A building or group of buildings designed to provide accommodation for military personnel. In ancient and medieval times, barracks often formed part of, or were attached to, fortifications, housing the troops that manned them. For example, barracks were incorporated at intervals along the length of Hadrian's wall in northern England, and developed into permanent settlements.
For much of European history barracks were the exception rather than the rule, and soldiers were billeted in civilian lodgings or public houses. This was a generally unsatisfactory process, and barracks became increasingly common from the late 17th century, their construction paralleling and exemplifying the rise of standing armies. Barracks, like fortresses, were embodiments of a royal authority that their imposing interiors often reflected. Vauban's masterpiece, the citadel of Lille, contains stately barracks designed by a local architect, Simon Vollant, while the stern Fort George, in the Scottish Highlands, contains granite barrack blocks intended almost as much to impress as to provide accommodation.
Barracks lying outside fortresses were rarely built to resist formal attack, but were usually robust enough to provide security against riot and insurrection, and the siting and construction of barracks often formed part of a government's policy on the maintenance of order. In Second Empire Paris, for example, inner-city barracks were designated as key strong points from which troops could move to secure railway stations and other vulnerable points, while outlying barracks, like that at Vincennes, to the east, could provide quick-reaction forces, notably artillery, of proven effectiveness against barricades built on Baron Haussmann's new wide boulevards. Although there was little perceived risk of large-scale civil disorder in Victorian England, the barracks built to house the county regiments created by Cardwell's reforms in the 1870s were of a uniform pattern, and embodied lofty red-brick ‘keeps’ which still grin out across many country towns.
Barracks were designed as much to contain as to impress. Access was generally strictly supervised, with soldiers entering and leaving past a guardroom, which housed a small detachment of men on duty 24 hours a day, as well as cells to contain petty offenders and the inebriate. A sentry at the gate controlled access, ensuring that soldiers walking out into the town were properly dressed and those returning were fit for readmittance, as well as deterring girls—attracted by love or more pecuniary motives—hawkers, and the curious. Most barracks had a drill-square at their centre, surrounded by accommodation blocks, offices, storerooms, and, in armies like the British where officers messed in barracks rather than ate in restaurants outside, an officers' mess. The internal layout of barrack blocks was often a good deal less impressive than their imposing exteriors. Soldiers slept, often two to a bed, in large dormitories. Bucket sanitation (in the British army the vessel was neatly termed the ‘sip pot’) was common until at least the late 19th century. Initially dining rooms were uncommon: men messed in small groups in their rooms, with food collected from the cookhouse by one of their number. Recreation was at first limited or non-existent, but during the second half of the 19th century many armies were influenced by liberalizing officers and officials who sought to introduce canteens where men could supplement their food, and proper dining rooms were issue food could be eaten in relative comfort.
Barrack life (in some respects not wholly unlike prison life) emphasized that, as the sociologist Stanley Goffman maintains, the armies of the age were ‘total institutions’, in which men were subjected to a control which usually broke down social divisions and weakened (if it did not totally extinguish) external ties. A man's life was minutely supervised, by corporals who normally had a screened-off ‘bunk’ in the barrack room, watchful sergeants, and more remote officers. Privacy was scarce. Men were not allowed to ‘walk out’ until their training was well advanced, and they could dress smartly enough to ‘pass the guard’ on their way out. Confinement to barracks for a specified time was generally the lowest rung on the ladder of military punishments. It is small wonder that both the French and German armies offered ‘one-year volunteers’ (well-educated conscripts who served for a year and generally passed to the reserve as officers) the privilege of living out of barracks. It was not just soldiers who lived in barracks. Some states maintained paramilitary police (like the gendarmerie in France) whose status was underlined by the fact that they lived in barracks. When more conventional police were forced to live in barracks or fortified police stations, it was a sure sign, like the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Anglo-Irish war, that they were losing their grip on the civil community they needed to form part of.
Old-style barracks are inappropriate for the professional armies which are an increasing feature of the last third of the 20th century. A high level of social control is generally deemed unnecessary, certainly once basic training is complete. The retention of volunteer soldiers demands improved food and accommodation, and an increasing proportion of officers and NCOs are married, requiring married quarters or hirings outside barracks. If the barracks eventually shares the fate of the conscript army whose rise it accompanied, it will live on in memory and literature, with P. C. Wren's character Henri de Beaujolais learning the hard lessons of survival in the barracks of the Blue Hussars, and the haunting melody of Lili Marlene recalling heart-rending moments ‘underneath the lamp-light, by the barrack-gate’.
— Andrew Haughton/Richard Holmes
