The British Army from Within

by Evelyn Charles Vivian

An illustration of this will serve far better than mere statement of the fact. It is well known that for years past there has been some difficulty in obtaining a sufficiency of officers for cavalry regiments, but what is not so well known is that, when a troop of cavalry is short of a lieutenant to lead it at drill and assume responsibility for its working, the troop-sergeant takes command and control of the troop. At the best, the pay of the troop-sergeant cannot be reckoned at more than four shillings a day, and on that amount of salary—twenty-eight shillings a week—he is given charge and control of somewhere about thirty men, together with horses, saddlery, and other Government property to the value of not less than £1800. For the safety and good order of this amount of property he is almost entirely responsible, as well as being charged with the superintendence, instruction, and control of the thirty men or more who comprise the troop under his command.

The fact is that the world has moved forward tremendously during the past thirty or forty years, while, except for small and inadequate changes in the rates of pay, the Army has stood still. Labour conditions have altered in every way, and the cost of living has increased, forcing up the wage rate. The Army has taken note of none of these things, but has gone on, as regards pay and allowances, in the way of forty years ago. The necessity for an advertising campaign proved that the old ways were beginning to fail, and efforts were being made to overcome the shortage of men without increasing the rates of pay—vain efforts, if statistics of the amount of recruiting done before and after the beginning of the advertising campaign count for anything.

We may leave these larger considerations to come down to a view of the interior working of a unit, its pay, feeding, and general life. All arrangements as regards pay for infantrymen are managed by the colour-sergeants of the companies, while in the cavalry and artillery the squadron or battery quartermaster-sergeants have control of the pay-sheets. These non-commissioned officers are charged with the business of drawing weekly the amount of pay required by their respective companies, squadrons, or batteries, and paying out the same to the men under the supervision of the company, squadron, or battery officers. The presence of the officer at the pay-table is a nominal business in most cases, and the non-commissioned officer does all the work, while in every case he is held responsible for any errors that may occur. Each man is given a stated weekly rate of pay, and at the end of each month there is a general settling up, at which the accounts of each man are explained to him; he is told what debts he has incurred to the regimental tailor, the bootmaker, or for new clothing that he has been compelled to purchase to make good deficiencies; in every unit each man is charged two or three pence a month—and sometimes more—by way of barrack damages, which includes the repair of broken windows, etc., and altogether the compulsory stoppages from pay generally amount to not less than two shillings per man per month.

The system of pay is a complicated one. As a bed-rock minimum there is a regular rate of pay of a shilling and a penny a day for an infantryman, and a penny or twopence a day more for the other arms of the service. On to this is added the messing allowance of threepence a day, which is spent for the men in supplementing their ration allowance of food, and never reaches them in coin at all; there is a clothing allowance, which goes to defray the expense attendant on the renewal of articles of attire; there is yet another allowance for the upkeep of clothing and kit; there is the proficiency pay to which each man becomes entitled after a certain amount of service, and which consists of varying grades according to the musketry standard and character of the man; this ranges from fourpence to sixpence a day; and then there is badge pay, which adds a penny or twopence a day to old soldiers’ pay so long as they behave themselves. The colour-sergeant or quartermaster-sergeant has to keep account of all these small items, and it is small matter for wonder that many a worried officer or non-com., puzzling his brains over the intricacies of a pay-sheet, expresses an earnest wish that the whole complicated system may be swept away, and a straightforward rate of pay for each man substituted.

The Army Pay Corps, a non-combatant branch of the service, is charged with the business of auditing and keeping accounts straight, and this corps forms the final court of appeal for all matters connected with the pay of the soldier. The Royal Warrant for Pay, a bulky volume published annually, is the manual by which the Pay Corps is guided to its decisions, and from which the harassed colour-sergeant or quartermaster-sergeant derives inspiration for his work.

In all units serving at home, and in most of those serving abroad, a system of messing is established regimentally to supplement the ration allowance. Rations for the soldier, by the way, consist in England of one pound of bread and three-quarters of a pound of meat with bone per day, and all else must be bought out of pay and messing allowance. In colonial stations the ration allowance is enlarged to include certain vegetables, and in India the scale is still more liberal, but it is obvious that the English ration of bread and meat is not sufficient for the needs of the soldier, nor will the official messing allowance of threepence per day per man altogether compensate for ration deficiencies. Beyond doubt, however, the provision of necessaries has been brought to a very fine art in the Army, and, with an efficient cook-sergeant in charge of the regimental cookhouses, and capable caterers to supervise purchases for the messing account, with an allowance of fourpence a day per man the rank and file can have a sufficiency of plain, wholesome food.

The sergeant-cook in charge of the cookhouses of each unit must have passed through a course at the Aldershot school of cookery before he can undertake the duties of his post, but he is the only trained cook in each unit. Men are chosen as company cooks or squadron cooks haphazard, and often with too little regard to their fitness for their posts. In spite of all disadvantages, though, the average of cooking in the Army is good, especially when one considers the unpromising material with which the cooks have to deal. The contract price for Army meat is not half that paid per pound by the civilian buyers; it is, of course, all foreign meat that is supplied in normal times.

While the single men of the Army draw their meat supplies daily, married quarters’ rations are drawn on stated days, and, as the majority of the occupants of the married quarters are non-commissioned officers and their wives, it follows naturally that, in getting their exact ration with regard to weight, they are given every consideration with regard to the quality of meat cut off from the lump. On married quarters’ days the troops get a surprisingly small allowance of meat and a surprisingly large allowance of bone, for the regulation governing supply enacts that “three-quarters of a pound of meat with bone” shall be allowed for each soldier. That “with bone” may mean that two-thirds of the allowance or more is bone, though the soldier has in this matter as well as in others the right of complaint if he considers that he is being subjected to injustice in any way. The quality of meat supplied, and its correct quantity, is supposed to constitute one of the cares of the orderly officer of the day, for the orderly officer, together with the quartermaster or the representative of the latter, is supposed to attend at the issue of rations of both bread and meat.

In this connection a word regarding the duties of the orderly officer will not be out of place. These duties are undertaken by the lieutenants and second lieutenants of each unit, who take turns of a day apiece as “orderly officer of the day.” It has already been remarked that an officer does not really begin to count in the life of a unit until he has attained to the rank of captain and to the experience gained by such length of service as makes him eligible for captaincy. In no one thing does this fact become so clear as the way in which the duty of orderly officer of the day is performed in the majority of units. It happens as a rule that a lieutenant performs his turn of orderly conscientiously and well; at times, however, it happens that a subaltern, impatient at the fiddling duties involved in the turn of orderly, regards complaints on the part of the men as trivial and annoying, neglects to see that real causes of grievance are properly remedied, and lays the foundations of deep dislike for himself on the part of the men of the unit. One of the duties falling to the orderly officer is that of visiting the dining-rooms of the regiment or battalion and inquiring in each room if the men have any complaints to make with regard to the quality or quantity of the food supplied. If any complaint is made, it should be at once investigated, and, if found justifiable, remedied.

But the subaltern doing orderly duty far too often does not know—because he has not troubled to learn—the way to set about remedying a just complaint; a very common form of reply to a complaint by the men is, “I will see about it,” and that is all that the men ever hear, while they are careful never to make a complaint to that particular officer again, since they know he is not to be depended on. The attitude of some junior officers towards the men making a complaint is at times one of suspicion; the officer seems to imagine that the man is doing it for amusement, and not until he has grown a little, and incidentally passed out from the rank in which he takes his turn as orderly officer, does he come to understand that men only make complaints to their officers about things which are absolutely beyond their own power to remedy. Frivolous or unjustifiable complaints, when proved to be such, are very heavily punished, and consequently men abstain as a rule from making them.