That commanders within an individual theater would distribute the units under their command to make best use of what was available is both logical and obvious. Nevertheless, the level of sophistication ultimately attained, particularly in the peninsula, was considerable and gives a clear indication of how far commanders were able to make the regimental system work for them. By accepting that each unit had to be treated on its merits, and that it was simply not possible to assume that all infantry battalions or cavalry regiments were equal—in strength, training, or fitness—it was then possible to ensure that each individual unit was used to its full potential. If a unit was not fit to serve in the field, it could be posted to a second line duty, but by rotating units through such postings, rather than keeping them in the field until they deteriorated completely, it was also possible to prolong the amount of time a particular unit was able to remain in theater and thus squeeze the maximum level of efficiency out of the system.
For Wellington in the peninsula, the practicalities of this system were simplified by the fact that his command encompassed both the field army and various garrison forces. The border fortresses of Almeida and Elvas were largely left to Portuguese troops, but a British presence was continually maintained at Lisbon, which for the bulk of the conflict served as the main supply port and depot for the army. From June 14, 1809, the post of commandant at Lisbon was filled by Colonel, later Major General, Warren Peacocke, a guardsman who had briefly commanded a brigade in the Fourth Division but whose field service was cut short by illness. Peacocke rapidly became a key figure in the organization of the British forces, as it fell to him to report to Wellington on the condition of any reinforcements as they arrived, both new units and drafts for existing ones, and it is clear that Wellington trusted Peacocke’s judgment and took his reports extremely seriously. In 1811, for example, he wrote to the secretary of state for war and the colonies as a direct result of Peacocke’s comments: “I have the honour to transmit a letter from Colonel Peacocke with its enclosures reporting the imperfect state in which some Detachments have been sent from England and I shall be much obliged to your Lordship, if you will give such directions as may prevent the recurrence of such irregularities.”55 In most instances, reinforcements spent a short period of acclimatization at Lisbon and were then, when deemed ready, integrated into the main army.56 In some cases, as with Craufurd’s Light Brigade, which landed on July 3, 1809, and was with the field army by July 29, the demands of service meant that units had to go straight to the front, but, equally, units in poor condition frequently stayed longer. This was the case with the 77th, which had served longer in the peninsula than most single-battalion regiments but had spent much of its time confined to garrison duties at Lisbon as being unfit for service, having only two brief spells of active employment with the field army.57
Service under Peacocke at Lisbon could serve as a filter for incoming units, but, as with the 77th, units could also be sent back to Lisbon from the field army in order to recover after having fallen into poor condition. With reference to such units, Peacocke was particularly tasked with attending to their “habits of obedience to orders, subordination, regularity, and interior economy . . . as well as to their parade discipline and drill.”58 The 2/83rd benefited from this treatment, as we have already seen; the 3/27th was also detached for a time in similar fashion, as, for shorter periods, were the 1/26th, 2/58th and 2/88th.59 Reference to the graph in figure 3 showing manpower strength in the 2/83rd makes the beneficial nature of a spell detached to Lisbon apparent. When sent to Lisbon, the battalion had only 274 effectives out of 789 rank and file and was in poor order, in part from having lost its commanding officer at Talavera.60 Upon preparing to rejoin the field army a year later, the proportion of sick had dropped to less than 10 percent and the battalion was sufficiently restored in fitness and internal economy to serve actively throughout the remainder of the war.61
Whilst the Lisbon garrison remained important throughout the war, the shift to supply bases on the Biscay coast in late 1813 diminished its significance as many units now disembarked at ports closer to the fighting. At the same time, increasing strategic demands and shrinking manpower reserves meant that more poor-quality units were being sent on service, creating the need to replicate the functions of Peacocke’s command without tying a significant body of manpower to a specific physical location. Wellington’s solution was to create a new infantry brigade in July 1813, outside the established divisional structure, which would operate with the field army but which also served as an explicitly designated “nursery” for newly arrived regiments. As with his selection of Peacocke for the Lisbon post, Wellington appointed an experienced commander with substantial organizational experience. His choice was Major General Lord Aylmer, who had served throughout the Peninsular War as assistant or deputy assistant adjutant general, and who was additionally possessed of extensive campaign experience dating back to the early 1790s. Aylmer’s Brigade was intended to compose the 1/37th, 76th, and 2/84th; however, the 1/37th was delayed, having to come from Gibraltar rather than Britain, and the 85th eventually became the brigade’s third battalion. Later, the 2/84th was transferred to the Fifth Division, but the 1/37th did eventually join, as did the 2/62nd and 77th.62 Because his new command was initially based around the Biscayan ports via which reinforcements were joining the army, Aylmer was also to take on Peacocke’s old role of checking the state of drafts coming out to reinforce regiments already in the theater, and to “see that they are marched off without loss of time to their several divisions.”63 Although this assessment was an important task in itself, Aylmer’s primary responsibility remained that of advancing the readiness of the battalions under his direct command.
