Horses, however, were not the only animals employed, and, particularly in the peninsula, the mule became the indispensable beast of everyday burden. Mules were employed to carry forage, supplies, camp kettles, tents, and—albeit illicitly—private baggage.5 Under exceptional circumstances they could even be used directly in lieu of horses; faced with a complete lack of artillery horses when assuming command at Cadiz, Major General William Stewart authorized the formation of “a field brigade of Light Artillery consisting of 4 lt 3 pounders and 1 51/2 inch howitzer drawn by mules . . . to be stationed at Fort Puntales.”6 The main role of mules was always as pack animals though, in which role Assistant Commissary Richard Henegan of the ordnance field train considered them “worth [their] weight in gold on a long march.”7 As a result of their indispensability, prices of mules rose from 25 Portuguese dollars in 1808 to not less than 180 dollars by 1813.8
Also forming a vital element of the supply system, particularly in the peninsula where the design of cart had hardly changed in centuries, were draught oxen whose presence was essential not only for moving supplies and ordnance but also, on occasion, shifting artillery behind the lines.9 Like the bulk of the mules, however, these animals were privately owned and hired for military service. They were controlled by the Commissariat and Ordnance Departments, but were managed by Portuguese and Spanish civilians, and thus there are no official records relative to their numbers and mortality rates. Their organization, though, brought headaches enough for the officers assigned to deal with their drivers, with Henegan of the field train and August Schaumann of the Commissary Department both frequently descending into exasperation when their memoirs touch on both the animals and their equally self-willed masters; not the least of Henegan’s problems was preventing the bullock drivers smoking whilst hauling powder!10
In attempting to understand the numbers of animals directly employed by the British Army, and the resulting problems of supply and demand, the situation is further complicated by the fact that there is little useful data over and above that from the main peninsular field army. Lack of substantial cavalry deployment outside the peninsula means that it is necessary to focus more heavily on that theater in any case, but, by and large, much of what data is available from elsewhere is patchy and incomplete. Only in Flanders and France during 1815 was a mounted contingent fielded on a par with that in the peninsula, and even then the campaign was of so short a duration, and the figures so badly skewed by horses lost at Waterloo, that it is hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from this theater.
At its peak strength in April 1814, the army under Wellington had 13,887 horses on its rolls, a ratio of 2:9 in relation to its 61,535 rank and file.11 This ratio had nearly halved from 1:8 in the earliest days of the war, in reflection of the growing number of cavalry regiments assigned to Wellington’s command, but the growth rate is staggered over the course of the war, with the sharpest increases generally coinciding with preparations for a new campaign, as shown in figure 9. These totals represent only half the story, for the figures not only fail to include the privately owned mounts of officers but also omit the vast numbers of draft animals, official and unofficial, that accompanied the army. Complete data does not exist for these creatures, although in some of the smaller forces serving elsewhere the printed “horses” on returns has been amended by the addition of “and mules.” We can, however, gain some insight into the scale of this unrecorded mass since Commissary General Sir John Bisset noted the presence of 8,815 commissariat mules with the peninsular field army in June 1812, along with a further 16,165 horses and mules for baggage and forage.12 If the 567 horses listed on the strength of the Wagon Train are also included, this yields 25,547 animals, or roughly five-sevenths of the total number serving with Wellington’s army, employed in support of the logistical train. Including the combat arms and comparing the grand total of 34,127 animals with the rank-and-file strength of the army for the same month, this now gives a ratio of animals to men in the region of 3:5.13 These figures, of course, still make no consideration of the vast numbers of oxen, for which no data is available.
Nor, indeed, does that data make any inclusion of the privately owned mounts of officers, for which there was an ongoing demand. We have already seen Herbert Taylor noting his expectation that officers from Graham’s command would need to mount themselves upon arriving on service, and a similar concern had earlier prompted Wellington to “beg leave to recommend that 50 or 60 Horses or mares of a superior description should be purchased at the price of 40 or 50 £ each as a Remount for the Officers of the Cavalry, who cannot find Horses in the Peninsula at present fit for the service; and would pay this price for these horses.”14 Providing sufficient high-quality mounts for officers was by no means a small requirement in itself, when one considers that Wellington himself maintained a stud of some ten horses whilst Graham began the Vitoria campaign with thirteen.15 Even junior officers maintained a private establishment of riding and draught animals. George Gleig, as a young lieutenant still swept up in the romance of the open-air campaigning lifestyle, nevertheless accumulated kit “quite enough to load a mule,”16 but others had rather more extensive stables. John Aitchison, as a lieutenant of the 3rd Foot Guards, also made do with a single mule for his kit, but added a pony in addition as a mount for himself on returning to the peninsula in 1812, complaining as he did so that the cost of animals had risen to exorbitant levels since he had first arrived in the theater three years previously.17 In these provisions, as in the fact that each also maintained a brace of gundogs, Gleig and Aitchison were fairly typical subalterns. More extravagant was the sporting William Hay, who, as an ensign of the 1/52nd, had as his mount a spirited Portuguese mare, which, if his memoirs are to be believed, nevertheless repaid his investment by winning him a wager through her speed and endurance over an arduous long-distance ride from “Castel de Vieda” to Portalegre and back in less than two and a half hours.18 Captain Neil Douglas of the 1/79th, meanwhile, preferred comfort to speed, and on arrival in the peninsula “Purchased two Mules, and a Jack Ass, also a Mess Mule for carrying prog [i.e., provisions].”19
Figure 9. Peninsular Horse Strength by Month and Arm of Service. Data from Monthly Returns, TNA, WO17/2464–2465, 2467–2476.
