War, Economy and the Military Mind

Geoffrey Best, Andrew Wheatcroft, Geoffrey Best, Andrew Wheatcroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367616557
• eBook ISBN: 9781000259360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1976, this book explores the relationship between European society and the military institutions it fostered from 1815–1918.

In the period from the fall of Napoleonic imperialism to the outbreak of the First World War armies and navies grew in complexity, cost and size. The first half of this book investigates these institutions from within, and looks at some of the factors which held them together in an increasingly difficult and hostile world, at their self-image, and at the pressures upon them from society at large.

As the role of military institutions within society increased in importance, analysts began to look for the effects which this interpenetration had on society. Part 2 is concerned with the effects of this growing dominance of society by its defenders. By the end of period covered by this book, the age of total mobilisation for the war effort was upon us. In a sense this second part of the book reinforces the conclusions of the first, that military institutions are separate from the societies which surround them, and between the two a growing gap of misunderstanding and incomprehension yawned.

PART I

In the period from the fall of Napoleonic imperialism to the outbreak of the First World War armies and navies grew in complexity, cost and size. The first half of this book investigates these institutions from within, and looks at some of the factors which held them together in an increasingly difficult and hostile world, at their self-image, and at the pressures upon them from society at large. John Keegan points to the elements of continuity, to the sense of active history which pervades an army like the British which has a regimental structure as its base. Richard Luckett discusses the views which soldiers had of themselves and their performance as writers and critics of military life, views which differ markedly from those of critics looking from outside. Douglas Porch shows how one type of external pressure, republican ideology, was less effective at creating unrest within an army than the traditional discontents of military life; he suggests that the traditional categories by which we analyse armies need to be revised. Andrew Wheatcroft also reflects on the comparative weight of internal and external factors in determining an army’s attitude, and concludes that ‘professional’ issues are those which truly divide armies from within. All these studies tend towards the common conclusion that we should no longer seek to apply the values of external society, but look instead for the values and attitudes which differentiate military society.

1 Regimental Ideology

John Keegan

This is an essay in amateur sociology, which sets out to answer a question probably only an amateur sociologist would ask: do national armies have individual ‘characters’ and, if so, what determines them? More precisely, it states and attempts to prove a hypothesis: that the British army’s strong and distinctive character is the product, in large measure, of its unique internal structure; that the salient features of that structure are, nevertheless, and despite appearances to the contrary, common to many institutions of the English professional class; that the notable political docility of the British army is a function in part of the identity of outlook between soldier and civilian which those common features breed, but in part also a function of the peculiarity of the structure of the army itself; and, finally, but much more tentatively, that the ‘anthropological’ approach to the study of armies, which is the one through which this writer has achieved whatever perception he may have of the British army’s character, is potentially of wider application, and is likely to prove, in our present state of ignorance about what armies are really like, a good deal more revealing than a conventionally sociological one.

But I must begin by disclaiming any credit for my adoption of the ‘anthropological’ approach, or for the resulting insights which it has offered me, for the truth is that I stumbled into it accidentally and by a roundabout route. I was, at the outset, merely trying to find my bearings in new and quite unfamiliar surroundings – those of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, which I had joined, as a junior lecturer in military history, almost straight from Oxford. I knew, at the time, a little military history but nothing about the army or about how its officers were trained. ‘What is Sandhurst?’, was the question I therefore asked myself. Was it a sort of military university, like West Point, where academic achievement carried as much, if not more, weight than military performance? Or, like St-Cyr, was it a sort of novitiate, to which postulant officers came to try out their vocations and to be initiated into the rule of the order? Or was it a sort of super public school (where, as the local wits had it, ‘the OTC had got out of hand’)? That seemed the most likely analogy, not only because the public school is such a dominant institution-type in this country, and because of the well known and well documented link between the public schools and the army, but more simply because the Sandhurst Charter, I discovered, laid down specific aims for the Academy which, military allusions apart, might have been written by a great Victorian headmaster. They were, ‘to develop in the officer cadet the essential characteristics of leadership, discipline and duty; to develop his physical fitness; and to lay the foundations of military and academic knowledge upon which the officer’s future studies can be builf.¹

