'Soldier, soldier, will you marry me, With your knapsack, fife and drum?'
The war brings the British soldier back into his own, as the nation's defender and the nation's hero. The only change is that in one sense everybody in Britain is now a soldier, and in another sense nobody is. The old 'soldier' who spent his life in barracks, busy in war, boozy in peace, is now hard to find. In his place are a mass of 'combatants,' 'mechanized units,' 'pilots,' 'bombers,' 'ground-men,' 'flying-men' and 'tank-mechanics.' After the war they will be absorbed back again into the nation. It will turn out that the bomber was really a stockbroker, and that the submarine-torpedo man was studying for the ministry--between shots. In other words, the old-fashioned soldiers will have vanished, along with so many other old-fashioned things of England that we are told are to vanish after the war.
Poor old British soldier! He had only had about two and a half centuries of existence--since Charles the Second took over Oliver Cromwell's standing army. He was never welcome. The nation only accepted him on sufferance; drank his health in war time, and kicked him out of the pub in peace.
The little verse above, a fragment of a Victorian nursery song, gives the measure of what a worthless fellow the nursery understood the soldier to be. Here he was, verse after verse, cadging and sponging on the poor girl, evidently a housemaid, lured to ruin by his red coat. First she sings to him:
'Soldier, soldier, will you marry me, With your knapsack, fife and drum?'
And he sings back, miserable fellow:
'Oh no, my pretty maid, I can't marry now, For I haven't got a shirt to put on.'
So the pretty housemaid gives the soldier a shirt and sings again for matrimony. But the soldier sings back for boots...and then for a hat, and so on endlessly. If there was an end, a final gift, it was not one for the nursery to hear.
After popular ballads had had their crack at the soldier, the comic poetry of the day took its turn in laughing at him Here is Tom Hood, England's comic poet par excellence:
'Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war's alarms,
But a cannon ball took off his legs,
And he laid down his arms'
It appears that Ben Battle had 'left his legs in Badajoz's breeches,' an amusing memory of the fun of the Peninsular War. This may perhaps have been mere superficial laughter without malice. But there is a certain underlying meaning in it. An old soldier was taken for granted as a pauper, an object of charity. People may still recall the game, 'Here comes an old soldier to town, pray what will you give him?'
All that represents not what the British soldier was really like, but the character that the Victorian generations insisted on fastening on him. Kipling never wrote truer lines than the ones in which he speaks of the treatment of Mr. Thomas Atkins at the hands of his fellow-citizens:
'I went into a public house to get a glass of beer, The publican, he up and say: "We don't serve soldiers 'ere." For it's "Tommy this" and "Tommy that" and "chuck 'im out, the brute!--" But it's thin red line of heroes when the guns begin to shoot.'
The British public ever since early Victoria days, and, indeed, for a century more or less before that, has always looked on soldiers of the ranks in that same way. In time of peace it resents their existence, deplores their low morals, and at first threat of war suddenly discovers that they are the 'nation's defenders,' the 'boys in blue, or in khaki' or the 'thin red line of heroes'--made thin, no doubt, by low feeding in peace time. When the war ends they are welcomed home under arches of flowers, with all the girls leaping for their necks--and within six months they are expected to vanish into thin air, keep out of the public-houses and give no trouble.
This attitude is all the more strange as contrasted with the typical British attitude towards the 'sailor.' Fact, fiction and fancy have enveloped the British sailor with qualities as endearing as those of Mr. Thomas Atkins are, supposedly, offensive and discreditable. The sailor is a 'Jolly Jack Tar'--the more tar on him the better. It is his business to be perpetually drunk and 'to take his Nancy on his knee'--the same Nancy who, as a housemaid, won't walk out with Mr. Atkins because she 'doesn't hold with soldiers.' But the Jack Tar stuff gets the girls every time. In return, they are supposed to take all his money, clean his pockets out and when it's all gone, send him off to sea again. The Jolly Jack Tar is supposed to have 'a wife in every port,' but if Tommy Atkins in barracks ever ventures on having a Mary or two, there's a terrible fuss about it.
Think of all our ballads, poetry and songs that exalt the life of a sailor:
'In No. 9, Old Richmond Square,
Mark well what I do say
My Nancy Dawson, she lives there,
She is a maiden passing fair,
With bright blue eyes and golden hair,
But I'll go no more a-ro-o-ving
For you, fair maid.'
Turn on the gramophone of recollection and over it comes a mingled melody of ballads in exaltation of the sailor and the sea--'Stretch every stitch of canvas, boys, to catch the flowing wind'. 'Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main, Full many a stormy wind shall blow ere Jack comes home again.'
And as the sounds die lower and fainter one seizes among them the requiem of the dead, the dirge for the sailors claimed by the sea:
'Here's to the health of poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of the crew!
No more he'll hear the wind a-rolling
For death hath broached him to!'
How deep the sounds echo and reverberate like the boom of the sea itself.
And all this--this national tribute of romance, of affection, of gratitude, how much has the soldier? Little, mighty little--at least in life. Our poets, apart from Kipling, always sing of his death, never of his life.
'Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs but to do or die.'
Exactly. Theirs not to make any trouble! Neither in life, nor in death.
Students of literature will think to contradict me by reminding us of odd notes that sound in our poetry in praise of the soldier's life. Here's Shakespeare. He always is, right on the spot. Is it Iago singing? I forget.
'Then clink to the cannikin, clink,
Why shouldn't a soldier drink?
For life's but a span, so enjoy it who can,
And clink to the cannikin, clink.'
But better students of literature will tell us that this apparent exception proves the rule. Such drinking songs as these are meant to show what a wicked fellow the soldier is, how essentially without serious thought of a future life--in short, hell for him.
