaster. The court martial found Kingsley guilty on two of the three charges against him, agreeing that Rae was indeed his senior officer. Kingsley was suspended from rank and pay for three months, a modest sentence in the circumstances, and earned a surprisingly gentle reproof from Wellington, who reminded him that ‘inconvenience may be felt at some time by individuals’ but the general interest had to take precedence. A modern quartermaster, shown the court-martial papers, concluded that he would have done exactly the same in Kingsley’s place, and put his own battalion first.

After 1871 quartermasters were granted honorary commissions as lieutenants or captains, and the Manual of Military Law emphasised that, even though they still held substantive warrant rank, this made them officers within the meaning of the Army Act. They were invariably promoted from the ranks, usually moving on to be their battalion’s quartermaster after having served as its RSM. It was not until after the First World War that they were given full commissions, and not until later that the concept of a ‘Late Entry’ commission was introduced, enabling commissioned ex-warrant officers to do a wide variety of jobs. The post of quartermaster had never been the only outlet for officers commissioned from the ranks. There was the adjutant’s appointment until it became the preserve of mainstream officers. The regimental post of paymaster, once thought highly suitable for an ex-NCO, had become attractive to gentleman officers rather earlier, because it was seen to be ‘one of the best appointments in the service’ from a financial point of view. Riding masters in the cavalry were commissioned from the ranks, and the post still exists in the Household Cavalry. Later, directors of music (senior to bandmasters, who are warrant officers) and masters at arms in the Army Physical Training Corps were also ex-rankers. However, the concept of the Late Entry commission enabled such officers to do a wider variety of jobs than ever before, perhaps commanding headquarters companies in infantry battalions or furnishing the Royal Army Medical Corps with the non-medical administrative officers it needs.

Doug Beattie was commissioned in 2005 after his tour as RSM of 1/R Irish and twenty-two years’ service, and acknowledged that while this gave him the opportunity to stay in the army ‘for the immediate future and well beyond’, there was a catch. The army thought him ‘best suited to a training and logistical role’. After a training job he would then be likely to return to his old battalion where ‘I would probably become a welfare officer, looking after the families of those going off to fight.’ It was not for him, and he decided to resign. Before his resignation took effect, though, he was posted to Afghanistan, where he won a Military Cross in a burst of desperate fighting alongside the Afghan National Army and police at Garmsir in 2006. Although still determined to leave the army, he was unable to resist the opportunity of helping his own battalion prepare for its Afghanistan tour, and accompanying them when it deployed. ‘Soldiering was what I did and what I knew’, he wrote. ‘It was in my blood.’

His unhappiness with the sorts of jobs on offer after commissioning is not untypical. It reflects a slow transition, not yet completed, between old army and new.

It is impossible to overemphasise either the importance of quartermasters or their impact on superiors and subordinates alike. Some might indeed have deserved the description given the quartermaster of a cavalry regiment in the Indian Mutiny as ‘old, excessively conceited, disobliging and ungentlemanly …’

Their passage through the ranks will not have imbued them with profound confidence in human nature; they will be older than most officers of their rank, and, although the selection of mainstream officers from a broader background continues to reduce the social differences between quartermasters and their brother officers, they will certainly not be graduates in a largely graduate officers’ mess. At their best they are sources of wise advice as well as solid professional expertise, and are often remembered long after most other officers are forgotten.

