Veterans is a term more used in the USA than in Britain to describe people who have served in the armed forces. The USA celebrates 11 November (Armistice Day in Britain and the Commonwealth) as Veterans' Day to honour all men and women who have served in the US armed forces, without implying that they have seen active service. Those who have are to be found in the organizations called VFW (veterans of foreign wars). In Britain, the term ‘ex-service’ is used to denote a person who has served in the armed forces and ‘veterans’ refers only to those who have been involved in campaigns. In battles through the ages, the numbers and deployment of veterans—that is, soldiers with previous combat experience—has very often been the deciding factor, but the focus of this entry is on what happened to them afterwards.
In the ancient world, a veteran did not necessarily have a special status within society. Military service in ancient Greece was seen as a mark of manhood as all free men were required to serve their city state. Thus veterans were neither unusual nor considered different to other citizens. Roman noblemen considered successful service with the army as an important route for a political career and imperial Rome, with its standing army of Legions, did accord veterans a special status after serving their statutory 30 years. Completion of service in the army could confer the rights of citizenship on the veterans and such old soldiers were often settled on farms in border regions where they were expected to provide stability to the area.
Throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, veterans did not expect or receive special treatment, but ex-soldiers with military experience could have an influence upon their societies. In the 1450s and 1460s, the large numbers of veterans of the Hundred Years War who returned to England had a destabilizing effect on the country and provided a ready supply of fighting men during the Wars of the Roses.
The same destabilizing effect was felt in Europe during the French wars of religion and the Thirty Years War in the 17th century. However, the English parliament's treatment of the New Model Army after the British civil wars provides the clearest example of the problems for veterans in peacetime. With the war over, parliament had no need for the army and no longer wished to pay the large sums necessary to keep the army together. This caused enormous resentment among the soldiers who demanded better treatment from the government and was instrumental in provoking the army's intervention in politics. Governments have invariably been suspicious of veterans as men trained for war who seem to have no place in a more settled society once the firing stops. As Kipling wrote later in Tommy (see Atkins, Tommy):
‘It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it's “Saviour of 'is country” when the guns begin to shoot.’
The development of proper standing armies in the latter part of the 17th century brought about a minor change in the status of veterans. Most European monarchs set up military hospitals to care for veterans of exceptional service and loyalty. Louis XIV of France established the Hôtel des Invalides while Charles II established the Royal Hospital Chelsea for old soldiers and the Greenwich Hospital for old sailors in Britain.
However, the fate of most veterans during the 18th and 19th centuries was to be returned to an unsympathetic civilian society with no assistance from the government. After the Napoleonic wars, the large numbers of men discharged from the services caused the British government much alarm in a period of radical discontent, while the clamour of veterans of his Grande Armée was a major factor in Napoleon's decision to attempt to regain his throne in 1815 during the Hundred Days.
The aftermath of the American civil war saw the development of some of the first powerful veterans' organizations. The Grand Army of the Republic, established in 1866, became a strident voice within the Republican Party until the turn of the century. By ‘waving the bloody shirt’ the Grand Army of the Republic demanded generous pensions for war veterans and often swung the outcome of elections in the northern states. Although not limited to Confederate veterans, the Ku Klux Klan also picked at the scabs of the civil war, much to the detriment of the social and political development of the South.
However, it was WW I, involving as it did millions of men who fought for their nations and wider ideals, which really altered the status of veterans within societies across the world. The veterans' organizations established after 1918 derived great strength from the huge numbers of veterans demobilized, and the great sacrifices made by each nation's manhood made it difficult for governments to ignore the many grievances of veterans on their return to a bleak post-war world.
Thus, the inter-war period saw the first mass organizations of veterans. In the USA the American Legion, formed in 1919 by veterans who had fought in France, became a powerful political voice for the fair treatment of returned soldiers. The same was true in France of a number of competing organizations, all of which demanded better treatment for French veterans. The British Legion was founded in 1921 out of a number of rival organizations and, although it never became as powerful politically as its sister organizations in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, it nevertheless became a major social movement which worked for the unemployed and disabled veterans, widows, and orphans left as a result of the war. The British Legion enshrined, as did all veterans' organizations worldwide, the comradeship which soldiers had felt during their service and worked to increase the meagre pensions allotted to veterans after the war.
The British Legion adopted the Flanders poppy as the symbol for its main fund-raising event, thus the anniversary of the Armistice became Poppy Day, and this meant that the organization became intimately connected with the rituals of remembrance, the powerful emotional response of remembering the sacrifice and loss of WW I. Many pilgrimages to the battlefield memorials and cemeteries of the war were organized by veterans' groups as one way to come to terms with the grief caused by war. In Australia and New Zealand, veterans' organizations play a crucial role in Anzac Day, which remembers the contribution of their countries' troops in the two world wars.
However, it was German and Italian veterans' movements after WW I which had the greatest influence on world events. Italian fascism began among dissatisfied Italian veterans, and Benito Mussolini used their support for his dramatic ‘March on Rome’ in 1922 when he seized power. In Weimar Germany, veterans' groups assumed considerable political importance, with the right-wing Stalhelm and republican Reichsbanner both contributing to the increasing political violence within the country. Hitler derived a great deal of strength from disaffected WW I veterans and the Nazis used the idea of the Frontkampfer (a veteran who has been at the front) as a powerful political rallying cry.
One of the most idealistic elements of veterans' organizations after WW I was their belief in the idea of the ‘Brotherhood of the Trenches’. Many veterans believed that all soldiers who had fought in the war—even on opposing sides—shared a special bond and could work together for peace to ensure that such a terrible war never happened again. While the many meetings between veteran movements in the 1930s did not secure world peace, the idea of a special bond between fighting men is still a powerful concept even today.
After WW II, the importance of the special needs of veterans was recognized in proper planning for the reintegration of fighting men back into society. The GI Bill in the USA was the most famous of such programmes which offered veterans job training, education, grants for businesses, and other help in establishing a stable civilian life. Similar measures enacted in Britain and elsewhere proved that veterans had become an important factor in government planning. Unfortunately the Veterans' Administration in the USA became a byword for corruption and inhumanity only rivalled by the bureau set up to deal with the Native Americans, which had a head start of nearly a century.
The treatment of Vietnam veterans demonstrated that the traditional suspicion of returned soldiers could still assert itself. Soldiers from this war were neither deployed nor returned home en masse, as their fathers and grandfathers had been, thus deliberately reducing the possibility of politically embarrassing action. This worked even better than planned, as the returning veterans absorbed much of the indiscriminate hostility from a civilian population disaffected by the war. The ostracism of the Vietnam veterans by government and people alike remains among the most unsavoury episodes in US history.
Many veterans of the Gulf war have had to fight to gain recognition of the serious medical problems they have suffered as a result of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ which covers a wide range of symptoms and has yet to be properly explained but may well be a result of prophylactic injections given in preparation for chemical and biological warfare. Veterans today can still find reintegration into civilian society a long and hard process but the organizations established after WW I are still very active and can offer much-needed support to returning soldiers.
Bibliography
- Dearing, Mary, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge, La., 1952).
- Diehl, James, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (London, 1977).
- Wootton, Graham, The Official History of the British Legion (London, 1956)
— Niall Barr
