Can anyone offer examples of officers giving up their benefit/privilege to suffer along side their men and finally, would it have been wise for an officer to suffer hardship given the weight of responsibility that they were tasked with?
See, here's an interesting thing and a contrast between British and US armies - it was noticed by British observers that US officers shared in a lot of the roles of the men, but didn't care for them nearly as well.
The Yankee officers although they drink, associate, sleep and fight with their men, do not take the slightest interest of care for their men, and every-one looks out for himself, no one for the public good or his men's welfare... At the end of a day's march the officers look out for themselves; never see that their men are properly and completely encamped, or fed, much less that the poor horses are fed or looked after; that the men's arms, accoutrements, or artillery or cavalry harness is cleaned or repaired": Captain Edward Osborne Hewett, RE, 3 December 1862, from R. A. Preston, 'A Letter from a British Military Observer of the American Civil War,'
Military Affairs, vol. 16 (Summer 1952), p.49-60
This probably contrasted quite strongly because in the Crimean War there was a massive supply screw up during the Eupatoria landing (there was a storm after the fighting echelon disembarked, so the supplies were still aboard ship) and so the general officers ended up doing things like sleeping under turned-over carts or just riding about for hours in the rain. IIRC one general officer (the Duke of Cambridge?) ended up having a real time of it at sea.
ED: here we go:
"The oldest soldiers never witnessed nor heard of a campaign in which general officers were obliged to live out in tents in the open field, for the want of a roof to cover them, and generals who passed their youth in the Peninsular war, and who had witnessed a good deal of fighting since that time in various parts of the world, were unanimous in declaring that they never knew or read of a war in which the officers were exposed to such hardships." (Russell of the Times, C Chapman)
"The Duke of Cambridge, sick and depressed, was passing an anxious time of it in the Retribution, off Balaklava, in all the horrors of that dreadful scene at sea- in fact all the generals and colonels and officers in the field were just as badly off as the meanest private."
"Sir George Brown slept under a cart tilted over. The Duke of Cambridge (First Division), wrapped in a waterproof coat, spent most of the night riding about among his men. Sir de Lacy Evans (Second Division) was the only general whose staff had been careful enough to provide him with a tent." (Despatches from the Crimea, WH Russell)
"By a merciful interposition of providence we have been saved from a watery grave, and nothing but a miracle saved us... It was a fearful gale & we had a more dreadful 24 hours of it than we ever spent. It carried away two anchors and our rudder; [we] had to throw over all our upper deck guns & then we had to hold on by one anchor 200 yards ffrom the rocks which by a merciful providence held us on." (Duke of Cambridge, quoted in the National Army Museum Book of the Crimean War). 21 ships were wrecked in this storm.
"When the surgeon of the Scots Fusilier Guards complained to his servant that his shirt was full of lice, the servant replied, "The Duke of Cambridge is covered with them, sir." (Redcoat, Richard Holmes).
Essentially what you had was that US army officers had generally gained their position (as officers) through popularity contests - i.e. elections - in newly raised units, while British army officers were of a different and higher social class to their men. This led in British units to greater social stratification, but it also led to a strong sense of
nobliesse oblige and the generally superior British food, pay and medical arrangements in the Victorian period - not compared to the US specifically but to other armies in general.
Bringing the