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

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       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 word England would not simply have been offensive to many of those round mess table or in barrack-room, but it would have been a poor definition of the army’s origins. For, start to finish, it was a British army, its members drawn from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And for most of the period it had a substantial foreign element, whose soldiers were induced to serve King George by financial gain, political opinion, religious belief or simply their ruler’s whim.

      All major armies recruited foreign troops. Indeed, the notion of nationality itself was still evolving, and in the mid-eighteenth century Voltaire wrote that ‘the concept of a fatherland is variable and contradictory. Most of the inhabitants of a country like France do not know what it means.’ In 1751 the Prussian army of 133,000 men had only 50,000 native subjects of the king of Prussia, and just 80,000 in an army of 190,000 in 1786. The French army had German, Swiss, Italian, Irish and Scots regiments, and during the eighteenth century 12 per cent of its peacetime and 20 per cent of its wartime strength was recruited abroad. Young men were usually encouraged into foreign service by the prospect of economic betterment, but religion and family tradition also helped establish firm links between, say, Roman Catholic Irish minor gentry families and the French or Austrian armies into which so many of their sons were commissioned. Sometimes, though, enlistment followed a run of bad luck – the penniless Abbé Bastiani signed on into a Prussian regiment and rose to become one of Frederick the Great’s closest companions – and sometimes recruits were simply conned, like the young Swiss Ulrich Bräker who thought that he had gone to Berlin to become an officer’s servant but finished up ‘impressed into the notorious donner und blitzen regiment of Itzenplitz.’⁵⁰

      In addition to individual recruitment, where young men became officers or signed on as soldiers after making their own way abroad, it was not uncommon for the regiments of one state to be temporarily transferred to the service of another for a suitable fee. For the American War of Independence the British army contracted with the rulers of some German states for the services of their foreign contingents. The diarist Julius Friedrich Wasmus was a company surgeon in the Duke of Brunswick’s Lieb-Regiment, which served with the British in North America. In November 1779 Captain Peebles saw two German regiments on parade, ‘the Hessian Grenadiers, dressed up and powdered, [and] the Ansbachers the finest looking troops and tallest, I ever saw, and in high discipline.’⁵¹

      There was widespread agreement that France was Britain’s natural adversary. In 1759 Sir Thomas Cave of the Leicester Militia told the Marquis of Granby that ‘the spirit of the people to oppose the natural enemy of this kingdom is so great, that I had a roll of 50 volunteers offered me, every one a man of considerable property.’⁵² Sergeant Roger Lamb of the 23^rd Foot, who served in the American War and left a remarkably literate account of his experiences, when writing in 1809 described the French as ‘for many ages the professed and natural enemies of Britain.’⁵³ Indeed, some British politicians welcomed the French Revolution not simply because it represented the overthrow of despotism, but because it apparently did lasting damage to French military potential. William Windham, secretary at war in William Pitt’s government of 1783–1801, was happy to see France in ‘a situation which, more than at any other period, frees us from anxiety on her account.’⁵⁴ The courteous Lord Raglan, commander-in-chief in the Crimea, tended to refer to his Russian enemy as ‘the French’ because for the whole of his previous active service the French were the enemy.

      However, until Prussia established herself as the dominant (and thus most-imitated) military nation in Europe during the Seven Years’ War, French military fashion held sway. French military terminology was widely used (even in the nineteenth century engineers spoke knowingly СКАЧАТЬ