In his Sherston’s Progress trilogy, Siegfried Sassoon modelled that ‘husky-voiced old campaigner’, the gruff but kindly Joe Dottrell, quartermaster of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, on its real quartermaster, Captain Yates. He also appears to no less advantage in The War the Infantry Knew, the battalion’s unofficial history, compiled by Captain James Churchill Dunn, its medical officer for much of the war. Yates met the battalion as it stumbled back from Le Cateau in 1914. ‘The Quartermaster had some stew and tea ready, and we had an issue of rum, and, what was still better, some letters from home.’ He got the men away, a platoon at a time, to have a bath – ‘badly needed’ – when the battalion held autumnal trenches above the Aisne. On St David’s Day 1916 (sacred to the Royal Welch) he secured, though we can only guess how, ‘a leek for everyone’s cap.’ He saved time and trouble by keeping his transport close behind the battalion on the Somme, though everyone else’s was sent further back. When the battalion ran dangerously short of ammunition in the German spring offensive of 1918 ‘Yates has made up, although scrounging is not so easy as formerly.’ When the war ended he not only took home ‘a complete Mobilisation Store for a battalion, down to the last horseshoe and strap,’ but a complete German mortar acquired by the brigadier and ‘innumerable brass shell-cases’ that Yates and the adjutant had collected. And at last, when the battalion paraded through Wrexham on its arrival in Britain, he astonished those who had no notion of there having been a Mrs Yates by spotting her amongst the crowd: ‘forty years of army discipline were forgotten, he dashed from the ranks, and greeted her heartily and unblushingly.’

The quartermaster’s subordinates were headed by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, from 1913 a warrant officer, and included an assortment of storemen, with cooks, grooms, and transport-men often coming under his command too. He had a particular lien on company quartermaster sergeants who, like him, were known as quarter-blokes. Although his post was not the most martial, RQMS T.W. Fitzpatrick of 2/Royal Irish did more than most to save the BEF on 23 August 1914, assembling a scratch force (including the battalion’s armourer, Sergeant Redmond, with that useful asset, a newly-repaired machine gun) to hold the Bascule crossroads near Mons. He was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal and a commission for the day’s work, and ended the war a lieutenant colonel.

As adjutant generals were to adjutants, so quartermaster generals were to quartermasters. Yet there was one big difference. Although a quartermaster general and his Q staff were responsible for accommodation and quartering, supplies of all sorts, remounts and accounting, neither the army’s quartermaster general, nor the quartermaster general of a deployed force, would ever have been a battalion quartermaster. Wully Robertson, the BEF’s quartermaster general in 1914, had indeed served in the ranks, though he had been commissioned long before he was eligible to be quartermaster. It is a reflection of the army’s relationship with its own logisticians that Lieutenant General Sir Paul Travers, who had spent much of his career in the Royal Corps of Transport, was the first professional logistician to become quartermaster general, in 1982. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the army’s logistic services were militarised, and even then there was more than a little disdain, on the part of what became known as the ‘teeth arms’, for the supporting services.

This did not prevent some quartermaster generals from being very competent. Perhaps the most outstanding of them was General Sir John Cowans, in post for the whole of the First World War and according to Asquith ‘the best quartermaster since Moses’. He combined regimental service in the Rifle Brigade, into which he had been commissioned in 1881, with a series of logistic staff jobs. He was urbane and tireless, and, unusually amongst officers who had grown up in a small army, had the capacity to think big. He got on well with ministers – not always a simple task in that uneasy world of frocks and brass-hats – and his ‘penchant for other men’s wives’ may have endeared him to Lloyd George.

When Wully Robertson stepped up from being QMG in France to take over as the BEF’s chief of staff in 1915, the post went to Ronald Maxwell. But he was replaced in December 1917 because of political pressure, and against Haig’s wishes, by Travers Clarke. Maxwell had been good but Clarke was even better, an extraordinary administrator who coped with both the haemorrhaging of resources after the slashing cut of the German 1918 offensive and the unprecedented demands of the mobile warfare of the last Hundred Days. It says something of the way that history is written (for we scribblers prefer warriors to logisticians) that few, even amongst the war’s more serious historians, give him the attention he deserves. Major General Hubert Essame likened him to Lazare Carnot, who had done so much to keep the threadbare warriors of revolutionary France in the field, and called him the ‘Carnot of Haig’s armies’.

