The Making Of The British Army (18 page)

The elastic British army was expanded once again – to 34,000 at home and 13,000 in the colonies – and the militia were put on alert. Ten new infantry regiments were raised, including two of Highlanders who were allowed to appropriate all the romantic trappings of pipes and tartan denied their clansmen at home. Existing regiments were augmented by second battalions, which became regiments in their own right two years later. Four regular regiments were raised in America, including the impressive Royal Americans made up largely of Swiss and German immigrants, natural
jaegers
, who would be the progenitors of the army’s light infantry and rifle regiments. Two thousand extra men were recruited for the artillery and engineers. And this was just a beginning. By 1762, when the war seemed to offer great opportunities in both Europe and the colonies, the home and colonial establishments stood at 112,000 officers and men, with an additional 24,000 in Ireland – considerably more than in the army of today.

The Seven Years War thus saw the consolidation of all that had gone before in the army’s development – consolidation
and
innovation, for, besides the free-shooting Royal Americans, the army’s eleven regiments of dragoons each raised a light troop: lighter men on lighter horses, more agile, more versatile, capable of independent action – like the Pandours and Croats, but with the discipline of red coats. They were at once successful on the Continent, and soon whole regiments of ‘light dragoons’ were being raised.

The embryonic light infantry, on the other hand, were as yet used only in the wilderness of upper New York colony and Pennsylvania, where strictly drilled lines of muskets made little impression, especially with the Huron auxiliaries on whom the French were increasingly relying. It was savage frontier warfare, and the lessons were hard
learned; never more so than in July 1755 on the Monongahela River near what is now Pittsburgh. Major-General Edward Braddock, a Scot who had fought with the Coldstream Guards in Flanders, advanced into the forest with a force of 2,200 regulars and colonial militia, including a young Colonel George Washington, intending to capture Fort Duquesne and cut the line of French outposts between the St Lawrence and Ohio rivers. In a scene out of the 1992 film
The Last of the Mohicans
(James Fenimore Cooper’s novel is set during this war) he was ambushed by just 900 Frenchmen and Indians. When his men broke ranks to take cover, the old Coldstreamer cursed them back into line, whence they poured volley after volley into the neutral trees. Braddock, as brave as he was stubborn, had five horses shot under him before a bullet lodged in his lungs. His dying words were at last perceptive, however: ‘We shall know better another time.’

And so they would, for the following year ‘ranger’ companies were raised – like
jaegers
, frontiersmen who habitually carried the rifle, and for whom red was the colour of blood rather than a coat. Thus began the notion that camouflage and concealed movement had their place – if only, yet, in the backwoods of America.

Meanwhile in Europe the war to keep the French busy and away from Britain’s colonies needed attention. William Pitt (the elder) became prime minister at the end of 1756, and he was at first reluctant to acknowledge the full implications of the maritime strategy. The
ends
were plain enough: the destruction of French power in America and the West Indies. The
ways
were a maritime – land offensive in North America, and war on the Continent to draw French resources away from the Atlantic and the New World. The
means
were increased naval strength in the North Atlantic, strengthened colonial and regular garrisons in America, and subsidies to the continental allies. The snag was that subsidies alone could not guarantee that the allies would fight. Only British troops fighting alongside them could do that.

Pitt’s reluctance to seize the nettle and field a continental army arose from two obvious and perennial fears: first, the fear of invasion; second, the fear of the bottomless pit into which the country would have to pour money once it sent troops to Europe. His was a dilemma that would remain with the army right up to the present day: how to find troops for the Empire (and today for the consequences of empire) – ‘light troops’, on the whole – while maintaining the ‘heavier’ capability to fight a first-class army.

Pitt first tried a compromise. Rather than send an army to fight alongside his German allies he would mount seaborne raids on the French coast – ‘tip and run’ raids. The compromise failed, however, proving to be no more than an irritant to the French, and certainly no diversion, since the landing forces did not stay long enough to draw troops away from Germany or inflict enough damage to justify a permanent redeployment for defence of the coast. In fact all the raids succeeded in diverting were British troops from the two points of decision – the Rhine and North America.

As so often, it was events that forced the strategic hand. In 1757 the French invaded Hanover and defeated the duke of Cumberland (who had by then been made commander-in-chief of the King’s German forces). By September they controlled most of the country, and had it not been for the Prussians’ victories at Rossbach and Leuthen, George II might have been forced to give up Hanover and make a separate peace. There was no holding back troops from the Rhine now.

But news from across the Atlantic was not encouraging either. The earl of Loudon, commander-in-chief in North America, had led a seaborne operation to capture Louisbourg, which commanded the sea approaches to the St Lawrence. To do so, because the promised reinforcements from Britain had not materialized, he had withdrawn troops from the New York and Pennsylvania frontier. But to no avail, for on arriving off Louisbourg he saw that the French had more warships than he, and so called off the attack. Meanwhile, under their new and capable commander-in-chief, the marquis de Montcalm, the French took advantage of Loudon’s absence to capture the strategically important Fort William Henry at the head of Lake George (the historical backdrop to
The Last of the Mohicans).

And as if to underline Pitt’s failure to grasp the nettle, while Loudon was failing to take Louisbourg and losing Fort Henry for want of warships and troops, back across the Atlantic sixteen ships of the line landed 10,000 seasoned infantry at Rochefort, the French Portsmouth, in another raid. It was even less productive than usual, for the port was heavily defended, and so the raiders promptly sailed home again. Had these 10,000 men been in Hanover, the duke of Cumberland might not have been defeated. Had they been in America, Fort William Henry might have been held. And the warships, had they been off Louisbourg, might have overpowered the French squadron. Opponents at the time described Pitt’s tip and run tactics as ‘breaking windows with guineas’.
Two centuries later, with scarce resources spread all over the Mediterranean, and Churchill suggesting yet more Pitt-like schemes, Field Marshal Alanbrooke would write of his frustration with what he called the prime minister’s ‘stratagems of evasion’.

