Bettany
I'm off to Yorkshire, Wakefield to be precise, to see some recruitment records for the militia. The militia was responsible for defending the country at home. It was only called upon in times of crisis. Joining the militia could be a bit of a lottery. Not quite conscription, but hardly voluntary either.

What would have been the first point of contact with the general public?

John Spencer
The first thing was the militia census form. Now this is effectively an early form of census paper that was delivered to the head of each household for him to list, quite simply, all residents in his house. Typical form filling style, he'd begun to fill in the wrong section first and had to cross it out and go back.

Bettany
And there's a whole entry completely scribbled out here. What would that have been?

John
That was actually the head of the household, John, who actually wrote his own name in under the 'liable to serve' section, despite of the fact that he was 53 and actually exempt from service.

Bettany
So once you know that you are eligible, as most of these names are, then your name will go into a ballot.

John
That's right and we have a surviving set of ballot papers here which quite simply are the names of all the eligible persons written on slips of paper, to be drawn by the parish constable.

Bettany
It's extraordinary that these have survived because they are such flimsy little things.

John
Yes. I presume they were recycled. This ballot was held every few years so I suppose once you've written the names it makes sense to keep them. So once you were chosen by ballot, the time would come when this was delivered to you, if you're an officer, or the summons would go round to the other ranks.

Bettany
"All men enrolled to serve in the local militia" - you had to have evening dress.

John
Officers only. Officers will turn up with their light grey pantaloons and half boots which, at the bottom, tells you exactly where to buy your half boots - from Mr Metcalf's shop, who will sell them to you for the mere price of 13 shillings a pair, obviously a bargain.

Bettany
Fantastic document. However, in war time, armies were reluctantly accepted as a necessity. It would drag men together to fight a campaign and only survivors were discharged at the end. Men joined up as volunteers. That was the system. And it had always been difficult persuading them.

In the 1700s and 1800s it was a familiar sight to see the recruiting officer in the market square, cajoling local youths with promises of drink, adventure and the king's shilling. Haphazard as this was, by the Napoleonic wars, the army had become both more professional and surprisingly more literate. For the first time there were personal and unofficial records of battles, some of which proved extremely useful to a man called William Sidebourne, when he set about constructing a model of Waterloo.

So would the public have got to see depictions of battles like these?

Julian Humphrys
Well they would. This was the sort of thing that people went to go and see in those days, you know its like Star Wars of the time. They'd even make a special journey to come and look at things like this. Actually there should be 150,000 figures, but even Sidebourne couldn't run to that so what he did was he did it on a 1:2 scale. That made the figures twice as big as they should be so they occupy the right amount of space, although obviously they are a bit high.

Bettany
And who was this Sidebourne character?

Julian
Well, he was a soldier himself. He doesn't seem to have seen any active service as such but he came from a military family.

Bettany
And how did he gather the information?

Julian
He got permission from Lord Hill to send a circular letter out to surviving officers, asking a certain number of questions. It's a printed letter - in this case a chap called Murray who had been in the 18th Hussars, living in Wimbledon I think at the time. The key question is: What was the particular formation of (in this case it's the 18th Hussars) at the moment, about 7pm? He says to Sidebourne, considering the smoke, noise, excitement, all absorbing performance of duty, and ever varying instance of battle, those engaged can give by no means a lucid account of what it is.

Bettany
Are there any details on here of actual action that took place?

Julian
Where he can be, he's quite precise about what happened. His answer here: The formation of the 18th Hussars was three squadrons in line (a squadron was a sub unit of the whole regiment). Its left to the road, its right to the 10th Hussars. I think it shows you that there was a lot more space on these battlefields than you would perhaps first suspect. It's quite a lot of marching, marching, to and fro. But it's also evidence of the huge interest that Waterloo provoked at the time, the impact it had on society.

Bettany
Dominic and Rupert arrive at the Public Record Office. Having looked through Vere's personal family records, they want to see his official papers. Of particular interest if his medical file, revealing Vere's problems with a persistent cough, both in France and later in Turkey. The doctor clearly thought that the TB was all due to the war.

Dominic
It says "I consider his present condition attributable to active service", presumably in France, although that possibly could refer to his time in Turkey as well.

Bettany
William Spencer offers his help. He has brought the citation for Vere's military cross.

William
"He showed the greatest courage and response under heavy shell fire. At great personal risk he went out to the assistance of an officer who had been wounded and also a wounded man."

Dominic
It doesn't specifically say that he gave his gas mask to his sergeant.

Bettany
But could the wounded man have been his sergeant. William explains that citations don't always record all the information received.

William
They selected parts of it, what they thought were the most salient parts to put into the public domain. To say this is what this individual officer did and we are giving him a military cross for it.

Dominic
Given that, its possible that he did do it and its just not mentioned.

William
Quite possibly.

Dominic
So its not particularly historical but I think it happened. You just sort of get the impression from what you read of this man that he might have done.

Bettany
Perhaps Vere did do it, or was the loss so great, particularly when Vere had survived the full horror of the war, that his family needed to make him into a tragic hero. He was after all the last of the Bennet Stanfords, the boy who had shown so much promise, now dead at 28.

World War I took the lives of more British soldiers in battle than any war in history. By November 1918, three quarters of a million men, one tenth of the British Expeditionary Force, lay dead. When there weren't enough volunteers, men had to be forced to fight. The National Registration Act of 1916 was a survey of all those eligible to serve, and two million men were subsequently conscripted. It was the end of old style recruitment.

In the future though we probably won't need conscription. With advanced military technology, modern warfare requires small numbers of highly trained professionals, rather than cannon fodder. And with the development of communication technology we know a lot more about war. Faxes can be sent to us from the thick of the fighting.

The truth is there will always be different accounts, differing memories. Wars in the 21st century will provide an embarrassment of riches for historians, and a mass of papers and videos and disks. It's a reminder of Wellington's belief that there never can be an official version of warfare on which everyone agrees.

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Content last updated: 03/04/2006

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