After perhaps a year (I had joined the Academy in 1960), it began to dawn on me, however, that between the letter of the Charter and the spirit of Sandhurst life there yawned a divide. It was not that the staff or students sought to evade the Charter’s prescriptions. On the contrary: military training was carried on with great energy and imagination and those parts of it which engaged the cadets’ sense of adventure – overseas exercises, helicopter drill, field firing – were entered into with real enthusiasm. The academic courses were transmitted in a genuinely academic way and usually succeeded in generating a lively intellectual response. Games were played to a high competitive standard, and semi-vocational activities like sailing, gliding, flying, mountaineering and skindiving, which Sandhurst offered in a variety and at a cheapness which would make the average undergraduate blink with envy, had a strong following. Yet despite their ostentatious pursuit of the Academy’s stated aims, and despite the recognised weight which professional perfection, academic achievement and athletic distinction carried in the assessment of an individual cadet’s placing in the Order of Merit, I eventually came to conclude that staff and students were reserving their real energies for a different and quite private competition, of which the Academy officially knew almost nothing; that the object of that competition was the filling of regimental vacancies; and that Sandhurst was therefore neither university, nor seminary, nor public school, but some different sort of institution altogether which I was unable, and have subsequently ceased trying, to categorise.

Here must be described the method by which cadets and regiments choose each other. The match does not depend upon a cadet’s position in the Order of Merit, though a high placing may improve his chance of securing or even bettering his first choice of regiment, and a low placing may jeopardise the promise of a regimental vacancy already given. These caveats aside, it would be true to say that the parties concerned – the cadet on the one hand, the regiment on the other – strike their bargain direct, either before the young man joins Sandhurst (the Green-jackets have a particularly extensive network of talent scouts among the staff of the leading public schools) or through the regimental representative during the cadet’s time at the Academy. The regimental representative can make only a tentative offer; it is confirmed after the candidate has been interviewed by a panel of the regiment’s senior officers, who will normally include a number of serving or retired generals. Sandhurst intervenes in this process only to the extent of allocating the total of available vacancies between the regiments and recording the names of those who eventually fill them – a quite different procedure from that, say, at St-Cyr, where the cadet first in the Order of Merit has first pick of the vacancies, and so on downwards. The Academy does, of course, prescribe after proper consultation certain minimum entrance standards to the different regiments and corps; but as these apply stringently only to the less combatant – and therefore less popular – branches, the main bargaining process is scarcely affected. That process I came to compare, fairly early in my acquaintance with Sandhurst, to a marriage market; and it was the same analogy which struck an American sociology student who was given permission to do his doctoral work at the Academy in 1968.² What separately alerted us to the crucial importance of pair-bonding between regiments and cadets was not, at least in my case, the deployment of any unusual power of perception or of an informed sociological sense. It was a simple observation of what seemed most to exercise cadets and instructors (who are also the regimental representatives), measured in terms of their own assessment of their ‘success’ or ‘failure’. For just as cadets want to be accepted by the ‘best’ regiment which they have a realistic chance of joining, so instructors are anxious to secure the ‘best’ cadets for the vacancies they have to fill. To this preoccupation, almost everything else at Sandhurst is secondary.

But merely to have observed the importance attached to regimental selection was not, of course, to have explained it. So how to explain it? One can begin by showing that a Hobson’s choice of regiment (and some cadets are necessarily left with Hobson’s choice) will limit both vertically and laterally the broad pattern of an officer’s career from the outset. Entry into the technical Corps, for example, means that an officer’s range of activity is going to be confined fairly strictly to the technical functions which his Corps performs, and that he can expect promotion only within its own hierarchy. The officer who joins the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, the Royal Army Ordnance Corp, Royal Corps of Transport, or even the Royal Signals, which between them recruit almost a third of all officer entrants, cannot therefore look forward to becoming a senior general staff officer; he has a much reduced chance of entry to the Staff College, the gateway to a generalist career in the Army; and he will spend most of his service either supervising workshops, controlling transport or caretaking stores. No wonder that a lively and ambitious young man, unless he has a genuinely technical bent, should look automatically to the regiments of cavalry, artillery and infantry (though also to the Corps of Royal Engineers which, for historical reasons counts as a combatant regiment),³ since that way lies variety, promotion and, by extension, prestige.

But that does not explain the importance attached by an individual cadet to securing acceptance by a particular regiment, nor why he should prefer one regiment over another. An immediate guess might be that some regiments offer better promotion prospects than others, in the same way that all regiments do over all corps. But that is not so. It is true that the High Command in the First World War is often loosely categorised as a collection of ‘cavalry generals’, and that Haig, Byng and Gough, to name the Commander-in-Chief and two of his Army Commanders in France were cavalrymen. But of the others, Home was a gunner, Plumer from the York and Lancaster Regiment, Rawlinson a Rifleman, and Birdwood originally a Royal Scots Fusilier. Moreover, of the Second World War generals, though Gort, now in process of rehabilitation, and Alexander were Guardsmen, Montgomery was a County Infantryman (a Warwick), Wavell a Highlander (Black Watch), and Auchinleck and Slim from the Indian Army, socially the poor relation of the British. Promotion beyond the regiment, in short, is generally by merit, promotion to the top exclusively by merit as, I would venture to argue, it has been throughout the last hundred years; and I do not think it possible to show even a random connection between the attainment of high rank in the British army and particular regimental origins, as it is in the old German army, if the curious case of the third Garde-Regiment zu Fuss means anything.⁴