After the total number of horses involved, the second figure that needs to be appreciated is the sheer scale of equine mortality, and the consequent demand for replacement animals. The British Army recorded the loss of a staggering 18,940 horses by the main body of troops in the peninsula. In addition, Sir John Moore’s forces recorded a further 218 equine deaths during November and December 1808, to which must be added the horses shot at Corunna to prevent their use by the French; based on the December 1808 totals this represents a further 5,006 animals, to give a grand total of 24,164 horses dead for the war as a whole.20 Even leaving aside Moore’s losses, which nevertheless served to remove the Hussar Brigade from the roster of effective regiments for several years whilst its component units were remounted,21 this level of losses represents an immense requirement for replacement horses to enable the army to maintain its effectiveness. The nature of these losses is tracked in figure 10.
Whilst an approximate base rate in the region of twenty to twenty-five deaths per thousand horses can be identified throughout the course of the war—the overall average works out as thirty-eight deaths per thousand horses, but that is distorted by the periods of higher mortality—there are nevertheless obvious points of far higher mortality. The worst losses in absolute terms are during the retreat from Burgos, but in relative terms the huge number of horses lost during the Talavera campaign make the month ending on August 25, 1809, the worst, with a quarter of the total equine strength being lost. Here, the already high level of strategic consumption due to the shortage of forage and the forced march south through Portugal is further increased and distorted by the heavy battlefield losses sustained by the 23rd Light Dragoons at Talavera—228 deaths out of 940 being from this regiment.22 The smaller peaks and trough
s in losses correspond either to major battles, or else to periods when the army was either unusually active or recommencing active operations after a period in cantonments—in other words, precisely the same factors as those influencing fluctuation in manpower wastage.
Figure 10. Peninsular Horse Deaths by Month and Arm of Service. Data from Monthly Returns, TNA, WO17/2464–2465, 2467–2476.
Of course, equine wastage was not just restricted to horses lost permanently through death. Just as men who had become permanently unfit for active duty could be drafted off to continue serving in garrison units, horses that were not fit for cavalry or artillery service could be “cast” and passed on to train units where they could still be useful. The 1812 second half-yearly inspection return for the 14th Light Dragoons, for example, contains an annex: “A Return of horses proposed to be cast, most of them able to do duty in the Wagon Train.”23 There was little point in shipping a worn-out cavalry horse back to England, whereas even a few weeks’ draught work represented a continued return on the initial investment. The poor state of these cast animals, and their obviously higher mortality rate, is made clear by an incident from 1809 when, in a bizarre inversion of the normal practice, sixty-one animals from the Irish Commissariat Corps were utilized as remounts for the 14th and 16th Light Dragoons due to a complete lack of any other available horseflesh. Unfit for cavalry service—most likely unfit for any service—the entire batch perished after only a single day’s work.24
In the same way that it was rapidly established that soldiers needed to become fully acclimatized to a theater of operations before becoming fully effective, so too did it become clear that the same was the case for horses. Even before being considered for active duty, the animals needed to be properly broken for service and become accustomed to the role they were to fulfill, a process that required one and a half to two years.25 This, and the fact that more mature animals were considered less prone to illness, led Wellington to recommend in December 1810 “that no horses should be sent for Service to this Country which will not be Six years old in May; and that Mares should be sent in preference to Horses, as it has been found that they bear the Work better than the Horses.”26 Once horses had arrived in theater, it was also important to ensure that they were given time to adapt to the local forage, and, shortly after reassuming command of the British forces in the peninsula, Wellesley stressed this requirement in a General Order: “Those horses of the Dragoons and Artillery, which will eat the corn and forage of the country, are to feed with that description of forage only; the commanding officers of Dragoons and Artillery will give direction that all horses may be accustomed to the corn and forage of the country, by being fed at first, in the proportion of half English and half Portuguese corn and forage; then of two-thirds Portuguese and one-third English; and lastly of the whole Portuguese.”27 By such means, in theory, suitable remounts would arrive during times of relative inactivity and would become accustomed to the climate and country before serious campaigning began; in practice, of course, nothing was that simple.