Clarke’s department worried about the allowances in lieu of billets available to French and Belgian interpreters; the relationship between ammunition parks at corps level and their satellite divisional sub-parks; and the process of compensating landowners for damage to trees and other property. It had a comprehensive policy on the recycling of damaged equipment, advising that ‘any boot which is not badly cut in the uppers can be repaired, and if doubt exists it is better to err on the safe side, and class the boot as repairable.’ When the Machine Gun Corps was formed in 1915, the QMG’s branch had to devise new scales of equipment, so that cavalry machine gun squadrons received, inter alia, two chisels, one plane, one bench vice, and a saddletree-maker (to equip the horses with the packs used to transport ammuntion and the guns themselves). It issued instruction on correspondence, from ordinary letters, through express delivery and on to weekend letter telegrams, which could be sent from France to certain colonies or dependencies provided that they were written in plain English or French and included no code-words.

Rations were a major preoccupation, with a complex shopping list of entitlements and alternatives for man and beast. Men working in arduous conditions could receive extra tea and sugar daily, and two ounces of pea soup or two Oxo cubes twice weekly during the winter months. Indian rations included ghee, ghur, ginger, chillies, and turmeric; and Africans were entitled to a pound and a half of mealie meal per man per day. Transport of all sorts was the responsibility of Q Branch: spares, spark-plugs and speeding all merited entries in routine orders. Finally, the branch even ventured into matters adjutantal, warning that officers had been seen returning from France to the United Kingdom wearing Sam Browne belts from which the braces and frog had been removed. At least one of the braces should be worn at all times, although (generous concession) the frog need only be worn with the sword itself.

Historically, the quartermaster general of a field army was its commander’s chief staff officer, for military operations were so intimately concerned with supply and movement that it was natural for the QMG’s branch to take the lead. Both Marlborough’s chief of staff, William Cadogan, and Wellington’s, George Murray, were formally entitled quartermaster general, and Richard Airey, who made his own imprecise contribution to the misunderstandings that led to the Charge of the Light Brigade, held the same title, although he was effectively Lord Raglan’s chief of staff. The title chief of staff did not appear till the end of the nineteenth century, and by the First World War he was defined as the commander’s ‘responsible adviser for all matters affecting all matters of military operations … by whom all orders to field units will be signed.’

The general staff (G Branch) was primus inter pares, with overriding responsibility for all orders, operations, communication, censorship and legal issues.

Until the British adopted the NATO staff system in the 1980s, their staff officers had titles prefixed with GSO (for General Staff Officer). A number indicated their ranks, with GSO1 for lieutenant colonels, ‘2’ for majors and ‘3’ for captains. The chief of staff of a brigade had long been its brigade major, assisted, as the First World War went on, by two staff captains, A and Q. Terminology changed, within NATO, to the prefix SO (for Staff Officer) and a number for rank, mirroring the old British system, and then a designation that places the officer precisely within the appropriate general staff branch, with its G prefix: thus SO2 G3 Training is a major in the training branch of a headquarters. The old GOC, for General Officer Commanding, is now replaced by ‘commander’, and brigade majors, like their equivalents at higher levels, are now chiefs of staff. Adding acronyms stirs that alphabet soup which itself contributes to a military sense of identity by helping form a language all but impenetrable to outsiders. The British commander of the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps is COMARRC, and his chief of staff (with a whiff of the steppe) COSARRC. Chief of staff survives, at least conversationally, unabbreviated, but his deputy is generally clipped down to the unlovely Dee-Cos.