There was good news from the East, however, which although it would have next to no effect on the strategic aims of the current conflict, would bring to the fore one of the strongest influences on the army’s culture and way of war. In India, Colonel Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’) won a stunning victory over the Nawab of Bengal’s army at Plassey, 70 miles north of Calcutta (the Nawab having captured the city the year before and filled its notorious ‘black hole’ with prisoners). The Nawab had 50,000 men, Clive had only 3,000, fewer than 1,000 of them British, including the only King’s regiment in India, the 39th Foot. The others were ‘Company troops’, raised and administered by the East India Company and commanded entirely by officers commissioned by the Company. The 39th Foot (later the Dorsetshire Regiment) were hired from the Crown, which otherwise had no interest in the subcontinent, for India was a trading opportunity not a colony.

At a distance the Nawab’s army – elephants, camels, bullock carts, billowing standards, regiments of horse and foot – had looked like a well-disciplined force, their spears, scimitars, shields and antique matchlocks not discernibly different from the weapons that Clive’s own men carried. The Nawab himself rode into the field in a gilded howdah atop a richly caparisoned elephant, with a regalia of swords, fans and umbrellas, as if at the head of a stately procession (not so very different from Marlborough himself, perhaps, who had more than once driven on to the battlefield in a coach). Clive was not going to test even this antique strength, however. Instead he intrigued his way to victory, for in the weeks before he had bribed the Nawab’s discontented officers, and their ambivalence on the day unnerved as much as it actually blunted the army’s fighting edge.

Fighting there was, however. The battle opened in the humid heat of a June morning, when the Nawab’s French-manned artillery began a massive cannonade of the British camp. It actually did little damage, the shot flying high, but gave the impression of much destruction. The Nawab meanwhile paraded his army up and down in a ‘great show of noise and futile movements’, as one contemporary account has it, for about five hours, until at eleven o’clock the Nawab’s battle commander, Mir Madan, launched an attack on the fortified grove in which Clive’s
force had taken post. But he did so with only about a tenth of the army’s strength. Clive’s single Royal Artillery battery answered furiously, a fortuitous ball decapitated Mir Madan, and the attack petered out.

Soon after, it began raining heavily. Clive’s troops quickly covered their powder, but the Nawab’s men did not. When the rain stopped towards the middle of the afternoon, the Royal Artillery reopened fire, while the Nawab’s lay useless. Clive then launched a counter-attack, and by dusk, with the Nawab’s guns and muskets useless and his cavalry bribed into inaction, the Bengal army was in full retreat.

The Honourable East India Company was now a force to be reckoned with in Bengal, and by degrees would spread its power through the rest of the subcontinent, largely by the skill of its own troops but also with King’s regiments hired from the profits of increasing trade and from the taxes raised in the territory annexed in the wake of their victories. India, indeed, would grow so important to the Empire that by the end of the nineteenth century half the army would be either stationed there, or getting ready to go, or just returned; and the other half would be studying its methods.
⁴¹

The ‘oblique’ approach to war that Plassey represented would become characteristic of the following two centuries of continual, if usually low-intensity, operations in India and on its frontiers. It was war at a different pace, requiring sophisticated intelligence of local affairs, nerve and immense patience as well as bluff, gold, bullock carts and artillery, together with initiative on the part of junior officers who needed as much political as military acumen. From time to time, solid ranks of red discharging regular volleys would be needed, but it is no coincidence that it was in India that red was first replaced by khaki – where cunning, not mere discipline, was needed to defeat enemies who were masters of the first and who disdained the second.

But winning battles on the Ganges Plain, however thrilling to London, would not draw French troops away from either America or Europe. In 1758 Pitt stopped throwing guineas at windows and instead sent troops to Hanover – 12,000 of them, under command of Lord George Sackville and the marquess of Granby – and more ships to America.
The Royal Navy’s guns were soon covering an exemplary and successful assault landing on Louisbourg, opening the door at last to an offensive in French Canada.

Pitt’s strategic courage continued to reap rewards, and the following year, 1759, was the
annus mirabilis
of British arms. At Minden in Westphalia, not far from where the duke of Cumberland had almost lost his name two years earlier, the British infantry had one of their finest hours. In America, the 42-year-old Lieutenant-General Jeffrey Amherst took Fort Ticonderoga, key to movement between New York and Montreal, while the 32-year-old Major-General James Wolfe stormed the Heights of Abraham to capture Quebec. And in November the Royal Navy gained a famous victory at Quiberon Bay off St Nazaire, ending the threat of invasion – and indeed knocking the French navy out of the war.

Minden stands out as a singular and formative achievement. ‘I never thought to see a single line of infantry break through three lines of cavalry ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin,’ wrote the French marquis de Contades afterwards. Minden has been celebrated on 1 August ever since by the six regiments which distinguished themselves in the charge against cavalry, and has long been recognized by the rest of the army as a prime example of audacious offensive spirit.

The ancient city of Minden, which had been a Prussian possession since the middle of the previous century, sits on the River Weser where it cuts through a forested ridge, the Wesergebirge. After their setbacks of the previous year, a counter-offensive had taken French troops to within 30 miles of Hanover city itself, and from July the fleur-de-lys was flying over Minden. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick hastily moved his 40,000-strong Hanoverian – Prussian – British army towards the city to halt any further advance along the Weser, and by the end of the month had managed effectively to lay siege to Minden from the north-west.