Note: This book review was originally written for an academic reading course on “total war”. That conceptual focus is reflected in the review.
Total war as a concept requires, among its many facets, discussion of total mobilisation, which in turn requires insight into the men and women being mobilised for total war aims. Richard Holmes’s Soldiers contributes to that discussion by providing a social history of the British soldier, woven tightly around military history but centring the lives and structures of those who serve as contrasted to spotlighting the events they lived through. One aspect that Holmes highlights right from the beginning, is “not how much [the British soldier] has changed: but how little”. This is a meaningful statement to hinge the volume on. Conceptually, total war is best understood as a continuity, rather than a descriptor for a singular event or events. Holmes’s recognition that the centrepiece of fighting a total war – its manpower – must also be a continuity tracks well onto the framework and thus raises both the utility and the applicability of this book in the broader corpus of literature engaging with concepts of total war.
Holmes engages with the enduring nature of the volunteer as something with a longstanding history in the British army, which in turn evolved within the larger conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Highlighting the sociopolitical fallout of the English Civil War and the “no standing army” slogan of the Restoration, Holmes first links the experience of the civil war and its upending of the role of class in the armed forces to it impact on the officer corps. This is, namely, the emergence of the desire for the officer as gentleman – one of the reasons driving the purchase of commissions, as opposed to attaining a commission through a training college, and a key marker in the longstanding desire for a numerically limited and professionalised army (itself a concept that evolves over time). The class basis of the officer corps, he also notes, is also something inherently transformed by the need for expansion in manpower during the First World War, which shifted the social structure into one comprising nearly 60% of recruits from middle-class occupational groups.
The officer as gentleman is in truth a “title…given in England to all that distinguish themselves from the common sort of people by good garb, genteel air or good education, wealth or learning”. These are all qualities that do not need a specific event to exist. They describe a cultural phenomenon that manifests differently through Britain’s socioeconomic and political shifts, cementing it as something enduring that is made unique by the circumstances in which it emerges. An 18th century titled lord with a purchased commission and a 20th century middle-class university graduate from the officer training corps are not anomalies from the conflicts they fought in, but points on a continuity.
Returning to the notion of volunteers, Holmes’ segments on militias and on recruitment are highlights that engage with the emergence of the yeomanry and auxiliary corps like the Territorial Force, and on recruiting volunteers. Both, he notes, ultimately also play into the frame of total mobilisation during the World Wars, wherein the auxiliary corps and Territorial Force become absorbed into the broader armed forces, and wherein the cost of total war ultimately requires the volunteer nature of the British army – held on to tightly until 1916 – to ultimately require conscription in order to achieve Britain’s war aims.
Holmes also notes that the shrinking power of the monarchy had occurred in tandem with the growing power of the House of Commons, such as the evolution and establishment of a Ministry of Defence. He rightly asserts that this “increase of political control over the army” and the “growing authority of the Civil Service” were part of that wider development, and aptly links this to the two world wars as having “added their own weight to the process”, where “what happened on the battlefields was only an index of a much broader national effort”. This is notable as it ties the social shifts in Britain to its ability to wage total war. By roping control of the army into the broader national capacity of the legislative and executive branches, the army becomes one element of total defence alongside other sectors such as industry. Holmes’s chapter dedicated to women bolsters this notion of the interplay between the forces fighting at the front and those serving at home or in auxiliary forces – as war became more total, the interactions of women with a male-dominated sector of society also becomes more intertwined, until the present day when women may now serve as regular servicemembers.
Overall, Soldiers is a fascinating and detailed social history of the social structures of soldiering life that places it in the deep context of the military history it is intertwined with. It makes several meaningful links with concepts of total mobilisation that make it a unique addition to texts engaging with concepts of total war, even if on a more interdisciplinary tangent.