It is now needful to turn to the second and perhaps more important school of the British Army. As in the Low Countries we found English and Scots fighting side by side, but gave to the English, as their numerical preponderance demanded, the greater share of attention, so now in the German battlefields of the Thirty Years\' War we shall see them again ranked together, but must devote ourselves for the same reason to the actions of the Scots.
The North Britons seem to have found their way very quickly to the banners of Gustavus Adolphus, and to have fought with him in his earlier campaigns long before he had established himself as the champion of Protestantism. To mention but two memorable names, Sir John Hepburn and Sir Alexander Leslie had risen to high rank in his service many years before he crossed the Baltic for his marvellous campaigns in Germany. But to trace the history of the famous Scottish regiments aright, they must be briefly followed from their first departure from Scotland to take service under King Christian the Fourth of Denmark, who curiously enough forms the link that connects the two schools of Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus.
1626,
August 17.
It was in reliance on promises of subsidy from the English King Charles the First that Christian first levied an army and took the field for the Protestant cause. His plan was for a defensive campaign, but this was impossible unless his soldiers were regularly paid, which they would be, as he hoped, with English money.[174] Needless to say, Charles when the moment came was unable to fulfil his promise; Christian was driven to take the offensive and was completely defeated by Tilly at Lutter. The unhappy king appealed indignantly to Charles for help, but Charles could send nothing but four English regiments which had been raised for service in the Low Countries two years before, and were now, through the prevailing maladministration in every department of English affairs, weak, disorganised and useless. Their numbers were however supplemented by the press-gang, and a body of some five thousand men, unpaid and ill-found, ripe for disease and disorder, were shipped off to the Elbe.
A little earlier than the defeat at Lutter one of the many gentlemen-adventurers in Scotland, Sir Donald Mackay, had obtained leave from King Charles to raise and transport five thousand men for King Christian\'s ally, the famous free lance, Count Ernest Mansfeld. It does not appear that he succeeded in recruiting even half of that number, for heavy drafts had already been made upon the centre and south of Scotland for levies. Still some two thousand men were collected by fair means or foul, and even if some of them were taken from the Tolbooth at Edinburgh, it was fitting that in a corps so famous there should be representatives from the Heart of Midlothian. But it is certain that a goodly proportion were taken from the northern counties and in particular from the district of the Clan Mackay, and that these took the field in their national costume and so were the first organised body deserving the name of a kilted regiment. The officers, from their names and still more from their subsequent behaviour, seem to have been without exception gentlemen of birth and standing, worthy to represent their nation. Some of them probably had already experience of war; one at least, Robert Munro, the historian of the regiment, had served in the Scottish body-guard of the King of France, and had learned from sad experience the meaning of the word discipline.[144]
[175]
1627.
The regiment sailed in divisions from Cromarty and Aberdeen and arrived at Glückstadt on the Elbe in October 1626. The winter was spent in training the men, but not without riot and brawling. The officers were constantly quarrelling, and there was so little discipline among the men that a sergeant actually fell out of the ranks when at drill to cudgel a foreign officer who had maltreated one of his comrades. Meanwhile Count Mansfeld, who had originally hired the regiment, was dead, and in March 1627 Sir Donald Mackay offered its services to the King of Denmark. Christian accordingly reviewed it, and having first inspected the ranks on parade, "drums beating, colours flying, horses neighing," saw it march past and paid it a handsome compliment. The men were then drawn, after the fashion of the landsknechts, into a ring, where they took the oath and listened to a rehearsal of the articles of war; and so their services began. Half of them were despatched with the English regiments to Bremen, and the remainder were stationed at Lauenburg to guard the passage of the Elbe.
July.
After a vast deal of marching and counter-marching four companies, under Major Dunbar, were left at Boitzenburg, at the junction of the Boitze and the Elbe, while Mackay with the remaining seven was moved to Ruppin. Three days after Mackay\'s departure, Tilly\'s army, ten thousand strong, marched up to Boitzenburg and prepared to push forward into Holstein. Dunbar knowing his own weakness had strengthened his defences, but eight hundred men was a small garrison against an army. On the very first night he made a successful sortie; and on the next day the Imperialist army assaulted his works at all[176] points. The first attack was repulsed with loss of over five hundred men to the assailants. Reinforcements were brought up; the attack was renewed and again beaten off, and finally a third and furious onslaught was made on the little band of Scots. In the midst of the fighting the ammunition of the garrison failed and its fire ceased. The Imperialists, guessing the cause, made a general rush for the walls. The Scots met them at first with showers of sand torn from the ramparts, and presently falling in with pike and butt of musket fought the Imperialists hand to hand, and after a desperate struggle drove them out with the loss of another five hundred men. Tilly then drew off and crossed the Elbe higher up, and Dunbar by Christian\'s order marched proudly out of Boitzenburg. This was the first engagement of Mackay\'s regiment, a fitting prelude to work that was to come.[145]
October.
