THE SOLDIERS
During Napoleon’s first incarnation as emperor, his army was multinational. The backbone was of course French, but there were regiments of Dutch, of Belgians, of Hungarians, of Italians, of Poles and of Germans of the Confederation of the Rhine. Now those contingents were all serving the Allies, and with a few exceptions – Poles, a few Hungarians and the odd German – the army was entirely French. Rather more than half the soldiers were veterans, either those serving in the reduced army of the Bourbon restoration or discharged veterans who had served Napoleon before his first abdication and had rejoined as soon as they could – there were around 75,000 of the latter. Others were prisoners of war released from Dartmoor, from hulks in the Thames, and from Spain or Russia. Around 200,000 former prisoners of war had returned after April 1814, although many of them were medically unfit to serve.
Unusually for a French army, less than half the Army of the North, as the French army for the forthcoming campaign was titled, were conscripts. The pre-1789 Bourbon army was made up of professionals, many of whom were not French at all but Swiss, who signed up for between eight and twenty years. Conscription, the ‘blood tax’, was introduced by the Revolution. It was always unpopular and evasion was rife. Although violent resistance, with the beating up of gendarmes sent to enforce it, had declined, deserters and evaders could usually count on being given food and shelter, particularly in rural areas. Technically every male aged between eighteen and forty had to register and those unmarried between twenty and twenty-five years of age (extended to thirty after the return from Elba) were eligible to be called up, but as not all were needed, the requisite number was drawn by lot in each area. As First Consul and then emperor up to 1814, Napoleon, or rather his administration, called up around 2.5 million Frenchmen, of whom only around 1.3 million actually served. Not all the absentees were ‘no shows’: some failed the rudimentary medical examination (or paid doctors to fail them), some availed themselves of forgers who sold discharge certificates, some married after registration, and some did not meet the height requirement. A man drawn by lot could avoid service by paying a fine, which varied from 1,800 to 4,000 francs, or £76 to £160 at the exchange rate of the time, and then finding and paying another to take his place. Although both revolutionaries and Napoleon saw conscription as spreading the burden of war evenly across the nation, in fact only the poor were actually conscripted. On his return from Elba, Napoleon promised not to reintroduce conscription, but when his peace overtures came to naught, he had little option, describing it as much detested but ensuring the safety of the state. The class of 1815, those born in 1797, could produce 150,000 men if all were embodied. In practice, in the entire Napoleonic period, around one in fifteen of eligible rural inhabitants was actually embodied, and around one in seven in urban areas, where evasion was more difficult. In peacetime – effectively only the short-lived Peace of Amiens from March 1802 to May 1803 – the period of conscription varied from one year to five years, whereas in wartime it was indefinite – effectively until the end of hostilities.
While the old soldiers were reasonably well equipped, the conscripts called up in April and May of 1815 lacked everything except what they stood up in when they joined their regiments. The factories of France performed magnificently to produce uniforms, equipment and weapons. In Paris alone, 1,250 uniforms and 1.5 million cartridges were being turned out every week. By the time the campaign began, most men had at least a pair of boots, a blue jacket and a shako. While regiments of the line were established for depot battalions to train the new recruits, there was little time to do so and most regiments took their recruits straight into existing companies of the line with an old soldier detailed to train them. Inevitably, the veterans had little time for the newcomers: bullying was rife, many were cheated out of the few sous they had when they arrived, many were the innocent peasants sent to the quartermasters’ stores with instructions to collect a long stand, and most stood open-mouthed at the veterans’ tales of glory and derring-do in campaigns waged and battles fought, no doubt suitably embellished. It was the same in all armies – and still is in some.
