It was now the turn of the Australian 2nd Division to enter the fiery crucible that was Pozières. The first intimation of what lay ahead had come when they detrained at a railhead outside Albert and ‘were perplexed by a peculiar odour in the air’. On asking locals what the smell was, they ‘were morbidly informed “Boo coo Australiè, fini Pozières”’. As the men of the 2nd Division approached the front they made their way through what had been no man’s land, ‘dotted with little wooden crosses’ marking where men had fallen, passing across what remained of the former German lines, although the trenches had been blown in, and ‘ammunition of all kinds, bombs equipment and clothing were scattered everywhere waiting to be gathered by the Salvage Corps’. Pushing on, they reached the outer edge of Pozières, where the new Australian trenches, in places little more than shell scrapes a few feet deep, lay within 800 metres of the new German front line. Years later Private Vic Graham remembered his introduction to the battlefield: ‘So this is the Somme!…Pozières that was, is no longer. Rubble desolates its site, trenches and the remains of their trenches and defences are littered as far as the eye can see. The rolling rises of the area only accentuate the fearful carnage of artillery and infantry attacks.’

The Australian positions now looked across open ground to a brown line of earth on the horizon line, some 500 to 700 metres distant, that marked a ridge, known as Pozières Heights, and which could be ‘identified by the pall of smoke and dust of the intense bombardment by the artillery of both sides’. The OG1 Line formed the first line of defence, while beyond, and just north of the main road, a pile of rubble marked the remains of the German strongpoint known as the Windmill. The OG Lines ran north-west from the Windmill, with a sharp dog-leg turn where the Ovilliers–Courcelette road crossed the OG Lines, known as the Elbow, and the southern section had been turned into a defensive trench line known to the Germans as Neuer Ganter Weg. Behind that, the OG1 Line followed the ridge to the north-west past the strongpoint at Mouquet Farm, to the Fest Zollern.

In the Somme Valley on a day in spring in the early twenty-first century, almost a century after the Armistice that ended the First World War, all is peaceful. In the distance giant harvesters, marked by flashing orange lights, crawl through the fields. It is hard to believe that this verdant countryside was once a lunar landscape, the ground pulverised by incessant artillery fire, and the air stank of blood and cordite fumes.

The village of Pozières is located on a slight rise that provides panoramic views across the countryside to the south. In the distance the gleam of the golden Virgin atop the basilica at Albert marks the location of that town while, to the south-east, fields of ripening grain roll away towards the grove of trees around the village of Contalmaison.

The buildings of Pozi`eres straggle along the road that runs from Albert to Bapaume, as they had done in the years before 1914. Although the buildings appear to have been there for centuries, all have been built since the end of the First World War for, by the end of 1916, Pozières was a name on a map, and nothing more. The only indication that a village had once stood there was the slight stain of pulverised brick dust amid the shell craters.

AUTHORITY in the eighteenth-century British Army was far from absolute. Instead, the practical bounds of military authority were the result of give-and-take interactions between officers and enlisted men. For example, amongst the many complaints of ill-treatment levelled against Lieutenant William Catherwood of the 66th, was that he had shortened the men's rations unfairly, to which the men of his company ‘murmured much on account of this usage’. In response, Major William Coates, who commanded the regiment at the time, swiftly removed Catherwood from his post and installed a replacement, who restored the company's rations, ending the murmuring in the ranks. As this episode demonstrates, officers were sensitive to the thoughts and actions of their subordinates and responded to them, although they did not always do so in such a positive manner.

This chapter will examine the spectrum of tactics employed by soldiers to exert influence upon their officers in the execution of military justice. These approaches ranged from outright protest to fulsome co-operation, with various forms of negotiation accounting for the majority of interactions which ended in mutually beneficial solutions to problems. The records generated by the military justice process provide an unparalleled source to explore these disputes and interactions between officers and men. While a growing number of soldiers’ accounts have come to light over recent decades, few of these provide any penetrating commentary on their authors’ relations with their officers.

Officers’ diaries and correspondence tend to be similarly silent on the issue. In contrast, the records generated by the military justice process preserve significant details of the complicated interactions through which soldiers and officers negotiated the bounds of military authority. Previous commentators have interpreted enlisted men as the hapless victims of brutal officers. In contrast, this chapter will analyse common soldiers as active agents in a system whose structure shaped their options in ways that differed significantly from their civilian labourer counterparts.

PROTESTING MILITARY INJUSTICE

EXISTING SCHOLARSHIP on common soldiers’ protests has focused narrowly on instances of mutiny and desertion, but taking a broader view to include forms that hitherto have been overlooked provides a more detailed understanding of how these pointed acts of resistance could lead to negotiation.

