FOREWORD

The charm of this book is obvious enough, but to recognize its historical importance one must first consider the old-fashioned infantry soldier who built up the British Empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was known on the one hand for his foul mouth, his love of drink and prostitutes, his irreligion, his rowdiness and his ignorance; on the other for his courage, his endurance, his loyalty and his skill with fusil and pike, or with rifle and bayonet. Wellington referred to the troops who served under him in the Peninsular war as “the scum of the land,” but they won him a dukedom by driving the French out of Spain in a series of extraordinarily severe engagements, and finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It was only after Waterloo that a generic name was found for the British soldier. It was adopted from the sample filled-out form shown to the troops to help them record the details of their service correctly: “I, Private Thomas Atkins, of His Majesty’s Twenty-Third Regiment of Foot.” There is a legend that Wellington himself supplied this name and regiment in commemoration of a soldier who had come under his notice in Spain for gallantry in the field. A new name for a familiar type.

The army that fought and swore and drank in Spain was composed of much the same sort of heroic scum as had fought and swore and drunk in the Low Countries under Marlborough a hundred years before; and it remained much the same throughout the nineteenth century, and until the Great War. It was still Thomas Atkins who in 1914 fought under Sir John French on the Marne and the Aisne, and who then as a last proof of his courage, his discipline and his marksmanship saved the Channel Ports at the First Battle of Ypres and so faded away into history.

Thomas Atkins was temporarily succeeded by the citizen soldier, and at the conclusion of the War by a new type of professional soldier, a man with a far higher standard of education, far greater sobriety and a strong mechanical bent. Beer and the rifle ceased to be the two main ingredients of Army life. Already towards the end of the War it was being jokingly said in my battalion (first, I believe, by the author of this book) that with the formation of all the new specialist groups – machine-gunners, Lewis-gunners, trench-mortar men, bomb-throwers, rifle-grenadiers, gas-specialists – the ordinary rifle-and-bayonet man would soon be an out-of-date survival who would parade at the head of the battalion on Church Parade in company with the Regimental Goat. It has not yet quite come to this, but the mechanization of the Army is progressing steadily and experts in modern war allow the ordinary infantry-man merely the status of “mopper-up” after an offensive launched with tanks, armoured cars, gas, artillery, and aerial bombing and machine-gunning.

Thomas Atkins is gone. What records remain to tell what sort of a man he really was? Few, and most of those misleading and contradictory. Some of his officers have written about him, in a gentlemanly but distant style, and he appears, more or less in caricature, in novels and plays of the eightee