Make war fun

His last words were ‘Damn thing went off’. The rifle volunteers were not boy-scouts for grown men but a serious military force, and having a grand time of it. We need them again.

Largely forgotten by popular culture, the volunteer movement was a major social movement of the nineteenth century. Technically they are still with us in the Army Reserve, but you would hardly know. It us nothing like the Good Old Days: in Queen Victoria’s time, a quarter of a million men from all walks of life all across the realm would finish work of an evening, get into uniform and go off to the drill hall with their pals. It was more sociable than the pub, and sober and with guns. In the summer, trainloads of volunteers would head off for a camp and exercises – the factory toiler now arrayed as an officer, and labourers, clerks, farmhands and civil servants becoming soldiers to a man.

It was a self-grown military movement: men gathered in their workplaces and their villages, forming their own military units unasked, with the excuse of an Act of Parliament unrepealed from Napoleon’s time – and when Boney’s nephew was crowned in 1852, it took on an urgency. Men in their thousands bought guns or whatever weapons they could get, elected officers and presented themselves in ready-made units to their Lord-Lieutenant.

Their task was simple: defend these islands against invaders. On the coasts and the hills stood a series of forts and artillery positions built by the Regulars – for invasion was a genuine concern with Europe restless, and the volunteers would be ready to fight, if the invasion had ever come.

The movement produced some cavalry units, artillery and others, but for the most part there were rifle companies. At first they had to supply their own uniforms and weapons. The best-armed were a company formed by workers at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Enfield, who could borrow from work. Eventually the government provided weapons but long seemed embarrassed about the whole thing, as it had not been their idea. In those early days, the rifle volunteers were a movement of the middle-class: no-one is fiercer than a shopkeeper defending his stock and bookdebts. Later, when some pay was provided, factory labourers joined. In uniform though, all class is gone, and in the volunteers a machinist could be an officer and a bank manager a private.

It was a social event, to be in the volunteers, or the men would not have kept signing up and staying on, sometimes into their eighties. I had at least one ancestor who was a volunteer, and was tickled by the informal chumminess of the cards he received calling him for the week’s drill.

The activities of the volunteers were well reported, celebrated in the press, and it was serious business. Occasionally accidents reminded them of the reality of what they were: the quote at the head of this piece was from an obituary in The Times, of a volunteer officer who died cleaning his pistol at a summer camp. Moors and heaths sprouted rifle ranges, even some pubs; drill halls sprung up in little towns; manoeuvres were held on the downs and moorlands; there were massed reviews in Hyde Park. Yet all this seems to have faded from the collective memory.

(This site has railed against the desk-bound clerks of the Ministry of Defence coming to outnumber the soldiers who are meant to be their purpose – there was a time though when they could be both: the Civil Service Rifles were a formidable unit. Perhaps no one should be employed in that department without knowing how to use a rifle and bayonet and to sleep under canvass in the winter.)

The volunteers were raised strictly for home service, but such a powerful force would inevitably be seen as having a wider role: several units volunteered en masse for Imperial Service against the Boers, and in the Great War, volunteers went to the trenches. Kitchener took a lesson from them, recruiting ‘pals’ units for the regular army, to keep the social bonds (until the reality of mass-slaughter meant splitting them up, as otherwise a town might be deprived of all its young men at a stroke).

The end of the Great War ended the volunteers as such. They were transformed instead into the Territorial Army. After the Russian Revolution, it was felt best to keep men from forming their own armed bands.

The Territorials continue – now as the Army Reserve, and they are fine soldiers.

The fun has gone out of it though. Once it was accepted that a keen man could call around his friends in factory or office to form a rifle company – it is the spirit we need again. Joining a fighting unit must be better than any cringe-inducing ‘bonding weekend’ – camaraderie is important in a workplace, but it could channeled be to a greater, shaded purpose, for the nation.

The world has grown darker – it is too horrid to think of war spreading as far as our islands, but watch what has happened to the Ukraine and we know that the destruction of war is reality, not history. If we need to know where we will find the men who will stand as a wall against the invader – look around. War preparation is the most serious business of the nation, but Britons find our strength amongst ourselves and our social bonds within the compass of the seas: we owe our allegiance to the King directly and not at the direction of bureaucracy, and we fight relentlessly when warfare is part of our social bond – so let us make it fun again.