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

considered it (as I believe the generality of soldiers consider it) an honour to be made a light-bob.’ But he wore a red coat like his comrades of the battalion companies, and had little specialist training. His company was combined with ten others into a light battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Sharpe of the 9^th Foot and sent on the Helder expedition, dispatched to Holland in September 1799 as part of an Anglo-Russian force commanded by the Duke of York. It fought an inconclusive battle at Egmont op Zee, and, perilously short of supplies, was lucky to be able to negotiate a convention which allowed it to withdraw unmolested.

      During the battle, Surtees discovered what it was like to fight real light infantry, tirailleurs, some armed with rifles which outranged the musket and all trained to take full advantage of the ground. The French skirmishers ‘had greatly the advantage over us in point of shooting, their bullets doing much more execution than ours.’ As he followed up the retreating enemy he saw remarkably few dead Frenchmen, and thought that most of the dead must have been carried off, ‘but experience has since taught me that we must have done them little harm.’⁴⁴ Although he fired almost 150 rounds, he doubted if he actually hit anybody.

      The Helder expedition rubbed home the point that light troops were scarcely less valuable in Europe than in North America. Colonel Coote Manningham and Lieutenant Colonel the Hon William Steward were amongst the reformers who demanded the establishment of light troops armed with rifles rather than muskets, dressed in something less conspicuous than the ‘old red rag’. We shall see later how an Experimental Corps of Riflemen was raised in 1800, soon to be embodied as the 95^th Regiment (later The Rifle Brigade). For the moment, though, it is worth observing that with the Baker rifles and green uniforms of the new riflemen came a new notion of discipline. The new unit’s regulations emphasised that trust and respect were, with discipline, the cement that bound riflemen together.

      Every inferior, whether officer or soldier shall receive the lawful commands of his superior with deference and respect, and shall execute them to the best of his power. Every superior in his turn, whether he be an Officer or Non-Commissioned Officer, shall give his orders in the language of moderation and of regard to the feelings of the men under his command; abuse, bad language or blows being positively forbid in the regiment…It is the Colonel’s particular wish that duty should be done from cheerfulness and inclination, and not from mere command and the necessity of obeying…⁴⁵

      Influential though the linked concepts of the citizen-soldier and the light infantryman were, neither revolutionised the conduct of war. If the Duke of Marlborough, who fought his last great battle at Malplaquet in 1709, was wafted back from the Elysian Fields to watch the battle of Waterloo in 1815 (or even the Alma fifty years later), he would have found many superficial differences but little fundamental change. Shakos were now worn instead of tricorne hats, and longskirted coats with big turned-back lapels had been replaced by something altogether trimmer. Regiments now had numbers, instead of being known by the name of their current colonel (though if the 37th was no longer Monro’s Regiment, it still retained its familiar yellow facings); there were indeed more skirmishers about than he would have remembered, and some of them wore uniforms which might have struck him as disturbingly drab.

      Weapons had certainly improved. Marlborough would have observed that reforms like those initiated in the French army by Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval had standardised the calibres of artillery pieces and, through improved carriages and better harness, made it possible for them to move faster on the battlefield. The snappy movement of Captain Cavalié Mercer’s Royal Horse Artillery would doubtless have merited his applause. Yet most of their projectiles were roundshot, a single solid cannon ball, or canister, a tin container filled with small balls that burst on leaving the muzzle to give the cannon the effect of a gigantic shotgun. Howitzers, still a minority amongst the artillery, fired explosive shells, though, like those in his own day, their effect was uncertain. Sometimes they exploded harmlessly in mid-air, and sometimes they lay on the ground, fuses sputtering, giving ample opportunity for those nearby to escape. Even ‘spherical case’ – in the British service eponymously named after Henry Shrapnel, its inventor – a shell designed to bust in the air and scatter balls and metal fragments below, was notoriously unreliable.

      There had been organisational changes he might have admired. Chief amongst these was the development of the corps d’armée system by Napoleon. In 1809 Napoleon had reminded Eugène de Beauharnais of its advantages. ‘Here is the general principle of war – a corps of 25,000–30,000 men can be left on its own,’ he wrote. ‘Well-handled, it can fight or alternatively avoid action, and manoeuvre according to circumstances without any harm coming to it, because an opponent cannot force it to accept an engagement but if it chooses to do so it can fight alone for a long time.’⁴⁶ Yet here, as in much else, Napoleon was more adapter than innovator, and his development of the corps harked back deep into the eighteenth century to the ideas of Marshal de Broglie, the Duc de Choiseul and above all Jacques Antoine, Comte de Guibert. The latter, incidentally, favoured citizen-soldiers, but agreed that ‘since we cannot have citizen troops, and perfect troops, [what we must do is] to have our troops at least disciplined and trained.’⁴⁷

      What would certainly have impressed Marlborough was the way in which armies, and the populations that supported them, had grown since his day. Nothing in his career could equal ‘the Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in October 1813, where the rival armies put over half a million men into the field. Yet this was exceptional. Just under 200,000 men had met at the bloody and indecisive Malplaquet in 1709, and there were actually rather less at the wholly conclusive Waterloo.

       ENGLAND, HOME AND BEAUTY?

      IT WAS AN AGE OF TIPPLING. Captain John Peebles, commanding the grenadier company of the 42^nd Regiment in North America, recalled a cheery dinner at which 31 officers drank 72 bottles of claret, eighteen of Madeira and twelve of port, not to mention a little porter and punch by way of skirmishing. He was a serious-minded professional soldier and certainly no drunkard, but his diary is speckled with entries like that for 29 March 1777: ‘dined with our light captain and got foul with claret.’⁴⁸ Formal dinners as well as more casual gatherings were interspersed with toasts, at which those present drank the health of individuals, institutions or even sudden inspirations. The practice is remembered today in the Royal Navy’s toasts, one for each day of the week. Some are patriotic or professional sentiments like ‘Our Ships at Sea’, or more personal tributes like ‘Wives and Sweethearts’ (to which cynics add sotto voce ‘and may they never meet’.) Occasionally the communal drinking was accompanied by a song like ‘The Owl’, sung as a round, with each drinker taking a line.

      To-whit, to-whoo

      To whom drinks’t thou?

      O knave, to thee

      This song is well sung, I make you a vow

      And here’s a knave that drinkest now.

      By Victorian times, when some of the loucher habits of the Georgian era had been restrained, toasts remained popular, and one of the most common was ‘England, Home and Beauty’. It was drunk across the globe in garrisons and outposts summed up by Kipling’s ex-Troop Sergeant Major O’Kelly as running:

      From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore,

      Hong-Kong and Peshawur,

      Lucknow and Etawah,

      And fifty-five more all endin’ in ‘pore’⁴⁹

      Attractive as it might be to men surrounded by Khyber rocks, South African kopjes or Chindwin teak, England, home and beauty was a most inaccurate description of the society which had spawned Hobden, his comrades, and many of their officers too.

      The