Sherer’s is not only one of the most eloquent summaries of the experience of a battalion at war in the Napoleonic era but also one of the most representative. For all that has been written on the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars, these events typify only a few days in a campaigning experience that spanned months or years. It therefore comes as little surprise that the bulk of memoir accounts focus not on the battles but on the day-to-day experience of active service and that their focus is rarely on the army as a whole but on the regiment with which the writer served. Decision on the field of battle rested with commanders at a higher level, but it was at a regimental level that the daily burden of war—Sherer’s grim trio of sickness, suffering, and the sword—was felt. Thus, ultimately, it was on the success or failure of the regimental system that the fate of Britain’s campaigns rested.
This work is not a narrative history of the British Army’s campaigns against Napoleon and his allies; neither is it a social history of the army during those campaigns, nor, at least in the conventional sense of providing detailed orders of battle, does it track the organization of the forces involved. Many excellent works have been produced that cover all of these topics; they are listed in the bibliography, and this work would have been impossible without them. What I have attempted here, however, is to draw on all these various approaches, alongside a systematic study of original returns and reports, in order to offer a fresh insight into how the British Army functioned in the field during the Napoleonic Wars. This approach, in turn, starts to pose new questions as to just how effective the British regimental system actually was. The question is not one of impact on battlefield performance, where the historical record largely speaks for itself, but rather one of how the system stood up to months and years of sustained campaign service in a war far more immense in scale than anything it had been designed for.
One may well argue that since the ultimate purpose of an army is to defeat the forces of the enemy on the battlefield, the effectiveness of a military force can only be judged by looking at factors bearing directly on this. Yet it must be remembered that warfare in the Napoleonic era saw very few days of actual pitched battle, and that when one consults the correspondence of senior commanders, the majority of exchanges deal not with strategy and tactics but with administration, discipline, logistics, and manpower. It is also unwise for the historian to judge an army solely on its battlefield record, since there is evidence aplenty to suggest that units that performed well in battle did not always do so well during ordinary campaigning; the indiscipline of the 88th Foot was as notorious as its combat record was exemplary, whilst the foreigners of the Chasseurs Britanniques fought with a determination that does not fit with that regiment’s continual record of desertion off the battlefield. What must be considered is how individual units, and the larger formations of which they formed a part, were able to sustain an effective strength whilst on service. This ability, in turn, was directly responsible for dictating the level of strength that could be brought to bear on the battlefield.
In conventional narratives, the time spent between combats is all too frequently dispensed with as essentially a topic for social histories, best left to memoir accounts. Except in extreme cases, such as the privations suffered during the retreat from Burgos, or the Guadiana and Walcheren fever epidemics, little consideration is typically given as to how the rigors of that time between battles might affect the outcome of the next combat. For the writer of battle history, there is no pressing need to explain why, to invent a hypothetical case, such and such a battalion embarked on campaign with 800 men, and fought its first battle a month later with just 650. The assumption is seemingly that, if the 650 were enough to win the day, the fate of the remainder is unimportant. Within the strict narrative confines of battle history, this reasoning cannot be faulted. On the other hand, it also cannot be denied that considerable effort has been expended in attempting to explain these sorts of cases for other armies of the period, suggesting that a similar treatment of the British Army is needed to fill the gap.
Such methods date back, at the very least, to Charles Joseph Minard’s 1861 graphical representation of the strength of the Grande Armée of 1812.2 More recently, Scott Bowden’s application of the concept of strategic consumption has been utilized for analysis of the reraised Grande Armée of 1813 in a work that has inspired much of the methodology behind this study.3 In order to achieve something similar here, much time was spent in the National Archives at Kew, transcribing the monthly returns covering the majority of the campaigns in which the British Army was engaged between 1808 and 1815, and it is an analysis of these figures that underpins much of the content of this book.
I shall return to the contents of these tables, and their uses, later, but it is first necessary to say something about the scope and remit of this study. Firstly, the time frame has, with a few minor deviations, been maintained at 1808–15. This was in part for practical reasons relating to the amount of numerical data that could legitimately be processed during the course of what started life as a three-year doctoral project, but also, and ultimately more importantly, because those years encapsulate a distinct and self-contained narrative. The period in question marks one of the few occasions—only the First World War, and perhaps the War of the Spanish Succession, can be fairly compared—in which the British Army took a sustained leading role in warfare on the European continent. Field armies were deployed in more than one theater simultaneously, and over a five-year period a force was maintained in the Iberian Peninsula that won some of the most decisive victories of the Napoleonic Wars. That this great achievement was possible seems all the more surprising when one considers that the British Army as a whole had barely completed—indeed, to some extent was still completing—one of the greatest internal overhauls in its history, simultaneously with a swing in strategic policy that exchanged a doctrine of short-term deployments, with specific limited goals, for one of sustained conflict directed at the defeat of the enemy’s troops in the field and the liberation of occupied allied territory. Thus, the reforms instigated by the Duke of York during the late 1790s and early 1800s form the background to this narrative since it was these, along with unit-level traditions that were far older, that created the systems by which the British Army was organized in 1808.
