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

with scenes like this. John Gabriel Stedman, an officer in the Scots Brigade in Dutch service, wrote in 1772 that: ‘I never remember to have brought a soldier to punishment, if it was not at all in my power to avoid it, while I have known a pitiful ensign, one Robert Munro, get a poor man flogged because he had passed him without taking off his hat.’²⁸

      Due process of military law (itself usually swift and partial) brought a wide range of other punishments from simple detention, through riding the wooden horse (sitting astride a sharp-backed wooden frame, often with weights attached to the feet to increase the severity), running the gauntlet (the bare-backed offender proceeded between two ranks of soldiers who lashed him as he passed), straightforward flogging to the death sentence itself. Death might be administered by shooting, hanging or breaking on the wheel. In 1776 Stedman watched the latter penalty inflicted on a murderer:

      Tied on the cross, his hand was chopped off, and with a large iron crow [bar] all his bones were smashed to splinters, without he let his voice be heard…All done, and the ropes slacked, he wreathed himself off the cross, when seeing the Magistrates and others, going off, he groaned three or four times, and complained in a clear voice that he was not yet dead…He then begged the hangman to finish him off, in vain, and cursed him also…He lived from six-thirty o’clock till about eleven, when his head was chopped off.²⁹

      This gruesome penalty was inflicted in the bright noon of the Enlightenment, with Mozart at his keyboard, Josiah Wedgwood at his pottery, and Voltaire plying his quill.

      Many contemporaries found it easy to reconcile their own liberal opinions with recognition that the battlefield imposed such severe stresses that only drill and discipline enabled a man to tolerate them. The fledgeling United States of America, for all its use of irregulars and militias, could not have won the War of Independence without its regular Continental Army, whose drill and discipline owed much to the efforts of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, an ex-captain in the Prussian army. He was appointed inspector-general of the Continental Army in 1778, ‘bringing to the ragged colonial citizen army a discipline and effectiveness it had hitherto lacked.’³⁰ Continental soldiers may indeed have been fighting for ‘inalienable rights’, but they submitted to a discipline scarcely less severe than that suffered by the men they fought.

      What was new about the American Revolution was its recognition that soldiers were emphatically citizens in uniform. In 1783 George Washington wrote:

      It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal service, to the defence of it…³¹

      This declaration of principle was a forerunner to another new republic’s response to military crisis. The French National Convention, facing converging attack by the armies of monarchical Europe, passed the decree of levée en masse on 23 August 1793, announcing grandiloquently that:

      Young men will go to battle; married men will forge arms and transport supplies; women will make tents, uniforms and serve in the hospitals; children will pick rags; old men will have themselves carried to the public squares, to help inspire the courage of the warriors, and preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.³²

      The concept of soldier-citizen was to be stamped on the French army during the Revolution and, indeed, long beyond it. In August 1917 the trench newspaper Le Crapouillot warned officers that they often mistook:

      distance for dignity, brutality for firmness, and the propensity to punish for professional zeal…Men are neither inferior beings, nor simple fighting machines. Our soldiers are not professional soldiers, but citizen-soldiers. You must show men that you feel their unhappiness, sympathise with them, and understand the greatness of their sacrifices.³³

      It was not simply that French soldiers were citizens under arms: they were soldiers who fought best in a particular way. French theorists consistently argued that there was something definitively Gallic about the attack with cold steel. In 1866 one wrote in a military journal that:

      For all Frenchmen, battle is above all an individual action, the presence of dash, agility and the offensive spirit, that is to say, the attack with the bayonet; for the German, it is the fusillade…individualism drowned in the mass, passive courage and the defensive.³⁴

      French discipline was rarely as rigid as Steuben might have wished. When Napoleon III met Franz Josef of Austria at Villafranca in north Italy in 1859, a French officer noted that while the Austrian hussar escort remained rock-steady, troopers of the Guides, crack light cavalry escorting Napoleon, craned and jostled to get a good view of the two emperors. They were Frenchmen, and that was just what he expected.

      Important though the concept of the citizen-soldier was, its practical effects were limited. Even the French soon drew back from democratic notions like electing officers, and although the harsh disciplinary code of the old regime (which had included beating with the flat of a sword, in an effort to produce a punishment that was painful yet not dishonourable) was jettisoned, its replacement was scarcely benign, and miscreants were consigned to the boulet, confinement with a roundshot attached to them by a chain. Napoleon’s ‘iron marshal’, Louis Nicolas Davout, had looters shot, but even this could not restrain his men, and when the French briefly occupied Moscow in 1812 his own quarters were pillaged. However, Napoleonic discipline in general – tough little Davout was something of an exception – was regarded as more relaxed than British. Some French deserters in Spain served with the British (this trade worked both ways, though it was always fatal for a deserter to be captured by his former comrades) but soon re-deserted because they found their new discipline far too severe.³⁵

      Napoleonic officers sometimes struck their men like the drillmasters of an earlier generation, yet even here the assault might have a distinctively French edge. During the Champagne campaign of 1814, when the Prussians, Russians and Austrians were closing in on Napoleon east of Paris, Captain Charles Parquin of the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard hit a corporal across the back with the flat of his sabre when he found that he had dismounted against his express orders. The man spun round, pulled open his coat to show his Legion of Honour, grasped his sabre, and said: ‘Captain, I have served my country and my Emperor for twenty-two years. I won this cross two years ago and now, in a matter of seconds, you have dishonoured me for ever!’ Parquin – ‘appalled at having lost my temper with an old soldier’ – replied: ‘Listen, corporal. If I were your equal in rank I should not hesitate to give you satisfaction, for I am not afraid of you. But I am your captain and I am apologising to you. Will you shake hands?’ The corporal, declaring that there was no ill-feeling on his part, shook hands, and Parquin records that: ‘Half an hour later he was sharing my modest supper which was, none the less, made all the more appetising by a bottle of brandy.’³⁶

      The concept of the citizen-soldier made few inroads into the British regular army, although it found more fertile ground when part-time Volunteer and Yeomanry units were raised during the French Revolutionary Wars. Some units balloted the whole corps to select officers, who were then duly commissioned by the lord-lieutenant of their county. It was a common practice for units ‘to pool their government remuneration and distribute it evenly among all ranks…’³⁷

      The second major influence on the armies of the period was initially tactical, although, as it questioned many of the assumptions dear to apostles of brick-dust and pipe-clay, it became philosophical, political and organisational too. There were times, especially in forests, woods or on broken ground, when serried ranks and measured volleys were simply inappropriate. European armies discovered the need for light troops in Eastern Europe