29 Sep 2011 01:18:17
The British army makes up 0.087% of the population and only one in 70 of us has a close relative serving in it, and yet its history – and that of war in general – commands an audience that far exceeds this tiny professional base. One reason is that Britain is blessed with authors who can speak to both general and specialist audiences. Like pantomime artists, they can wow the children while amusing the adults.Of these, Richard Holmes, who died in April while still at the height of his powers, was possibly the most physically familiar to both groups. His bespectacled, moustachioed and always dapper figure strode across muddy battlefields on to their TV screens. Indeed he sometimes rode, and the peccadilloes of his horse, Thatch, became almost as well known to his followers as did those of Thatch's owner. He was an improbable hit for the 21st century. The tributes to him on the irreverent and sometimes scurrilous Army Rumour Service website (ARRSE), a source that Holmes cites several times in Soldiers, stress that, as well as being a natural storyteller, possessed of a deep knowledge of his subject, he was a "gent", possessed of old-fashioned virtues, such as decency, generosity and integrity.
Soldiers, his last book, has been seen through the press by his family and friends. There are a few minor errors and misprints, which Holmes himself, with his extraordinary recall of accurate detail, would have corrected; there are some repetitions, which good editing would have sorted; and there are moments when chapters change direction without the fluency that was his hallmark. But Soldiers remains vintage Holmes. Indeed the very title makes that clear. He had used it before, for a book on men in battle that he and his erstwhile colleague, John Keegan, wrote in 1985. As for the subtitle, Redcoat, the story of the British soldier "in the age of horse and musket", was published in 2001, and Dusty Warriors, his account of the service in the Iraq war of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, of which he was colonel, in 2006.
The traces of all three are evident in the new Soldiers, but the scope of the latter is more ambitious. A social history of the British army, beginning with the civil war and ending in 2010, it uses many of the techniques deployed to such excellent effect not only in Redcoat but also in Tommy and Sahib, his accounts respectively of the soldier on the western front during the first world war and in India. The arcane details of military language and lore, the business of tradition, rank and dress (what in a memorable phrase Holmes calls "costume jewellery"), all make the book a sort of military Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Studded with personalities, some familiar – such as Wully Robertson, who rose from private to field marshal, or John Shipp, who was twice commissioned from the ranks in the Napoleonic wars – and many much less so and often the product of Holmes's own research, the book uses their individual stories to illustrate big themes.
The anecdotes derive their context from Holmes's grasp of the continuities, even if often pinned down with statistics that highlight change. Those that began this review are an example; so too are the extraordinary oscillations in the army's strength, particularly before 1861. The pattern of rapid expansion in time of major war, and equally severe contraction at its end, left its legacy of half-pay officers at one end of the social scale and impoverished beggars at the other. The army was cut by two-thirds between the seven years war and the French revolutionary wars, and was more than halved between the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean war. Colonial warfare made for greater equilibrium in the last half of the 19th century, but major war had its effects in 1914 and 1939, when the number of those commissioned multiplied roughly tenfold.
During his career, Holmes wrote about other armies, particularly that of France, but the humour and the occasional admission of emotion in Soldiers make it abundantly clear that it was the British army that commanded his true affection. His chapter that distinguishes between bullying in the army, which he does not condone, and "beasting", which "has both wrecked lives and saved them", captures his reluctance to criticise, let alone condemn. On the evidence here, much of the army's esprit de corps has been fuelled by alcohol, but there is no acknowledgment that today's army has a bigger drink problem than does the society from which it recruits. The love is that of a knowing parent: ready to admonish the child but ultimately not ready to concede any wrong to the outside world. Indeed, that quality may be why Holmes's stock is so high in professional circles: he could make the British army look at itself, know itself better, stop itself from too much complacency, but still love itself more.
Holmes ended his own military career as a brigadier, the senior officer of the Territorial army, with a stint in the MoD. He was therefore wonderfully qualified to make intrusions into current defence debates, but he chose not to. As those who taught with him at Sandhurst or those who were taught by him at the Staff College know, this was not because he did not have views that were both trenchant and well informed. Today, the army faces another set of cuts, which, even if not as severe as those of 1763 or 1815, come at a time when it is certainly more stretched than it was in the era of colonial warfare. It is therefore worth plumbing Soldiers for his opinions on the present and future as well as the past.
Three stand out. The first is the consequence of downsizing. Turning off the recruiting tap creates long-term structural imbalances in what is after all a hierarchical service. The army's age structure becomes distorted, and it struggles to regain its place in the employment market. Slow peacetime promotion can also too easily kill the commitment of those who have experienced war. In 1944, Michael Carver was commanding a brigade at the age of 30; although he ultimately became chief of the defence staff, he did not command a brigade again until 1960. The army kept Carver, but how many potential generals did it lose as it contracted after 1918 and 1945?
Secondly, and relatedly, the army has not maximised its talent, promoting those commissioned from the ranks too late in their careers to get a sensible return on their experience: here Holmes's example is Captain Doug Beattie MC, who was commissioned after 22 years' service but retired soon after. Thirdly, and predictably given Holmes's own Territorial career, the army in war has been much slower than many other armies to recognise the potential, including that of command, of reservists and those enlisted for the "duration".