CHAPTER 5

TO OBSERVE AND OBEY

THE NOTION OF a universal hierarchy in the army was slow to evolve. For instance, until 1788 troopers in the Life Guards were ‘private gentlemen’, initially recruited from that flotsam of gentry left unemployed after the Civil War, and expected to buy their own costly uniforms. In 1678 the separate troops of Life Guards had been reinforced by the newly raised Horse Grenadier Guards who used explosives in battle. Diarist John Evelyn described them at camp on Hounslow Heath as ‘dextrous in flinging hand Granados, every one having a pouch full; they had furred hats with coped crowns like Janissaries, which made them look very fierce …’

In contrast to the gentlemen of the Life Guards, however, privates in the Horse Grenadiers were just like private soldiers in the rest of the army. As time went on, service in the ranks, even the ranks of the Life Guards, became less attractive to a gentleman, all the more so because his 1660 pay of £73 a year (then equivalent to the income of ‘Eminent Clergymen’) was eroded by inflation and by the 1780s an artisan might expect to earn at least as much.

By then the Life Guards had become recruited with ‘native Londoners with alternative sources of income, whose part-time jobs as private gentlemen simply furthered family business interests’.

The 1788 reform replaced the existing troops of Life Guards and the Horse Grenadiers, with two new regiments: the 1st Life Guards and the 2nd Life Guards. These would now be recruited like the rest of the army, although the grenade badge on officers’ cloaks remained as a last echo of the Horse Grenadiers. This induced the Duke of York to write ‘I was a little sorry for the Horse Grenadiers because they were to a degree soldiers, but the Life Guards were nothing but a collection of London Tradespeople.’ Their regimental custom of addressing their men as ‘gentlemen’ harks back to an older world, and so too does the Household Cavalry practice of addressing lieutenant colonels and above by their rank rather than as ‘sir’. The reform also did away with the old Life Guards rank terminology, where commissioned ranks below captain (just two for the army as a whole) had been cornet, guidon, exempt, brigadier, and sub-brigadier. It left the Household Cavalry with an NCO terminology that still endures. Lance corporals are lance corporals, just as they would be in the rest of the army. But corporals are styled ‘lance corporal of horse’, sergeants are ‘corporal of horse’, staff sergeants are ‘staff corporals’, squadron sergeant majors are ‘squadron corporal majors’, and the regiment’s senior non-commissioned member is the ‘regimental corporal major’.

The reforms did nothing about the advantageous double-ranking system enjoyed by Guards officers. Central to its operation was the concept that rank in the army and rank in a given regiment were distinct. In 1687 captains in the Guards were given the army rank of lieutenant colonel. Four years later, the privilege was extended to lieutenants, who ranked as majors in the army. Finally in 1815 – as a reward for the conduct of the Foot Guards at Waterloo – ensigns were granted lieutenancies in the army. When a Guards officer reached the rank of major in his regiment he was at once made a colonel in the army. Formally a Guards captain would style himself ‘captain and lieutenant colonel’, but the custom of referring to officers by their higher army rank, clear enough at the time, easily causes confusion now.

At Waterloo there was a glut of colonels in and around the farm complex of Hougoumont. The light companies of the 1st, Coldstream, and 3rd Guards played a distinguished part in the defence of the Hougoumont, standing like a breakwater in front of Wellington’s right centre. All the company commanders, captains by regimental rank, enjoyed lieutenant-colonelcies in the army. James Macdonnell of the Coldstream was in overall command; Charles Dashwood of 3rd Guards in the garden and farm surrounds; Henry Windham of the Coldstream in the château and farm; with Lord Saltoun of 1st Guards in the orchard. Eventually Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Woodford (and a ‘proper’ lieutenant colonel in this context), commanding 2nd Coldstream Guards, was sent down with most of his battalion from Major General Sir John Byng’s brigade up on the ridge. Although he was now the senior officer in the area, Woodford generously let James Macdonnell remain in command. The burly Macdonnell had already distinguished himself by leading the handful of guardsmen who had closed the farm’s north gate after the French burst in. Private Matthew Clay of 3rd Guards ‘saw Lieutenant Colonel Macdonnell carrying a large piece of wood or trunk of a tree in his arms (one of his cheeks marked with blood, his charger bleeding within a short distance) with which he was hastening to secure the gates against the renewed attacks of the enemy.’

