Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword

by Andrew Bamford

  Collectively, the widespread use of nicknames indicates a healthy sense of self-identity and regimental rivalry as existing across all ranks. It is true that very few memoir accounts use nicknames for the writer’s own regiment, but many do employ them for other regiments, which reinforces rather than negates the importance of such nicknames as it still implies a regimentally based view of identity within the British Army as a whole, with other regiments being praised or denigrated as appropriate. If this conception sets up the rest of the army as an “other” to be judged and commented upon, by definition it also ascribes a collective “us” definition to the writer’s own unit, suggesting a “bottom-up” model of self-identity based on the regiment rather than a “top-down” one based on the British Army or even the nation.20

  If it was rare for even complementary nicknames to be used in reference to the writer’s own unit, it cannot be denied that unit pride did exist. For a start, there is an honest pride in many memoirs in relation to those events in which the writer’s unit particularly distinguished itself. Grattan, for example, explicitly titled one of the subsections in his chapter on Busaço as “Achievements of the 88th,” and in it assured his readers with respect to the bayonet charge made by his battalion that “The conception of this attack, its brilliant execution, which ended in the total overthrow of Reynier’s column, all belong to Colonel Alexander Wallace of the 88th Regiment” and that this was due “to the splendid state of perfection in which that corps then was.”21 Regimental pride also made it possible to reconcile difficult service with the logic that one’s unit had been given the task because it was the army’s best. George Gleig in later life was willing to concede that the same spirit was no doubt entertained in the ranks of every regiment going into action, but as a young lieutenant in the 85th was quite sure that the choice of his battalion to attack the village of Urrugne during the Battle of the Nivelle was a mark of the high regard in which Wellington held it. Whatever Wellington’s actual views on the unit, it was the fact that the men of the battalion felt themselves to have been specially chosen that was important, and the desire to live up to the reputation helped ensure that the 85th put up a sterling performance.22

  For those regiments with a longer history, a similar degree of pride could be taken in earlier triumphs—Emsdorf in 1760 for the 15th Hussars, for example—but more recent successes were also rapidly incorporated into regimental tradition.23 Lieutenant Swabey of the RHA observed that the first anniversary of Albuera was alcoholically celebrated within those regiments that had fought there, a circumstance that the editor of his diary remarked upon as being not uncommon.24 To a certain extent, this reinforcing of identity with reference to past service was aided by official and semiofficial measures. The most obvious of these was the bestowing of battle honors, but there were also other means, such as the additional Assaye Colour carried by the 74th, which can even be found being referred to in official paperwork as the “Assaye Regiment.”25 In a similar fashion, the previously unnamed 76th was for a time officially titled as the Hindoostan Regiment in reflection of its own services on the subcontinent.26 However, distinguished service in combat was only one source of pride. John Le Couteur of the 104th was keen to record in some detail the “unexampled march” of his regiment from New Brunswick to Kingston in the depths of the winter of 1813, taking pride not only in the physical achievement but also in the fact that, “[D]uring this long march, under considerable privations and hardships, not one single robbery was committed by the men, nor was there a single report made against them by the inhabitants to the commanding officer.”27An interesting sidelight on the standards of the time, if a clean sheet was so evidently an unusual and credit-worthy achievement!

  Regimental pride and identity could be put to practical use through systems of rewards and punishments. A growing tendency can be identified toward promoting good behavior, on or off the battlefield, by medals, badges, or other distinctions, such as long service distinctions used in the 71st and 72nd, or the Valiant Stormer badges awarded by the 52nd to those who had survived a forlorn hope.28 In another case—the 1/71st in the peninsula under the popular and well-respected Lt. Colonel Henry Cadogan—prizes were given both for sporting prowess and for skill in trade as demonstrated by competitions amongst the battalion’s cobblers and other craftsmen.29 Nevertheless, the value of such measures was not universally recognized, as may be inferred from an 1813 inspection of the 4th Dragoon Guards, in which the inspecting officer, Colonel Sir Granby Calcraft, discovered an odd inclusion in the men’s books:

  On examining the charges against the men, I remarked an almost universal one of one shilling per month “to St. Patrick’s Fund.” As I conceive that no such charge is sanctioned by King’s Regulations, I have felt it my duty to examine into the nature of that Fund. It appears to have been instituted under the sanction of the Commanding Officer in 1805, and was submitted to Lt. Genl. Stavely, Colonel of the Regiment, who not only approved of the measure but himself became a liberal subscriber. The Rules and Regulations were drawn up under the nominal title of St. Patrick’s Fund, and subject to a certain Act of Parliament entitled “an act for the encouragement and relief of friendly societies.”

