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

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The concept of soldier-citizen was to be stamped on the French army during the Revolution and, indeed, long beyond it. In August 1917 the trench newspaper Le Crapouillot warned officers that they often mistook:

distance for dignity, brutality for firmness, and the propensity to punish for professional zeal…Men are neither inferior beings, nor simple fighting machines. Our soldiers are not professional soldiers, but citizen-soldiers. You must show men that you feel their unhappiness, sympathise with them, and understand the greatness of their sacrifices.

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It was not simply that French soldiers were citizens under arms: they were soldiers who fought best in a particular way. French theorists consistently argued that there was something definitively Gallic about the attack with cold steel. In 1866 one wrote in a military journal that:

For all Frenchmen, battle is above all an individual action, the presence of dash, agility and the offensive spirit, that is to say, the attack with the bayonet; for the German, it is the fusillade…individualism drowned in the mass, passive courage and the defensive.

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French discipline was rarely as rigid as Steuben might have wished. When Napoleon III met Franz Josef of Austria at Villafranca in north Italy in 1859, a French officer noted that while the Austrian hussar escort remained rock-steady, troopers of the Guides, crack light cavalry escorting Napoleon, craned and jostled to get a good view of the two emperors. They were Frenchmen, and that was just what he expected.

Important though the concept of the citizen-soldier was, its practical effects were limited. Even the French soon drew back from democratic notions like electing officers, and although the harsh disciplinary code of the old regime (which had included beating with the flat of a sword, in an effort to produce a punishment that was painful yet not dishonourable) was jettisoned, its replacement was scarcely benign, and miscreants were consigned to the boulet, confinement with a roundshot attached to them by a chain. Napoleon’s ‘iron marshal’, Louis Nicolas Davout, had looters shot, but even this could not restrain his men, and when the French briefly occupied Moscow in 1812 his own quarters were pillaged. However, Napoleonic discipline in general – tough little Davout was something of an exception – was regarded as more relaxed than British. Some French deserters in Spain served with the British (this trade worked both ways, though it was always fatal for a deserter to be captured by his former comrades) but soon re-deserted because they found their new discipline far too severe.

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Napoleonic officers sometimes struck their men like the drillmasters of an earlier generation, yet even here the assault might have a distinctively French edge. During the Champagne campaign of 1814, when the Prussians, Russians and Austrians were closing in on Napoleon east of Paris, Captain Charles Parquin of the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard hit a corporal across the back with the flat of his sabre when he found that he had dismounted against his express orders. The man spun round, pulled open his coat to show his Legion of Honour, grasped his sabre, and said: ‘Captain, I have served my country and my Emperor for twenty-two years. I won this cross two years ago and now, in a matter of seconds, you have dishonoured me for ever!’ Parquin – ‘appalled at having lost my temper with an old soldier’ – replied: ‘Listen, corporal. If I were your equal in rank I should not hesitate to give you satisfaction, for I am not afraid of you. But I am your captain and I am apologising to you. Will you shake hands?’ The corporal, declaring that there was no ill-feeling on his part, shook hands, and Parquin records that: ‘Half an hour later he was sharing my modest supper which was, none the less, made all the more appetising by a bottle of brandy.’

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The concept of the citizen-soldier made few inroads into the British regular army, although it found more fertile ground when part-time Volunteer and Yeomanry units were raised during the French Revolutionary Wars. Some units balloted the whole corps to select officers, who were then duly commissioned by the lord-lieutenant of their county. It was a common practice for units ‘to pool their government remuneration and distribute it evenly among all ranks…’

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The second major influence on the armies of the period was initially tactical, although, as it questioned many of the assumptions dear to apostles of brick-dust and pipe-clay, it became philosophical, political and organisational too. There were times, especially in forests, woods or on broken ground, when serried ranks and measured volleys were simply inappropriate. European armies discovered the need for light troops in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and, providentially, discovered some of the men to meet the need in exactly the same place. Having discovered them, they then proceeded to dress them and drill them until they lost some of those qualities that had made them such admirable light troops in the first place.

