It was against this background that Napoleon’s return from Elba threw everything into chaos, but, with much of its best infantry still on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was hard-pressed even to create the “infamous army” that fought the Battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo.115 As we have seen, Wellington was not above talking down the quality of the forces under his command if doing so might obtain him reinforcements, but in this case the criticism—which may be interpreted as much as a comment on the 52,783 Netherlanders and Germans under his command as on the 42,640-strong British contingent—has rather more validity.116 That said, a better description might well have been an “incomplete army”; as we shall see, there were substantial differences in strength and organization between the forces that stood on the ridge at Waterloo and those that marched into Paris three weeks later. This distinction, however, serves only to highlight the narrowness of the margin by which a credible British force was assembled in the Netherlands. A French delay of a week or two would have found a much stronger British force, but, equally, bringing operations forward would have found one far weaker. Waterloo itself may well have been a near run thing on the battlefield, but the same can be said of the campaign as a whole so far as the British Army’s preparations for it are concerned.
Having brought this overview of the campaigns of the British Army during the period to a close, it remains only to review the nature of the overall manpower commitment, an exercise that demonstrates both the shifting priorities between different theaters of war, and the narrow margin that at times stood between the success and failure of the military system as a whole. Table 1 breaks down manpower deployments by theater during the period.
Table 1. Total Manpower Commitments, 1808–1815
Source: Data primarily derived from digest in TNA, WO17/2814, supplemented where necessary with data from elsewhere in the WO17 series.
One thing that immediately becomes apparent is the relative insignificance of the peninsula in terms of overall numbers. Although for some time the largest single overseas deployment, the peninsula was nevertheless greatly surpassed at all times by the sum total of other such deployments. For all its domination of the literature pertaining to the period, the Peninsular War did not represent the norm for the average experience of military service. Also obvious are the two periods of extreme commitment to multiple theaters, leading to potential overstretch. As noted, the first was 1809 when significant forces were simultaneously deployed to Walcheren and the peninsula, and the second, attained through a steady increase in deployments from 1810 onward, came in early 1814 when forces were committed to operations in the peninsula, North America, and the Low Countries. The last point to be kept in mind is the relatively fixed strength of the forces in the East and West Indies. In the former case, the figure represents a bare minimum garrison, although even this was stretched by the need to find troops to occupy Java and Mauritius by the end of the period. For the West Indies and America, on the other hand, the increase associated with the War of 1812 is by no means as large as might be expected. Strength in Canada increased considerably, but many of these troops came from elsewhere in Britain’s North Atlantic and Caribbean possessions; only with Napoleon defeated, at least for the time being, could troops be redirected from Europe in any numbers.
This redeployment was therefore achieved at the expense of entrusting Britain’s holdings in the West Indies to a very large extent to foreign and indigenous troops. This measure, however, was only part of a growing swing toward using non-British manpower, which the total figures used in table 1 do not immediately emphasize. Although the table shows an increase in the overall strength of the British Army, what it does not show is that this increase was largely composed of foreigners. In fact, the total number of British troops increased by relatively little, from 152,400 in January 1808 to a peak of 189,837 in July 1813. Thus, by early 1814 and the time of Britain’s greatest military efforts, total British manpower had actually begun to decline, with foreigners making up the shortfall. Although the better foreign units—the KGL and some of the émigré regiments—were of equal value to British regulars, and prioritized for active employment alongside them, it was rare for colonial troops to be so used. The War of 1812, which saw active use of the Canadian Fencibles and men of the West India regiments, was the only major exception to this rule. On the other hand, minor garrisons such as Surinam and Curaçao came largely to be manned by foreign or colonial units, and it was also rare for the Bahamas to have more than a company’s worth of British regulars. Even in India, an average garrison strength of around 20,000 British regulars becomes relatively insignificant when set against the contribution made by the troops of the HEIC, whose forces can be reckoned at approximately 6,000 European and 111,000 Indian troops as an average across the period.117 Because of these increasing demands for service in the overseas garrisons, the number of foreigners in British service rose at a far greater rate than the number of Britons in the years before 1814: from 31,891 in January 1808 to peak at 52,416 in January 1813. This represents an increase of 61 percent as opposed to only a 25 percent growth for the British, and is clearly indicative of the need to increase recruitment from this source and use the resulting units to replace British ones. Yet, even despite these measures, Britain’s total military manpower remained in decline after mid 1813.
The shortfall of manpower by 1813–14, at a time when the British Army was being pushed harder and harder by new strategic imperatives over and above its normal global commitments, meant that obtaining manpower, and keeping units at a viable combat strength, became severe problems both within individual theaters and for the British Army as a whole. Never for a moment should the reader forget that this period, whilst seeing great triumphs of arms, also saw Britain pushed to the breaking point, and one is forced to conclude that, had peace not come when it did in 1814, Britain would have been forced to choose between two, equally politically unthinkable, options: either cut back on Imperial commitments or introduce something akin to conscription. That Britain was able to finish the Napoleonic Wars as a significant power within the Sixth and Seventh Coalitions was, as we shall see, as much due to its ability to work with and around its military system, as to that system’s own inherent strengths.
