The Making Of The British Army (23 page)

The battle at Bemis Heights is therefore worth pondering, for on this tactical action the war turned. And the battle turned on the actions of individuals – Benedict Arnold and Timothy Murphy in particular. And if Murphy had not been so fine a shot it might have turned the other way. The lesson of this episode, that the most modest tactical success can transform the strategic situation when neither side significantly outnumbers the other, is one the United States has carried with it in its doctrine of overwhelming force. The British, meanwhile, always short of men and materiel, have frequently had to resort instead to unpalatable ‘stratagems of evasion’.

After a second Peace of Paris brought the American war to an end in 1783 the British army began a rapid slide into dejection and incapability. The cuts did not look too savage at first: only those additional regiments raised for the war were disbanded, for India now replaced America as the focus of the maritime strategy, the source of the commercial wealth that would sustain and enrich the nation. But the naval building programme was voracious in consuming that
wealth, and there was not even enough money to keep the ‘garrison army’ efficient. By the end of the decade recruiting had fallen to so dire a pitch that the army could not even reach its establishment of 52,000 (which included 6,400 to stiffen the native regiments raised and paid for by the East India Company). And little wonder, for the soldier was paid just 6d a day, the same as his predecessor in Charles I’s ‘guards and garrisons’, and even that was eroded by the stoppages of pay for food, clothing and countless ‘reckonables’. To make matters worse, no commander-in-chief was appointed, so that the army’s interests were looked after by successive civilian secretaries at war who proved uncommonly idle and corrupt. The army into which the eighteen-year-old ensign the Honourable Arthur Wellesley,
⁴⁸
later the duke of Wellington, was commissioned in 1787 stood in as low a state of efficiency as it ever had, or ever would again.

And the army
had
been efficient, no matter what the drubbings in America suggested. It had been a make-do-and-mend sort of efficiency, however: it did not compare with, say, the extraordinary military machine that the Prussian army had become (though a Prussian army of the same numbers would have fared no better than the British against the Americans). But the regiments that had battled in the forests, hills and swamps had adapted quite remarkably well, in the end fighting more like light infantry than musketeers of the line. And all of this sank in, taking root in the recesses of the army’s mind, so that when the moment came, two decades later, for Sir John Moore and his associates to begin retraining a part of the army as light infantry, it was more a dusting off of something put away than a buying of something new.

But while America had shown the army a type of warfare it would see increasingly in its imperial role – in the ‘small wars’ – campaigning on the Continent of Europe would remain an affair of mass and of ever-increasing firepower. When Britain merely dabbled in this, her fingers got badly burned. And she dabbled too often: it would be a decade and a half into the war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France before the British army could begin dictating terms. For first its leaders, both military and political, needed to learn – or rather, relearn – the old Marlburian trade.

LIKE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S TWO IMMOVABLES OF HUMAN EXISTENCE – DEATH
and taxes – in the eighteenth century there were two certainties of British life, at least in retrospect: war with France, and more red coats. More red coats, that is, after first a drastic reduction in their numbers. But as the century entered its final decade, the nature of war with the old enemy was changing. Britain was fighting a very different sort of France and a very different sort of French army, and the war – or more accurately wars – would see the ranks of red swell to a size that would be unmatched for another hundred years.

In February 1793 the ‘Committee of Public Safety’, the executive government of Revolutionary France, had declared war on every power in Europe except Russia. This time the contest was neither dynastic nor commercial, however, for the ends of the Revolution were ends of principle and ideology: the fight against it was a fight for the survival of Britain’s constitutional monarchy (and to many, therefore, for the survival of Britishness). And at first it looked as if the Revolution’s resources would be as infinite as its goals, for the Committee of Public Safety passed a measure authorizing a
levée en masse
, and France would soon have 850,000 men in its army. But because the Royal Navy, ‘the wooden walls’, had been so determinedly strengthened in the decade before, that vast army of Frenchmen would not be able to come to
England by sea. On the other hand, because the British army had been so comprehensively run down, Britain would not actually be able to take Paris, the only certain way of defeating France. The strategy would have to be indirect, therefore: the Royal Navy would squeeze the enemy commercially, seize its colonial wealth – principally the sugar islands of the West Indies – and use those gains to subsidize the continental powers traditionally able to field large armies. It would be Russia, Prussia and Austria that would do the ‘heavy lifting’ in battle with the massive, vigorous new armies of
La République.

So for ten years the British army had little to do except, as Macaulay put it, take some sugar island, courtesy of the Royal Navy, or ‘scatter some mob of half naked Irish peasants’ who made trouble for absentee landlords or who, in 1798, rose more ominously in support of a half-cock French landing. Occasionally the army might try some ‘descent and alarm’ in a diversionary attack, usually in the Low Countries, but the legatees of the great victories of Blenheim, Dettingen and Minden would soon be, in Macaulay’s words again, ‘beaten, chased, forced to re-embark, or forced to capitulate’. It was breaking windows with guineas once more, and a double humiliation after retreat from America.

