The Operational Role of British Military Police on the Western Front, 1914–18 1

The morale and discipline of the BEF on the Western Front has aroused considerable scholarly and popular interest. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to a body which had a central role in the enforcement of discipline, namely the Corps of Military Police (CMP, or Redcaps). Furthermore, one of the principal duties of the CMP – traffic control – has been almost entirely ignored. The relationship between an army and its military police is rarely easy, and the Great War perhaps marked the nadir of this relationship as far as the British Army was concerned. Other ranks ² and officers ³ united in whole-hearted condemnation of the CMP. Two former infantry privates claimed that military police were never to be seen ‘in the danger area’, and that few civil policemen became Redcaps; the latter’s job ‘was voluntary and few decent men would undertake it if they realised what it implied’. ⁴ Historians have mostly been content to accept such judgements at face value, ⁵ and for Redcap have read, it seems, ‘martinet’, ‘sadist’, and ‘enemy of the ordinary fighting soldier’. ⁶ This chapter will seek to demonstrate that such views contain a strange mixture of fact, error, opinion and prejudice.