Peace—general peace at all events—had reigned from 1783 to 1789, when the French Revolution broke out. With the merits or demerits of that great struggle this story has nothing to do; but none the less the overthrow of the monarchy of France not only created an almost continuous condition of war for a quarter of a century, but helped most materially to raise to the highest pitch the Continental opinion as to the military value of Great Britain. Its naval strength throughout that quarter of a century was most fully proved. It remained for the stubborn fighting power of the land forces to be displayed during the same eventful period. French anger, English panic, had dragged the latter into open war with France, and that not without allies. All the world began by being against the new Republic: small wonder, then, that in her new-born freedom she turned bitterly against her world-wide antagonists, and fought them all. That she did not fully conquer them was largely due to one small State—England. The wealth of the latter, even then comparatively greater than the Continent, her naval preponderance, infinitely greater, as events proved, than that of her antagonist, though her numerical fighting strength as compared with the Continental powers was but small, and her insular position, made her eventually almost the arbiter of Europe, when the great struggle drew to an end.
As usual, the actual number of the army throughout the years from 1793 to 1808 constantly varied. The 150,000 men under arms in 1780 was reduced to 40,000 the next156 year, was increased the year after to about 55,000 in Great Britain, and fell in 1784 to 18,000 at home, 12,000 in the “Plantations,” and some 6000 in India. The provision for the latter force was made by a new and special vote. The importance of the growing empire in the East was being at last recognised.
The system of levying troops continued much the same. Men were enlisted voluntarily by heavy bounties, and when that attraction failed, the pressgang, or even the prisons, was then employed to raise recruits. Unless disbanded at the end of a campaign, they served for life, or till worn out; but the dawn of a short-service system appeared in 1805, when the period of service was fixed at seventeen years.32
But the continued necessity for an increased army, and the dread of serious invasion that obtained, and not without reason, during the closing days of the eighteenth and the early days of the nineteenth centuries, was fast wearing down the old civil dislike. Officers on half-pay were rendered liable to trial by court martial. The militia system was introduced into Scotland, and the Shropshire Regiment was the first of the English militia to serve in that country, while greater care was taken as regards home defence. France was not content with a mere defensive r?le; but attempted, though with extreme feebleness, to carry the war into her enemy’s territory. She had threatened to land at Ilfracombe and then in Pembrokeshire; and actually did so at Castlebar during the Irish insurrection of 1797–98, though with no result save that of having to surrender. Ireland in that year had required, as she has before and since, a large garrison, and seven regiments of cavalry and four of infantry had been necessary to put down the rising that was practically crushed at Vinegar Hill.
The pay of the rank and file remained much the same, 1s. a day for a private; but the stoppage for the food ration out of it amounted to 6?d. Still the army was everywhere growing in esteem and in popularity. Decorations and brevets were largely bestowed in 1795, after the return of157 the army from foreign service. Frequent reviews, at which George III. and the Prince of Wales attended, were held. The Duke of York was a popular Commander-in-Chief, and did much to improve the discipline of the army. He was so well liked by the men as to win the name of the “Soldier’s Friend,” a title which his founding the “Royal Military Asylum” for the education of soldiers’ children emphasised. Under his auspices, too, and helped by Sir David Dundas, the somewhat varied and irregular systems of drill were made uniform by the introduction of the first real drill-book, the Rules and Regulations for the Formations, Field Exercise, and Movements of His Majesty’s Forces, in 1792.
At that time Prussia was looked on as the great schoolmaster in the art-military, as France was later, and as Germany is now. The English army has been mainly a copyist of other people’s methods since the century began. If, after the Crimea or the Italian campaign of 1859, we adopted kepi-shaped hats, baggy “pegtop” trousers, and “booted overalls” for riding, so, when Germany became successful, we copied her “Blucher boots,” flat-topped forage-caps, infantry helmet, and rank distinctions!
In this case, too, the Prussian system was the basis of our drill instruction, and, with but slight modifications, so remained until 1870, when linear formations gave place to extended order.