  The object of this fund appears to be, to grant pensions to NC Officers & Soldiers discharged after certain terms of service, and altho’ sanctioned by such authority and continued so long, I have deem’d it my duty to remark on its existence.30

  Evidently, the fund was a semiofficial way in which men who had served well could obtain some measure of subsequent relief from poverty. Equally evidently, Sir Granby does not entirely seem to have seen the point. The report says more about the limitations of the inspecting officer than about the utility of the fund; Calcraft was one of several colonels who were discretely posted away from the field army on reaching major general’s rank, indicating that Wellington had little time for his services or his opinions.31 In passing, it may be noted that the naming of the fund serves as a reinforcement of the unit’s identity as the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards.

  Alongside the carrot, there also existed the stick. Since the practice of corporal punishment served to make a public example of the victim, it also presented him as an object of shame before his comrades. For the shaming element of the punishment to be effective, there had to exist a bond of shared identity in the first place. Indeed, Joseph Donaldson of the 94th, using his memoirs to speak out against the practice of corporal punishment, insisted that the humiliation of a flogging was at least as degrading as the physical element. Speaking of a private of his regiment who was sentenced to five hundred lashes for stealing wine during the defense of Fort Matagorda at Cadiz, only to be pardoned at the last minute, Donaldson “did not think it any great act of favour to pardon him, after exposing him, stripped and tied up before his comrades. His back certainly remained whole; but his feelings must have been as much hurt, as if he had received the punishment.”32

  In a great many cases, the number of lashes sentenced was not the number issued, with the punishment being cut short or else never carried out at all. The fear of a flogging was widely acknowledged to be as bad as if not worse than the experience itself, to the extent that some men even attempted suicide rather than await punishment.33 Under such circumstances, a heavy sentence remitted at the last minute—particularly if, as with the case mentioned by Donaldson, the remission did not take place until the man had been exposed before his comrades—could serve as a severe punishment in itself without the lash being used at all.

  Thus, punishment, or the threat of punishment, relied for its effect in some part on the shared bonds of regimental comradeship that existed between rank-and-file soldiers, but also sought to manipulate those bonds in order to improve discipline. In 1811, for example, Private George Rider of the 1/7th was brought before a General Court Martial, along with several innocent comrades, on a charge of robbery from a house in Valverde. Rider, who was indisputably guilty, confessed in order to save his comrades from punishment; he,
in turn was then pardoned. Whilst Wellington used the General Order detailing the case to condemn any crime against the Portuguese people, he also held up Rider’s honesty before the court as a positive example.34 Men could also be pardoned if their unit had performed well in action, and it was common usage that a man who went into action with a punishment pending, and who survived the action, earned the right to a reprieve. Nor did a good battlefield performance only benefit a unit’s bad characters; deserving NCOs from units that had distinguished themselves might be promoted to commissioned rank as a collective reward and example to their regiment.35

  Units that had distinguished themselves could also be singled out for praise, and held up as an example to the forces as a whole, thus helping foster a spirit of pride and emulation. Typical of this was Wellington’s General Order after the action at El Bodón, which named the units and commanders concerned, detailed the services that had merited “his particular thanks,” and expressed the recommendation of “the conduct of these troops to the particular attention of the Officers and soldiers of this army, as an example to be followed in all such circumstances.”36 However, it was not just battlefield heroics that could get a unit mentioned in General Orders. John Aitchison of the 3rd Foot Guards wrote home in October 1809, telling his father, “It is a real pride to belong to a corps so highly thought of by all ranks of the army—many compliments are paid in General Orders—the other day alluding to inaccuracies in Returns—‘it is but justice to both battalions of Guards to state their returns have always been accurate in every particular, as the conduct of these excellent corps in the field has been regular and exemplary throughout.’”37 Evidently, anything that added luster to the regimental reputation was worth crowing about, from conduct in the field to the thoroughness of the adjutant and his clerks.

  However, if a sense of shared identity could be put to positive use in preventing misconduct within the regiment, it also led to attempts to minimize or conceal misdemeanors of which the efforts by the 1/3rd after Albuera, and by the 2/69th after Quatre Bras, to cover up the loss of their Colours are a somewhat extreme example. Although the Buffs were able to fudge the issue since the regiment had recovered the flags if not the poles, the loss by the 2/69th, only eighteen months after also losing a Colour at Bergen op Zoom, resulted in a doomed attempt to disguise the loss by producing a homemade replacement.38

  If it was impossible to keep battlefield misadventure from public knowledge, it was at least possible to ensure that blame was firmly placed elsewhere. Aitchison’s letters for some months after Talavera contain repeated assertions that, contrary to whatever his family might have heard, the Guards Brigade had been by no means as roughly handled during the repulse of the First Division’s counterattack as newspaper accounts were implying. Furthermore, in his first full letter home after the battle he sought to make it clear that the fact that the Guards had fallen back at all was down to the misconduct of others, writing, “[U]nfortunately the infantry of the German Legion, which formed the left of our division, gave way and this made it necessary for our brigade to retire. When we faced about, the enemy that were flying rallied and opened a heavy fire and we were taken in our left flank by that part of the enemy which ought have been driven back by the Germans.”39 Since he could at this date have no conception of how the battle would be reported back at home, Aitchison was evidently making sure that he had his excuses in place first. It should be noted, however, that where scapegoats are provided for disaster it is almost invariably the case, as here, that the troops in question are foreign rather than British.

