The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  never prepared for war. Yet they never doubted that they would be victorious.

  As a land power Britain was contemptible. Compared with France with half a million out of her twenty-five millions in arms or learning to bear arms, the United Kingdom supported at home an effective strength of less than 15,000 troops. Its line regiments, long reduced by peace-time economy, were skeletons with a cadre of regular officers and a rank and file of ragged recruits. The rest of the Army—another 30,000—was scattered about the world, mostly in remote and unhealthy stations which constantly called for new drafts.

  Though a force with fine fighting traditions which once under Marlborough had won a European reputation, this little Army typified the unmilitary character of libertarian and aristocratic Britain. Its officers were gentlemen who paid for their commissions and regarded them as their private property. Its rank and file were unemployed artisans, jailbirds and village bad-hats who had exhausted every other resource but enlistment in a despised calling. Many others were drawn, as the Duke of Wellington said later, from the scum of the earth and enlisted only for drink. They had no continuity of employment, no interest in their profession save regimental pride and little hope of gratitude from the community they served. For England still regarded with jealousy a force which might be used to increase the power of the Executive.1 It was always kept as small as possible and its existence only renewed from year to year by parliamentary vote.

  In earlier times, before the menace of Louis XIV had wrung a standing army out of a reluctant people, England had relied for defence on a territorial levy of landowners and peasants who turned out annually for a few days' perfunctory training. Militia service had long ceased to be universal, but it survived for purposes of home defence. The force was commanded by the Lord-Lieutenants of the counties and officered by country gentlemen. Every year, after Parliament had fixed the quota of men required from each county, a ballot was held of all capable of bearing arms. Those who were unlucky enough to be drawn enjoyed a freeman's option of paying a substitute.

  This had the effect of deflecting recruits from the

  1 For this reason soldiers, until almost the end of the century, were billeted in alehouses instead of being concentrated in barracks.

  regular Army since the private bounty money offered for Militia deputies tended to exceed the Government's more parsimonious rate.

  On the outbreak of war Pitt introduced a Bill for raising 25,000 recruits for the Army and embodying 19,000 additional men in the Militia. But, as he shrank from compulsion, the former were easier to vote than to raise. And the Militia, being only liable to home service, failed wholly to meet the nation's need for a striking force. For this auxiliaries had to be sought from the smaller states of Germany. According to custom 14,000 troops from the King's hereditary Electorate of Hanover were therefore taken on the payroll and another 8000 hired, after much preliminary haggling, from the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt.

  Had Britain had to rely on land power alone, her effort in a European war would have been negligible. But though in 1792 only twelve battleships were in actual commission and there was no ship of the line either in the Mediterranean or West Indies, the Navy remained what it had been since Pepys had made it so a century before—the first in the world. Against France's seventy-six battle-ships with an aggregate broadside of 74,000 lbs., Britain had a hundred and thirteen with a broadside of 89,000 lbs. Schooled by the anxious memories of his youth when the fleets of all Europe had united against Britain, Pitt—peace-lover though he was—had never neglected the Navy. During the decade in which he was restoring the country's finances after the American war, he had still found money to build thirty-three new ships of the line and to repair sixty others. Advised by the great naval administrator, Sir Charles Middleton, he took particular care of the arsenals and dockyards. Fanny Burney, who visited Plymouth in 1789, where many of the great ships were laid up in harbour, paid a glowing tribute to their preparedness: "a noble and tremendous sight, it was a sort of sighing satisfaction to see such numerous stores of war's alarms! " A plan of Middleton's for allocating to each vessel a reserve of stores now proved remarkably effective in mobilisation. Within a few weeks fifty-four of the great ships were in commission, and thirty-nine more fit for immediate service.

  The difficulty was to get the men to man them. It was the custom at the end of every war for a Government dependent on a Parliament of taxpayers to discharge the bulk of the seamen. Only the officers—a corps of the highest professional skill—were retained permanently. The lower deck was recruited, as occasion required, from the merchant and fishing fleets, whose hereditary craftsmen supported by their labours and simple virtues the nation's maritime wealth and strength.

