Wellington’s infantry certainly possessed the discipline and coolness needed to maximise the effect of their weapons by holding their fire until particularly close range. A study of some nineteen British firefights for which musketry range is specifically mentioned50 shows only four cases (21%) where fire was opened at 100 yards or more, but nine (47%) in which the combat eventually closed to twenty yards or less. The average range for opening fire (from 16 mentions) works out at 75.5 yards, and that for closing fire (from 17 cases) is 30.4 yards. The overall average range of British firefights, taking a mean between the start and finish of each engagement, thus seems to work out at 64.2 yards. It is the average for closing fire, however, which is probably the most significant: little more than the length of a cricket pitch!
It remains an open question whether the infantry of other nations could habitually hold their fire until such close ranges, especially after the passing of most of the mature, intensively trained armies by around 1808. Whether it is a matter of the Grande Armée of the Boulogne camp, or of the Prussian army of Jena, we have a general impression that these professional armies had been better at the minutiae of battalion drill than were their immediate successors.51 Personally, I am persuaded that the emphasis thereafter moved more to skirmish fire at longer range – but admittedly we have no solid data base to prove it. No specific figures or analyses have ever, to my knowledge, been assembled to test this point, and one suspects that they would be very much more difficult to find, even for the French, than they are for the British. If we did have such details, and if we could make an attempt at generalising the firing ranges for the whole of the period between 1808 and 1815, it would surely be surprising if the overall average were not considerably longer than for the British during the same period.
This is not to say that all long-range fire was always necessarily inaccurate. There was at this time, for example, a certain growth in the idea that soldiers should be encouraged to aim their pieces, rather than just level them in the general direction of the enemy.52 This in turn was often linked to the idea of training specialist light infantry, and some proud regimental traditions were created as a result. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that Napoleonic ‘Light Infantry’ was all too often indistinguishable in practice from line infantry,53 and much nonsense has been written about the special qualities supposedly bestowed by a ‘light’ designation. We must therefore tread warily, and distinguish carefully between two very distinct species: frivolous light infantry who were not given any special training, and serious light infantry who were.
On one hand there was a mass of ordinary soldiers who happened to be called ‘light infantry’, ‘voltigeurs’, ‘chasseurs’, ‘tirailleurs’, and so on, merely by a terminological accident and regardless of any particular ability or experience. Such troops might be reinforced in their light identity only by some tailor’s flourish in the cut of the jacket, or by an unconventionally coloured plume. In the French army, where most Napoleonic light regiments were of this type, there was no proper training manual for skirmishing before 1831, unless units chanced to receive privately produced drill books from their individual colonels.54 All infantry, both light and line, often fought as skirmishers; but usually following merely their own inspirations.
Perhaps the most extreme case of a ‘pseudo-light’ formation was the Second Imperial Guard Voltigeur Division of February-March 1814. Three-quarters of its men had been civilians only ten days before the Division was formed and marched out to war, which was itself only twenty days before it had to bear the brunt of some heavy fighting at Craonne, suffering around 50% casualties. The men’s personal equipment was always very far from complete during this campaign, and their formal tactical training must have been as close to zero as to make no difference.55
A number of France’s opponents, on the other hand, did maintain small but specialist light infantry forces that were genuinely manned by experts. Such forces would typically enjoy high esprit de corps and a strong awareness of the true functions of light infantry – although in combat they tended to be used in close order as often as they were set to skirmishing.56 We may further suggest that their forte lay in skilled but auxiliary outpost, scouting or rearguard work, or in preparatory, harrassment shooting before the main set-piece clashes of large bodies, rather than in the exchange of musketry between more or less densely formed lines. Such troops doubtless made an invaluable contribution to every army they supported – but they probably did not often change the overall range or rate of killing within the major firefights by a very great margin.
Those light infantry regiments which were sufficiently specialised to carry rifles could certainly achieve superior results to those armed with the smoothbore, and at longer ranges. Weller found that rifles firing a spherical ball could keep a grouping of around twelve inches at 100 yards, although accuracy at 400 yards was described as either ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.57 Ezekiel Baker, the designer of the British rifle used in the Peninsula, felt that he could not guarantee accuracy at greater ranges than 200 yards, even in target practice, although a proportion of hits could still be expected at 300 yards.58
Nevertheless, this means that the true advantage with a rifle was really little more than 100 yards’ extra reach over that of a smoothbore, which might sometimes be reduced still further by the growing interest in accurate fire that was potentially increasing the efficacy of ordinary muskets. In any case, modern experience in Korea and Vietnam has shown that there are normally very few combat situations in which riflemen have an opportunity to fire effectively at more than 200 yards, regardless of the ballistic properties of their weapons. Beyond that range the battle tends to pass to heavier, crew-served weapons – or artillery, in Napoleonic terms – if there are any targets visible at all.59
To compound the problem, Napoleonic riflemen always had to pay a heavy price for their slender margin of extra range, in terms of convenience and speed of firing. The need to use a patched ball to minimise ‘windage’ made for difficulties in ramming, and often necessitated the assistance of a mallet. Baker was also at pains to stress the great care and deliberation that was essential to loading, estimating range and aiming, which all added still further to the slowness of fire. It would take a rifleman at least three times as long to fire each round as it did a musketeer, leaving him exceptionally vulnerable to massed attacks unless he was well protected by terrain or fieldworks.60
In summary, it seems fair to say that there were no genuinely long-range Napoleonic weapons apart from the artillery, although the latter could certainly exercise a powerful effect up to about a kilometre, and the French Villantroys coastal mortar was claimed to be reasonably accurate against shipping as far afield as six kilometres. In common with musketry, however, artillery was generally decisive only at short range, where grape and cannister could be used. A formed line would perhaps not choose to present itself within long artillery range of an enemy for any length of time if it could be avoided; but if it was unavoidable, such an ordeal was usually considered more or less bearable. Wellington deliberately accepted this penalty for Beresford’s flank march around the enemy redoubts at Toulouse, and the French Imperial Guard made a celebrated stand under prolonged cannonading at Aspern-Essling.61 By contrast to such operations, however, it was generally understood that a much more fearsome fire could be expected within a zone 200 yards or less from an enemy’s position. When they arrived within this zone it was normal for soldiers to hope for a very rapid resolution of the combat.