In order to judge just how effective those systems were when subjected to the test of sustained active service, in the Iberian Peninsula, in North America, and in northern Europe, I have deliberately avoided any detailed consideration of the British Army’s role in domestic or colonial affairs where different circumstances applied. Nevertheless, the British Army was controlled from headquarters at Horse Guards in London, and drew its recruits from all corners of the British Isles. This being so, it is impossible to ignore the domestic scene completely, for the circumstances of their home service and recruiting did much to affect the subsequent performance of the various battalions and regiments once they deployed overseas. A vital resource here are the reports and returns that form the lasting record of the biannual inspections carried out, at least in theory, on all regiments, corps, and detachments of the British Army. Because few such records have survived from inspections carried out on active service—particularly in the years before 1812—this is a patchy record at best, and one that therefore requires supplementing with reports made in the months prior to a unit’s departure overseas. By supplementing these, where possible, with those reports from overseas that have survived, as well as with the correspondence of commanders in the field and the commander in chief at Horse Guards, it is generally possible to fill in most of the gaps in the story of a particular regiment and thereby follow it from deployment, through the rigors of campaign service, to its eventual return home.
Alongside this written paper trail, there is also a numerical one in the shape of the monthly returns already mentioned. Whilst these documents represent a resource comprising vast numbers of tabulated data, there has, as yet, been no large-scale systematic study of them. T
hey have, it is true, been extensively mined for information on specific regiments, or to establish the strength of the forces deployed at a given battle, but they have not previously been used to underpin a study as extensive as this one. Thanks to modern spreadsheet software, it has been possible to transcribe over 300 tables giving monthly snapshots of data from various theaters. From these, over 250 further, more sophisticated, tables have been created, analyzing specific units and tracking change over time. In this way it is possible to compare the various trends within a single unit across a period of time, or to compare a number of units present simultaneously in the same theater. This method has been used, for example, to analyze the performance of provisional and detachment battalions during the Peninsular War, or to pick up on different sickness and death ratios—for both men and horses—in the different arms of service.
My hope and intention was that once this statistical analysis had been used to pinpoint areas of interest, investigation by more conventional means would reveal the reasons behind the trends and anomalies identified, and on the whole this has proved to be the case. However, some of the results produced by this methodology have proved to be so unexpected that they present substantial challenges to long-standing beliefs that have gone unchallenged for many years. This, in turn, has questioned the validity of some of the memoir sources on which these beliefs are based, and, although I have used firsthand accounts wherever possible throughout this book, there are places—usually, in fairness, when the author is writing long after the fact, or about events not personally witnessed—where conflicting evidence renders the memoir palpably inaccurate and a hindrance rather than a help to understanding. Revisionism for its own sake is a dangerous thing, but there are nevertheless several instances where the statistical data leaves no other option than a substantial reassessment of the assumptions, and some of the sources, on which much of the analysis of the British Army of this period has been based.
Abbreviations
AGO
Additional General Order
GO
General Order
KGL
King’s German Legion
NCO
Non Commissioned Officer
RHA
Royal Horse Artillery
TNA
The National Archives
WO
War Office
CHAPTER 1
The British Army and Its Campaigns
The British Army of 1808, despite having undergone an extensive program of reform over the previous decade, was still very much a mixture of the old and the new. Thanks to the measures instituted under the aegis of the Duke of York following his appointment as commander in chief in 1795, the British Army was a far more professional body than heretofore. During this thirteen-year period, its command structure, both military and civil, was reorganized, leading to the concentration of responsibility into a relatively small number of posts. This restructuring enabled Viscount Castlereagh, then occupying the senior civil post of secretary of state for war and the colonies, to complement York’s military reforms with a shake-up of the way in which the British Army was recruited and its manpower systems organized. It was the resulting increase in manpower available for active service, at the expense of reducing the numbers of men assigned to home defense, that enabled Britain to mount the campaigns covered by this work.1
Yet although York could influence how a regiment was trained and led, and although Castlereagh’s reforms gave it better access to fresh manpower, the regiment nevertheless remained a decidedly independent entity. In theory at least, a great deal remained in the hands of the regimental colonels, who, position notwithstanding, tended to be fairly senior general officers. On a more day-to-day level, much depended on the seniority and reputation of a regiment, on the character and experience of the field officers commanding it, on its station and service, and on its success or otherwise in attracting recruits. But whilst this book is ultimately about successes and failures at a regimental level, that focus would make little sense without an understanding of how the higher levels of command functioned. Such an overview is all the more essential since it also serves to place the statistical sources used in this study in their historical context. The modern historian may have the advantage of software-aided analysis, but the returns and reports that underpin the conclusions presented in this work were just as keenly pursued at the time, at all levels of the military and civil hierarchy, and, at least when the system was working efficiently, decisions of strategic import were taken as a result.2
Indeed, one could even go so far as to assert that strategy was at times directly dictated by the rise and fall of the totals at the bottom of every column of every return. In 1809, for example, Britain found that it simply did not have the manpower available to mount successful campaigns in two different theaters of war, whilst in 1814 there were three different theaters competing for a decidedly finite pool of resources. It then, of course, fell to the government to decide on its priorities, and for the staff at Horse Guards to allocate manpower accordingly. The same was true on an operational level. Not only did the availability of manpower dictate the course of events on a local scale, determining whether troops could be spared to reinforce a garrison here, or to mount an expedition there, but also in a larger sense, regulating whether or not a force could operate in a particular area at all. During the winter of 1809–10, for example, Wellington was torn between political demands that called him to maintain his army on Spanish soil, and the practicalities of the fact that the soil in question was the malarial marshes of the Guadiana valley around Badajoz. In the end, the practical outweighed the political, and he was compelled to make a substantial redeployment of his troops for the simple reason that many of them would otherwise have succumbed to illness. Without an understanding of the course of the campaigns, therefore, one cannot fully appreciate the nature of the demands that they placed on Britain’s military systems; without an understanding of those systems, it is impossible to fully appreciate why these same campaigns took the form that they did.