Hussars, light cavalry introduced into the French army in 1692, were modelled on wild horsemen from the great plain of Hungary. However, the efforts of military tailors speedily made them heavier, first converting the fur-trimmed cap to the towering busby with the cap itself surviving only as the vestigial busby bag hanging down on one side. They then made the dolman (short jacket) and breeches skin-tight, and eventually converted the pelisse, initially an extra jacket handily slung from the shoulders, into a relic as vestigial as the busby bag but a good deal more inconvenient.

The Austrians exacted universal compulsory conscription on the Military Border of Croatia and Slavonia, raising, by the 1790s, seventeen regiments of Grenzer infantry. They were traditionally trained as light infantry – or, rather, untrained, for it was believed that much of their value sprang from their experience of hewing a living as free peasants in a tough border area. However, conventionally-minded senior officers increased the amount of formal training given to the Grenzers, effectively converting them into second-grade line infantry, leading Major General Joseph Klein to complain that men with less formal training had provided ‘a much better light infantry than the present regulated and drilled Grenzer.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It is no surprise that the first bout of Austrian military reforms in 1798–9 included withdrawing Grenzer regiments from the line and combining small sharpshooter and free corps units into fifteen light battalions. The second reform period continued the movement, but it was clear to promising young commanders that Austrian skirmishers were still too rigidly controlled to take on the French with confidence. Something precious had been drilled out of the army, and as late as 1813 the future Field-Marshal Radetzky admitted that ‘fighting en tirailleur should be done only in very restricted fashion, because neither we nor the Russians have mastered the manière de tirailleur.’

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However, at the height of their powers, during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the Grenzer had been formidable light infantry. Hussars and Croats formed a screen which Frederick the Great’s intelligence agents found hard to penetrate; they snapped up isolated detachments and cruelly galled the Prussian line if it came within reach of the covered positions they favoured. At Kolin, in 1759, Croats lurking in a cornfield provoked an engagement which soon got out of hand and ended in what was intended as a flanking attack heading, disastrously, for the front of the Austrian line. In 1758 Frederick told General Philip Yorke that ‘he was more upon his guard against them than against any other troops…that it was impossible for them [the Prussians] to oppose anything equal to them in that kind, and that he did not like to be always sacrificing his regular infantry in that kind of war.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Lacking native light infantry of his own, Frederick raised ‘free battalions’ from disparate regions of his empire, but it was not a happy experiment: one battalion murdered its commanding officer and deserted en masse, complete with its pay chest and a cannon.

The British army first discovered the need for light troops in the forests of North America. Hostilities between Britain and France had begun there in 1754 without formal declaration of war. This was partly because of friction between the thirteen British colonies and the smaller French colonial population, chiefly concentrated in the St Lawrence Valley between Quebec and Montreal. The French had built a string of forts to prevent British penetration, and Major General Edward Braddock made for one of them, Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), at the forks of the Ohio where the Monongahela and Allegheny meet. He had 1,200 men, including regulars from the 44th and 48th Foot – both regiments brought up to full strength by drafting in men from other units and less than cohesive in consequence – and some American irregulars, the young George Washington, of the Virginia Militia, among them.

Near the Monongahela River, Braddock was ambushed by a smaller force of Frenchmen and Indians. The battle was not wholly one-sided, for the French commander was killed by the first volley: most of his men fled and the Indians were only kept in the battle by the courage of the French officers leading them. But after the first shock – and there were rarely times when encountering the rolling volleys of redcoats in line was not a shock – the Indians and remaining French steadied to their task, firing from cover, where they presented poor targets, and they concentrated on the enemy officers. Braddock lost 63 of his 86 officers killed or wounded – with 914 NCOs and men – and was himself hit in the arm and lung. He died four days later, after saying: ‘We shall know better how to deal with them another time.’

Shortly after Braddock’s defeat, the British raised a new, large regiment, the 60th Foot (Royal Americans), some of whose battalions were trained as marksmen. ‘In order to qualify for the Service of the Woods,’ ran a contemporary account, they were ‘taught to load and fire, lying on the ground and kneeling…to march in Order, slow and fast, in all sorts of Ground…[to] pitch and fold their Tents, and be accustomed to pack up and carry their necessities in the most commodious manner.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Each battalion of line infantry was given a light company, whose training emphasised skirmishing and marksmanship, in 1758. These light companies – ‘light bobs’ – were paired with the pre-existing grenadiers to form what were termed flank companies, with the grenadiers parading on the right of the battalion’s line and the light company on its left.