A walking man can cover 200 yards in two or three minutes, and this should therefore in theory have been the total time taken up by most infantry clashes. An attacker had to make up his mind to cross that distance as rapidly as possible, in order to chase off the enemy before the latter could fire many shots. With luck, during two minutes a defending rifleman might fire only once, a cannon twice or thrice, and a musketeer perhaps scarcely more. Apart from a few novelties, like the repeating Austrian airgun, a defender’s weapon
s normally had a low rate of fire. Even when the defender was closely packed, as he often was,62 this made a relatively low total volume of fire – at least in contrast to massed fire from either the medieval longbow or the late nineteenth-century breechloading rifle. It was not very much to keep an attacker at bay, but it was the best that was available in Napoleonic times.
To further downgrade a defender’s fire, the weaponry of the day was notoriously prone to misfires, and the loading procedure was so complex that all but the steadiest troops were quite liable to fumble it in a crisis.63 Under conditions of combat stress the available fire might well lack the accuracy and density needed to stop a determined rush, allowing a defender to be swept away. From his point of view, therefore, it was important to find some means of delaying the assailant within the 200-yard zone, so that he would not reach his objective before a great deal more fire could be poured upon him. In essence there were two ways of achieving this – either by turning the attacker around by a Wellingtonian counter-attack in the way we have already analysed, or by the judicious choice of an encumbered battlefield calculated to prolong the firefight.
If the defending troops were insufficiently trained to contemplate a counter-attack, then the obvious way to delay the enemy was to stand behind either natural obstacles or artificial fieldworks. A subtle variant on this theme that was sometimes encountered, whether intentionally or not, was when the enemy was given good cover a short distance in front of the defending line, so he would be tempted to go to ground and open fire. This was what happened to Pack’s Portuguese assaulting the Arapil Grande at Salamanca, when they found a convenient breast-high shelf of rock between them and the French. It also happened to Freire’s Spanish at Toulouse, when they advanced into a sunken lane but could not be persuaded to advance out of it. In both cases the enemy was able to advance a few leisurely paces, and devastate the attacker with fire from above.64
More straightforwardly, however, an attack could be deprived of its impetus if it simply had to climb a steep slope under fire, as Claparède found in the Closewitz ravine at the start of Jena,65 and Picton’s Division found at the start of Orthez.66 Unimproved slopes usually remained technically passable, however, and in favourable circumstances all but the very steepest could be stormed. Wellington’s final assault at Sorauren was up a very steep slope, as were many others in the Pyrenees and more than a few of Napoleon’s attacks in the Alps. If he had time, however, a defender could amass additional protection by artificially scarping the natural contours. A flat, near-vertical face some twelve or eighteen feet high might be etched into an otherwise-climbable hillside. The heights around Torres Vedras, for example, still bear the marks of such excavations to this day.67
Water obstacles might also be used to delay an attacker, although not even the sea was enough to stop French cavalry from capturing the Dutch fleet across the ice in 1795. Lake Zurich was crossed by Soult’s swimmers in 1799, and the Bidassoa estuary, almost half a mile wide, was forded by Wellington’s men in 1814. Yet on the other hand a staunchly-defended rivulet could sometimes loom as large as a mighty torrent in the eyes of an uncertain assailant. The tiny Portina brook at Talavera was enough to mark a boundary between the two armies for much of the battle, as was the Goldbach stream on the French right at Austerlitz. Of course it was often possible to increase the value of water obstacles artificially, either by bridge demolitions or by creating inundations, but such measures were more usual in fortress warfare, or in a strategic context, rather than in pitched battles in the open field.