  The sailor's calling was not looked down upon like that of the private soldier. Britons were proud of their Navy and felt no jealousy of it, for they knew it could never be the instrument of arbitrary power. They loved to sing songs extolling the virtues of the honest, manly tars who served it. Dibdin's " Tom Bowling " was a national favourite. But he was not paid or treated like one. So long as he served on a merchantman he could earn good wages. In the King's Navy he got little but wounds and glory. Owing to the excessive conservatism of the race, the rate of naval pay remained what it had been in the days of Charles II. Discipline was stern and cruel, food conditions bad, leave almost non-existent.

  Therefore, though British seamen were loyal and brave, they did not volunteer with alacrity. In time of war the nation resorted to a device which savoured more of some oriental despotism than a free constitution. By immemorial custom pressgangs roved the streets and waterways of the coastal towns and districts, seizing at will any young man bred to the sea or who looked like a sailor. Certain classes were exempted, and a gentleman stood in little danger of being " pressed.' But though liability to impress was theoretically limited to seafaring men, many a likely looking young landsman in London and the seaports found himself trepanned and hauled aboard one of His Majesty's tenders bound for the fleet. Smollett in Roderick Random has left a vivid picture of the press-gang's operations: the " squat tawny fellow with the hanger by his side and a cudgel in his hand " and his genial " Yo ho! brother, you must come along with* me! "; the gang with their drawn cutlasses, the stinking hold packed with weeping wretches, the stench of the tender; the undressed wounds of those who had made a fight fee liberty; the bumboat women and the gin, the brutal midshipman who squirted a mouthful of dissolved tobacco through the grating on the crowded captives. There was no appeal and no redress.

  In 1792 the personnel of the Navy, which had been 110,000 at the end of the American war, was only 16,000. Though an Act for enlarging the fleet was passed in December, up to the outbreak of the war recruiting was conducted through normal channels. Certain cities like London and Rochester offered bounties to volunteers, which, joined to the knowledge that compulsion must follow, speeded things up a little. But it was not till the second half of February that the dreaded Press broke out on the River and several thousand seamen were dragged from incoming merchantmen and. colliers. After that the work of manning the King's ships went on smartly. Yet months elapsed before the battle fleet was ready.1 In the meantime the country had to rely on its frigates.

  Fortunately, for the moment the enemy was not formidable at sea. A dozen years before the Royal Navy of France had proved a worthy adversary. But now, though eight of its ships mounted no guns or more to the 100 of the largest British class, the Revolutionary cant of " incivism " had deprived it of its best officers and reduced its crews to unruly mobs incapable of the intricate skill and unquestioning discipline needed to bring squadrons of large sailing vessels into action. Even the rank of sea-gunners—the old corps d’elite of the French lower deck—was done away with by the Naval Committee of the Convention on the ground that it savoured of aristocracy. The rot which had begun in the dockyard towns soon spread to the magazines and ships: responsibility passed from the worker and the technician to the demagogue. By the secon
d year of the Revolution mutiny was the only sure avenue to promotion. The ships were dirty and neglected: the men remained in port and never went to sea. When the Convention ordered them out to fight, it found that the " audacity " it shrilly demanded was a poor substitute for seamanship.

  Such considerations caused Pitt to hope that the war he had striven so hard to avoid might not be so serious a matter after all. To the eye of reason the French were doing almost everything calculated to destroy their own country. They had slain or banished their leaders, alienated every friendly state in Europe, undermined the discipline of their defenders and neglected the arts of life for windy abstractions. Their frantic boasts that they were about to " dictate peace on the ruins of the Tower of London " and show up

  1 At the end of the first year of war only 56,337 men had been added to the establishment.—C.H.B.E., II, 39.

  the weakness of Britain's " corrupting wealth " did not impress Pitt. It was indeed on this very wealth that he relied. As the first financial statesman of the age, he had nothing but contempt for the reckless way in which the Jacobins were destroying France's credit and commerce. The Republic was already on the high road to bankruptcy. Britain, thanks to his prudent management, was richer than ever in her history. Despite the bad harvests revenue was again buoyant and trade expanding. An economic victory seemed assured.