Although Wellington’s initial memorandum implied that the brigade would ultimately become part of the First Division, this was never formally implemented although both formations served as part of the army’s Left Wing, under the overall command of Lt. General Sir John Hope. However, retaining Aylmer outside the established chain of command made sense so far as the brigade’s nursery role was concerned since it made it available for a series of second-line tasks that would hopefully enable its component units to gain experience and ultimately become fit for more demanding duty. This is made explicit in Wellington’s instructions to Hope, upon the 2/62nd joining the army: “The 62d may be encamped and act as you please; but as they are very young, and but just arrived, I should think it best to keep them as a kind of reserve for some time, before they are put into one of the divisions. It was to nurse the newly arrived troops that I formed Lord Aylmer’s brigade; and I think . . . it will be as well to treat the 62d in the same way.”64 The war ended before this plan could be carried through for the 2/62nd, but the 2/84th benefited from a spell of service under Aylmer to facilitate its subsequent integration into the line as part of the Fifth Division. Only the cessation of hostilities prevented the extension of the practice, which Wellington intended should henceforth apply to all new battalions joining his command.65 The retention of the 85th with the brigade, when it was by all accounts an effective unit, may have owed more to the fact that as a light infantry corps the battalion was a useful addition to Hope’s command, which was otherwise short of such troops, and, indeed, the 85th seems to have operated apart from the rest of the brigade for much of the time.66
Although Aylmer’s Brigade subsumed much of the function previously exercised by Peacocke’s command at Lisbon, the role of the outlying garrisons did not disappear entirely, and it is possible to see the existence of a nursery field brigade as an intermediate step between these forces and the main army. Indeed, a similar practice was observed when the forces in Flanders were built up during 1815, and two infantry brigades were created outside of the established divisional structure. Of these, Major General Mackenzie’s Seventh Brigade was assigned to a permanent garrison posting at Antwerp, in a role somewhat akin to Peacocke’s Lisbon command; further battalions were also independently assigned to rear-area garris
on duties. In parallel to this, Colonel Sir Charles Greville’s Twelfth Brigade, created after Waterloo, functioned in something like the nursery role that Aylmer’s Brigade had filled in 1813–14, with newly arrived battalions being temporarily assigned to it before being forwarded to an active division of the line. In this case, though, once there were no more reinforcements for it to process, the brigade assumed a regular role as part of the Second Division.67 Thus, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars a three-tier system had evolved, at least in the larger field armies, which not only allowed newly arrived units be fed into the active army via nursery formations but which also allowed poorly performing units to be taken out of the line for a spell in garrison before rejoining the line, either directly or via another nursery spell.