BRITISH VICTORY at the Siege of Gibraltar (1779–83) was achieved in the midst of overwhelming British defeat in the American Revolutionary War. This victory was subsequently represented in several large-scale pictures, painted by leading contemporary artists. John Trumbull's The Sortieof the Garrison at Gibraltar (painted 1789, Fig. 1) depicts a successful British attack upon the invading Spanish forces at the Rock on 26–27 November 1781. John Singleton Copley's The Defeat of the Spanish Batteries at Gibraltar (painted 1783–91, Fig. 2) recounts a later British victory over the Franco-Spanish allied attack which took place on 13–14 September 1782. Both works were publicly exhibited in London in the decade that followed British defeat in America. Trumbull exhibited The Sortie in a one-work show in the Ansell Auction Rooms at Spring Gardens in April 1789. Two years later, in 1791, Copley exhibited The Defeat of the Spanish Batteries in a one-work show in a temporary pavilion at Green Park. The public exhibition of these martial narratives invites us to consider how contemporary military action, and the men who participated in this conflict, were presented to, and received by, the late eighteenth-century British public.

Trumbull's depiction of The Sortie of the Garrison at Gibraltar recounts the events when the British garrison set a surprise attack upon an invasive Spanish encampment. Captain John Drinkwater recorded the progression of events in the History of the Late Siege of Gibraltar, first published in 1785. On the night of 26 November 1781, the British garrison marched upon a Spanish camp. Before dawn, the British forces had demolished it in a particularly brutal act of martial aggression. Trumbull depicts the encounter in its later stages as dawn is breaking. While Spanish troops are depicted fleeing to the upper left of the painting, British soldiers continue with the onslaught in the middle distance; a wielded pick and axe are clearly visible against the clouded sky. In the centre of the composition, the British general George Eliott offers aid to the fallen Spanish officer, Captain Don José de Barboza. When British officers offered to remove him to a place of safety, Barboza refused, wishing instead to die upon the ruins of his post.

BETWEEN 1740 AND 1815, hundreds of thousands of men in Britain took part in some form of auxiliary military service for home defence, in the militia, limited service regiments and part-time formations. The history of these formations has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, focused on the role as patriotic citizens (or not), their particularism and idiosyncrasies, the extent of mobilisation and the politics of their formation. There is, however, relatively little about them as soldiers, and in particular how these forms of soldiering came into being and were understood by contemporaries. Although there were huge varieties in the terms of service of these men, there were fundamental similarities between them. They were all fairly ‘regular’ in that they adopted the uniform, drill and weaponry of the regular army and, just as significantly, sought to legitimise their role and behaviour as soldiers through similar mechanisms. This chapter examines all the men in auxiliary forces in Britain, both full-time and part-time soldiers outside of the line regiments of the British Army. In most cases these were temporary military formations raised in wartime with limited terms of service (at most the British Isles), and this has resulted in them often being compartmentalised in existing works on the subject. What follows is an examination of all of them to explore the broader military culture that was created in this period, and also consider why it was so homogenous.

Concomitant with a broad approach to auxiliary soldiers in this chapter is an equally wide chronological framework, which also requires some explanation. The military crisis of the Forty-Five Rebellion prompted debates about arming the people to provide additional military forces in Britain to counter any invasion, with equally strong concerns about order and discipline if this was done. Moreover, it provoked deliberations about the nature of British society, particularly around its lack of martial, and often by extension masculine, spirit. These themes emerged again and again through the conflicts in the period, and the response to Earl Shelburne's plan for encouraging local forces in 1782 exemplifies the debates about mass arming and legitimacy. On the one hand, some viewed any such plan with alarm, whilst Charles James Fox saw this as an opportunity to strengthen Britain's military ‘and to do this by the consent, and with the concurrence of the people themselves’.

THE PROMISE of a ‘Chelsea Pension’ for those who became debilitated while serving their king was an attractive prospect for the recruits and soldiers of the later eighteenth-century army and militia. Recruiters and promoters of these services used it to full advantage. It is easy to imagine charismatic recruiting sergeants using ‘the Pension’ as a prop in their carefully stage-managed performances outside taverns. The promise would have had added resonance as recruiting sergeants were often recently pensioned veterans themselves. However, for many it was only ever a promise. In spite of its prominent position in the many discussions of the benefits of service in the regular, volunteer or militia forces, no serving soldier, however wounded, sick or elderly, was automatically entitled to any of the Chelsea pensions before 1807. Satirical prints such as The Recruiting Serjeant (1770) juxtaposed this by picturing crippled veterans watching recruiters perform, contrasting the promised glamour of being treated ‘as Gentlemen & provided for accordingly’. The reality was far closer to that of the amputee veteran pictured on the far right of the image: ‘Thirty Years have I serv'd and you see what I am come to at last.’ By the 1770s, the more common sentimental depiction of the veteran soldier was not that of the happy rewarded Chelsea Pensioner, but that of an honourable but decayed elderly man, a victim of both the ineffectual government of army pensions and the insufficient financial gratitude of those above him.

The invalid pensions overseen by the Lords and Commissioners of the Royal Hospital of Chelsea were not automatically granted to all invalid, sick or elderly men, no matter how much the men thought themselves entitled. The records of the hospital testify to its rigid and centralised bureaucracy deeply concerned with its regulations and precedence. The strict admissions requirements effectively excluded large numbers of men from even applying. Pensions could be officially withdrawn without prior notice on the whim of the commissioners or unofficially by Chelsea's inspectors or agents. Many more individuals temporarily lost their pensions through their ignorance of Chelsea's bureaucratic idiosyncrasies. While these issues kept petitioners and successful pensioners in a comparatively weak position, it did not prevent them from actively negotiating with the system in a variety of ways.

