Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket

Perhaps five hundred yards to Sherer’s right was Ensign Benjamin Hobhouse of the 57

Regiment, which was engaged in a prodigious close-range firefight.

At this time our poor fellows dropped around us in every direction. In the activity of the officers to keep the men firm, and to supply them with the ammunition of the fallen, you could scarcely avoid treading on the dying and the dead. But all was firm…Tho’ alone, our fire never slackened, nor were the men in the least disheartened…Our Colonel, major, every captain and eleven subalterns fell; our King’s Colours were cut in two, our regimental ones had 17 balls through them, many companies were without officers…

(#litres_trial_promo)

Lieutenant Colonel William Inglis, hit in the chest by grapeshot, lay in front of the colours and encouraged his men by shouting ‘Die hard, 57

, die hard’. The 57

Regiment and its post-1881 successor the Middlesex Regiment, were to be proudly known as Diehards.

Finally, the Fusilier brigade – two battalions of 7

Royal Fusiliers and one of 23

Royal Welch Fusiliers – arrived to clinch the victory. In the ranks of 1/7

was Private John Spencer Cooper, an avid student of military history who had enlisted in the Volunteers in 1803 at the age of fifteen and transferred to the regulars in 1806. His book Rough Notes of Seven Campaigns, written up when Cooper was 81, gives a soldier’s view of the battle.

Under the tremendous fire of the enemy our line staggers, men are knocked about like skittles, but not a step backward is taken. Here our Colonel and all the field-officers of the brigade fell killed or wounded, but no confusion ensued. The orders were ‘close up’; ‘close in’; ‘fire away’; ‘forward’. This is done. We are close to the enemy’s columns; they break and rush down the other side of the hill in the greatest moblike confusion.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The word ‘moblike’ goes to the very heart of the matter. As the French columns disintegrated, so Soult’s army reverted to the shoal of individuals in which all armies have their origin, and to which, but for the efforts of drillmasters, leaders, and steadfast comrades, they return all too easily. Soult told Napoleon that he had been robbed of victory. ‘The British were completely beaten and the day was mine, but they did not know it and would not run.’ Well might Sir William Napier, himself a Peninsular veteran, celebrate ‘that astonishing infantry’.

Britain’s command of the sea, re-emphasised at Trafalgar in 1805, enabled her to mount smaller expeditions. Sometimes these were successes, like the descent on Copenhagen in 1807, and sometimes failures, like the disastrous Buenos Aires expedition of 1806–7. The epoch had a tragic adjunct. An Anglo-American conflict – ‘the War of 1812’ – had begun promisingly for Britain with the repulse of an American attack on Canada and the temporary seizure of Washington, but ended in British defeat at New Orleans in January 1815, a battle fought before news of a negotiated peace reached North America.

It was not until 1854 that the British army faced its first major post-Napoleonic trial, and the final major war of our period, when an Anglo-French force, with its British contingent under General Lord Raglan, invaded the Crimea in an effort to take the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. The Allies won an early victory on the River Alma in September and beat off two Russian attacks on their siege lines at Balaclava and Inkerman. After a dreadful winter on freezing uplands, they took the outworks that dominated Sevastopol and forced the Russians to withdraw the following summer.

There was sporadic fighting in India throughout the period. In 1764 the British strengthened their grip on Bengal at the battle of Buxar, and in 1799 Tipoo Sultan, ruler of Mysore, was killed when the British stormed his capital Seringapatam. There were three wars against the fierce Mahrattas, whose confederacy sprawled across central India, and in the second (1803–5) they were beaten, with the future Duke of Wellington striking the decisive blow at Assaye (1803). The Pindaris, piratical freebooters who lived on the fringe of the Mahratta armies, were beaten in 1812–17, and a third Mahratta war in 1817–19 saw the British extend their power to the borders of the Punjab and Sind.

In 1838 the governor-general of India, Lord Auckland, decided to install a pro-British ruler, Shah Shujah, on the throne of Afghanistan to provide a bulwark against the threat of Russian expansion. The advance to Kabul went well, but in the winter of 1841–42 there was rising against Shah Shujah. The British and Indian force, weakly commanded, retired from Kabul towards Jellalabad, but was cut to pieces as it did so: only one man, Dr Bryden, managed to reach safety.

Better fortune attended the next expansionist step, and in 1843 the British annexed Sind. This brought them into conflict with the martial Sikhs, rulers of the Punjab. In the first Sikh War (1845–46) the British won hard-fought battles at Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon. When hostilities broke out again in 1848 the British had the better of a scrambling battle at Chilian wallah and a decisive clash at Gujerat, and went on to annex the Punjab.