  It was the measure of Pitt's ignorance of war that he put his trust in such a consideration. He was a noble creature with all his father's courage and patriotism and rather more than his sincerity. But cast straight from Cambridge into the Commons and thence, with scarcely a pause, into Downing Street, he was still at 33, after nine years of supreme office, austerely ignorant of the world. A master of figures and blue books, he was not yet a master of men. Inexperienced and unread in warlike matters, he had to guide a Cabinet of rich and easy-going noblemen and country gentlemen— subject to every breath of parliamentary opinion—through the bewildering dilemmas of a world war. He had to bring them to prompt and clear-cut decisions on far-reaching issues. Above all he had to steel them to resist the constant temptation of the line of least resistance which gives initiative to the enemy.

  In this task he could look for little help from his colleagues. His Foreign Minister and cousin, Lord Grenville, was even less fitted than he for the shocks of a revolutionary age. Proud, chilling and scholarly, he was more at home in a library than a Cabinet. He preferred to leave strategy alone and to concentrate on foreign policy. The chief Service member of the Government, Pitt's elder brother Chatham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had been a soldier and was a man of good brains. But he found it more restful not to use them. Owing to his unpunctuality, he was known as the late Lord Chatham. The Master of the Ordnance, the Duke of Richmond, was a worthy country gentleman. The Secretary-at-War, Sir George Yonge, was not in the Cabinet at all.

  For knowledge of men and affairs, Pitt had to rely on his Home Secretary, the 51-year-old Henry Dundas. This bustling, genial, irrepressible, ruddy-faced Scot looked after the worldly management of the Tory Party, and, while in office, of the country. He had, as Pitt liked to say of him, a turn for facilitating business. As befitted a master of honest jobbery—for the man, like all who surrounded Pitt, was a patriot—he was a great pluralist. As Home Secretary, he was also responsible for the Colonies. As First Commissioner for India, he controlled the political patronage and military operations of the East India Company. He was also Treasurer of the Navy and Groom of the Stole.

  Dundas was Pitt's boon companion in his one human failing— the bottle. The confidences of these two over the port were the delight of the wits and cartoonists. The latter loved to portray them waxing maudlin over a bumper and a loyally emblematic chamber pot at Pitt's Wimbledon lodgings or swaying into the House of Commons after dinner.1 With his Scottish accent, his commonplace, clubbable mind and his bluff, good-natured " Wha' wants me? " Dundas was a great figure in the House of Commons and City. He was a first-rate politician: a past-master of jobs, compromises and arrangements, always thinking of the lobby and the next election. He knew nothing of the art of war, for which by training and temperament he was little fitted.

  Unfortunately he supposed he was: for his self-confidence like his joviality was inexhaustible. His first act after the declaration of war was to draw up a Memorandum recommending that no change should be made in any of his many offices. Nor was it. Since the Secretary-at-War was outside the Cabinet and the First Lord of the Admiralty sunk in slothful good-living, Dundas, with his command of the Prime Minister's ear, his direction of Colonial and Indian operations and his footing in the Admiralty, became virtually Minister for Defence.

  Such were the men with whom Pitt faced the armed Jacobin. His mind was not trained to run in warlike grooves: it had just suffered a profound shock and disappointment. He was dazed by the unreasoning of this barbarous appeal to violence. Strategy, unlike finance, was an unfamiliar dimension to him.

  1 Among the Bacchanalian Epigrams of the Opposition wits were : " Pitt: ‘ I can't discern the Speaker, Hal, can you ?' " Dundas : ‘ Not see the Speaker ! Damme, I see two I *’"

  and

  " Pitt: ' Europe's true balance must not be overthrown.'

