The Last Full Measure (18 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Unpopular officers ran the risk of being fragged. At Blenheim in 1704 a detested officer of the Fifteenth Foot “faced about to the regiment and took off his hat to give an hussa; and just got out
these words, ‘Gentlemen, the day is ours!’ when a musket ball hit him in the forehead, and killed him instantly.”
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Given that many line officers were required to stand in front of their troops, the risk of being shot, either accidentally or accidentally on purpose, was considerable, as one officer attested: “I served one campaign as captain of infantry, and I confess that I suffered frequent anxieties on this account.”
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The strict demands of honor ensured that more officers, in numerical proportion to nonofficers, were killed. At Waterloo, for example, the officers were 5 percent of the total force but were killed at a much higher ratio. Almost 50 percent of the 840 British infantry officers at Waterloo and Quatre Bras were killed or wounded (compared with perhaps 20 percent of other ranks). Of 63 British commanding officers, 32 became casualties; the Royal Scots lost 31 out of 36 officers, and the Seventy-Third Highlanders, 22 of 26.
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If the numbers for the four Peninsular battles of Barrosa, Fuentes del Oñoro, Albuera, and Vitoria are combined, French officers constituted 3.4 percent of the total French army but represented 4.9 percent of the casualties. In other words, a French officer stood a 44 percent higher chance of becoming a casualty than one of his men.
Ironically, even though an officer stood in greater peril than his men of being killed outright in battle, he had a much better chance of surviving if he were wounded. First, he was better fed and therefore likely to be healthier; second, he could depend on swifter and more personalized medical attention, which might include being sent home to recuperate, a luxury certainly not afforded the ordinary soldier.
THE DEATHS OF
one’s colleagues were also treated with a certain detachment, even though the deceased may have been a close
companion. Rifleman Harris, describing the agonizing death of his friend Sergeant Fraser, ends the account with: “Within about half-an-hour after this I left Sergeant Fraser, and, indeed, for the time had as completely forgotten him as if he had died a hundred years back. The sight of so much bloodshed around will not suffer the mind to dwell long on any particular casualty, even though it happens to be one’s dearest friend.”
A French soldier described the almost jocular way a comrade’s death was treated: “The frequency of danger made us regard death as one of the most common occurrences of life. We grieved for our comrades when wounded, but if they were dead, we showed an indifference about them often even ironical. When the soldiers in passing recognized a companion numbered with the slain, they would say, ‘He is now above want, he will abuse his horse no more, his drinking days are done,’ or words to that purpose; which manifested in them a stoical disregard of existence. It was the only funeral oration spoken over the warriors that had fallen.”
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But even dead comrades could still offer a macabre companionship. “James Ponton was another crony of mine,” declared Harris. But Ponton was a little too rash going forward “and was not to be restrained by anything but a bullet when in action. This time he got one which striking him in the thigh, I suppose cut an artery and he died quickly. The Frenchmen’s balls were flying very wickedly at that moment; and I crept up to Ponton and took shelter by lying behind and making a rest for my rifle of his dead body. It strikes me that I revenged his death by the assistance of his carcase.”
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After the battle of Roliça in Portugal in 1808 Rifleman Harris spotted a dead soldier:
He was lying on his side amongst some burnt-up bushes, and whether the heat of the firing here had set these bushes on fire, or from whatever cause they had been ignited, I
cannot take it upon me to say; but certain it is … that this man, whom we guessed to have been French, was as completely roasted as if he had been spitted before a good kitchen-fire.… He was drawn all up like a dried frog. I called the attention of one or two men near me, and we examined him, turning him about with our rifles with no little curiosity. I remember now, with some surprise, that the miserable fate of this poor fellow called forth from us very little sympathy, but seemed only to be the subject of mirth.
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When an officer was killed his effects were sold off to fellow officers, whose reaction could, to our tender sensibilities, be shockingly callous. George Robert Gleig, a subaltern in the Eighty-Fifth Foot during the Peninsular War, explained: “A strange compound of good and bad feeling accompanies the progress of the auction. In every party of men, there will always be some whose thoughts, centring entirely in self, regard everything … solely as it increases their enjoyments.… Even the sale of the clothes and accoutrements of one who but a few weeks or days before was their living, and perhaps favourite companion, furnishes to such men food for mirth; and I am sorry to say, that during the sale of which I now speak, more laughter was heard than redounded to the credit of those who joined in, or produced it.… I fear that few laughed more heartily than I.”
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Officers benefited in other important ways. First, pocketing the pay of men killed in action was a lucrative perquisite. It was not unknown for British officers in the American War of Independence to make eight hundred pounds a year in this way (the equivalent to the annual remuneration of an infantry colonel).
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Second, with every death a rung up the ladder of promotion became vacant—and one that did not have to be paid for because the families of the fallen could not sell the dead man’s commission. A vacancy created by death was filled by seniority. Lieutenant
William Scott, an American officer captured at Bunker Hill, gave a startlingly honest view on the relationship between death in battle and the reward that might accrue: “I offered to enlist upon having a Lieutenant’s Commission; which was granted. I imagined myself now in a way of Promotion: if I was killed in battle, there would be an end of me, but if my Captain was killed, I should rise in Rank, & should have a Chance to rise higher.”
