Richards Old Soldier Sahib

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-910901-54-0
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

'...A remarkable and fascinating account...' --Phil Carradice, BBC From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir Old Soldiers Never Die, Old Soldier Sahib is Frank Richards' account of his experiences as a Royal Welch Fusilier in India and Burma at the dawn of the 20th century.

Frank Richards was born in 1883 in Monmouthshire. Orphaned at nine years old, he was brought up by his aunt and uncle in the industrial Blaina area, and went on to work as a coal miner throughout the 1890s before joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1901. A veteran soldier who served in British India and many areas of the Western Front, he wrote his seminal account of the Great War from the standpoint of the common soldier, Old Soldiers Never Die, in 1933. This was followed by Old Soldier Sahib, a memoir of his time serving in British India, in 1936. He died in 1961.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Frank

Leseproben

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 eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and there are one or two miserably sentimentalized accounts of him by Victorian authors – for example, Dickens’ Private Richard Doubledick. Perhaps the best miniature portrait of him that survives is contained in the first stanza of Sir Francis Doyle’s Private of the Buffs. According to the note which accompanies the poem, the private was No. 2051 Private John Moyse, and he and some Sikhs “having remained behind with the grog-carts,” during an incident in the 1860 campaign in China, “fell into the hands of the Chinese.” They were ordered to kow-tow before a Tartar governor. The Sikhs obeyed, but “Moyse refused to prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive and was immediately knocked upon the head and his body thrown on a dunghill.”

Last night, among his fellow roughs,

He jested, quaffed and swore,

A drunken Private of the Buffs

Who never looked before;

Today, beneath the foeman’s frown

He stands in ELGIN’s place,

Ambassador from Britain’s Crown

And type of all her race.

Poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught…

The poem deteriorates here, but the point has been well made. Elgin, by the way, was British Envoy to China at the time (and afterwards Viceroy of India) and the Buffs are the East Kent Regiment, so called from the buff-facings on their uniform.

But when did Thomas Atkins ever publish any intimate statement about himself? Or how could he? He was an unlettered man and even if he had a gift for story-telling and could find an amanuensis, the sort of story that he had to tell would not have been considered polite material for publication. Occasionally a sergeant or sergeant-major wrote an account of his own part in some campaign – one Sergeant Lamb, for example, of the Twenty-Third Foot (the Royal Welch Fusiliers) has left a valuable record of his service in the American War of Independence. But the questions that we should like to ask about the way the troops lived in peace and war are never answered in such works; and the language is usually more studied and frigid, even, than the language of officer-historians.

Rudyard Kipling’s Soldiers Three was a literary surprise. He seemed somehow to have won the authority of Thomas Atkins to make on his behalf the first public revelation of barrack-room life in the East, with all his private joys and sorrows and sins laid out as for kit-inspection. A good deal of what Kipling wrote was interesting and accurate; a good deal was necessarily in the vein that he afterwards exploited in “Thy Servant a Dog” – experimental intuition of the feelings of a poor dumb friend; a good deal was fantasia. His Privates Ortheris, Learoyd and Mulvaney are, we feel, far closer to the truth than Dickens’s Private Doubledick, but they are clearly not the real Thomas Atkins. It was impossible that they should be. Kipling was, in the first place, a civilian and never lived a barrack-room life himself; next, he was a journalist with the journalist’s temptation to improve on a good story; and, lastly, he wrote the book at a time when nearly all the best stories that he must have picked up in conversation with old soldiers and quite all the swear-words that embellished them were still considered unprintable. What “ruddy” and “blushing” and “perisher” were to the real swear-words, Kipling’s amended stories were to the originals.

Now, unexpectedly, Private Frank Richards, who happens to belong to the same regiment as did Sergeant Lamb and the original Private Thomas Atkins, has supplied the very document that has been so long missing from the archives. It is an old-fashioned British soldier’s own record of service, written in his own language, unimproved and uncensored: “I, Private Thomas Atkins, of His Majesty’s Twenty-Third Regiment of Foot …” The words “His Majesty’s” are not idle. “Our Royal Family was always popular with the rank and file,” Richards reports.

The word “uncensored” reminds me of the time that I first became aware of Richards’ talents as a writer: it was in trenches, two days after the Battle of Loos, in September, 1915. He was a signaller in my company, and we had both been lucky not to be killed: the Battalion had lost heavily in an attack against good German troops, posted behind uncut barbed wire. There had also been a number of gas-casualties from our own gas, which was being used for the first time: it was altogether a bad show. I was now censoring the company letters, as usual a dull task: “This comes leaving me in the pink which I hope it finds you. We are having a bit of rain now. I expect you will have read in the papers of this latest do. I have lost a few good pals but was lucky myself. Fags are always welcome, and also socks.” Seldom any more than that, and signed “ever your loving husband,” or “ever your respectful son.” Then I came on a long letter addressed to someone in Wales and giving a detailed, accurate and grimly joking account of what had really happened – the uncut wire, the bungling of the gas, the casualties, the strange behaviour of the Scottish troops on our flank, the readiness of our own men to continue the suicidal attack, had not Major Charlie Owen, the Adjutant, in temporary command, sworn angry oaths and called it off.

I handed the letter to a regular officer (one of the very few left) who was sharing the dug-out with me, “Can I pass this?” I asked.

He read it through. “The man ought to be crimed, really. But every word is true, and the official communiqué will be all lies, and people at home ought to know what really happened. You know this Richards, of course? – a good man. The best signaller we’ve got, and the oldest soldier in the company – fifteen years’ service. Here, I’ll pass it myself.” He scribbled his initials on the envelope.

I was in the Battalion with Richards in 1915, in 1916 (when I was wounded during our capture of High Wood), and early in 1917; after which I was invalided home for good. Richards, who had been with the first troops who arrived in France after the declaration of War, brought off a twenty-thousand to one chance: he stuck it out until the Armistice, never missing a battle, never getting wounded, never applying for...