A bit of background

Bit of background to ‘Other Ranks’...

Part I:

The idea of making a Sound Installation on the subject of British ranking soldiers came to me back in the Summer of 2008.

I’d been reading Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books and had, amidst the interest and excitement of having some important historical events presented so very accessibly, developed a fascination with the daily miserable slog it must have been, trudging around France, Spain and Portugal in the early 19th Century. The Indian stories, which lead the chronology of the series but which, if I’m telling you right, were written and published last, as context for the later books, impressed me even more.

They set me thinking about what it might have felt like to go into an oldfashioned battle, far from home, with no RAF on-hand to whisk you off for 2 weeks R&R every 3 months, and only the most primitive of medical support, 19th Century kkit and officers who bought their right to decide your fate, based on their wealth and nothing else.

It also struck me that, much as I was always glad that Sharpe and Harper made it out alive, the massed slaughter of those battlefields represented, gripping fiction aside, the ending of thousands and thousands of very real lives, of unique human beings, each one of whom must, I thought and still think, have felt as lonely and frightened as any of us would in similar circumstances.

I followed the series through to Waterloo, when the sheer numbers began to overwhelm me.

Around that time I also got around to reading War And Peace, swiftly followed by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the latter of which contains a chapter on the battle of Waterloo which also impressed me deeply:

The author, writing in the mid 19th Century, recounts true living memory. He describes walking the battlefield, finding the marks of battle still apparent on the wooden gates of the chateau of Hougomont, and then reports firsthand accounts of the voices of the wounded, flung into the well in the yard at Hougomont, feebly crying through the night following the battle, for rescue which never came.

All this is, we believe and certainly hope, a million miles away from the experience of the modern British soldier. He is far-divorced even from the trenches of the First World War, which captured my imagination years before, when GCSE History sent me to the English department to discover Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen for the first time.

Over the years I’ve pursued interests spanning British prehistory, the Dark Ages, the Wars Of The Roses, the English Civil War and World War II. The military has never been my primary focus but all the human tales, historical and fictional, are woven with skirmishes, battles and wars; the memories of warfare are deeply embedded in our language, culture and psyche; this is our history.

(continued in Part II).