British Army Uniform and the First World War

Men in Khaki

J. Tynan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137318312
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Jane Tynan offers new perspectives on the cultural history of the First World War by examining the clothing worn by British combatants on the western front. Khaki emerges as a significant part of war experience, which embodied gender, social class and ethnicity, impacted the tailoring trade and became a touchstone for pacifist resistance.

1

Introduction: Khaki and the First World War

In 2009, a new infantry camouflage pattern and kit was widely reported in the British media. The new Multi-Terrain Pattern, a flexible colour scheme devised in response to the diversity of terrain experienced by British soldiers, was the first major change to the uniform in forty years. Three years later a newspaper reported that British soldiers were unhappy with the new pattern. The various press stories emerging at the time concerning the clothing worn by soldiers in the field of battle suggest that uniform design forms part of an ongoing public discourse on the state of the armed forces. What soldiers wear is critical to their discipline, protection and morale, but their clothing also shapes the public image of the military.

Army clothing seems to embody all of the fears and anxieties we have about sending people to war. This book is about the politics of dressing soldiers and in particular, how clothing transformed men into combatants. I take uniform seriously to explore both what khaki service dress meant during the First World War and also what it has come to mean in the collective memory. Its most enduring image is the British soldier in khaki. What first appeared unremarkable became, by virtue of the scale and reach of the war, part of its visual and material legacy. This book asks how khaki came to constitute the public image of the British army and perhaps offers some insights into why it was subsequently adopted by various armies to become the standard design for modern military uniform.

It is important to return to where khaki started and why the British army originally adopted this drab colour for their uniforms. There are a number of stories about the genesis of khaki but most point to India in the nineteenth century. A scholarly journal from the 1930s offers a detailed account of Sir Harry Lumsden’s first attempts to create khaki; as a lieutenant at Peshawar, he raised the Corps of Guides in 1846, and when he was ordered to ensure that his troops were ‘loosely, comfortably and suitably clad,’ he bought up white cotton cloth at the bazaar at Lahore, and as the story goes, ‘this white cotton cloth was taken down to the river bank; there, first being soaked in water, mud was rubbed into it, which had the effect of making the cloth very much the colour of the plains around. The stuff was then dried and ironed, and cut into loose blouses and pants as a uniform for the Guides.’¹ This crude camouflage caught on and in 1848 Hodson, then second in command and adjutant of the Guides, wrote home to his brother about selecting ‘drab’ uniforms and requested that he send enough of the material to clothe 900 men. In 1850 Sir Charles Napier observed that the Guides were ‘the only properly dressed light troops in India.’²

Hodson was keen on this lightweight uniform of khaki colour for the regiment, which he declared would ‘make them invisible in a land of dust.’³ Denis Winter also dates khaki back to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 but claims that the former uniform was boiled in water with mazari palm to make it less conspicuous.⁴ While various accounts suggest that khaki was first used in battle in India, it was widely adopted for the service dress of British troops when changes in military technology gave soldiers in camouflage clothing tactical advantage.⁵ For the Indian Mutiny drab shades were adopted by two British regiments, not just for camouflage purposes but also to lighten the soldier’s kit, as more practical colours meant that men could carry fewer garments: ‘The 52nd dyed their white uniforms before leaving Sialkot, and the 61st before leaving Ferozepore to join the army in front of Delhi ... other British regiments who arrived at Delhi in their white uniforms soon followed this example and stained them khaki.’⁶ As Friedrich Carl Theis in his 1903 book on khaki dyeing observed, khaki was not one colour but described certain shades of drab that varied from ‘grey to olive, and from olive to brown.’⁷ Whoever was responsible for the genesis of khaki knew that clothes that adopted the colour of the landscape would be infinitely more useful to soldiers than the bright colours that had made them so conspicuous.

The root of the word khaki is thought to come from the Hindi and Urdu word for ‘earth’ or ‘dust.’ What started as a practical alternative to white became so much more; as Hodson suggested, khaki became the solution to the dangers of visibility on the battlefield. Drab shades for battledress were a success in India, and between the years 1860 and 1870 a khaki field service uniform was gradually introduced into the Indian army.⁸ In Britain, when the army became concerned with visibility, they looked to the Indian experience; an 1893 report finds the Secretary of State directing commanding officers of regiments at home to give the new ‘khakee’ colour a trial.⁹ By the late nineteenth century, in an effort to standardize appearance the British army moved away from decorative uniforms. This was partly a response to the success of functional uniforms, which were becoming part of civilian life.¹⁰ Uniforms were critical to the various systems whereby military and civilian organizations were disciplined and controlled. Khaki was a response to surveillance technologies and tactics of dispersal; on the battlefield armies strategically employed inconspicuous colours for camouflage.¹¹ As changing technologies brought surveillance techniques into ever greater prominence, drab colours came into their own in battles fought by British soldiers.

As this book will show, khaki reflected the modernizing of the British army in the early twentieth century. Throughout this book I use the term modernity to describe a particular form of social, temporal and technological change in early twentieth-century Britain. The concept of modernity is key to making sense of changes in the relationship between war and society, changes that are reflected in the move from military spectacle to uniforms made not only for utility but also for mobilizing the mass production of army clothing. One of the central arguments of this book is that khaki embodied changes within the early twentieth-century British army, changes that became paradigmatic for cultural shifts taking place in the wider society. As the century progressed, armies all over the world took up khaki. If new uniform designs reflected changing approaches to soldiering, did khaki constitute a modern military appearance?