Brown Bess was now almost a thing of the past, superseded from 1842 by a musket ignited by a percussion cap, which was far more reliable than the flintlock, and from 1853 by a percussion rifle. Ironically it was the introduction of this rifle into the Indian army that helped produce the last conflict of the period. The rifle’s paper cartridge was lubricated with grease, and rumours that this was the fat of pork (unclean to Muslims) or cattle (sacred to Hindus) induced some soldiers of the Bengal army to refuse the cartridges and precipitated the Indian Mutiny in March 1857. The mutineers took Delhi, and overwhelmed a British force at Cawnpore, where the survivors were massacred. Lucknow, capital of the princely state of Oudh, held out, and was eventually relieved after the British had taken Delhi by storm in September 1857.

The Mutiny was the last time that Brown Bess was carried in battle by British soldiers. Lieutenant Richard Barter, adjutant of the 75

Foot, – ‘the Stirlingshire Regiment, good men and true as ever had the honour of serving their Queen and Country’ – describes how a hundred men from his battalion were issued with the new rifle, ‘all the rest of the regiment retaining old Brown Bess’. But the new weapon was not deemed a success, and ‘the men, with few exceptions, contrived to get rid of their rifles and in their place picked up the old weapons of their dead comrades.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Hobden would surely have approved.

Brown Bess had held sway for more than a century. But within a decade she was as obsolete as the longbow, superseded first by percussion weapons and finally by breech-loading rifles in a process of accelerating technical innovation. There were other major changes too: the purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871, and the regimental system was recast shortly afterwards to produce county regiments, with two regular battalions (the 37th joined the 67th (South Hampshire) Regiment to produce the Hampshire Regiment) linked to form a new regiment which would normally have one battalion at home and another abroad. The process was not popular, and traditionalists demanded the return of ‘our numbers wreathed in glory.’ In 1884 Colonel Arthur Poole angrily declared that he could not possibly attend a Hampshire regimental dinner. ‘Damned names,’ he wrote, ‘mean nothing. Since time immemorial regiments have been numbered according to their precedence in the Line…I will not come to anything called a Hampshire Regimental dinner. My compliments, Sir, and be damned.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

RED COAT AND BROWN BESS (#ulink_04f55cc1-82e6-532c-ba2d-bd1c8077233e)

HODBEN AND HIS COMRADES plied their deadly trade with Brown Bess. This weapon, similar to her cousins such as the Prussian Potsdam musket, named after the great arsenal on the outskirts of Berlin, and the French 1777 pattern, named for the year of its introduction into service, painted the face of battle for more than a century. It was inherently inaccurate and its range was very short, inspiring tactics based on blocks of infantry which fired away at one another at close range in a contest where the rapidity of fire and the steadfastness of the firers were of prime importance. Loading and firing required the infantryman to carry out set actions in the proper sequence, driven home by repeated drilling till they became little less than a conditioned reflex. The efficient movement of large numbers of men, often across difficult country and sometimes under fire, demanded that the individual elements of the mighty whole responded promptly and identically to commands.

The length of paces had to be exact and their frequency precise. ‘When men march in cadence,’ declared a military writer in 1763, ‘it gives them a bold and imposing air; and by the habit they acquire in regulating their pace, we may almost guess what time a body of men will take to traverse a certain length of ground.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Troops usually moved in column, to promote control, and fought in line, to maximise firepower, though there were numerous practical variations. And, most notably from the pens of the French theorists the Chevalier Folard and Baron de Mesnil-Durand, there were assertions that the column was king because the sheer physical and psychological shock it delivered would always triumph over the squibbing musketry of the line.

Deploying from column of march to line of battle was a complex business, which required careful attention to maintaining the intervals between parallel columns so that when each column wheeled through ninety degrees an even, continuous line, without embarrassing gaps or confusing overlaps, was the result. At the 1785 Silesian manoeuvres a Prussian army of 23,000 men approached in column and, on a single cannon-shot, wheeled in seconds into a line two and a quarter miles long. Wheeling required the men on the inner flank to mark time (marching on the spot) while those on the outer flank stepped out briskly. An eighteenth century German writer tells how:

Whether on horseback or on foot, a regular wheel is just about the most difficult of all movements to accomplish. When a wheel is well done, you have the impression that the alignment has been regulated with a ruler, that one flank is tied to a stake, and that the other is describing the arc of a circle. You can employ these images if you wish to convey to the soldiers a clear idea of what goes on in a wheel.