The headquarters of the regiment was presently moved from Ruppin to Oldenburg to hold the pass against Tilly\'s advance, and here they too came into action. They were ill supported by their foreign comrades, for the Danes gave way, the Germans of Christian\'s army took to their heels, and the brunt of the engagement fell upon half the regiment of Scots. After two hours of heavy fighting they were relieved by the other half, and so the two divisions, taking turn and turn, maintained the struggle against vastly superior numbers from seven in the morning till four in the afternoon, when the enemy at last drew off owing to the darkness. The spirit shown by the Scots was superb. Ensign David Ross received a bullet in the chest; he retired for a few minutes to get the wound dressed, and returned to the fight; nor did he afterwards miss an hour\'s duty on the plea that he was wounded. Hector Munro of Coull, being shot through the foot, refused[177] to retire till he had fired away all his ammunition, and before he could do so was shot in the other foot also. Yet another, Hugh Murray, being ordered to bring away his brother\'s corpse under a heavy fire, swore that he would first empty his brother\'s bandoliers against the enemy, and was shot in the eye, though not fatally, while fulfilling his oath. Yet these were young soldiers, of so little experience that they left their reserve of ammunition exposed, and suffered heavily from the explosion of a barrel of powder. They lost sixteen officers and four hundred men that day.
That night the Danish army retreated to Heiligenhaven, but some German Reiters that were attached to it were so unsteady that they speedily turned the retreat into a flight; and when the harbour was reached the cavalry crowded on to the mole to seize all the transport-vessels for themselves. Sir Donald Mackay, who was himself wounded, was not the man to suffer his regiment to be sacrificed; he calmly ordered his pikemen to advance, swept the whole of the Reiters into the sea, seized the nearest ship, brought others out of the roadstead and proceeded to the work of embarkation. The last boat\'s load shoved off surrounded by the enemy\'s horse, and the last of the Scots, a gallant boy named Murchison, though wounded in the head and shot through the arm, swam off to the boat under a heavy fire, only to die two days later of his injuries. The rest of the Danish army, thirty-five troops of horse and forty companies of foot, surrendered without a blow. Hence it is hardly surprising that, when next the Scots found themselves in quarters alongside Danish horse, there was a furious riot which cost the lives of seven or eight men before it could be suppressed. But in truth Mackay\'s regiment was so much weakened by its losses that both colonel and lieutenant-colonel returned perforce to Scotland to raise recruits.
1628.
I shall not follow the various small actions of the[178] earlier part of the campaign of 1628 in Holstein, though many of them were brilliant enough. It must suffice that Scotch and English fought constantly side by side not only against the enemy, but once riotously against the Danes themselves, whom they considered to be unduly favoured in the matter of rations. In May the Imperialists moved up in force to occupy Stralsund; and the burghers having appealed to Christian for assistance received from him the seven companies, now reduced to eight hundred men, of Mackay\'s regiment.
June 26.
On arrival their commanding officer at once selected the most dangerous post in the defences, as in honour bound, and for six weeks the regiment was harassed to death by exhausting duty. The men took their very meals at their posts, and Monro, who was now a major, mentions that he never once took off his clothes. They suffered heavily too from the enemy\'s fire, a single cannon shot strewing the walls with the brains of no fewer than fourteen men; but still they held out. At last Wallenstein came up in person, impatient at the delay, and vowed that he would take the town in three nights though it hung by a chain between heaven and earth. His first assault was hurled back by the Scots with the loss of a thousand men. But the Highlanders also had been severely punished; three officers and two hundred men had been killed outright, and seven more officers were wounded. On the following night the attack was renewed and again repulsed, but the garrison was now compelled to open a parley in order to gain time; and the negotiations were prolonged until the arrival of a second Scottish regiment under Lord Spynie enabled the defenders to renew their defiance.
1630.
February.
Shortly after the King of Sweden charged himself with the defence of Stralsund. Alexander Leslie, whom we shall meet again, was appointed to take the command, and Mackay\'s and Spynie\'s regiments after a final sortie were withdrawn to Copenhagen. Of Mackay\'s, five hundred had been killed outright in the siege, and a bare hundred only remained unwounded; in fact the[179] regiment required virtually to be reconstructed. The work of recruiting and reorganisation occupied the winter months, at the close of which the corps, now raised to ten companies and fifteen hundred men, was honourably discharged from the service of Denmark, and free to join itself, as it presently did, to Gustavus Adolphus.