What made strategic consumption of horses so problematic was that the remount system did not permit the steady provision of replacements from home. Indeed, lack of available transports at times prevented mounted units from even embarking on service with sufficient animals, as in the 1808 campaign when some of two-fifths of the available cavalry and artillery could not be moved for lack of horseflesh.28 The assumption had been that animals could be obtained on active service, but this rapidly proved to be a fallacy, and the dispatch of remounts had to be instituted although this took some time to be implemented and Cradock was forced to send officers to North Africa in search of horses.29 Even then, the same overconfident assumptions about the availability of horses continued in other theaters. Lt. General Frederick Maitland, commanding the first wave of forces dispatched to eastern Spain, complained on arrival at Alicante that “The necessity of procuring mules for the Conveyance of Provisions, Ammunition & Baggage, as also to move the Field Artillery for which the number of horses with us was very insufficient, delayed us several days.”30 Yet more naïve was the assumption that Taylor would be able to obtain draught and riding animals for Graham’s forces in the Netherlands at the end of 1813; considering that Europe had been scoured for horses to remount the Grande Armée after the Russian debacle, it is scarcely to be wondered that only a few animals, mostly unfit or unsuitable, could be rounded up.31
The relatively low ratio of cavalry to infantry of almost all British forces sent overseas is largely connected to these difficulties, which relate not so much to a shortage of horseflesh, but, rather, a shortage of means to get it to where it was required. This problem played an important role in dictating to what extent, and in what quantity, cavalry regiments could be deployed. For example, when Wellesley’s force set out for Portugal in 1808, it required twenty-nine transports for the nine battalions of infantry, but a further twenty-one horse transports for the animals required by three artillery batteries and two squadrons of cavalry.32 To place this requirement in context, in 1810 the Transport Board could deploy 980 vessels totaling 250,000 tons burthen, of which 320 were eventually assigned to serving the forces in the peninsula.33 Shipping remounts alone made a substantial inroad into that force, with the need to deploy a new cavalry regiment or brigade representing a substantial investment in shipping space, not to forget the need for escorts, the absence of which in 1813 saw the best part of a whole troop of the 18th Hussars—forty-five men and sixty horses—captured and ransomed by an American privateer.34 There was also the issue of cost, with Wellington observing that, over and above a purchase price of twenty-five guineas, it cost ten pounds per horse to ship remounts to Portugal.35
Like the men themselves, horses did not respond well to prolonged spells aboard transports. Indeed, some objected to the whole shipping process and responded accordingly; William Tomkinson’s bay horse Bob twice escaped from the slings by which he was being hoisted aboard a transport at Falmouth, and then kicked out again “and nearly killed the second mate of the vessel by knocking him overboard.”36 One of the regiment’s own troop horses subsequently followed the unfortunate mate over the rails, having been ordered to be shot after exhibiting symptoms indicating the onset of what Tomkinson referred to as “farcy.”37 More commonly known as glanders, this contagious disease, transmittable through contaminated food or water but also by the nasal discharges of the afflicted animals, would have likely infected the whole shipment had drastic action not been taken. Similar precautions were necessary on campaign, particularly if occupying quarters that had previously been used by the French, whose cavalry mounts were believed to be poorly cared for and thus liable to spread infection.38 Even if serious contagion was avoided, a sea voyage did nothing for the health of horses cooped up aboard ship, particularly if sanitary conditions were poor, and animals inevitably fell off in condition.39 Others contrived to harm themselves or their counterparts by following the example of Tomkinson’s Bob, whilst a rough passage led almost inevitably to broken legs and the consequent destruction of the injured animals.40
The remount situation was further complicated by the restrictions imposed on it by the regimental system, which meant that, rather than being organized centrally, remounts were obtained individually by each unit.41 This problem, relating to the retention by regiments at home of mature, campaign-ready horses whilst those on active service had to use young animals not accustomed to the rigors of service, was one of several associated issues raised by Wellington in correspondence with Bathurst as preparations for the 1813 campaign got under way. Wellington also expressed his dislike of the need, again brought on by the confines of the system, to receive whole new regiments rather than simply acquire their horses for the use of existing units. The same round of correspondence notes the lack of horses to haul the guns, which kept a portion of the artillery confined to garrison duty at Lisbon.42 By extension, the employment of a significant portion of the Portuguese cavalry in a dismounted garrison
role, and the steady reduction of the numbers of artillery batteries of that nation serving in the field, may also be attributed to the same cause.43
An additional problem stemming from the fact that horses were obtained by the individual regiments was that it was not always possible for them to obtain the most suitable animals. The 12th Light Dragoons was particularly lucky in this regard since the regiment’s colonel from 1791 to 1815 was the veteran cavalry officer Lt. General Sir James Steuart, who saw his duties very much in the model of the eighteenth-century colonel-proprietor and vetted the quality of any augmentation to his regiment, be that the appointment of a new cornet or the purchase of a batch of remounts.44 The month of July 1811, for example, found Steuart writing to Captain James Bridger, commanding the regimental depot, to see how well the latest remounts were doing;45 a year later, he was taking an even more active role. A hope that Preston Fair would be a good source of remounts having proved false, Steuart turned his attentions from Lancashire to Scotland in response to an earlier arrangement with a Mr. Hugh Taylor to supply fifty horses at Dumfries. Steuart’s standards, however, were exacting; not only would he “take no Horse which is not strong and active fit to carry 18 stone on the road,” and between fourteen hands two inches and fifteen hands, he also specified a preference for “dark brown in point of colour—any blacks must have a dash of blood.” Rather than entrust the task to anyone else, Steuart, then in his sixty-eighth year, informed Taylor that he would inspect and approve the horses personally.46
Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword Page 32