Not Rambo

They are unexceptional men, these nine old soldiers Philip Ziegler rounded up and interviewed at length at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, a particularly English institution for men of their sort. Through their eyes and their stories, the reader gets a different look at the 20th century, the English, their families and their army. Though they represent a dying empire, they are, in essence, Everyman or at least every soldier who ever wore a uniform in any country.

In “Soldiers: Fighting Men’s Lives, 1901-2001,” the storytelling is understated and matter-of-fact. Not a Rambo in this lot of what the British call “other ranks,” or enlisted men, though there are men here, including Albert Alexandre, who saw action in the trenches at Ypres and Passchendaele in World War I at the tender age of 16; and Thomas Parnell, who rode on the last British Army horse patrol into the Khyber Pass in August 1939; and Douglas Wright, who escaped Dunkirk to become a commando who raided behind enemy lines.

All nine of Ziegler’s soldiers had, in their twilight years, entered the old soldiers’ home. There they live a monastic life where their basic needs are basically met: A room so tiny it is called a berth, 5 feet by 9 feet. Three square meals a day. The comfort of military rules and military neighbors. They are trotted out once or twice a year on parade in their distinctive scarlet coats and tricorner hats, symbols of a lost empire.

How they ended up taking the king’s shilling is a story in itself. Most signed up to escape homes with too many children and not enough food, in neighborhoods where there was no other way to escape a brief brutal life in the coal mine. Poverty was the norm. They left as soon as they could, some signing up as “boy soldiers,” or apprentice soldiers, at 14 or 15, trading a life at home often so harsh that it made barracks life and the tender mercies of a tough sergeant major look good by comparison.

The women in their lives, be they mothers or wives, have nonspeaking, nonvoting parts in these life dramas, worn down or worn out by too many children and too much work and too little support and husbands who drink up what little money they earns. The wives put up with frequent moves, living with parents when no army quarters are available, and long separations. Small wonder the men of these stories are widowers or divorced.

The men do as the army tells them, even when it makes no sense. They are “rushed” out East to India or Burma at a time when that journey takes several weeks--only then to be “rushed” back to England. They are on occasion lost in transit, in a way that only armies can contrive, left dangling for weeks or months in some holding camp where they were never intended to have landed. Promotions are won and lost. Good guys can finish last.

The nine in this book serve in peacetime in India, Ceylon, Malaya, Hong Kong, Malta, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Aden, the Persian Gulf states, Libya, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Cameroons. They are the last guards of a fading empire. They are largely ignorant and contemptuous of the locals.

One is struck by how little the army, its officers or its NCOs tell them of just what is going on in the world, in the war, in the army or outside the gate of their posts. They soldier on, blindly obedient and proud of it. One is temporarily posted to a U.S. Army unit, where he is made terribly uneasy by the easy familiarity between officers and enlisted ranks.

They are uncomplaining souls, even when the army they love dumps them unprepared back into civilian life with a hearty handshake, a few quid and the thanks of a grateful nation.

In the end, faced with loneliness and failing health on the outside or signing up for a cell as a Chelsea pensioner, each votes for the familiar and comforting. Alwyn Holmes’ wife, Jean, once asked him what he would do if she died first and he became a lonely old man. “I won’t be a lonely old man,” he replied. “I’ll go back where I belong, to the army.” At the Royal Hospital Chelsea, they have reenlisted. They are with their own sort once more and, to a man, say they don’t mind spending the end of their lives with the same institution they began with.