The Making Of The British Army (20 page)

Fortune continued to favour the allies, who were able to close to the ridge in the late morning without being discovered. At about midday the
Erbprinz’s
outflanking column (including the Guards and Highlanders) burst from the mist and in short order took the Heinberg, the round-topped hill anchoring the left of the French line. Du Muy counter-attacked strongly, but the
Erbprinz’s
second column attacked the French in rear and over-ran the guns. There was a brisk infantry fight, and then a charge by the Royal
Dragoons decided it: the French began swarming from the ridge.

But du Muy’s cavalry (all thirty-one squadrons) on the right of the line had yet to join the battle: a determined charge might yet have thrown back the
Erbprinz
’
s
men. The marquess of Granby’s twenty-two squadrons of horse had now come on to the field, however, and, having summed up the situation with the much-prized cavalryman’s
coup d’œil
, Granby attacked at once.

And at speed. Granby himself galloped so fast that his hat and wig flew off, and he went ‘bald-headed for the enemy’ – providing the inspiration for many a public house name and its bald-pate sign. These were heavy cavalry (dragoons and dragoon guards) – big men on big horses, with straight swords to impale rather than slash: the hooves thundered, the ground shook, and the shock of collision knocked all fight from those French brave enough to stand their ground. For most had just turned their reins and run from the field with the rest of du Muy’s men. The Minden debt had been spectacularly repaid in full.

It had in fact already been repaid in part a fortnight earlier, 60 miles to the south-west at Emsdorff as the allied army was withdrawing on Kassel. The newly raised 15th Light Dragoons – altogether smaller men on smaller horses, carrying lighter, curved swords for cutting in the duel – had repeatedly charged unbroken infantry, cavalry and artillery, against all expectations of what a light regiment could do, and taken 2,000 prisoners and two dozen guns. As reward they were given the right to bear ‘Emsdorff’ on their helmets and guidons – the beginning of the system of battle honours.

The cavalry was unquestionably the shock arm of the battlefield once more, as Prince Rupert had been certain it should be, and as Cromwell had made it.

A hundred years after Monck had paraded the remnants of the New Model Army at Blackheath, the British infantry stood at last as a formidably large corps as well as a capable one. By 1763 it had grown to four battalions of Foot Guards and 147 of infantry of the line of battle, including twenty-three of Highlanders. It fought in line three ranks deep, and sometimes only two, or in square when attacked by cavalry; and unlike the French it advanced in line too, its effectiveness lying not in numbers and the juggernaut column, but in musketry – firing on orders, as one body. A few commanders, especially those who had seen ‘light infantry’ in North America, thought there was a place
for troops moving and firing on their own initiative under looser control, but for the time being what gave the winning edge in battle was the volley, and it needed iron discipline – unflinching obedience to orders through constant drill.

The Royal Artillery, although still handicapped by having no permanent teams of drivers (who, like carters at harvest-time, were hired only ‘for the duration’) was also now, in quality at least, a match for that of the continental armies, its guns much handier and able to get about the battlefield in a way that Marlborough would have envied. The duke of Brunswick wrote to one gunner officer after Minden to commend his skill – ‘It is to you and your brigade
⁴³
that I am indebted for having silenced the fire of a battery of the enemy, which extremely galled the troops’ – and gave him and his fellow captains generous bounties. British field artillery was coming of age.

With infantrymen who could stand their ground by fire and take the enemy’s ground with the bayonet, and with cavalry that could charge home but remain under control, supported by artillery that was handy enough in and out of action to be able to shape the course of the battle, George II’s army now had the potential to be as good as any in Europe. All that was required for a successful campaign was their proper handling before and during battle – in other words, generalship.

But if Marlborough had shown the way, disasters such as Sackville’s at Minden, Loudon’s in America and Sir John Mordaunt’s at Roche- fort
⁴⁴
showed that good generalship was still elusive, and certainly not a precise science. It did repay study, however; many a continental general had been primed in his profession at one or more of the European military academies. But Britain had only Woolwich, a technical college for the artillery and engineers. The odd Englishman had studied abroad, but it was unusual. Some had served with continental armies, but the majority of senior officers had not. Nor was it easy to discern in peace the characteristics of a good general in war. George II had correctly identified Wolfe’s ability, but had at first been scathing of Granby’s, calling him ‘a sot, a bully, that does nothing but drink and quarrel’. Granby was no Marlborough, though he would
become commander-in-chief, but he did share Corporal John’s common touch, and gained a reputation for generosity towards his own troops which undoubtedly spurred other officers into humanity in a way that would have been strange to the armies of the
ancien régime.

One of the problems of British generalship lay in the criteria for promotion. The first requirement of an officer in the first half of the eighteenth century was absolute loyalty to the house of Hanover. Better an untried man with a stake in the Hanoverian succession than a proven soldier with uncertain loyalties (and perhaps even closet Jacobite sympathies). John Campbell, fourth earl of Loudon, a key player in suppression of the Forty-five, had afterwards been promoted to command in America. Benjamin Franklin wrote of him: ‘On the whole I then wonder’d much, how such a Man came to be entrusted with so important a Business as the Conduct of a great Army; but having since seen more of the great World, and the means of obtaining & Motives for giving Places, & Employments, my Wonder is diminished.’