In open battle it was more normal to create obstacles to an attacker’s mobility by digging redoubts and other banked fieldworks, surrounded by dry ditches and timber palisades or chevaux de frise. The Russian army especially favoured these techniques, and we find it fighting from behind earthworks in many of its defensive battles from Eylau onwards. This did not ultimately stop French infantry from taking Russian positions by storm – and at Borodino even the cavalry managed to do the same – but it did increase the difficulty of such assaults.68
Elsewhere the building of redoubts was often associated with hill positions where a long line had to be held by relatively few troops, but where lateral communications were a cause for concern. Torres Vedras and the successive lines of French fieldworks on the Pyrenees both fell into this category, albeit with very different efficacy in each case. In the Portuguese example the fieldworks exerted an entirely successful deterrent effect upon the enemy; but on the Franco-Spanish border they had no appreciable influence upon the battle whatsoever. Time and again Wellington’s men were able to storm Soult’s apparently impressive Pyrenean hilltop forts, suffering only minor losses.69 We must conclude that the defenders felt themselves inadequately provided with either supporting echelons of friendly troops, or with personal constitutional fortitude. At all events, it is clear that detached forts were scarcely a very complete answer to the problem of defending an infantry line on an extended battlefront.
Barricaded farms and hamlets were normally more useful bastions of defence, since they tended to be more extensive and could accommodate more troops. On at least one occasion a whole battalion was billetted in a single cottage near Bayonne,70 and in the same campaign the stalwart defences of Barrouilhet, Arcangues, and St Boës deserve in their way to be no less celebrated than those of Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte at Waterloo.
The classical alternative to a defence based on redoubts, villages or other detached strongpoints was to build a continuous line of fortification, comparable to Hadrian’s Wall or the ne plus ultra line of Marlborough’s era. Similar expedients were tried occasionally during the French Revolutionary Wars, and not without success. The British on the Zijpe line in North Holland in 1799, for example, had exploited the local layout of dykes and canals to establish a flankless perimeter that could be held while they completed their concentration. All it needed was enough men to hold the frontage in sufficient force at every point, and enough time to complete the necessary excavations.
From the Napoleonic period, perhaps the classic case of such a linear fieldwork came in the so-called ‘Battle of New Orleans’ at the start of 1815, which was in fact a series of four actions spread over two weeks. When examined as a whole, this episode can give us quite a vivid and instructive illustration of many of the points that are most relevant to the tactics of the day. Let us therefore round off this chapter by sailing westwards across the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula, to contemplate a battle that – in British eyes at least – has all too often been overshadowed by the events that were soon to take place on the southern outskirts of Brussels.
The battles of New Orleans 23 December 1814–18 January 1815.
At the end of 1814 the British had completed their successful attack on Washington and were attempting to advance up the Mississippi through New Orleans.71 The entrance to the river was blocked by US forts, however, so it was decided to advance around the rear of the city by making a flank move through the waterways further to the East. This ‘indirect approach’ was initially extremely successful, and achieved an impressive operational surprise. The American flotilla guarding Lake Borgne was destroyed, and General Pakenham was able to land his miniature army undetected, just seven miles from New Orleans itself. The capstone was set on this manoeuvre when Colonel Thornton, the man who had burned the White House, narrowly managed to beat off General Andrew Jackson’s shrewd counter-attack at Villeré’s plantation on the night of 23–24 December. After this the American forces were thrown into disarray, and for a time there was no coherent defending force between the British and their target.
Ironically enough, 24 December was also the day when the Treaty of Ghent was signed in Belgium between Britain and the USA, bringing the war to a close on terms that were scarcely wonderful for the Americans. Until that time their operations on land had been largely unsuccessful, and a great gloom had descended upon their governing circles.72 As if by telepathy, however, the British forces outside New Orleans seemed to
let go of their grip on reality and military efficiency at the very moment when the treaty was signed. From 24 December onwards, it was the British who were to make all the running in the field of military incompetence.
After their victory at Villeré’s plantation, the British entirely failed to make a pursuit, but instead permitted the Americans to steal their herd of draught animals. Jackson was also given time to dig in on a flankless, mile-long position along the north bank of a wet ditch in Chalmette plantation. He used every resource available to improve these positions, but not all of them were felicitous. The improvised cotton bale breastworks unfortunately caught fire from the cannons’ muzzle flashes, while an attempted water obstacle equally unfortunately drained off into the Mississippi. Nevertheless, a line of sorts was soon established and roughly manned. At Villeré’s plantation Jackson had learned the hard lesson that his shaky forces, half of whom were militia, were unreliable in the offensive. He now spared no effort to patch together a purely static defence. Pakenham had meanwhile arrived with reinforcements, but he greatly overestimated his enemy’s strength and decided to wait still longer while artillery was brought forward and a canal opened to provide communications with his boats.
The advance was finally resumed on the 28th, but it was halted as soon as it encountered cannon fire from the Americans’ fortified line. The whole British force went to earth in flat but soggy ground interspersed with drains, some 600 yards from Jackson’s position. It stayed there, immobile and useless, for seven hours under long-range bombardment. British rocket fire was ineffective in this exchange, and a promising attempt to outflank the enemy was countermanded just in time to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Pakenham entirely failed to order any assault, even though at this stage Jackson’s defences were still very weak, and he did nothing to boost the morale of his frustrated soldiers.
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