Modernity is a contested term. For Marshall Berman, it has three distinct phases, culminating in the 1900s with the complete integration of various processes of modernization.¹² A modern society has been described as one that invests in reason and rationality, is organized around capitalism and state regulation, has faith in progress and is defined by mass systems and surveillance.¹³ On the other hand, modern society also generates new conditions of production and consumption. This study of the First World War British army uniform engages the contradictions of modernity: on the one hand the drive for increased standardization and on the other the impulse to practice individual creativity and consumer choice. It asks how the circumstances of the First World War contributed to khaki’s establishment as the modern form of military uniform.

An important aspect of the introduction of khaki was that it marked the demise of military plumage, a traditional strategy to daunt the enemy on the battlefield. With its drab colours and functional features, khaki integrated the uniform with modern warfare, a design characterized by economy, comfort and convenience. As Thomas Abler argues, khaki, along with other modern innovations in military clothing, emerged for military tasks required on the frontier of the empire due to the demands made on soldiers to be mobile and capable of individual action.¹⁴ Visibility became a new kind of problem in battle, particularly when the smokeless magazine rifle emerged in the 1890s, which gave a soldier the advantage that black powder would no longer obscure his field of vision.¹⁵ If the red coat symbolized the military techniques of spectacle, did khaki service dress respond to new technologies of surveillance? Did khaki demand a new visual iconography? Early in the First World War a 1914 article in the Illustrated London News declared that ‘The Thin Khaki Line Repels the Corps d’Élite of the German Army,’ an awkward attempt to describe the new inconspicuous battledress in the language of the traditional warrior ethic.¹⁶

Subsequent chapters explore khaki as a design that embodied a new modernity and challenged traditional ideas about military masculinities. The book examines whether clothing worn by the British army, in its first modern incarnation, visualizes military bodies and events in specific ways. Visuality is, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, a militarized technique to gain control over people, a ‘technique of colonial and imperial practice, operating both at “home” and “abroad,” by which power visualizes History to itself.’¹⁷ In warfare, visuality is a powerful technique, particularly in a media age, but is not limited to the regime of images. Rather, warfare is driven by capacities to visualize, which are in turn linked to the desire to gain authority over others. In her study of images in war culture, Dora Apel argues that the contest of images is ‘the continuation of war by other means.’¹⁸ As this book will show, in the First World War, images played a critical role in the representation and experience of war, but particular images of uniform reveal cultural processes that made men and ranked them for military service.

Development of uniform

It is necessary to trace developments in uniform that led to the emergence of khaki. In their modern incarnation, uniforms are strongly associated with the rationalizing of institutional practices in the mid-nineteenth century, when military uniforms took on a functional appearance. However, the British approach to military dress originates in the 1400s, according to James Laver, who argues that uniforms became increasingly standardized up to the twentieth century.¹⁹ Uniform dressing started with the liveries of feudal lords, for whom clothing advertised allegiance through house colours. In the Napoleonic wars British soldiers were wearing uniforms that were extravagant and decorative, but following the Crimean War, army modernization saw a review of uniforms. By the late nineteenth century, the British army was transitioning from red to khaki uniforms.

Between 1869 and 1874, there were several major reforms to modernize the British army, including the abolition of the commission purchase system and the reorganization of regimental structure. But there were significant changes to uniform, including the replacement of traditional regimental facings, so that colours signified country. In 1897 khaki was adopted as the universal dress for all British troops overseas.²⁰ Khaki came to embody new approaches to warfare and in the First World War new ideas about the citizen soldier. British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki is very much about the ordinary soldier’s war, which for Denis Winter was made up of ‘small details and large emotions.’²¹ One of the aims of this book is to consider how people responded to and interpreted khaki clothing, to determine how it became a significant part of the culture of First World War Britain. The decision to focus on uniforms worn during the First World War gave me an opportunity to consider khaki in the context of a large conflict – during the war over six million soldiers wore forms of khaki dress. This book consciously adopts the concept of culture to consider whether the analysis of uniform clothing can enhance understanding of the impact of war on civil society.

The war was waged for just over four years, and from very early both sides were caught in the trench system. By November 1914 there were unimaginable losses; standards for recruits were lowered, suggesting the urgent need to replenish the army in the first year. In the second attack at Ypres (1915), the Germans used gas against the British, and the September battle of Loos added 60,000 British casualties to the war’s total. At this point new volunteers were no longer sufficient to replace the dead. October saw the Derby scheme come into operation, anticipating the introduction of the Military Service Act in 1916. The Somme was the final confirmation that the war was on a scale not seen before, and the loss of life and limb caused people to question the wisdom of continuing. By the time the war ended, the sense of purpose that had characterized images early in the war were a memory. There is a huge literature on how the war was fought, but in this book the actual fighting is a backdrop to the analysis of cultural meanings created by the war experience. The book is very much shaped by the images created by the trenches, the tragic losses and the warfare, but the discussion considers when and where events were mediated and by whom.

The research for this book is deeply influenced by cultural studies approaches to history that seek meaning in the most ordinary practices and make close readings of a range of sources. Anthropologist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: Khaki and the First World War1
• Part I   Making Men
• Part II   Ranking Men
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index