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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ line, without embarrassing gaps or confusing overlaps, was the result. At the 1785 Silesian manoeuvres a Prussian army of 23,000 men approached in column and, on a single cannon-shot, wheeled in seconds into a line two and a quarter miles long. Wheeling required the men on the inner flank to mark time (marching on the spot) while those on the outer flank stepped out briskly. An eighteenth century German writer tells how:

      Whether on horseback or on foot, a regular wheel is just about the most difficult of all movements to accomplish. When a wheel is well done, you have the impression that the alignment has been regulated with a ruler, that one flank is tied to a stake, and that the other is describing the arc of a circle. You can employ these images if you wish to convey to the soldiers a clear idea of what goes on in a wheel.²⁵

      If repetitious drill and rigid discipline were important in bringing the soldier into battle, they were crucial once fighting commenced. Bad weapon-handling constantly caused accidents. When front rank men knelt to fire and then sprang up to load they were often shot by careless rear-rank men: the Napoleonic Marshal Gouvion St-Cyr reckoned that one-quarter of French infantry casualties in his career were caused this way. Soldiers were terribly burned when cartridge-boxes blew up; eyes were poked out with bayonets as ungainly soldiers bungled drill movements, and ramrods were regularly fired off by men who had forgotten to remove them from the barrel of their musket, causing injuries and broken windows during practice, and difficulty in battle, where a spare ramrod might not be at hand.

      Individual nervousness could easily swell to provoke a wider panic, opening a gap that a watchful enemy might exploit. This sort of thing was to the drillmaster what heresy was to the devout: something requiring urgent and extreme correction. A French writer recommended his readers: ‘Do not hesitate to smash in the skull of any soldiers who grumble, or who give vent to cries like “We are cut off”…’²⁶ In 1759 Major General James Wolfe famously declared that he would rather have written Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ than take Quebec, and he was indeed to be killed capturing it. But there was little echo of the Enlightenment in his regimental orders when he commanded the 20th Foot at Canterbury in 1755 and warned:

      A soldier who quits his rank, or offers to flag, is instantly to be put to death by the officer who commands that platoon, or the officer or sergeant in rear of that platoon; a soldier does not deserve to live who won’t fight for his king and country.²⁷

      The weapon carried by the majority of combatants not only dictated the shape of combat: it helped determine the composition of armies and their conduct off the battlefield as well as on it. Most armies in the age of the flintlock were composed of rank and file drawn from society’s lower orders and officered (though the generalisation is broad) by gentlemen. They emphasised uniformity and conformity, and tended to look upon initiative as a potentially dangerous aberration. Their discipline was rigid. In most European armies a mistake in drill would bring immediate corporal punishment: a Frenchman living in Berlin was shocked to see a fifteen year old junker thrash an old soldier for a trivial mistake. It was not only tender-hearted civilians who felt uncomfortable 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.СКАЧАТЬ