To understand this attitude we have to look back into history. The English, historically speaking, always hated 'soldiers,' 'paid men,' as the word literally means, men hired to kill instead of fighting for anger's sake. An Englishman could look after himself; his house was his castle. There were no regular soldiers in England till Charles II, as said above, kept over some of Cromwell's standing army as a permanent force (the Coldstream Guards, etc.). William of Orange added to it. But, even with that, the power to keep an army was granted by Parliament so grudgingly that it went on only from year to year. The Supply Act only granted money, and the Mutiny Act only sanctioned discipline by legislation renewed every year. Without that, the army would come to a full stop for want of pay, and the officer's authority vanish for want of legal sanction. Without the renewal of the act, if an officer said, 'Eyes right!' the soldier might answer, 'Don't disturb me; I'm looking at something pretty good.' This was true, in all peace time, up to the advent of the present war.
So the unhappy soldier had to pay for the sins of an evil profession. His treatment and his pay reflected this so late as the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, the soldier lived in barracks without heat or ventilation; slept two, and even four, in a bed and was swept off by disease like vermin. There was little public heed of it. There were so many paupers and people of despair in the 'Merry England' of a century ago that recruits were always findable; the Queen's shilling could keep pace with Death.
The Victorian soldier's pay was twopence halfpenny a day, but there were so many odd charges and deductions at the start that a recruit might not get any pay at all for four months. The soldier lived under a savage code of flogging and punishment. He got no education. Before the Board schools of 1870 most soldiers could not read or write. The recruit was given (after 1829) a little record book (which he could not read) with a sample name in it--Thomas Atkins. That stood for him. Later he turned it to glory.
Thus a soldier was supposed to be a disreputable sort of person, whose aim in life was to get housemaids 'into trouble.' Soldiers, not officers! That was entirely different. Just as common soldiers had too little, so officers had too much in the long stretches of Victorian peace. These were days before modern inventiveness had turned an officer's life into industry and algebra. An officer in between wars was supposed to do nothing--except to go to lawn parties, hunts, drags--God knows what--I forget the names of their entertainments--and accept the role of the pampered darling of the ladies. Every now and then there came along a 'little war,' and thither the officer went to play his part with infinite courage and no algebra; conquered the natives till they said, 'Quit!' then taught them how to play cricket.
How the times have changed! One thinks now of European expansion, and the expansions imitated from it, as one vast horror of flaming gas and tearing detonations--how different it waswhen Quanko Sambo, laying down his assegai, took up a cricket bat to develop his marvellous native ability at a cut to the off, and his permanent native inability to stand firm against a fast leg break...Of the 'little wars' of the time of which I speak, were the Abyssinian and the Ashanti, and the second Afghan and the first Boer--all of that enough and plenty, if all mixed with a period of service in India to give the officer his right to tea and muffins and the favour of the fair sex in the intervening intervals of leisure; enough to rank him above the curate, the doctor, the lawyer and the banker; the 'business men' they were not yet respectable. The officers, all feathers and whiskers, ruled the roost.
But, oddly enough, the reasoning that created the social esteem of the officer was not applied to Mr. Thomas Atkins. He was in all the wars, big or little, just as much as his officer--but he got no thanks for it at home. I think one reason was that in the 'Victorian' period of peace from Waterloo to the Crimea--there was, literally, a generation who went into the army as young men after 1815 and served a whole lifetime, from subalterns to colonels, and never heard a shot fired except blank cartridges at a review. And here was a corresponding British public--the public of Charles Dickens's time, who had grown to forget war, who were absolutely removed from all possibility of invasion or civil war, who could not foresee in fancy the days of falling bombs--such a nation, sunk in the utter security of peace, sunk, by millions, in the utter hopelessness of poverty, what could they know or realize of soldiers? Soldiers! To the working men of the Chartist days, soldiers meant the men with guns called out to shoot down workmen in the massacre of Peterloo (1819). Soldiers, Yah! just a butcher with a red-coat. Honestly, ever so many workmen in England felt like that in the period of Victorian Peace. And officers! to the plain people, outside of society, great and small--officers, just fuss and feathers, India and hot curry!
Turn over the pages of Punch, which began its life as a radical paper of protest and grew with years to the mellowness of saddened wisdom--and there you will see the officer and the soldier, in their Victorian feathers and in their Victorian 'pubs.'
No pages reflect this attitude more than the volumes of Charles Dickens, a repository of social history. Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War to Dickens was needless and silly; foreigners, comic people, who lacked stability; officers, fops; soldiers, loafers. Here and there, I admit, are bright exceptions (for I know my Dickens as a Scottish divine knows his Bible); I can recall, of course, Mr. Bagshot and Trooper George. But speaking by and large, the whole military art was, to Dickens, either needless or comic. Witness the famous Chatham review in Pickwick, or the stock figure of the 'recruiting sergeant,' as in Barnaby Rudge and elsewhere--the Sergeant with the King's shilling--an engine of temptation and corruption to the young--seducing young men into 'going for a soldier'.'
It was only as the old standing army was passing away, at the close of the century, to give place to the new Nation under Arms, that the 'soldier' began to come into his own...The South African War rediscovered Thomas Atkins as a 'Soldier of the Queen,' and sang invocations to him, 'as a good 'un heart and hand, as a credit to his calling and to all his native land.' But before the change had time to be more than begun the Great War of 1914 swept away the foolish complacency of Victorian Britain and set in a true light the values that had been disregarded.
But why--as the comedians say--why rake all that up now? So that we'll know better next time.