To make matters worse, yellow fever killed so many men in the West Indies that military recruiting was desperately blighted. Britain, unlike France, had no system of conscription – nor much likelihood of being able to enforce one. The navy had the press gang, but the army’s only means of coercion (the ballot) was employed in filling the ranks of the militia,
⁴⁹
the nation’s unlikely safeguard in the event that a few transports should evade His Majesty’s ships in the Channel.
⁵⁰

Nor were some of the measures taken to make up for lost time very helpful. The decision in 1793 to appoint the first commander-in-chief since the American war was a good one, but the decision to appoint the 76-year-old Lord Amherst, the hero of Ticonderoga in the
annus mirabilis
of 1759, whose health and vigour was even feebler than his age
suggested, was certainly not. When he was replaced after two years by the duke of York, Henry Dundas, the secretary of state for war – at last a cabinet post in its own right – complained that ‘Amherst was a worthy and respectable old man … but the mischief he did in a few years will not be repaired but by the unremitting attention of many’. In 1795, then, the army’s stock stood as low as the life expectancy of its troops.

Remarkably, however, the army did not entirely lose heart. Or rather, enough of its capable officers did not. Indeed, a sort of grim determination now took hold which would be a useful example during the frequent periods of military doldrums in the following two centuries, perhaps best exemplified by the remarks of the young Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Wellesley after the ill-fated expedition to Flanders in 1793–4: ‘At least I learned what
not
to do, and that is always a valuable lesson.’

A valuable lesson indeed, if scant comfort to countless widows and orphans. There were, though, some less bloody lessons to be learned during the lean years of the 1790s. The ‘variety of steps in our infantry and the feebleness and disorderly floating of our lines’, of which the young James Wolfe had complained after Dettingen, were replaced, if with some resistance, by a standard drill. It had been devised by Colonel Sir David Dundas, known (and not always affectionately) as ‘Old Pivot’, for the drill was based on Frederick the Great’s instructions, with their emphasis on the lines of infantry changing direction, and thus the direction of their fire, by pivoting on the left, right or centre points of the line – a slower method than hitherto, but one that cured the problem of Wolfe’s ‘floating’. Still, ‘made in Germany’ was not a recommendation to every officer, and the 1792
Rules and Regulations for the Movement of His Majesty’s Army
took a deal of enforcing – which the duke of York’s appointment went some way to doing, convinced as he was that it was better to have an imperfect drill understood by all than a hundred and one different variants all claiming to be the perfect system.

Indeed, the painfully slow reform of the army really began with York’s outrageous promotion to field marshal and commander-in-chief at the age of 32 – and without the distinction of success in the field. There was just something in the character of George III’s younger son that recommended him to generals far more experienced than himself. It was, of course, prudent for any ambitious officer to be on good terms
with the King’s son, but this alone could not have explained the near-universal respect for York’s energy, devotion to the army, administrative ability – and, though it had been comparatively little tested, physical courage. Not for nothing was he known to all ranks, rather like the marquess of Granby, as ‘the soldier’s friend’. If only he had won even a minor victory in the field and had possessed the figure of a Wellesley or a Moore rather than the corpulence of his brother the Prince Regent, there might today be a worthy statue of him in Whitehall.

‘The grand old duke of York’: commander-in-chief at 32.

One of York’s most pressing tasks was to reform the purchase system. In the decade or so of stagnation after the American war the worst practices had returned, and there were as many new ones. Other than in the artillery and engineers, where commissioning and promotion were still conducted on merit and tightly controlled by the Board of Ordnance, in many regiments the officers were neither capable nor even at duty. The system of a hundred years before, whereby a man of modest means could enrich himself (or at least make a living) through foreign service had developed into a system by which a rich man could buy himself an agreeable, prestigious life. The rough and ready country gentry of Marlborough’s day did at least have to be present in order to make their money, whereas now the ‘gentleman’ could use his family means to buy himself a fine uniform and the admiration of London or Bath, and as long as his regiment was not required for duty overseas his presence on parade was scarcely desired. When his regiment
was
posted abroad he simply exchanged into another that was returning home: there were always impecunious officers keen enough for the cheaper life in India or, while life actually lasted, the West Indies. Sometimes it did not even have to be the tropics to put off a blade: Beau Brummell famously sold out of the 10th Light Dragoons when they were posted to Manchester on the grounds that he had ‘not enlisted for foreign service’.

York managed to curb some of the worst excesses of purchase but in truth it needed the active support of the entire officer corps to end the abuse, and in a sense every officer, good or bad, had a stake in the old system. Arthur Wellesley himself had risen to command of the 33rd Foot (which by then he had taken to India) entirely by purchase and without doing a day’s actual duty in several of the regiments through which he had advanced in rank. What York did manage to do was impose minimum qualification times, so that an officer at least had to spend a decent period in each lower rank before buying his way into the
next one up, and establish a reporting system by which he was able to advance outstanding officers on merit without purchase. Frederick the Great had abolished purchase in the Prussian army and substituted a rigorous system of selection and training of cadets, and Revolutionary France had swept away purchase along with much else of the
ancien régime;
but both countries had universal conscription and therefore a better class of soldier. Perversely, perhaps, Britain’s ‘scum of the earth’ responded quite extraordinarily well to being led by the sort of men who would pay for the privilege of doing so – backed up, of course, by the lash. The job of these ‘gentlemen’s sons’ was by and large straightforward: ‘the NCOs showed us how to fight,’ wrote one old soldier after Waterloo, ‘and the officers how to die’.