Why then the attraction between an individual cadet and a particular regiment? It might be explained in terms of social competitiveness, for as is well known, British regiments may be arranged in a sort of pecking order, well drawn by Simon Raven in his Encounter essay, ‘Perish by the Sword’.⁵ The Foot Guards, Household Cavalry, four or five regiments of Cavalry of the Line, and the Greenjackets would be put at the top, the rest of the Cavalry next, slightly below them the Highland regiments (though coequal, if not superior, by their own reckoning), then the Light Infantry and Fusiliers, following those the Southern English County and Lowland Scots regiments, and last the Irish, Welsh, Northern and Midland regiments. Somewhere in the middle would come the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, which demand special professional attainments, and the Royal Tank and Parachute Regiments, which cultivate a rather bogus specialist outlook. But to imply, as a theory of naked competitiveness would demand, that all cadets make a bid for the top and then, as in a Dutch auction, drop back until they can find a taker, would be to misrepresent events. The English social system is not as arriviste as that and the Sandhurst social climber who misses a rung gets short shrift on the way down. It would be unkind to indicate exactly where he is likely to end up, but safe to say that regiments which would have responded warmly to his overtures in the first instance will very often spurn him once he has been refused elsewhere.

This should not, in my view, be seen as evidence of regimental pique, the wounded reaction of the thin-skinned. It suggests to me, on the contrary, that most regiments have a very robust sense of identity, are looking for a cadet whose identity tallies with their their own – since they are stuck with him for life once they take him on – and have little patience to spend on the trimmer or the wobbler. The average cadet, who knows for his part that what each regiment has to offer is its own particular way of life and circle of friendship, is usually quick to grasp the point, and to make up his own mind about what sort of person he is (or can successfully pass himself off as being).

What, in short, we are dealing with is a question of image, perceived image but, more important, also self-image, and the first question about it to settle – since regimental self-image is crucial to an understanding of the British army’s character and behaviour – is that of how it was formed. In the case of the regiments at the top of Mr Raven’s pecking order – Guards, Greenjackets, Cavalry, Highlanders – formation took place at an early date and has a fairly obvious root cause. The Guards’ derives from their constant proximity to the sovereign, the Cavalry’s from the afterglow of Chivalry, the Greenjackets’ from the romance of their Peninsula achievements, the Highlanders’ from their semi-savage origins and now grossly exaggerated tribal character. But the self-image of the more numerous, workaday County regiments is of much more recent formation and to examine when and how it took shape one must return to the era of the Cardwell and post-Cardwell reforms of the 1870s and 1880s.

The nature of these reforms will be familiar. They entailed the substitution of short- for long-service enlistment of private soldiers, the abolition of the purchase of commissions by officers, the pairing of single into double battalion regiments and their localisation’ in permanent recruiting areas. It is therefore from Cardwell (though to be precise from 1881, when he had already ceased to be Secretary of War), that the County Regiment dates, and that is true even though some regiments had borne County titles since the 1750s. What ensured the new regiments’ assumption of a genuinely County character, which the earlier allocation of titles had not done, was the location of each regimental depot in the region from which it was supposed to recruit (even though many regiments continued to make good deficiencies with Irishmen and Londoners); and the affiliation to the regiment of the local Militia and Volunteer battalions, the citizen soldiers of the area.

Now the principal effect intended by these reforms was to provide more economically and efficiently for the garrisoning of the Empire. In that intention, as Brian Bond has shown, Cardwell’s reforms only partially succeeded.⁶ But it was also an intention of his to transform the basis on which the army was officered, the means he chose being the abolition of the property qualification (i.e. purchase). Here one must quickly forestall the objection that abolition was a precondition for the whole package, an objective whose force must, of course, be accepted. But what surely can be said in this respect is that Cardwell – and by no means only Cardwell – was also anxious to attract officer candidates from the rising middle classes. The bait he offered was ‘entry by competition’ and ‘promotion by merit’, a promise – or a threat – nicely calculated both to attract the energetic ‘new man’ and to frighten the worst of the merely mon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Notes on Contributors