As the pre-revolutionary army had been relatively small, there were few purpose-built barracks, and the Directorate had made use of churches, convents and monasteries from which the rightful inhabitants had been evicted. Recruits found themselves herded into these insanitary, cramped accommodations with tiny windows and expected to share a palliasse on the stone-flagged floor with at least one other; and as the original furniture had been looted or used as firewood, there was nothing to sit on but piles of straw – not that recruits got much time for sitting. A more healthy option was a tented camp, and many of the units in and around Paris were so accommodated, as were those men of the recently expanded National Guard who had been absorbed into the army. But life in barracks, whether in convents or tented, was not healthy and most soldiers were glad when they were ordered to march away to the front. Meanwhile, training for the post-Elba recruits could only be rudimentary: route marches to harden the feet and accustom the back to carrying the weight of one’s kit in white leather equipment, some basic instruction in battlefield drill movements and firing practice with the musket. As powder and shot was expensive, men were issued with wooden pegs in place of flints, so they could practise loading and firing without actually doing so.
The normal establishment for the line infantry company and cavalry squadron was five sergeants, ten corporals, 104 privates and two drummers or buglers. The NCOs were always regulars and usually had considerable service; indeed, in many cases promotion, although theoretically on merit alone, was by seniority. In the royalist army NCOs’ rank was denoted by what sort of aiguillette the man wore, or the colour of lace in his epaulette, but this was confusing in a citizen army and a much simpler and more obvious system was introduced where corporals wore a red chevron, point uppermost, above the cuff, sergeants a gold one and sergeant majors two gold ones, a system soon copied in principle by the British. On the face of it, the soldiers’ pay was reasonably good, provided it actually appeared. A regular sergeant in the infantry received 1.69 francs per day, or £24.67 per annum, while a regular private’s yearly emoluments amounted to £9.05. This compares with a captain’s annual salary of £111.80 – rather less than a British captain’s £191.62 – and a whopping £1,600 for a marshal.* Conscripts got considerably less.
Discipline in the French army of Napoleon was less indiscriminate than it had been in the early revolutionary armies. Men could be executed by firing squad, but this seems to have been inflicted on officers suspected of disloyalty rather than on soldiers for purely military offences. Some of the punishments of the old Bourbon army lingered on, however. The Crapaudine required an offender to have his leg strapped up tight to his body and to be left in the lying position for a prescribed period, while Barre involved tying the man to a gun carriage in the open and denied food and water; or a man could be sentenced to Silo, or confinement in unpleasant conditions, which might be no more than a hole hastily dug in the ground. While in some aspects of military discipline French soldiers, representing as they did a wider spectrum of society than did their British equivalents, were better behaved, the incidence of rape was considerably higher in the French service. This may be because the British soldier on the loose tended to search for and consume large quantities of alcohol first, before his thoughts turned to women, while French ambitions were the other way round.
The elite of the Napoleonic army was the Imperial Guard. Originally formed to protect the Directorate, it metamorphosed from Consular to Imperial, and despite being downgraded and reduced in size by the restored monarchy, it had managed to retain its traditions and élan – albeit that much of it was not on display, at least not while royalists were looking. Once Napoleon returned, the Guard was restored in status, if not quite to its original size, which had been almost one third of the army in 1813/14. Qualifications for entry to the Guard were strict. For the Old Guard men must have had ten years’ service, including operational service, and be graded ‘excellent’. For the cream of the cream, the 1st and 2nd Regiments of Grenadiers of the Old Guard infantry and 1st and 2nd Regiments of Horse Grenadiers, men had to be at least six feet in height (although in the latter stages this requirement was often relaxed by a couple of inches or so, particularly for the cavalry when heavy horses were hard to come by). Mutton-chop whiskers and moustaches were compulsory, as was a pigtail tied by a black ribbon. Both horse and foot wore tall bearskin caps with a metal plate bearing the eagle and Napoleonic insignia, and they were the only part of the French army to retain the greasing and powdering of the hair. The Guard was almost an independent army of its own, with integral infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineers, and was divided into Old, Middle and Young depending on length of service; the Young Guard provided the light infantry battalions, although it is unclear whether the term ‘Middle Guard’ was an official nomenclature or simply the colloquial term for the third and fourth regiments. Prior to Napoleon’s first abdication, the Guard also had a training function, with regiments of the line rotating through the Guard, then returning to the line with standards improved, but there was not time to reintroduce this custom before Waterloo.