This polarity was as much ideological as ceremonial, with the grenadiers – ‘tow rows’ – epitomising the wheel and pivot of the old world, and the light bobs the stalk and scurry of the new. In 1763 American Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region rose in a rebellion known from the name of the Ottawa chief who led it, as Pontiac’s. Amongst the troops who opposed it were light companies, serving away from their parent battalions, who looked markedly different to Braddock’s redcoats. An officer described the sombre dress of British light infantry.

The ground is black ratteen or frieze, lapelled and cuffed with blue;…a waistcoat with sleeves, a short jacket without sleeves; only arm holes and wings to the shoulders (in like manner to the grenadiers and drummers of the line) white metal buttons, linen or canvas drawers;…a pair of leggings of the same colour with their coat which reach up to the middle of their thighs…and, from the calf of the leg downwards, they button…[The light infantry man] has no lace, but, besides the usual pockets, he has two, not quite so high on his breast, made of leather, for balls and flints…His knapsack is carried very high between the shoulders, and is fastened with a strap or web over his shoulder, as the Indians carry their pack…

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However, the army tended to revert to formal type in peacetime, and light companies disappeared after the Seven Years’ War, though they were later reinstated. It was not just that conventionally-minded officers argued that they were of little value on European battlefields, where the fortune of the day would be decided by the volleys of the line, but that whole ethos of light troops was inimical to formal discipline. During the American War of Independence when conditions again made light troops an indispensable component of the army, one British officer described them as:

For the most part young and insolent puppies, whose worthlessness was apparently their recommendation for a service which placed them in the post of danger, in the way of becoming food for powder, their most appropriate destination next to that of the gallows.

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There was a palpable tension between the light infantry ethos, with its emphasis on practical uniform, individual skills and relaxed discipline, and the older notion of unthinking obedience.

By the time the Wars of the French Revolution broke out in 1792 British light companies had little, apart from their shoulder-wings, to mark them out from their comrades in battalion companies. William Surtees, born in Northumberland in 1781, had always wanted to be a soldier, and in 1799 he joined the 56

Regiment. It was known as the Pompadours because its purple facings were allegedly Madame de Pompadour’s favourite colour – or, as some smutty warriors alleged, the colour of her drawers. Surtees was almost immediately posted to the light company, and tells us that: ‘I felt not a little proud of my advancement, as I considered it (as I believe the generality of soldiers consider it) an honour to be made a light-bob.’ But he wore a red coat like his comrades of the battalion companies, and had little specialist training. His company was combined with ten others into a light battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Sharpe of the 9

Foot and sent on the Helder expedition, dispatched to Holland in September 1799 as part of an Anglo-Russian force commanded by the Duke of York. It fought an inconclusive battle at Egmont op Zee, and, perilously short of supplies, was lucky to be able to negotiate a convention which allowed it to withdraw unmolested.

During the battle, Surtees discovered what it was like to fight real light infantry, tirailleurs, some armed with rifles which outranged the musket and all trained to take full advantage of the ground. The French skirmishers ‘had greatly the advantage over us in point of shooting, their bullets doing much more execution than ours.’ As he followed up the retreating enemy he saw remarkably few dead Frenchmen, and thought that most of the dead must have been carried off, ‘but experience has since taught me that we must have done them little harm.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Although he fired almost 150 rounds, he doubted if he actually hit anybody.

The Helder expedition rubbed home the point that light troops were scarcely less valuable in Europe than in North America. Colonel Coote Manningham and Lieutenant Colonel the Hon William Steward were amongst the reformers who demanded the establishment of light troops armed with rifles rather than muskets, dressed in something less conspicuous than the ‘old red rag’. We shall see later how an Experimental Corps of Riflemen was raised in 1800, soon to be embodied as the 95

Regiment (later The Rifle Brigade). For the moment, though, it is worth observing that with the Baker rifles and green uniforms of the new riflemen came a new notion of discipline. The new unit’s regulations emphasised that trust and respect were, with discipline, the cement that bound riflemen together.