The pace was increased from 75 to 80 per minute for the ordinary march or movement, but one of 120 (our present quick march) was permitted for wheeling and such minor man?uvres! The ranks were, when the book first appeared, three deep, as obtained in Germany, until the death of the late Emperor; but light infantry were allowed to form two deep before skirmishing. The battalion had ten companies, including the flank or “Light” and “Grenadier” companies. The absolute rigidity of the line was insisted on. To be able to form line from open column without either making gaps or causing crowding was the essence of good drill; and hence, the “march past,” if well executed, was really then a true test of the efficiency of158 a battalion. Other editions of this drill-book were published in 1809, 1815, and 1817, but in 1808, the three-rank formation was abolished for active service. It has been surmised that the necessity, with the small armies we despatched in these days, of this reduction in depth was made in order that a wider front might be offered to the frequently numerical superiority of our adversaries.33
In all our early campaigns, notoriously those of the Marlborough period, the British infantry had shone in the offensive. From the steady advance against Blenheim to the vigorous dash at Lincelles, it had shown how capable it was of attacking even against enormous odds. And yet from 1800 almost until now there has been an impression that our army is better on the defensive than in the attack. Even after Waterloo, Müffling writes: “I felt a strong conviction that if fortune so far favoured us in a battle that the English army could act on the defensive, while the Prussians acted simultaneously on the offensive, we should obtain a brilliant victory over Napoleon.” Unfounded as such an idea was, if the military history of the past be examined, there is no doubt it remained a tradition for long after the battle that proved once again the undaunted steadiness of the British line.
But the main change was in the extension of the principle of skirmishing which the American war had introduced. For a long time the “light companies” of battalions were designed to cover the front of the line during its advance and protect it while man?uvring. Built up for specific purpose into battalions, they formulated a drill of their own; which General Dundas in his Principles of Military Movements condemns. The rapid movements adopted met with little favour from an officer imbued with the stiff rigidity of Prussian drill-sergeants. “The importance of light infantry has more particularly tended to establish this practice. During the late war their service was conspicuous, and their gallantry and exertions have met with merited applause. But instead of being considered as an159 accessory to the battalion, they have become the principal feature of our army, and have almost put grenadiers out of fashion. The showy exercise, the airy dress, the independent modes which they have adopted, have caught the minds of young officers, and made them imagine that these ought to be general and exclusive.”
All this the drill-book of 1792 was designed to remedy, but though it produced uniformity, which was valuable, it failed to check the development of permanent light infantry battalions, such as composed the magnificent Light Brigade of the Peninsular days.
But when, in 1804, a Camp of Instruction was formed at Shorncliffe under General John Moore, a new era to some extent began. Moore did not favour the rigid drill of Dundas’s drill-book of 1792. He “d—d the Eighteen Man?uvres,” which were looked on as essential for a well-trained regiment to undergo. He introduced the system of light infantry drill which was the basis of all such work in our army and in our drill-books up to 1870; and the regiments he trained, the 4th, 52nd, 57th, 59th, and 95th, came nobly to the front when the time arrived. The general was knighted a year later, and the 52nd presented him with a diamond star, valued at 350 guineas, in token of their appreciation of his services; while as colonel of the first regiment named officially “Light Infantry,” he chose for one of the supporters of his coat of arms a light infantry soldier. The other was a Highlander, in remembrance of the help one of the 92nd had given him when wounded at Egmont-op-Zee.
Abroad, the formations were generally columnar, more or less, and the movements of these dense bodies was covered, as was the line elsewhere, by skirmishers from the light (flank) companies or light infantry battalions. The French also had foreshadowed two modern improvements in the use of balloons at Fleurus and the introduction of telegraphy by means of semaphores. In England, on the other hand, General Congreve had invented the war-rocket in 1805, and two years before, Sir Henry Shrapnell the160 “spherical case,” which afterwards took his name and which was first used with effect at Vimiera.
Fighting was tolerably general in Europe from 1793 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802. We had been fighting at sea with the French in Lord Howe’s victory of the 1st June and at the Nile, with the Spanish at Cape St. Vincent, and the Danes at Copenhagen. We had occupied Toulon at the request of French Royalists, and been compelled to abandon it, very largely through the action of a young officer of artillery named Bonaparte. There had been practically three campaigns in Flanders. The Duke of York, with the 14th, 37th, 53rd, etc., and a brigade of Guards, had been despatched to Holland, where the latter, but three battalions strong, routed an entrenched force of 5000 men, so that “The French, who had been accustomed to the cold, lifeless attacks of the Dutch, were amazed at the spirit and intrepidity of the British.” For this the brigade bears the name of Lincelles on their colours. The 14th also displayed the greatest coolness at Famars, young soldiers though they were; for, attacking with too much impetuosity, their colonel made them halt and re-form, and when thus steadied, took them into action again, the band playing them to victory with the French Revolutionary tune of ?a ira. Ever afterwards the tune is played after dinner at mess, and is the regimental march. The attack on Dunkirk, however, failed, and the duke returned home.
The next year he returned, and the campaign, embittered by an order of Republican France to give no quarter to wounded or prisoners, re-opened. In the brilliant little cavalry action at Villers en Couche the 15th Light Dragoons especially distinguished themselves, and for their gallantry, as well as for saving the life of the Emperor of Germany, eight of the officers were decorated with the cross of the order of Maria Theresa; while at Cateau the Royals fought so brilliantly that ￡500 was given to the regiment by the Duke of York’s orders.