  In a similar fashion, incidents of crime and indiscipline could also be reinterpreted before being presented for wider consumption. In marked contrast to the pride taken by Le Couteur in the good conduct of the 104th, William Grattan’s memoirs contain several instances where the conduct by his men is passed off as an amusing jape but in fact undoubtedly represented criminal acts. The story of “Ody Brophy and the Bacon,” in which Lt. John D’Arcy was also complicit in failing to punish a blatant theft, stands as a particularly flagrant example of this tendency. Despite having apprehended Private Brophy rushing out of a “good-looking house” near Robleda “with half a flitch of bacon under his arm,” D’Arcy feigned to believe Brophy’s tall tale that he had intended to purchase the bacon on the lieutenant’s behalf, only to be misunderstood and set upon by its owners. The result was that D’Arcy paid off the aggrieved Spaniards, retained the bacon, and let Brophy off scot-free. The tale is unashamedly told by Grattan as a fine example of the extent to which the men of the 88th possessed the gift of the gab, or, as he put it, “had a taking way with them.”40 Clearly, the hard truth would not have been appropriate in the context of the memoirs, and whilst Grattan would have struggled to ever portray the Connaught Rangers as orderly and disciplined, his characterization of the unit as roguish rather than criminal is an inspired attempt to portray a shared corporate identity in the best possible light.

  Over and above the issue of how the officers and men of the British Army figured themselves and their comrades, unit identity also had a tangible impact on unit performance, both on and off the battlefield. During Moore’s retreat to Corunna, his infantry lost, through all causes, 22.8 percent of its strength. Yet an average for the losses of those regiments that might be assumed from designation to identify themselves as a cut above the ordinary line—Foot Guards, highlanders, light infantry, and fusiliers—comes out notably lower, at 17.6 percent.41 Battalions able to draw on higher morale, better training, or both, as these units could, were naturally more likely to hold together and maintain a more disciplined state, and this was noticed at the time. Even a cavalryman’s prejudice against those who did their soldiering on foot could not prevent Captain Gordon of the 15th Hussars from asserting, “The Guards bore up against all these hardships far better than the rest of the army. Their ranks were always well closed, and the battalions mustered strong; they lost comparatively few of their number by straggling.”42

  Gordon asserted that the same was true of the light infantry, but that straggling amongst the highlanders was bad. This latter distinction is not immediately obvious from the data, which would suggest that at least these stragglers, unlike many from the line regiments, retained both the intention and the ability to rejoin when they could; contemporary accounts would imply that this was also true of those who fell out from light infantry units.43 Lest it be thought that this is an isolated example, similar trends can also be noted when a comparison is made of the effective strength of units at the end of the 1812 retreat from Burgos. The differing condition of units at the commencement of this retreat, and different unit experiences during it, prevent a direct comparison being drawn with Moore’s troops, but when one examines the figures from 1812 and compares like for like, the best ratios of effectives in proportion to total strength are again to be found amongst the light infantry, highlanders, and Foot Guards.44

  Whilst hard evidence can be used to demonstrate a correlation between assumed elite status and low levels of strategic consumption, the connection between this issue and that of combat effectiveness is somewhat harder to quantify. Indeed, there were occasions where pretensions to elite status led to unnecessary losses caused either by overconfidence or a desire to live up to the myth.45 The overextension of the Foot Guards following the failure of the First Division’s counterattack at Talavera is one example that may be cited in this regard, and the near loss of a significant part of the Light Division after it lingered too long on the wrong bank of the Côa during the combat of July 24, 1810, is another, although the latter case also has much to do with divisional commander Robert’s Craufurd’s overrating of his own abilities. The misadventures of the heavy cavalry at Waterloo may also be ascribed to a similar cause—its men were, in the words of Sergeant Johnston of the 2nd Dragoons, “cock sure of victory,” and paid the price for that overconfidence when their charge left them vulnerable to counterattack.46 Most telling of all is the case of the 1/42nd when
serving with the “Highland Brigade” of the Sixth Division during the Battle of Toulouse. Having contrived to invert the order of companies within the battalion during its advance, Lt. Colonel Robert Macara insisted on reforming his command under heavy fire before going forward to join the remainder of the brigade in the assault on the Great Redoubt. Such matters of seniority and precedence were considered particularly important in Scots units, but the battalion suffered 414 casualties, compared to 214 in the 1/79th and 111 in the 1/91st that fought alongside it: an unnecessarily high price for maintaining the standards of the regiment. As the 42nd was also the senior highland corps, the impetus to do things in the correct manner was doubly important, requiring Macara to demonstrate his battalion’s superiority over the two junior highland units forming the remainder of the brigade, as well as over the rest of the Sixth Division.47