CHAPTER 2
Regimental Identity and Leadership
In the spring of 1814, having led the second battalion of the 73rd Foot through a year of hard and distinguished campaigning that had taken it from the Baltic to Belgium, the popular and respected Lt. Colonel William Harris took a well-earned respite and left the battalion under the temporary command of Major Dawson Kelly. As Major General Gibbs reported after inspecting the battalion a short time later, Kelly was “an officer of great respectability but having been chiefly employed on the Staff of the Army does not appear acquainted with the Drill or management of a Regiment. The corps is not in as good state of discipline as they were and very unsteady awkward and careless in manoeuvre.”1
Lest there be any doubt, Gibbs reiterated his point when commenting on the battalion’s private soldiers, explicitly stating that this decline in standards was Kelly’s fault. However, Kelly’s failings as a commander had had a wider effect as the rank and file, who, although “a very good body of men with a general appearance of health and cleanliness,” were found to be “neither well drilled, except in the firelock exercise[,] or attentive.” Some of this could be put down to hard service, but Gibbs also noted discord amongst the officers—with whom Kelly had in turn expressed dissatisfaction—and, in particular, amongst the battalion’s NCOs. Thomas Morris, who served in the ranks of the 2/73rd throughout its time in Germany and the Netherlands, later identified the ready availability of cheap gin as having played a key part in the tailing off of the battalion’s efficiency, but also noted that Kelly’s response to the deteriorating situation was a resort to increasingly heavy punishments, something that is confirmed by Gibbs’s report.2 As much as anything, Kelly—who had a good combat record with the battal
ion prior to taking command of it—seems simply to have been out of his depth, but there can be no denying that both the morale and effectiveness of the battalion suffered all the same.
The 2/73rd would, as we shall see, in time recover its condition and go on to fight with distinction at Waterloo, but the example of this battalion clearly highlights the importance of unit identity, morale, and esprit de corps, and the vital role that a battalion or regimental commander played in this—for good or ill. With the right individuals in the right places, the regimental system was ideally suited to facilitate the development of all these things. Officer appointments still involved purchase, but the worst abuses of that system had been abolished with set amounts of time to be served in each rank and the establishment of training schools for prospective officers. However, since officers attained command on the basis of seniority rather than competency, the system crucially failed to ensure that the right man would end up in the right job—in other words, a unit was as likely to find itself with a Major Kelly in command as a Lt. Colonel Harris, and Dawson Kelly was by no stretch of the imagination the worst sort of officer to attain such an appointment.
Thus, the regimental system as it operated during the Napoleonic era was in many ways something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it shifted a great deal of administrative responsibility away from Horse Guards, most notably in respect of recruitment, and it also provided the focus for a strong, and growing, sense of unit identity and esprit de corps. The differences between various regiments, particularly those aspiring to a self-defined elite status, impacted both on their internal sense of identity and—albeit not always with positive results—on their campaign and combat performance. Nevertheless, the fact that the system allowed some units to raise themselves above the majority should not obscure the fact that the same system bore much of the responsibility for the poor state of others.
The Role of Identity
What is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the issues surrounding regimental identity is the fact that in many cases it was a relatively new development. Admittedly, there were regiments that traced their ancestry back to the Restoration and even beyond, but over half of the line infantry and around a quarter of the cavalry regiments dated only from the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, the 78th Highlanders, and all regiments of foot junior to it, had been raised as a result of the revolutionary and Napoleonic conflicts, as had the 21st–25th Light Dragoons. As a result, other than the 94th, which had previously been the old unnumbered Scotch Brigade, these regiments were completely lacking in prior history and traditions.3 Care also needs to be taken in placing too much value on the sense of identity surrounding regimental names, for this was still an age of numbered regiments, and many of the most famous mass appeals to units use the number rather than any title. Consider Lt. Colonel William Inglis’s possibly apocryphal “Die hard, 57th! Die hard!” cry at Albuera, or Sir Thomas Picton’s rallying cry at Quatre Bras: “28th! Remember Egypt!”4 The former certainly created a nickname, but neither exhortation makes any reference to an existing name, official or otherwise. In part, this usage may be attributed to the fact that regimental titles were, relatively speaking, a new invention, and still secondary to the numerical designation of a unit. For the bulk of line regiments, the existence of a geographic county name would have little resonance to a rank and file whose composition in terms of background was far more disparate.