(#litres_trial_promo)

If repetitious drill and rigid discipline were important in bringing the soldier into battle, they were crucial once fighting commenced. Bad weapon-handling constantly caused accidents. When front rank men knelt to fire and then sprang up to load they were often shot by careless rear-rank men: the Napoleonic Marshal Gouvion St-Cyr reckoned that one-quarter of French infantry casualties in his career were caused this way. Soldiers were terribly burned when cartridge-boxes blew up; eyes were poked out with bayonets as ungainly soldiers bungled drill movements, and ramrods were regularly fired off by men who had forgotten to remove them from the barrel of their musket, causing injuries and broken windows during practice, and difficulty in battle, where a spare ramrod might not be at hand.

Individual nervousness could easily swell to provoke a wider panic, opening a gap that a watchful enemy might exploit. This sort of thing was to the drillmaster what heresy was to the devout: something requiring urgent and extreme correction. A French writer recommended his readers: ‘Do not hesitate to smash in the skull of any soldiers who grumble, or who give vent to cries like “We are cut off”…’

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1759 Major General James Wolfe famously declared that he would rather have written Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ than take Quebec, and he was indeed to be killed capturing it. But there was little echo of the Enlightenment in his regimental orders when he commanded the 20th Foot at Canterbury in 1755 and warned:

A soldier who quits his rank, or offers to flag, is instantly to be put to death by the officer who commands that platoon, or the officer or sergeant in rear of that platoon; a soldier does not deserve to live who won’t fight for his king and country.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The weapon carried by the majority of combatants not only dictated the shape of combat: it helped determine the composition of armies and their conduct off the battlefield as well as on it. Most armies in the age of the flintlock were composed of rank and file drawn from society’s lower orders and officered (though the generalisation is broad) by gentlemen. They emphasised uniformity and conformity, and tended to look upon initiative as a potentially dangerous aberration. Their discipline was rigid. In most European armies a mistake in drill would bring immediate corporal punishment: a Frenchman living in Berlin was shocked to see a fifteen year old junker thrash an old soldier for a trivial mistake. It was not only tender-hearted civilians who felt uncomfortable with scenes like this. John Gabriel Stedman, an officer in the Scots Brigade in Dutch service, wrote in 1772 that: ‘I never remember to have brought a soldier to punishment, if it was not at all in my power to avoid it, while I have known a pitiful ensign, one Robert Munro, get a poor man flogged because he had passed him without taking off his hat.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Due process of military law (itself usually swift and partial) brought a wide range of other punishments from simple detention, through riding the wooden horse (sitting astride a sharp-backed wooden frame, often with weights attached to the feet to increase the severity), running the gauntlet (the bare-backed offender proceeded between two ranks of soldiers who lashed him as he passed), straightforward flogging to the death sentence itself. Death might be administered by shooting, hanging or breaking on the wheel. In 1776 Stedman watched the latter penalty inflicted on a murderer:

Tied on the cross, his hand was chopped off, and with a large iron crow [bar] all his bones were smashed to splinters, without he let his voice be heard…All done, and the ropes slacked, he wreathed himself off the cross, when seeing the Magistrates and others, going off, he groaned three or four times, and complained in a clear voice that he was not yet dead…He then begged the hangman to finish him off, in vain, and cursed him also…He lived from six-thirty o’clock till about eleven, when his head was chopped off.

(#litres_trial_promo)

This gruesome penalty was inflicted in the bright noon of the Enlightenment, with Mozart at his keyboard, Josiah Wedgwood at his pottery, and Voltaire plying his quill.

Many contemporaries found it easy to reconcile their own liberal opinions with recognition that the battlefield imposed such severe stresses that only drill and discipline enabled a man to tolerate them. The fledgeling United States of America, for all its use of irregulars and militias, could not have won the War of Independence without its regular Continental Army, whose drill and discipline owed much to the efforts of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, an ex-captain in the Prussian army. He was appointed inspector-general of the Continental Army in 1778, ‘bringing to the ragged colonial citizen army a discipline and effectiveness it had hitherto lacked.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Continental soldiers may indeed have been fighting for ‘inalienable rights’, but they submitted to a discipline scarcely less severe than that suffered by the men they fought.

What was new about the American Revolution was its recognition that soldiers were emphatically citizens in uniform. In 1783 George Washington wrote:

It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal service, to the defence of it…

(#litres_trial_promo)

This declaration of principle was a forerunner to another new republic’s response to military crisis. The French National Convention, facing converging attack by the armies of monarchical Europe, passed the decree of levée en masse on 23 August 1793, announcing grandiloquently that:

Young men will go to battle; married men will forge arms and transport supplies; women will make tents, uniforms and serve in the hospitals; children will pick rags; old men will have themselves carried to the public squares, to help inspire the courage of the warriors, and preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.