Every inferior, whether officer or soldier shall receive the lawful commands of his superior with deference and respect, and shall execute them to the best of his power. Every superior in his turn, whether he be an Officer or Non-Commissioned Officer, shall give his orders in the language of moderation and of regard to the feelings of the men under his command; abuse, bad language or blows being positively forbid in the regiment…It is the Colonel’s particular wish that duty should be done from cheerfulness and inclination, and not from mere command and the necessity of obeying…

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Influential though the linked concepts of the citizen-soldier and the light infantryman were, neither revolutionised the conduct of war. If the Duke of Marlborough, who fought his last great battle at Malplaquet in 1709, was wafted back from the Elysian Fields to watch the battle of Waterloo in 1815 (or even the Alma fifty years later), he would have found many superficial differences but little fundamental change. Shakos were now worn instead of tricorne hats, and longskirted coats with big turned-back lapels had been replaced by something altogether trimmer. Regiments now had numbers, instead of being known by the name of their current colonel (though if the 37th was no longer Monro’s Regiment, it still retained its familiar yellow facings); there were indeed more skirmishers about than he would have remembered, and some of them wore uniforms which might have struck him as disturbingly drab.

Weapons had certainly improved. Marlborough would have observed that reforms like those initiated in the French army by Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval had standardised the calibres of artillery pieces and, through improved carriages and better harness, made it possible for them to move faster on the battlefield. The snappy movement of Captain Cavalié Mercer’s Royal Horse Artillery would doubtless have merited his applause. Yet most of their projectiles were roundshot, a single solid cannon ball, or canister, a tin container filled with small balls that burst on leaving the muzzle to give the cannon the effect of a gigantic shotgun. Howitzers, still a minority amongst the artillery, fired explosive shells, though, like those in his own day, their effect was uncertain. Sometimes they exploded harmlessly in mid-air, and sometimes they lay on the ground, fuses sputtering, giving ample opportunity for those nearby to escape. Even ‘spherical case’ – in the British service eponymously named after Henry Shrapnel, its inventor – a shell designed to bust in the air and scatter balls and metal fragments below, was notoriously unreliable.

There had been organisational changes he might have admired. Chief amongst these was the development of the corps d’armée system by Napoleon. In 1809 Napoleon had reminded Eugène de Beauharnais of its advantages. ‘Here is the general principle of war – a corps of 25,000–30,000 men can be left on its own,’ he wrote. ‘Well-handled, it can fight or alternatively avoid action, and manoeuvre according to circumstances without any harm coming to it, because an opponent cannot force it to accept an engagement but if it chooses to do so it can fight alone for a long time.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet here, as in much else, Napoleon was more adapter than innovator, and his development of the corps harked back deep into the eighteenth century to the ideas of Marshal de Broglie, the Duc de Choiseul and above all Jacques Antoine, Comte de Guibert. The latter, incidentally, favoured citizen-soldiers, but agreed that ‘since we cannot have citizen troops, and perfect troops, [what we must do is] to have our troops at least disciplined and trained.’

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What would certainly have impressed Marlborough was the way in which armies, and the populations that supported them, had grown since his day. Nothing in his career could equal ‘the Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in October 1813, where the rival armies put over half a million men into the field. Yet this was exceptional. Just under 200,000 men had met at the bloody and indecisive Malplaquet in 1709, and there were actually rather less at the wholly conclusive Waterloo.

ENGLAND, HOME AND BEAUTY? (#ulink_78fcbd8c-916f-5d7b-99f8-7e4403e7e335)

IT WAS AN AGE OF TIPPLING. Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the 42

Regiment in North America, recalled a cheery dinner at which 31 officers drank 72 bottles of claret, eighteen of Madeira and twelve of port, not to mention a little porter and punch by way of skirmishing. He was a serious-minded professional soldier and certainly no drunkard, but his diary is speckled with entries like that for 29 March 1777: ‘dined with our light captain and got foul with claret.’