Only in the oldest regiments with their royal or other distinguishing titles, and in some of the newest units, did the name have any potential as a unifying focus of identity. In this fashion, for example, Major General Edward Pakenham could favor a name that was far older than the regimental number to encourage the 1/7th at Aldea de Ponte by shouting, “Forward Fusiliers!”5 Whilst geographical titles predominate throughout the list, having been allocated en masse in 1782, the patriotic language of the 1790s is apparent in the use of “Loyal” and/or “Volunteers” in the titles of units raised in that decade, indicative of the new forms and expressions of patriotism then evident. This was the era of the loyalist “Counter-Revolution” posited by the historian John Cookson, but, although its legacy survived in the titles of the 80th–82nd, 85th, and 90th Foot, it is less clear to what extent these appellations were recognized in the same way by the 1810s.6 The award of additional titles as a mark of favor should also be noted, with the 87th becoming the Prince of Wales’s Own Irish after its exploits at Barrosa. On the other hand, county titles were frequently and sometimes radically reallocated on occasion, with the 39th exchanging East Middlesex for Dorsetshire in 1807, and the 70th making the jump from Surrey to Glasgow in 1812. Whilst these measures may well have helped attract new recruits, the nature of their effect on the men already in the ranks—if they had an effect at all—is rather more questionable.7
Distinctive regimental names, even archaic ones that no longer represented any actual difference from the norm, also gave certain units a justification for considering themselves a cut above the rest. The three regiments of Foot Guards were self-evidently distinct from the line, but there were a number of other regiments that may be considered, or that at least considered themselves, as being elite units. In no case however, even with the Guards, was a regiment entirely composed of specially selected men, and many of these self-defined elites differed from their counterparts only in distinctions of dress and nomenclature, as with the fusiliers and highlanders. There were three regiments of the former and eleven of the latter in 1808, although the 72nd–75th and 91st were ordered to cease using the highland dress and designation after April 7, 1809, in an attempt to broaden recruiting.8 Highlanders and fusiliers may be considered as having successfully cultivated a greater esprit de corps, and at least some of the highland regiments benefited in addition from a far more homogenous recruiting base than was the norm; this was the case for the 42nd, 78th, 79th, and 92nd. The 91st, although “de-kilted,” managed to keep its first battalion, if not purely highland, at least largely Scots but ended up with all manner of mongrels in the ranks of its second.9 In at least some highland units, the 1/92nd under Lt. Colonel John Cameron of Fassifern in particular, a strong element of the old clan paternalism was also retained, although the dictates of manpower replacement meant that this was by now a fading tendency.10 Nevertheless, both fusiliers and highlanders were to all intents and purposes ordinary battalions of the line so far as their organization and tactical use were concerned.
The other distinctive group, where role as well as title served as a distinction from the line, were the light infantry and rifles. The initial Light Brigade, trained at Shorncliffe from 1803, comprised the 43rd, 52nd and 95th, and these regiments all subsequently raised additional battalions. Along with the light battalions of the 60th and KGL, these represented the official sum of the light infantry at the opening of 1808. More battalions were in the process of being organized under the superintendence of Major General Rottenburg, author of the 1798 Regulations for the Exercise of Riflemen and Light Infantry, which was used for all light infantry training. The 51st, 68th, 71st and 85th were all converted during the course of 1808 and 1809 to add a further five light battalions, although the 51st and 1/71st were on active service during 1808 and were therefore only reorganized after their return from Corunna.11 The 90th (Perthshire Volunteers) had been raised in 1794 as a light infantry corps but was not formally recognized as such until 1815, despite serving in that role as early as the 1801 Egyptian campaign.12 Other units that were nominally regular battalions of the line were put through the same training regime at the discretion of their commanders; this is known to have been the case for the 20th and 2/78th, which may well explain why the former was brigaded with light infantry units during the Corunna campaign.13 The ethos of light infantry training, taken to even greater extremes in the rifles, involved a combination of independent thinking, open-order fighting, and marksmanship, which in turn demanded a better class of man, in terms of ability, both in the ranks and the officers’ mess.14 Of course
, these regiments still had their bad characters; Lt. Colonel John Colborne, who commanded the crack 1/52nd in the peninsula and at Waterloo, still asserted that any regiment, irrespective of special circumstances and pretensions to elite status, would be lucky that did not contain some fifty or so irredeemable hard bargains.15
Whilst the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth saw a proliferation in new names and designations for regiments, the name used by the rank and file to distinguish their unit would frequently be very different from that noted in the Army List. For the vast majority of regiments, at least one nickname can be identified as in use during the Napoleonic Wars, with several actually being coined during the period as a result of some exploit or misadventure on campaign.16 In some cases, these names were so established as to have become semiofficial and used as much by senior officers as by rank and file—witness Rowland Hill’s misassumption at Talavera that the French night attack was “the old Buffs, as usual, making some blunder”17—but others would seem to have had more limited circulation. Some of the more obtuse or obscure pseudonyms—“Pontius Pilate’s Body Guards” for the 1st Foot, or “Kirke’s Lambs” in ironic commemoration of an early colonel of the 2nd—seem more likely to have been restricted to the officers’ mess. Likewise, some of the more cant or dialect-based names—“Havercakes” for the 33rd, “Jaggers” for the 60th’s rifle battalions, or “Pot Hooks” for the 77th—may equally be assumed to be restricted to the rank and file.18 Whilst a few of the names are downright insulting epithets bestowed by outsiders, the bulk are either complementary or, if mildly insulting then at least humorously so as with “Honeysuckers” for the 58th Foot and “Cherrypickers” for the 11th Light Dragoons, both of which stem from thieving escapades in the peninsula.19
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