Yet further flexibility, over and above that obtained through the creation of posts like Peacocke’s and Aylmer’s, could be obtained by assigning veteran and/or garrison battalions to the major theaters, providing a fourth organizational echelon, albeit with only a one-way link to the rest of the system. Whilst these units could not provide manpower for the active elements, they could usefully absorb any individuals who were unfit to remain with their regiments, but who could still usefully remain overseas undertaking light duties. In this fashion, the 13th Royal Veteran Battalion was formed at Lisbon to facilitate the continued in-theater employment of those men unable to continue serving with active units. The battalion was embodied in April 1813 with an initial rank-and-file strength of 696, and was up to 957 by the end of the war.68 Renumbered as the 7th Royal Veteran Battalion after the 1814 reductions, it was assigned to Flanders in 1815 along with the 1st Foreign Veteran Battalion, the latter unit having been formed in 1813 as an expansion of the KGL Garrison Company that had spent much of the Peninsular War doing duty at Lisbon.69 With these two battalions, Wellington’s 1815 command accordingly contained the facility for unfit manpower—British and foreign—to be usefully absorbed into rear-echelon formations and thereby still provide useful service within the theater.
To a lesser extent, but for the same reasons, this practice went on in other theaters, and the expansion of British forces in North America during the War of 1812 led to the institution of similar measures. The 10th Royal Veteran Battalion served throughout the War of 1812 much as the 13th did in the peninsula, doing garrison duty in Canada and providing a home for men unfit to serve with active units there. However, a detachment was also created as part of the Nova Scotia command, entirely out of unfit men transferred from the 64th and 98th already on that station.70 This detachment initially numbered only 24 men, but eventually reached a peak strength of 197 rank and file in January 1815.71 Evidently, there were insufficient unfit men in so minor a command to create a whole new veteran unit, so making them part of the existing 10th Royal Veteran Battalion represented an administrative shortcut to allow men to be usefully retained on the station even though they were no longer fit to serve in an active battalion. Even in distant New South Wales, a single company of veterans was formed, officially attached to the 1/73rd but largely composed of men left behind as unfit when the 102nd left the station. In this case, it was felt that the men posted to the Veteran Company would be capable of doing duty in the Australian climate, but that their health would collapse if they were sent somewhere colder—since the 102nd eventually ended up in Nova Scotia, this was doubtless a wise decision. The New South Wales Veteran Company wore the uniform of the 73rd, but with the blue facings of the Royal Veteran battalions, and, like the veteran detachment created on Nova Scotia, represented a scaled-down version of what was being done in the larger commands.72
At the same time as the organization of manpower within the major theaters of war was being carried out with increasing levels of sophistication, these theaters were also being integrated far more closely into the established global policy of unit rotation. As the major focal points of the conflict shifted, the small permanent garrisons scattered around the globe were increasingly employed as satellites of the major active commands, leading to a far greater interlinkage of rotation policies. Even when a garrison was nominally independent of a larger adjacent command, as with Gibraltar in relation to the peninsular or Nova Scotia in relation to Canada, practical concerns overrode the restrictions laid down by command jurisdictions. For Wellington in the peninsula, the situation was eased in this regard by the existence of the Cadiz garrison as a semi-independent annex to his command, and although the exact status of this posting took some time to resolve it was ultimately very closely linked into the peninsular unit rotation system.73 Gibraltar, on the other hand, was a station in its own right, with a commander in chief answering to Horse Guards rather than to Wellington. Although this independent command within the Iberian Peninsula occasionally led to tensions over conflicting views regarding unit assignments,74 Gibraltar too ended up being successfully integrated into the local rotation system.