The success was but temporary. The French concentrated overwhelming numbers, and the army fell back on161 Antwerp, and then to Holland, and suffered terribly in the dreadful winter of 1794. The stubborn resistance of the rearguard, composed of the 14th, 37th, and 53rd, supported on the flanks by the skilful and bold work of the 7th, 15th, and 16th cavalry regiments, prevented a disaster which the indifference or probable disaffection of the Dutch troops did not tend to lessen; and finally, the dispirited but unbeaten force, abandoning its stores and spiking the guns it could not take with it, reached Bremen. The horrors of that dreadful march, begun on the 6th January 1795, are only equalled by the retreat from Moscow of a French army later; but the discipline and endurance of the troops was beyond all praise. The contemporary records especially mention the Guards, the 27th, 33rd, 42nd, 44th, and 78th Regiments for their splendid discipline. The 28th, too, were notorious for their strong regimental feeling. “Hospitals were their aversion. Their home was the battalion, and they were never happy away from it.” Of all the regiments, the hardy Scotsmen of the 42nd fared best; and in this disastrous campaign, honourable in all its details save that of mere success, another young officer, Arthur Wellesley of the 33rd, first saw fire at Boxtel. Thus the end of the last century was to give the early war-training to two great antagonists—Napoleon at Toulon and Wellington at Boxtel. This alone would render the military history of 1794–95 interesting to all who read.
But the eighteenth century was to see yet another campaign in the Netherlandic area. It had not been, on the whole, peculiarly favourable to British arms, and the last campaign there was to be no exception to the rule.
For, notwithstanding that the duke had the active co-operation of such men as Ralph Abercromby and John Moore, not much came of it. The allied Russians and British made little headway against the French with the “Batavian Republic,” and a check at Alkmaar, followed by a victory at Egmont-op-Zee on the 2nd October 1799 where, according to the duke, “under Divine Providence,” the French were entirely defeated, and where the Royals,162 the 20th, 25th, 49th, 63rd, 79th, and 92nd did their duty, practically terminated the Helder campaign. For, after an armistice, the British troops left the Netherlands, never to fight seriously in that district until the final victory of 1815, when Wellington, who first saw battle there, was to terminate a series of wars for which the Low Countries had for more than a century been the “cockpit.”
The landing of the army in Walcheren ten years later may be disregarded. Except in the capture of Flushing, there was practically no fighting. The real enemy was fever, and out of the forty thousand men who had been disembarked, thirty-five thousand had been in hospital. The plan of operation was initially bad, the carrying out worse. Between Chatham on shore and Strachan at sea there was so little intelligent co-operation that each abused the other for what was clearly the fact, that
“The Earl of Chatham, with his sword drawn, Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan; Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em, Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.”
As Napoleon himself remarked at one time, “Before six weeks, of the fifteen thousand troops which are in the Isle of Walcheren not fifteen hundred will be left, the rest will be in hospital. The expedition has been undertaken under false expectations and planned in ignorance.”
This is the grim and gruesome truth. With the above exception, then, the theatre of war after the expedition to the Helder was, for many a year, as far as the British army was concerned, changed. The increasing importance of India was beginning to be felt. Napoleon, far seeing, had recognised this, and first put into French minds the value of Egypt. Though there was no canal, as there is now, it was still geographically the shortest road to the East. Then, as now, Egypt was a station on the line that united Great Britain with Eastern possessions that were but embryos of what they are now. The one striking point in the vast and ambitious intellect of the greatest163 soldier the world has seen, Alexander and C?sar not excepted, is his grasp of the political future of the nations of Europe. Intuitively he saw the worth of Egypt to the great dominant naval powers, England and France. His views were almost prophetic, his ideas magnificent.
Notwithstanding the disaster to the French of Aboukir Bay, he decided on contending in Africa for the possession of Asia. What a stupendous genius the man had! How astounding the rise of the young officer of artillery, who fought against his fellow-patriots of Corsica, who drove the British out of Toulon, and who was soon to be the dominant soul in all Europe! “Who could have believed that a simple sub-lieutenant of artillery, a stranger to France by name and by birth, was destined to govern that great Empire and to give the law in a manner to all the Continent, in defiance of reason, justice, the hereditary rights of the legitimate princes of the realm, and the combined efforts of so great a number of loyalists in the interior of the kingdom, and all the Great Powers of Europe.”
In 1799 he had gone to Egypt with a considerable force. It is strange to think that such a thing was possible with British fleets on the seas. But it was so, and it only shows how the element of surprise, how the want of telegraph and the absence of steam, rendered the occupation of Egypt possible at all. It could not be so now. But then, before the danger was really grasped, the French had practically conquered Egypt, and were in full occupation of both Cairo and Alexandria. And these practically meant the country, and the closing of our highway to the East.
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