Likewise Mordaunt, so timorous in the Rochefort raid, was a staunch Whig MP who had commanded the reserve at Culloden and pursued the Highlanders after the battle. And Sackville was the son of the duke of Dorset, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. These were men who could be relied on politically. Nor were they without courage: Mordaunt had handled his brigade resolutely after the near-rout at Falkirk, and even Sackville had led the infantry from the front at Fontenoy. Yet they had no aptitude for managing a campaign, or perhaps even handling large numbers of troops in a field battle. When the duke of Wellington was asked who should take over from him in the Peninsula were he to fall, to the surprise of many he replied: ‘Beresford. He may not know how to lead an army, but he knows how to feed one.’
⁴⁵
Unlike in the century before, there were fewer men rising from the ranks of the minor gentry, men who had spent most of their time soldiering, and more who were appointed to command from the aristocracy, whose ‘social obligations’ could frequently detain them in London or on their family estates. The army was increasingly a gentlemanly pastime, not a means of advancement.

It was also extraordinary just how hard Parliament sometimes made it for a general to do his job. The veteran (Huguenot) field marshal Lord Ligonier was both commander-in-chief and Master General of the Ordnance. Just as Marlborough had done when he held both appointments, Ligonier tried his level best to unite the efforts of the cavalry and foot, which answered to his first title, with those of the artillery and engineers, which answered to the second. But Parliament kept the lines of responsibility and the budgets of the two departments strictly independent of each other, and this was inevitably mirrored in operations on the ground. It was the same with supply and transport: victualling and clothing were the responsibility of the Treasury, with the same civilian commissary arrangements as in the century before, while billeting and movement of troops at home remained the business of the secretary at war. The army owned not a draught horse or a waggon of its own, relying instead on civilian hire. It was a perfect system for making sure the army could not threaten the peace of the realm; it was equally imperfect for making war on the King’s enemies. Such was the inheritance of Cromwellian militarism and the Jacobite scares.

Marlborough had overcome the problems through force of personality and willingness to put money into the right hands. Half a century later, few generals had Marlborough’s personality and ability to scheme, and fewer still his experience. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick complained of being unable to take to the field after winter quarters in 1760 because ‘I have a monster of a commissariat independent in some respects of me, and composed of several heads independent of each other, each with its own chief or protector in England, but together as ignorant and as incapable as they are avid to line their own pockets.’

Thus the know-how of generalship was largely the preserve of elderly officers schooled somewhat cynically in working the system. And although age did not necessarily make them incapable in battle, as Lord Stair had demonstrated at Dettingen, it did not make for campaign flair either. Even Granby, for all his dash, knew that the art of campaigning did not come easy to him, for ‘sudden marches, alarms &tc drive the Commissariat business sometimes right out of our heads’. There were, of course, officers like Wolfe who rose with astonishing speed, but the system as a whole was haphazard. Perhaps, in the end, failure on the Continent was not so calamitous: war there was a diversion after all, and there were always Prussian field marshals and German troops to pull the fat from the fire. And when a raid on a sugar island or a coastal
fort went wrong the Royal Navy could usually sort out the mess, landing more supplies or evacuating the army.

But in North America it was different. There, as the early defeats in both wars of the mid-century had shown, mistakes of generalship were not so easily mitigated. The next trial would hammer the point home.

The Seven Years War ended on terms far more favourable than Marlborough’s wars, and certainly favourable to the maritime strategy. There was a deal of territory trading around the Caribbean, but the biggest gains in America were in the north and to the west. Before the war, British colonial America had been like a thin layer of sandwich filling between the Atlantic, whose control was uncertain, and the French who, though scattered thinly, held the interior from Canada (between the Great Lakes and the mouth of the St Lawrence, except for the snowy wastes around Hudson’s Bay and half of Newfoundland island) to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. By the end of the war, the sandwich filling had expanded to the Mississippi in the west and to Hudson’s Bay in the north, and the French outer layer had dwindled to the rump of Louisiana. That relic apart, there was no European power in continental North America but Britain. It was a glorious western empire for the new king, George III, who had come to the throne in 1760.

It had to be paid for, however. And it was the attempts to make the American colonists pay their share, without the fig leaf of parliamentary representation in London, that precipitated the Revolutionary War. ‘Spin’would invest the revolution with a certain nobility, but as Dr Johnson wrote in
Taxation No Tyranny
(1775), ‘How is it that we hear the loudest
yelps
for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’

Noble or not, the war ended with a complete defeat of British arms and an independent United States of America. But how did a handful of ‘regular’ American regiments and few thousand militiamen defeat a nation which had only just – and so spectacularly and comprehensively – helped defeat two of the greatest continental powers in a worldwide war? In military terms the answer was generalship, but an equal cause was parsimony: for Defoe’s warning, that it took three years and 30,000 lives to make a new army, was as apposite now as it had been after the Peace of Ryswick.

For the cuts following the Seven Years War were savage. In 1763 the land forces in His Majesty’s pay (including German mercenaries) stood
at 203,000. They were straight away reduced to just seventy regiments, each of a single battalion and at lower strength. Yet they had to garrison a vastly expanded empire. By 1764 the army had been further cut to 45,000, of which 12,000 were to police Ireland. And so when in 1763 the capable General Amherst was succeeded as commander-in- chief in North America by General Thomas Gage, the army was already stretched.

Gage himself was a difficult man. He knew the colonies well but his record in the field was at best mixed; his faulty tactics had led to disaster at the battle of Monongahela, and Amherst himself had questioned his judgement. He was confident of his own ability, however, and his brother was a government minister. And to his credit he had not been silent in the ten years before ‘the shot heard round the world’ at Concord, Massachusetts (April 1775), warning repeatedly of the need for more troops to counter the increasing truculence of the American militia. But he mishandled the opening skirmishes of the American Revolutionary War, and General William Howe, his deputy, whose brother had been killed at Ticonderoga, took over command in October.