Its first duty was to learn the new drill and discipline introduced by the King of Sweden; and as his system was destined to be accepted later by all the armies of Europe, no better place can be found than this, when it was just brought to perfection and first taught to British soldiers, to give some brief account of it.
The infantry of Gustavus Adolphus, as of all other civilised armies at that period, was made up of pikemen and musketeers, and beyond all doubt had originally been trained and organised on the models of the Spanish and the Dutch. Enough has already been said of these to enable the reader to follow the reforms introduced by the Swedish king. First as regards weapons: the old long pike was cut down from a length of fifteen or eighteen feet to the more modest dimension of eleven feet, and the old clumsy musket with its heavy rest was replaced by a lighter weapon which could be fired from the shoulder without further support. The defensive armour of the pikeman was also reduced to back, breast, and tassets; and thus both divisions of the infantry, carrying less weight than heretofore, were enabled to move more rapidly and to accomplish longer marches without fatigue. This was a first step towards the mobility which the great soldier designed to oppose to the old-fashioned forces of mass and weight.
Next as to the tactics of infantry: Gustavus\'s first improvement was to reduce the old formation from ten ranks to six; his second and more important was to withdraw the musketeers from their old station in the flanks of companies, and to mass pikes and shot into separate bodies. It is abundantly evident that he looked[180] upon the development of the fire of musketry as of the first importance in war, and to this end he sought to render the musketeers independent of the protection of the pikes. This idea led him to a curious revival of old methods, nothing less than a modification of the stakes which were seen in the hands of the English at Hastings and Agincourt, and which now took the name of hog\'s bristles or Swedish feathers. This, however, was a small matter compared to his improvement in the method of maintaining a continuous fire. Pescayra\'s system was one which, on the face of it, was not suited to young or unsteady troops. In theory it was a very simple matter that the ranks should fire and file off to the rear in succession, but in practice the temptation to men to get the firing done as quickly as possible and to seek shelter behind the ranks of their comrades was a great deal too strong. The retirement was apt to be executed with an unseemly haste which was demoralising to the whole company, and there was no certainty that the retiring ranks, instead of resuming their place in rear, would not disappear from the field altogether. Gustavus therefore made the ranks that had fired retire through[146] instead of outside their companies, where, through judicious posting of officers and non-commissioned officers, any disposition to hurry could be checked by the blow of a halberd across the shins or by such other expedients as the reader\'s imagination may suggest. In an advance, again, he made the rear ranks move up successively through the front ranks, and in a retreat caused the front ranks to retire through the rear.
This reform was as much moral as tactical; but the next made a great stride towards modern practice. Not content with reducing ten ranks to six Gustavus on occasions would double those six into three, and by making the front rank kneel enabled the fire of all[181] three to be delivered simultaneously. Here is seen the advantage of abolishing the old musket-rest, with which such a concentration of fire would have been impossible. Still following out his leading principle, he encouraged the use of cartridges to hasten the process of loading; and finally to perfect his work he introduced a new tactical unit, the peloton, called by Munro plotton and later naturalised among us as the platoon of musketeers, which consisted of forty-eight men, eight in rank and six in file, all of course carefully trained to the new tactics. Yet with all these changes the drill was of the simplest; if men could turn right, left, and about, and double their ranks and files, that was sufficient.
In the matter of pure organisation Gustavus again improved upon all existing systems. First he made the companies of uniform strength, one hundred and twenty-six men, distributed into twenty-one rots or files, and six corporalships. A corporalship of pikes consisted of three files, and of musketeers of four files;[147] and to every file was appointed a rottmeister[148] or leader, who stood in the front, and an unter-rottmeister or sub-leader, who stood in the rear rank. Both of these received higher pay than the private soldier. Two sergeants, four under-sergeants and a quartermaster-sergeant completed the strength of non-commissioned officers, while three pipers and as many drums made music for all. Moreover each company carried a kind of reserve with it in the shape of eighteen supernumerary men who bore the name of passe-volans, the old slang term for fictitious soldiers since the days of Hawkwood, and; were allowed to the captain as free men, unmustered. The officers of course were as usual captain, lieutenant, and ensign.
[182]
Eight such companies constituted a regiment, which was thus one thousand and eight men strong, with a colonel, lieute............