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

Ensign Patrick Hay who, as Sergeant Thomas Morris of his battalion observed, was ‘a fine-spirited fellow who had been our regimental surgeon, but, through the interest of the colonel, exchanged to ensign and adjutant.’ At Waterloo he saved one of the 73^rd’s companies from being cut off by French cuirassiers, shouting to its useless commander: ‘Captain Robinson, what are you about? Are you going to murder your men?’ He ordered the company back just in time for it to help the battalion form square.⁴²

      Many doctors shared the risks of the men they tended. Few did so as spectacularly as Surgeon William Bryden, seconded to Shah Shujah’s medical services in Afghanistan, who accompanied the army on its retreat from Kabul in 1842:

      I with difficulty put my pony into a gallop, and, taking the bridle in my teeth, cut right and left with my sword as I went through them. They could not reach me with their knives…One man on a mound over the road had a gun, which he fired close down upon me and broke my sword, leaving about six inches in the handle. But I got clear of them, and then found that the shot had hit the poor pony, wounding him in the loins, and he could hardly carry me.⁴³

      Bryden was the only member of the entire force to reach safety in Jellalabad after cutting his way through the Afghans.

      Without doubt the most remarkable medical officer of the age was James Miranda Barry, who entered the army as a hospital assistant in 1813, was appointed assistant surgeon two years later, and rose to become inspector-general of the Army Medical Department in 1858. It was only after Dr Barry’s death in 1865 that it was discovered that she was a woman, who appeared to have given birth to a child: she had concealed her gender throughout her military service. While serving at the Cape she was described as the most skilled of physicians but the most wayward of men, and her quarrelsome temper had led her to fight a duel.

      The theme of ‘the female drummer’, the woman who passes herself off as a man, was a familiar one in the period, and the song ‘Polly Oliver’ describes a girl who decided to ‘list for a soldier and follow my love.’ Very few women actually accomplished this feat in the British army (though the Russians had Nadezda Durova, who served in the Napoleonic Wars as ‘Cornet Aleksandrov’) but Barry’s officer status would have given her far more privacy than a private soldier could have attained in barrack-room or bivouac.

      The best-documented female soldier is Hannah Snell, who seems (though it is hard to separate fact from fiction) to have served four and a half years in the marines and been discharged in 1750. She subsequently made a living by appearing on the stage in her regimentals to perform arms drill, and selling buttons, garters and lace. The diarist Parson Woodford saw her at the White Hart, at Weston, near Norwich. He believed her assertion that she ‘was 21 years as a common soldier in the Army, and was not discovered by any as a woman’ and, kindly soul, ‘took 4 pr of 4d buttons and gave her 0.2.6.’⁴⁴ As we shall see, women routinely accompanied the army and some were killed or died of illness or exposure. One of them, the wife of Sergeant Reston of the 94^th Regiment, carried ammunition and supplies to the front line, at the siege of Matagorda Fort at Cadiz in 1810, and received no official recognition of her heroism despite the efforts of her regiment. But Mrs Reston made no attempt to conceal her gender, and Dr Barry’s sustained achievement is all the more remarkable.

      Lastly, the Home Office had a voice in military policy, for it controlled the non-regular forces of the crown until they were actually embodied into service and came under military command. The oldest reserve force was the militia, liable for limited training in peacetime and embodiment in grave emergency. Parish constables kept ‘fair and true lists’ of men between the ages of 18 and 45, and militiamen were selected from these rolls by ballot to serve for five years. County militia lists throw fascinating light on village society. In 1777, the village of Yardley Gobion in Northamptonshire listed four farmers and two farmers’ sons, each dignified by ‘Mr’ in the roll, two bakers, two tailors, a butcher, a horse-dealer, a hog-dealer, five servants, two men who maintained (apparently unsuccessfully) that they had already performed militia service, and nine labourers. Seven men were exempted as unfit, among them William Holman, who was ‘very near sighted’, Thomas Bignall, ‘very bow legged’ and William Robinson, who ‘saith he has fits’. Literary consistency was not the constables’ strong suit. Those of the Chipping Warden Hundred of Northamptonshire managed to spell Thorpe Mandeville, where appeals against listings were determined, as Thorp Mundville, Thrup Mandivil, Thrupmandeveill and Throp Mandevile.⁴⁵

      The militia was organised in county regiments, officered by gentlemen selected by the lords-lieutenant of those counties. Sometimes their martial zeal caused marital upset. In 1759 Lord Robert Manners, colonel of the Nottinghamshire Militia, told the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, that:

      Mr Martin Bird wants his name scratched off the Militia List, as his wife, on hearing he had taken a commission, was so affected that he thought she would have died! I suppose the Lady’s condition will be sufficient plea with Your Grace to let the gentleman off.⁴⁶

      Because the militia was funded by the land-tax, country gentlemen had a proprietary interest in the force:

      For this reason they felt a pride in furnishing it with officers; and indeed the militia lists of the period are simply a catalogue of the names of the leading county families…[Lords lieutenant] were to some extent petty Sovereigns, with the Militia for their army. They were attached to the force, frequently spent very large sums upon it, and easily grew to regard it as their own. The officers shared their views, and hence in many cases a regiment of Militia became a very exclusive country-club, with a just pride in itself which was not of little value.⁴⁷

      In February 1793, 19,000 militia were called out, but individuals were allowed to provide substitutes, and the demand for volunteers to act in this (relatively safe) capacity deprived the regular army of many potential recruits. Subsequent attempts to use the militia in direct support of the regular army – for instance by drafting the flank companies of militia regiments into battalions under the command of regular officers, granting regular commissions to militia officers who persuaded their men to volunteer for regular service (the so called ‘raising for rank’), and finally by raising the Army of Reserve, whose members could be drafted into the regular army (conscription by any other name) – were deeply unpopular in the shires.

      There was no militia in Scotland until 1797, not least because of the risk of distributing weapons to a society that had only recently been disarmed. In order to meet the demands of home defence during the Seven Years’ War and American War, Fencible regiments were raised, composed of regulars enlisted for home service for the duration of the war. In 1793 nine new Fencible regiments were raised, and more followed. Lastly, although there had been a short-lived plan to raise volunteers for home defence in 1782, in April 1794 an Act of Parliament authorised the formation of Volunteer units which would be subject to military discipline and eligible for pay when called out.

      An explosion of volunteering ensued: the five Associated Companies of St George’s, Hanover Square, actually formed up before the act was passed. Lord Winchelsea’s three troops of ‘Gentlemen and Yeomanry of the County of Rutland’ were the first units of the new Yeomanry Cavalry. The Yeomanry’s home defence role was to be overtaken, in the nineteenth century, by a growing emphasis on the preservation of internal security in a struggle which often pitted town against country, Yeoman against worker. Volunteers and Yeoman who could produce a certificate of regular attendance at drills were exempted from service in the militia. There were repeated suggestions that the congenial part-time soldiering enjoyed by these worthies induced those who could afford it – for Volunteers and Yeoman had to provide some of their own necessities, and the latter required access to a horse – to join the Volunteers or Yeomanry in order to avoid the militia.

      In a book whose chief concern is with the army’s combatant teeth rather than its administrative tail I have little time to delve more deeply into the labyrinth. But a labyrinth it