At the outset of the Peninsular War, Gibraltar was strongly garrisoned—understandably so, since Spain had so recently been an enemy. By late 1809, however, the pick of the original garrison had been sent to join the peninsular field army, and was replaced by weaker, less effective, units. September 1808 saw the core of the Gibraltar garrison composed of three strong first battalions, whose 2,514 effective rank and file made up over half the total force; a year later, these had been replaced by three second battalions, all numerically far weaker, and a second veteran unit to join the one that had been there from the outset.75 Some of these replacements had come out from home, but others came from the peninsula command, with the 2/9th swapping places with the 1/48th in May 1809, and the 2/30th and 2/88th later coming down from Lisbon to release the 1/57th and 1/61st.76 In similar fashion, the garrison on Madeira was also stripped of effective units to reinforce the troops being assembled in Portugal.77 In the first instance, these transfers simply represented a redistribution of manpower to facilitate the mounting of a new campaign, but once it became apparent that the war in the peninsula represented a long-term commitment, battalions began to rotate duties on a more organized basis. This system was greatly aided by the Spanish finally allowing, in early 1810, a British contingent to share in the garrisoning of Cadiz.78 Having a large garrison command within the peninsular command structure effectively created a three-tier system, in which units could be moved from sedentary garrison duties at Gibraltar, via semi-active service in the defense of Cadiz, to fully active duty with the main army under Wellington. Good cooperation between Wellington and the garrison commanders, and an effective working relationship with the Royal Navy, meant that troops could rapidly be shifted in times of emergency as in the autumn of 1810 when troops were rushed from Cadiz to Lisbon in response to Masséna’s invasion.79
This system was never an exact one, even in comparison with the intra-theater arrangements already considered, and neither the forces at Gibraltar nor Cadiz existed purely as auxiliaries to Wellington’s command. Cadiz was actively besieged by the French from February 1810 until August 1812, and it was therefore imperative that a core of effective units be maintained there at all times.80 Additionally, units from both Cadiz and Gibraltar needed to be kept available for commitments elsewhere in the Mediterranean, as with the Barrosa campaign, the failed attack on Fuengirola, or the rather more successful defense of Tarifa. Nevertheless, examples do exist of units going successively from Lisbon, to Gibraltar, to Cadiz, and thence back to Lisbon. One such was the 2/30th, initially detached to Gibraltar as part of the reorganization of 1809. This battalion had not performed well during its brief spell of prior active service, and it is clear from the comments of Brigadier General Hoghton, who inspected the unit at Gibraltar, that Wellesley had had good reason not to retain it with the field army. “Sufficient attention,” Hoghton wrote, “has not been paid to the drill of the regiment, and the field movements were by no means accurate,” although the men were clean and steady.81 The battalion eventually returned to the main army in October 1810, following ten months at Gibraltar and a further
three at Cadiz. This return may have been rushed due to the need to for troops to defend Lisbon, but the resulting respite from active service did at least enable the battalion to put in a further two-and-a-half years’ worth of duty before finally being recalled to Britain.82
More typical was the posting of a unit from the home station to Cadiz to enable it to become acclimatized before moving on to join Wellington. This was done with the 3/1st Foot Guards, 2/47th, 2/59th, and elements of the second and third battalions of the 95th Rifles and of the 2nd KGL Hussars.83 Transient units were also shifted via Gibraltar on occasion, as with the 2/4th, 1/28th, and 1/82nd. Just as Wellington placed considerable reliance on the views of Peacocke when it came to reporting on the state of units passing through Lisbon, so too was much responsibility delegated to the commanders at Cadiz: successively Major General William Stewart, Lt. General Thomas Graham, Major General George Cooke, and Colonel the Hon. Edward Capel. In that these officers also had to contend with the need to manage their commands as part of an active force defending the city, a delicate balancing act was entailed. September 1810, for example, found Graham informing the secretary of state for war and the colonies, “I have the honour to send enclosed the present allotment of the troops, by which your lordship will see that all is left here [in the city of Cadiz] is 1 battn. 30th Regt. and two companies of the 95th. . . . I should not have reduced the garrison of this place so low but for the necessity I have to get on with the field works of Isla de Leon before the rainy season sets in.”84 In this instance, Graham’s concerns went unheeded due to the threat posed by Masséna’s advance on Lisbon. With Wellington pushed back into the Lines of Torres Vedras, Cadiz was stripped of yet more troops to reinforce the main army, an order arriving on September 23 “for the immediate embarkation of the 2nd battns. of the 30th & 44th Regts. for the purpose of joining the army under Ld. Wellington.”85
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