Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes

the threat of Russian expansion. The advance to Kabul went well, but in the winter of 1841–42 there was rising against Shah Shujah. The British and Indian force, weakly commanded, retired from Kabul towards Jellalabad, but was cut to pieces as it did so: only one man, Dr Bryden, managed to reach safety.

      Better fortune attended the next expansionist step, and in 1843 the British annexed Sind. This brought them into conflict with the martial Sikhs, rulers of the Punjab. In the first Sikh War (1845–46) the British won hard-fought battles at Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon. When hostilities broke out again in 1848 the British had the better of a scrambling battle at Chilian wallah and a decisive clash at Gujerat, and went on to annex the Punjab.

      Brown Bess was now almost a thing of the past, superseded from 1842 by a musket ignited by a percussion cap, which was far more reliable than the flintlock, and from 1853 by a percussion rifle. Ironically it was the introduction of this rifle into the Indian army that helped produce the last conflict of the period. The rifle’s paper cartridge was lubricated with grease, and rumours that this was the fat of pork (unclean to Muslims) or cattle (sacred to Hindus) induced some soldiers of the Bengal army to refuse the cartridges and precipitated the Indian Mutiny in March 1857. The mutineers took Delhi, and overwhelmed a British force at Cawnpore, where the survivors were massacred. Lucknow, capital of the princely state of Oudh, held out, and was eventually relieved after the British had taken Delhi by storm in September 1857.

      The Mutiny was the last time that Brown Bess was carried in battle by British soldiers. Lieutenant Richard Barter, adjutant of the 75^th Foot, – ‘the Stirlingshire Regiment, good men and true as ever had the honour of serving their Queen and Country’ – describes how a hundred men from his battalion were issued with the new rifle, ‘all the rest of the regiment retaining old Brown Bess’. But the new weapon was not deemed a success, and ‘the men, with few exceptions, contrived to get rid of their rifles and in their place picked up the old weapons of their dead comrades.’²² Hobden would surely have approved.

      Brown Bess had held sway for more than a century. But within a decade she was as obsolete as the longbow, superseded first by percussion weapons and finally by breech-loading rifles in a process of accelerating technical innovation. There were other major changes too: the purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871, and the regimental system was recast shortly afterwards to produce county regiments, with two regular battalions (the 37th joined the 67th (South Hampshire) Regiment to produce the Hampshire Regiment) linked to form a new regiment which would normally have one battalion at home and another abroad. The process was not popular, and traditionalists demanded the return of ‘our numbers wreathed in glory.’ In 1884 Colonel Arthur Poole angrily declared that he could not possibly attend a Hampshire regimental dinner. ‘Damned names,’ he wrote, ‘mean nothing. Since time immemorial regiments have been numbered according to their precedence in the Line…I will not come to anything called a Hampshire Regimental dinner. My compliments, Sir, and be damned.’²³

       RED COAT AND BROWN BESS

      HODBEN AND HIS COMRADES plied their deadly trade with Brown Bess. This weapon, similar to her cousins such as the Prussian Potsdam musket, named after the great arsenal on the outskirts of Berlin, and the French 1777 pattern, named for the year of its introduction into service, painted the face of battle for more than a century. It was inherently inaccurate and its range was very short, inspiring tactics based on blocks of infantry which fired away at one another at close range in a contest where the rapidity of fire and the steadfastness of the firers were of prime importance. Loading and firing required the infantryman to carry out set actions in the proper sequence, driven home by repeated drilling till they became little less than a conditioned reflex. The efficient movement of large numbers of men, often across difficult country and sometimes under fire, demanded that the individual elements of the mighty whole responded promptly and identically to commands.

      The length of paces had to be exact and their frequency precise. ‘When men march in cadence,’ declared a military writer in 1763, ‘it gives them a bold and imposing air; and by the habit they acquire in regulating their pace, we may almost guess what time a body of men will take to traverse a certain length of ground.’²⁴ Troops usually moved in column, to promote control, and fought in line, to maximise firepower, though there were numerous practical variations. And, most notably from the pens of the French theorists the Chevalier Folard and Baron de Mesnil-Durand, there were assertions that the column was king because the sheer physical and psychological shock it delivered would always triumph over the squibbing musketry of the line.

      Deploying from column of march to line of battle was a complex business, which required careful attention to maintaining the intervals between parallel columns so that when each column wheeled through ninety degrees an even, continuous line, without embarrassing gaps or confusing overlaps, was the result. At the 1785 Silesian manoeuvres a Prussian army of 23,000 men approached in column and, on a single cannon-shot, wheeled in seconds into a line two and a quarter miles long. Wheeling required the men on the inner flank to mark time (marching on the spot) while those on the outer flank stepped out briskly. An eighteenth century German writer tells how:

      Whether on horseback or on foot, a regular wheel is just about the most difficult of all movements to accomplish. When a wheel is well done, you have the impression that the alignment has been regulated with a ruler, that one flank is tied to a stake, and that the other is describing the arc of a circle. You can employ these images if you wish to convey to the soldiers a clear idea of what goes on in a wheel.²⁵

      If repetitious drill and rigid discipline were important in bringing the soldier into battle, they were crucial once fighting commenced. Bad weapon-handling constantly caused accidents. When front rank men knelt to fire and then sprang up to load they were often shot by careless rear-rank men: the Napoleonic Marshal Gouvion St-Cyr reckoned that one-quarter of French infantry casualties in his career were caused this way. Soldiers were terribly burned when cartridge-boxes blew up; eyes were poked out with bayonets as ungainly soldiers bungled drill movements, and ramrods were regularly fired off by men who had forgotten to remove them from the barrel of their musket, causing injuries and broken windows during practice, and difficulty in battle, where a spare ramrod might not be at hand.

      Individual nervousness could easily swell to provoke a wider panic, opening a gap that a watchful enemy might exploit. This sort of thing was to the drillmaster what heresy was to the devout: something requiring urgent and extreme correction. A French writer recommended his readers: ‘Do not hesitate to smash in the skull of any soldiers who grumble, or who give vent to cries like “We are cut off”…’²⁶ In 1759 Major General James Wolfe famously declared that he would rather have written Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ than take Quebec, and he was indeed to be killed capturing it. But there was little echo of the Enlightenment in his regimental orders when he commanded the 20th Foot at Canterbury in 1755 and warned:

      A soldier who quits his rank, or offers to flag, is instantly to be put to death by the officer who commands that platoon, or the officer or sergeant in rear of that platoon; a soldier does not deserve to live who won’t fight for his king and country.²⁷

      The weapon carried by the majority of combatants not only dictated the shape of combat: it helped determine the composition of armies and their conduct off the battlefield as well as on it. Most armies in the age of the flintlock were composed of rank and file drawn from society’s lower orders and officered (though the generalisation is broad) by gentlemen. They emphasised uniformity and conformity, and tended to look upon initiative as a potentially dangerous aberration. Their discipline was rigid. In most European armies a mistake in drill would bring immediate corporal punishment: a Frenchman living in Berlin was shocked to see a fifteen year old junker thrash an old soldier for a trivial