Some called him ‘the bravest man in England’ for his part in animating the defence, although he always maintained that it was a team effort. He was knighted and ended his days as a general.

Guards officers eventually lost their double rank in 1871, with the reforms accompanying the abolition of the purchase of commissions. It had always been more than just a genteel way of ensuring that the ‘Gentlemen’s sons’ – as Guards officers were known in the Wellingtonian army – enjoyed added status. This had practical advantages: a force made up of several units or detachments was commanded by the senior officer, by army rank, present. As a general’s rank came by seniority from the date of promotion to lieutenant colonel, a Guards captain found himself on the roll from the date of his appointment. This increased his prospects of becoming a general early, and a handful of officers did indeed find themselves major generals in the army while still doing duty as captains in their own regiments.

Andrew Wheeler of the 1st Guards was commissioned in 1678, promoted to captain and lieutenant colonel in 1692, became a major general in 1727, and died a regimental captain three years later. More typical was Richard, sixth Earl of Cavan, commissioned in 1744, made captain and lieutenant colonel in 1756 and major general in 1772. He departed to command the 55th Foot as a regimental lieutenant colonel in 1774, and died, by now a lieutenant general, in 1778.

Major Charles Jones, author of the The Regimental Companion (1811), argued that dual rank ‘has often been detrimental on real service, is always a cause of distracting jealousy to the line, and has never … offered one solid advantage’. Ending purchase did not end the concept of dual rank. This situation initiated a long-running joke: a foreign officer in British pay, marching through Portugal in 1810, saw a senior Guards officer astride a donkey:

‘What a beautiful mule that is!’

‘It is not a mule, my good fellow, it is a jack-ass.’

‘Pardon me, it would indeed be a jack-ass in the line, but because it belongs to the Guards it must be a mule by brevet.’

From its earliest days the army had granted promotion as a reward for gallant or distinguished service, and this was known as brevet promotion. It was especially relevant in an age where medals and decorations were not generally available, and could be awarded individually or to a whole group. By the nineteenth century brevet was available, as an individual reward, only to officers who were already captains, and it could not take a man beyond colonel. Captain Garnet Wolseley, commissioned into the 12th Foot in 1852, was repeatedly put up for the brevet promotion for which his harum-scarum courage qualified him. But the military secretary regretted that he had not yet acquired the six years service that brevet rank demanded:

As Captain Wolseley has only been about three years and six months in the service, he is ineligible under the regulations to be promoted to the rank of Major, for which otherwise, in consideration of the services described by Sir Harry Jones, he would have been happy to have recommended him.

Another hero of the Indian Mutiny, Lieutenant Henry Norman, had so many recommendations that all he needed was his captaincy for the honours to kick in. ‘On the day of his captaincy,’ wrote a delighted brother officer, ‘he will be Major, Lieut-Colonel, CB [Companion of the Order of the Bath], perhaps full colonel. He deserves it all and more.’

Fred Roberts (who was to die as a field marshal in France in 1914) received his brevet majority on the day that his captaincy was gazetted in 1860, and a brevet lieutenant colonelcy followed almost immediately. Brevets were granted generously and gave commanders a quick and easy way of showing their approval.

The sniper’s fire of individual brevets, aimed at individuals, was interlocked with the wholesale bombardment of general brevet promotions that caught up whole batches of officers of similar seniority. In 1810 Henry Torrens assured a colonel that ‘It keeps up the spirit of an army to give frequent promotion to a Class of Men who have nothing to look to but the honourable attainment of rank in their profession.’ He enclosed an Army List showing the impact of a proposed general brevet. It would make ‘the Cols of 1803 and 1804 to be Major Generals, the Lieut Cols of 1800 to be Colonels, the remainder of the Majors of 1802 and the whole of 1803 to be Lieut Colonels.’ He added a postscript saying that he had just calculated the speed of promotion across the army, and reckoned that a man would be ‘tolerably fortunate’ to make lieutenant colonel with fifteen years’ service, and it would take him ten more years to make colonel and another seven as colonel before he became a major general. This meant that ‘the more fortunate’ of those who had entered the army at 16, could make major general at 51. The last general brevet, he added, had indeed promoted its youngest major general at 51 but its youngest lieutenant general at 75. Torrens understandably added an exclamation mark.