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Ironically, the killed offered all kinds of bounty to the living—a regular harvest. The common soldiers plundered the corpses on the battlefield for wallets, clothing, and boots (the secondary gleaning, which often involved bumping off the wounded, was usually carried out by civilians and camp followers). Those who went to the hospital were also invariably robbed. Major Richard Davenport of the Tenth Dragoons made this doleful report in 1759: “I am sorry I can give Mrs. Moss no other account of her husband than that he died at Münster. As to his things, whatever he had is lost. When a man goes into hospital, his wallet, with his necessaries are sent with him, but nothing ever returns. Those that recover, seldom bring anything back, but those that die are stripped of all. I have lost nine men and have not heard of anything that belonged to them. It is a common practice of a nurse, when a man is in danger, to put on a clean shirt, that he may die in it, and that it may become her perquisite.”
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And as the death rate in the hospital for the common soldier of the eighteenth century was about 40 percent, there was a good living, so to speak, to be made there.
Actions of particularly high risk, such as “forlorn hope” attacks on the breached walls of besieged towns, were surprisingly popular among the attacking troops because they offered the very real prospect of gain either from plunder or, if you beat the odds, a vaulting boost to one’s career. It was a kind of Russian roulette in a world where advancement was hard-won and the gamblers took their chances. Sir Thomas Brotherton, a British officer during
the Peninsular War, saw many of these chancers: “The volunteers [young men without the money to buy a commission] we had with the army … always recklessly exposed themselves in order to render themselves conspicuous, as their object was to get commissions given to them without purchase. The largest proportion of these volunteers were killed, but those who escaped were well rewarded for their adventurous spirit.”
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Captain Sir John Kincaid at Badajoz during the Peninsular War describes the general appetite for forlorn hopes:
In proportion as the grand crisis approached, the anxiety of the soldiers increased, not on account of any doubt or dread as to the result, but for fear that the place should be surrendered without standing an assault; for, singular as it may appear, although there was a certainty of about one man out of every three being knocked down, there were, perhaps, not three men in the three divisions who would not rather have braved all the chances than receive it tamely from the enemy. So great was the rage for passports into eternity in our battalion on that occasion, that even the officers’ servants insisted on taking their places in the ranks.
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Kincaid himself took a more pessimistic view of the prospects of the forlorn hope: “The advantage of being on a storming party is considered as giving the prior claim to be ‘put out of pain,’ for they receive the first fire, which is generally the best, not to mention that they are also expected to receive the earliest salutations from the beams of timber, hand-grenades, and other missiles which the garrison are generally prepared to transfer from the top of the wall, to the tops of the heads of their foremost visitors.”
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For the common soldier yet another risk had to be faced: the ever-present threat of the ultimate sanction—execution. Officers had the jurisdiction to kill men on the spot who attempted to leave
the field but very rarely exercised it, and some armies maintained enforcing units to prevent men “leaking” out of the battle. Nevertheless, it was a death that might be described as the shadow risk of combat. Not doing something could get you killed. Discipline was ferocious in most armies of the period. “Many soldiers,” stated Frederick the Great, “can be governed only with sternness and occasionally severity. If discipline fails to keep them in check they are apt to commit the crudest excesses. Since they greatly outnumber their superiors, they can be held in check only through fear.”
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Desertion rates in all armies were high, and those who were captured, particularly those who had deserted during action, stood a very good chance of being executed. James Fergus, a Scotch-Irish Pennsylvania militiaman, made the following diary entry on May 12, 1778, during the siege of Savannah, Georgia: “Four men, two white and a mulatto and a Negro, were taken outside the lines and brought in, supposed to be deserting to the enemy. The governor, coming by at the time, was asked what should be done with them. He said, ‘Hang them up to the beam of the gate,’ by which they were standing. This was immediately done, and there they hung all day.”
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Comrades-in-arms were enlisted to do the executions. Rifleman Harris was just a lad when he was chosen to make up a firing squad:
A private of the 70th Regiment had deserted from that corps … he was brought to trial at Portsmouth, and sentenced by general court-martial to be shot.
… As for myself, I felt that I would have given a good round sum (had I possessed it) to have been in any situation rather than the one in which I now found myself; and when I looked into the faces of my companions, I saw, by the pallor and anxiety depicted in each countenance, the reflection
of my own feelings. When all was ready, we were moved to the front, and the culprit was brought out. He made a short speech to the parade, acknowledging the justice of his sentence, and that drinking and evil company had brought the punishment upon him.
He behaved himself firmly and well, and did not seem at all to flinch. After being blindfolded, he was desired to kneel down behind a coffin … we immediately commenced loading.
This was done in the deepest silence, and the next moment we were primed and ready. There was then a dreadful pause … and the drum-major, again looking towards us, gave the signal before agreed upon (a flourish of his cane) and we levelled and fired … and the poor fellow, pierced by several balls, fell heavily upon his back; and as he lay, with his arms pinioned to his sides, I observed that his hands waved for a few moments, like the fins of a fish, when in the agonies of death. The drum-major also observed the movement, and, making another signal, four of our party immediately stepped up to the prostrate body, and placing the muzzles of our pieces to the head, fired, and put him out of his misery.
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Quite often a very sophisticated but sickeningly cruel piece of theater was played out upon the condemned. After the whole gruesome rigamarole of being marched to the place of execution (sometimes carrying their own coffins), stood by their expectant graves, and made to face their executioners, a last-minute reprieve was issued. And if it was not, it was important for the efficacy of this ultimate deterrent that there be an audience of fellow soldiers to bear witness and draw the salutary conclusion. But sometimes the whole thing backfired. The audience, in disgust, occasionally rebelled, as the American Revolutionary soldier John Plumb Martin described:
