Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes

twenty-six years of age before being considered. ‘A man who married off the strength,’ observed Frank Richards, ‘had to keep his wife on his own shilling a day; she lived outside barrack and he inside, and they met whenever they could, but officially she did not exist’.⁹⁰

      Single men in barracks, as Kipling accurately observed, did not grow into plaster saints, and, deprived of much chance of marriage, made other arrangements. Prostitutes thronged about in garrison towns, and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which vainly sought to control venereal disease by medical inspection and compulsory treatment, covered towns like Aldershot, Colchester and Woolwich in England and Cork in Ireland. Also included was the great military camp outside Dublin, the Curragh of Kildare, where girls and women known as ‘wrens’ lived rough outside the camp. Occasionally, when girls got into barracks, things got out of control; in 1896 soldiers of a Yorkshire regiment were involved in a gang rape, and three of them were sent to prison. There were more comfortable arrangements for officers, who could not be expected to rough it in huts out on the furze, and the future Edward VII was gently initiated into what became a life-long preoccupation at the Curragh in 1861.⁹¹ Regiments stationed in India maintained lal bazaars, essentially regimental brothels, and there were also many private establishments. Frank Richards recalled that ‘a magnificently built half-caste prostitute of fifty years of age’ decided to celebrate her retirement by giving:

      free access to her body between the hours of 6pm and 11pm. Preference was given to old customers. She posted a notice to this effect on the door of her room and if I related how many men applied and were admitted and went away satisfied in those short hours, I should not be believed.⁹²

      Girlfriends were smuggled into barracks too. One of Richards’ corporals briefly kept a woman in his bunk, an arrangement which led to predictable difficulties over an alternative use to which one of the company’s tea buckets was put. The architects who designed the ornamental iron railings surrounding Cardwell barracks had inadvertently spaced them so widely that sexual commerce could comfortably be carried out between them.⁹³

      It is important that we do not follow the Duke of Wellington and believe that all regular soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink …’, however. There was a sprinkling of gentleman-rankers, who had joined for a variety of reasons and usually kept quiet about them. Sometimes there were tragedies that we can only guess at. In 1909 Private John Vivian Crowther of the 18th Hussars shot himself in barracks. He was described at his inquest as ‘a cultured and educated Oxford graduate who had inherited a large property’.⁹⁴ John Lucy tells how:

      There was a taciturn sergeant from Waterford who was conversant with the intricacies of higher mathematics … There was an ex-divinity student with literary tastes, who drank much beer and affected an obvious pretence to gentle birth; a national school teacher; a man who had absconded from a colonial bank; a few decent sons of farmers.

      And there were the properly ambitious. Lucy declared that: ‘Promotion … is my mark’ and was speedily made a lance corporal. He found that the first promotion was the hardest to bear, for he was at once separated from his comrades and for the new NCO ‘every order he has to give to an old friend is a pain’.⁹⁵ Frank Richards decided that the price of promotion was too high, and obstinately declined it throughout his eight years with the colours and the whole of his wartime service. There were many like him: in 1918 young Frederick Hodges found himself in command of Private Pearson MM – ‘a short, sturdy little man … nearly twice my age’. Pearson had a long-running gag about the tinned pork and beans which were a common ration issue (‘I say, where is the pork?’). And he always called Hodges ‘Corp’.⁹⁶

      A hard-working regular soldier, who took his military training and army education seriously, might become a lance corporal in a year or two and corporal in three. He would be unlikely to make sergeant in his first enlistment – although promotion had speeded up during the Boer War – and the prospect of a third stripe and the more comfortable life of the sergeants’ mess was dangled out to persuade men to sign on after their first term. It was possible to get promoted from sergeant to colour sergeant (in the infantry) or staff sergeant (in other arms) and on to warrant officer in ten years, though this was fast work. King’s Regulations specifically guaranteed that warrant officers would be able to complete twelve years’ service, which entitled them to a small pension. Senior NCOs and warrant officers were likely to be able to complete twenty-one years’ service, increasing their pensions, as long as they remained fit, and could serve even longer with their commanding officer’s support. The Northamptons boasted a private soldier who had joined the regiment as a boy and died in harness just before the Boer War at the age of fifty-five. There were always jobs around the battalion which old soldiers like this could do: running the store which held the privately-purchased sports kit, helping break in recruits (‘Leave to fall out, trained soldier, please?’) and, of course, looking after the young gentlemen.

      Most of the officers came from what Edward Spiers has called ‘the traditional sources of supply’, and even that arch-traditionalist the Duke of Wellington would have been struck by how little the officer corps of 1914 differed from that he had taken to Waterloo 101 years before. The peerage, gentry, military families, the clergy and the professions provided its bulk, with a minority coming from business, commercial and industrial families.⁹⁷ In practice social divisions were more flexible than they might seem, with families who had made good in trade setting the seal on their gentility by buying land, marrying their daughters into the aristocracy and sending their sons into the army. Many a young man with a good education, crested signet ring and commission in a smart regiment was only two generations away from the shovel or the counting house.

      Military families played as important a part in the army of 1914 as they had in Wellington’s: no less than 43.1 percent of the fathers of cadets entering Sandhurst in the summer intake of 1910 were ‘military professionals’. In the winter of 1917 this had sunk to 17.9 percent, but by the winter of 1930 it was an astonishing 62.4 percent.⁹⁸ The future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, commissioned into the Black Watch in 1901, remembered that:

      I never felt any special inclination to a military career, but it would have taken more independence of character than I possessed at the time, to avoid it. Nearly all my relations were military. I had been brought up among soldiers; and my father, while professing to give me complete liberty of choice, was determined that I should be a soldier. I had no particular bent towards any other profession, and I took the line of least resistance.⁹⁹

      Alan Brooke came from a long line of soldiers originating in Ulster, and initially wanted to be a doctor, but military blood was thicker than medical water, and off he went to Woolwich to become a gunner. It was as well for Britain’s conduct of the Second World War that he did, although even at the height of his powers the slight, bespectacled Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke had, perhaps, a touch of the consulting room to him.

      Just as Wellington’s officer corps contained a good many young men whose only fortune was their sword, so too the army of 1914 had many officers who were just on the right side of the borders of gentility. This often made for an uncomfortable life, for although the purchase of commissions had been abolished a generation before, being an officer in the British army was an expensive business. In 1903 a War Office Committee reckoned that an officer needed a minimum of £160 a year in addition to his pay to be able to survive in the infantry. Life in the cavalry was more expensive, for a subaltern needed to provide himself with at least one charger and could hardly avoid hunting and playing polo: he could just scrape by with £300 a year, but the average private income of cavalry officers was £6–700. In 1912 Major General M. F. Rimington warned that it had once been possible to find rich young