General brevet promotions could mark an event like a Royal Jubilee, or the end of a war. A large promotion followed peace in 1815 ‘to reward those by whose brilliant service the peace had been achieved’.

When the army was being shrunk in the 1820s, brevet rank was used as an inducement to get officers to leave. They could retire with ‘Superior Brevet Rank in the Army’ and receive the half-pay of that new rank. They could then, if they wished, sell this ‘Unattached Half-Pay Commission’, an enticing departure from the general principle that one could only sell a commission that had been bought. There were an enormous amount of general brevets awarded in 1846, 1851, and 1854, but the process created a huge amount of elderly generals: the average age of major generals in the 1854 brevet was over 65. Over a twenty-year period half the major generals had not served for ten years, many had not served for twenty, and one had had no service for thirty-five. General brevets were abolished in 1854 and a fixed establishment for general officers was introduced, with rules for promotion and retirement.

A brevet officer usually did duty in his regimental rank, though serving outside his regiment – for instance, as aide-de-camp to a general – would allow him to be employed in his army rank, and to draw the full pay for it. There were certain other advantages. In 1869 it was laid down that captains holding a major’s brevet would be allocated cabins in troopships ahead of mere regimental captains; and in 1898 all brevet officers were ordered to wear the badges and appurtenances of their army rank. An order of 1912, however, ungenerously warned that brevet rank did not exempt an officer from passing the appropriate promotion examinations.

The over-generous use of brevets, together with the granting of temporary rank to help officer an army swollen by war, could create anomalies, with a favoured few enjoying temporary and brevet rank well in excess of their regimental rank. The Duke of Marlborough tried to explain that just because an officer had a temporary commission as brigadier, and brevets taking him through major to colonel, he was still not the senior captain in his own regiment, and when all the froth and bubble had gone, he was likely to finish up commanding a company again. ‘Besides Colonel Hollins having a commission as brigadier,’ wrote the duke, ‘does nowise exempt him from his duty as major, and there are older captains in the first regiment to whom it would be a prejudice when they come to roll together.’

In 1767, a dispute over command of the Cork garrison between Lieutenant Colonel Tulikens of the 45th Foot and Lieutenant Colonel Cunningham (regimentally a captain in the 45th, but holding his senior rank by brevet) established that ‘When corps join either in camp, garrison or quarters, the oldest officer (whether by Brevet or any other commission) is to command the whole.’

Brevet promotion lasted for much of the twentieth century, although it was increasingly discredited. On 26 August 1914, 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders formed part of the 3rd Division, holding the line in front of Audencourt at the battle of Le Cateau. Troops in that sector did not receive the order for a general withdrawal, and so, true to the standards of that tough old army, they fought on. At about 7.45 p.m. that evening Colonel William Gordon VC, second in command of the Gordons as a regimental major, noted that his battalion now had a company of Royal Scots and two of Royal Irish fighting alongside it. He immediately took command of the combined force by virtue of his army rank, which made him senior to Lieutenant Colonel Neish, his own commanding officer. The little party began to fall back just after midnight. It eventually collided with a field gun blocking the route, and although the Gordons rushed the piece before it could be fired, nearby Germans immediately stood to their arms and after an hour’s battle the British were overwhelmed. The Gordons lost about five hundred men, although a few survivors made their way through the German lines to Antwerp and on to England.

‘The fortune of war was hard upon the 1/Gordons’, lamented the official historian. ‘For the time, they practically ceased to exist as a battalion.’