  " Dundas : ‘Damn Europe's balance : try to keep your own !'

  Seeing France's naval weakness his first plan was to attack her only on the water. He would use his scanty military forces in conjunction with his fine fleet to strip her of her colonies. The wealth won in the West and East Indies would equip Allied armies to attack her by land. Increased customs receipts would pay for Austrian and Prussian subsidies. This was the " blue water " policy which his own father had made so glorious and profitable during the Seven Years War. Its principle of limited liability naturally appealed to a Minister whose main object had always been to balance national accounts and whose hatred of war was based at least partly on its expense. It commended itself, too, to the Navy, to the City whose treasure lay in Caribbean sugar islands, and to the politicians who reckoned that captured colonies would come in useful as bargaining counters at the peace conference.

  Yet even this conception of war required men. And because of the country's pacific policy in the past men were lacking. There were not enough at first even to man the fleet. Nineteen, or nearly a quarter, of the eighty-one battalions which constituted the infantry strength of the British Army were already fully absorbed in garrisoning those West Indian islands from which the main attack on France's colonies was to be launched. Even these had had to be reinforced recently to cope with the unrest of the slave population. And so unhealthy were the islands that the normal annual wastage from disease was 25 per cent. To take the offensive an additional force of at least 20,000 was needed. To raise a fraction of it the Government was forced to take the " flank " or picked companies from every garrison battalion in Britain and commit them to a long sea voyage and a climate notoriously destructive to white troops.

  But no sooner had promises of reinforcements been dispatched to the Governors of Jamaica and Barbados, than the Government's entire plan was unhinged by the course of events in Europe. Danger at her own front door at once deprived Britain of the initiative. On February 16th, Dumouriez invaded Holland. Prussia, treacherously husbanding her resources for aggression against Poland, failed to supply the army promised under its treaty obligations to its western neighbour. Beside themselves with terror the Dutch plutocrats appealed to Britain, unjustly reproaching her for their defenceless condition. The British Ambassador declared that they could scarcely ask more if their country were a part of Yorkshire. " But I incline to think," he added, " it should be considered as such for the present."

  For if the Dutch and their coastline were not to fall to the Jacobins, Britain had no option. It was to prevent this that she had gone to war. There was only one hope. In the path of the French armies lay the Hollandsdiep—a broad estuary which British gunboats supported by a handful of resolute troops might be able to hold for a few weeks until the Prussian and Au
strian armies arrived. The Cabinet promptly decided to send the only force available. On February 20th the seven battalions of the Foot Guards were drawn up on the Horse Guards' Parade. The King's soldier son, the Duke of York, told the men that it had been decided to dispatch the first battalion of each of the three regiments to Holland and asked for volunteers to bring them up to strength. True to its tradition, the entire Brigade stepped forward.

  When the 2000 redcoats, narrowly missing shipwreck in their tiny, hastily-improvised transports, reached Helvoetsluys on March 1st, the situation appeared desperate. The Dutch were unable or unwilling to make the slightest effort to help themselves; a British Staff Officer complained that the unconcern with which the burghers listened to the French guns at Willemstad made his blood boil.1 It looked as if nothing could stop the enemy. Yet on that very day the inherent weakness in the Revolution revealed itself. A hundred miles to the east the sluggish armies of Austria took the offensive and the Republican volunteer levies at once bolted. For their high spirits of the previous autumn had been sapped by the neglect and corruption of their political leaders. Their favourite demagogue, " Papa " Pache at the War Office, had swindled and starved them out of all confidence. Trusting no one, they took to their heels. But for the leisurely ways of the Prince of Coburg, the Austrian generalissimo, they might have been annihilated. As it was, Dumouriez's plan for the invasion of Holland was ruined. With his right flank exposed he fell back to Neerwinden, where he was again defeated on March 18th. A week later the Austrians were back in Brussels and the French inside their own frontiers.