Military Organization: The High Command
The professional head of the British Army was the commander in chief, who was always London-based in this period although the Duke of York had taken the field in the Netherlands in 1799 and entertained some hopes of doing so again when it was first mooted to send an army to Portugal.3 York, who had first been appointed to the post in 1795, remained in it until forced to resign in March 1809, as a result of the Mary-Ann Clarke scandal, in which his former mistress was implicated in alleged corruption relative to taking payments in return for using her influence with the Duke. General Sir David Dundas filled the post for the next two years until York, his reputation rehabilitated, was able to return in June 1811, serving thereafter until his death in 1827. The other two senior home-based staff appointments were those of adjutant general, filled throughout this period by Lt. General Sir Harry Calvert, and quartermaster general, held by Lt. General Sir Robert Brownrigg until 1811, and by Lt. General Sir James Willoughby Gordon thereafter. The latter post was concerned with arranging the movements and postings of regiments, whereas the former dealt primarily with matters of drill and discipline. Additionally, York raised the profile of the military secretary, previously a civilian post, by appointing Gordon to the role in 1809 to shoulder a portion of the commander in chief’s administrative tasks, replacing him with Colonel Henry Torrens when Gordon stepped up to become quartermaster general.
On the civil side—although the military-civil distinction was blurred by the appointment of serving officers to some civil posts—the major roles were those of the secretary at war, responsible for financial matters, and the secretary of state for war and the colonies, a senior Cabinet minister with overall responsibility for coordinating the war effort. The former post was successively held by General Sir James Murray-Pulteney, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, and Viscount Palmerston; the latter by Viscount Castlereagh until September 1809, then by Lord Liverpoo
l until his becoming prime minister in June 1812, and finally by the Earl of Bathurst until after the peace. Also worth mentioning at this juncture, since his name repeatedly crops up in correspondence throughout the period, is Colonel Henry Bunbury, an experienced staff officer and would-be strategist who served as undersecretary of state for war and the colonies—that is to say, the junior minister assisting the secretary of state—from November 1809.4 Finally, the roles of head of the ordnance services and de facto in-house military advisor to the Cabinet were combined in the office of master general of the ordnance, which was filled by Lt. General the Earl of Chatham until 1810, and by General the Earl of Mulgrave thereafter.5
The resulting system was complex, with the civil element at times duplicating military functions: something that can be seen as stemming, at least in part, from deep-seated fears of military absolutism dating back to the seventeenth century. Most strikingly, the secretary of state for war and the colonies had considerable control—albeit by indirect means—over matters that for all intents and purposes were purely military issues. Bathurst in particular elected at times to meddle in matters that did not, by rights, lie within the remit of his office. Yet, despite its unnecessary complexities, the system did work effectively enough when put to the test, but the relationships between the various posts need to be understood correctly if the successes and failures of the period are to be understood and a degree of credit and blame apportioned. The key point to be grasped is the comparatively subordinate nature of the commander in chief and his staff, who were, in effect, there merely to put into practice the military policies decided upon by the Cabinet. That body relied on the master general and the secretary of state for military advice, supplemented, where necessary, by input from the first lord of the admiralty, the foreign secretary, and the prime minister himself. In practice, however, as well as the always-possible wild card of royal intervention, the commander in chief could exercise a considerable amount of restraint on the government, with York successfully quashing proposals for a descent on Boulogne in 1808 by making it clear that the troops required were simply not available.6
Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword Page 2