ANYONE who has studied military history will be familiar with soldiers’ acute sensitivity to questions of precedence and honour. Most military historians take this for granted, although there is a growing appreciation that this type of phenomenon in the military is worthy of study, since institutional cultures can have a crucial operational significance. Armies are hierarchical organisations wherein formal rank is only achieved at great personal cost – be it by purchase, qualification or service – and where individual reputations are hard won and easily lost. These organisations have usually been all-male, and questions of status in the military have commonly been articulated in terms of masculine honour, creating further potential for rivalry and offence. Christopher Duffy has noted that the officers of European armies in the eighteenth century were particularly ‘rancorous and touchy’. In the Georgian military, disputes between officers over apparently trivial matters routinely escalated into exchanges of insults, blows and challenges to duel. Recourse was made with surprising frequency to the formal military authorities to resolve disputes, whether by courts martial or via the personal intervention of senior officers, the Secretary at War or even the king himself.

Nowhere was this truer than in England's militia. Reformed in 1757 as a parallel establishment to the regular army, it was officered by civilians who qualified by virtue of their social rank and landed property, and who thus provided ‘natural’ leaders to the civilian men who were balloted to serve in the county regiments. This equation of social with military rank may have simplified relations between militia officers – ‘Sir John or Sir Thomas must not be commanded by Squire any thing ’ – but there was potential for tension when militia and regular officers came into contact with each another. Militia officers were at once aware of their social superiority to their regular counterparts, and were sensitive to accusations of military inferiority. As a correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine complained: ‘The present method taken for chusing the officers, and ascertaining their rank, has no regard to the necessary qualifications or abilities of the person to be commissioned.’ In general, the militia was from the outset vulnerable to comparison with the regulars.

THE MOST DIFFICULT IDEAS to challenge are often those that are not explicitly articulated, but operate at the subterranean level of deep-rooted assumption. For all the recent emphasis on the need to free ourselves from the distortions of the narrowly national narrative, and recognise the intertwined, entangled, transnational, or even plain old-fashioned international dimensions of every society's past, the default setting for most historians seems to be the national perspective. Armies are perhaps particularly prone to this national approach. We tend to associate them with the nation state, national sentiment, and national identity. They act, especially in wartime, as a symbol of the nation. Historians of the British Army, over many generations, have reflected the general tendency to regard the British state's professional military forces as the embodiment of the nation and therefore as distinct and different from those of other states and nations.

Yet in the eighteenth century, at least, the British Army was as much a European as a British institution. It had much in common with, and was closely connected to, other European armies. Furthermore, in the right circumstances, its officers and men had little difficulty in appreciating their army's essential Europeanness. Unlikely though it may seem, we can even say that British soldiers possessed a European consciousness, based on occupational solidarity, which sat alongside their other senses of collective belonging. This chapter focuses mainly on the period 1740–93; from the middle of the eighteenth century until the time when Britain became involved in the French Revolutionary War. The case for the British Army's European character would probably be no less strong if earlier decades were examined. Recent work suggests that the argument may also hold good for the years after 1793.

Two important caveats need to be registered before the army's European features are analysed. The first is that the British military had some undeniably distinctive characteristics. Its control by the civil power, while not perhaps as absolute as some accounts suggest, marks it out from other European armies, many of which were clearly not constrained by constitutional limitations. From the middle of the century, the British Army was also more obviously committed to imperial theatres than most of its European counterparts…

ONE OF THE MORE COLOURFUL PORTRAYALS of the power of discipline in old-regime armies comes from the pen of Sir Michael Howard:

The significance of such views, presenting the eighteenth-century soldiery as a closely controlled and obedient lot, extends beyond the remit of old-regime military history. Social and cultural historians often see early-modern armies not only as disciplined but also disciplining forces which played a major role in bringing the European population under the closer and closer control of their respective states. This was a broad process which operated on a number of levels, but at its root lay the growing standardisation of social institutions and mores replacing tradition with regulation, informalities with formalities, compromise and negotiations with direct power and hierarchical dictates. Regular armies were not only the product of this development but also among its major promoters. However, the role of the military went beyond the coercion of those whose traditional lifestyle had fallen prey to the reforming zeal of the authorities. It has been argued that the disciplining of the soldiery enabled the social disciplining of the population at large. Their position as the most tightly controlled social institution in old-regime Europe allowed armies to become a testing ground for policies of social management and surveillance before they befell the rest of society, from the introduction of elementary education to a more regularised penal system.

Recent studies have usually taken a more nuanced view of social disciplining and growing state control, at least as far as civil society is concerned. Rather than being entirely coercive and imposed from above, it was largely based on negotiation and consent, often relying on intermediaries accepted by both the authorities and their subjects. The move towards greater uniformity was also a gradual one. To cite one example, contrary to the argument raised by Michel Foucault in his classic Discipline and Punish, the regularisation of the legal system in old-regime France was a slow and measured process, rather than the product of the relatively abrupt upheaval which took place in the end of the eighteenth century.