Private soldiers in the Guards were paid more than sergeants in the rest of the army – 912.50 francs, or £36.50 a year – and regimental commanders of the Old Guard were brigadiers rather than colonels. They had a uniform of higher quality, and considerably greater cost, than anyone else’s and even had a special musket with highly polished bands and butt plates. Not only was the pay of the Guard considerably better than for units of the line, but also rations, barracks and all sorts of allowances and privileges were far superior to anyone else’s, which not unnaturally gave rise to considerable resentment and jealousy. To the rest of the army the men of the Guard were ‘the Immortals’, who did not die because they did not fight. This was somewhat unfair as the Guard was always kept back as a reserve, to pluck victory, or at least a draw, from impending defeat, or to administer the final breakthrough if the battle seemed to be about to go either way. When they did fight, they fought with great bravery and an almost fanatical tenacity, with a personal loyalty to Napoleon rather than to the state. For the forthcoming campaign, the Guard mustered twenty-two battalions of infantry, four regiments of cavalry and ninety-six guns, twelve-pounders and eight-pounders, and it would be the Guard who were the last to lay down their arms at Waterloo.
The British army has never found it easy to recruit and, although there was no conscription for the regular army, that is not to say that there were not other means of compulsion – many of them economic. The authorities had to rely on persuasion, and occasionally coercion, to attract sufficient men to fill the number of units needed to fight the war. Britain had an empire, which needed garrisons spread all over the world, so the army was always, on paper at least, larger than that required solely to fight the French. Recruiting was not, as it is now, a central responsibility, but was devolved to regiments, which adopted a number of ways of enticing men to join. The simplest and most common method was to send recruiting parties around the towns and villages to appeal to patriotism, greed, escapism, love of adventure or simple economics in order to find the number of men needed. Each party would normally consist of a sergeant, a drummer and two or three old soldiers, and there was an officer in overall command for the county.
One of the most common myths about the British army of the period is that its ranks were filled by criminals, ne’er-do-wells, simpletons and others from the lowest strata of society, lured into the service when drunk or deceived into accepting the king’s shilling by subterfuge. While there were undoubtedly some of those types in each regiment, there were also men who were motivated by the attractions of a military life or by the prospect of adventure or who wanted to see the world. Recruiting parties did frequent the ale houses because that was the social centre of the life of those whom they hoped to enlist, and there were certainly cases of men being plied with drink to persuade them to join. The qualifications were relatively few: the man must not already be in the Army of the Reserve (Militia, Volunteers, Fencibles, Yeomanry), be no older than thirty-five for the line infantry and cavalry, or twenty-five for the Guards and the artillery, and at least 5 feet 4 inches tall (5 feet 8 inches for the Guards and artillery). Within twenty-four hours of a man agreeing to enlist, he had to be taken before a magistrate and declare that he wished to do so of his own free will, that the decision was taken when sober and that he had not been subject to any threats. This was one of the reforms put in place by the Duke of York to stamp out old practices such as slipping a coin into a man’s beer tankard so that he had in law ‘taken the shilling’ and had therefore enlisted, or getting a man so drunk that the recruiting sergeant could claim he had agreed to enlist despite the man having no recollection of it.
Once a man had confirmed that he really did want to be a soldier, he had to be passed by the doctor. The medical requirements were lax in the extreme. While the potential recruit was supposed to be examined for all sorts of ailments, including ophthalmia, ruptures, rheumatics and ‘damaged limbs’, many of the conditions that would bar a man from joining now – poor eyesight, deafness, flat feet, lack of intelligence, wetting the bed, etc., etc. – were passed over, with the only medical requirement stringently applied being that the man had to have four front teeth, two on the top and two on the bottom. This was because the loading drill for the musket required the ripping open of the cartridge with the teeth; if a man did not have any front teeth, he could not load a musket and was therefore useless. In an age when dental hygiene was hardly thought of and the cure for toothache was to pull out the offending tooth, young men with few or no teeth were common. Even with medical examinations that were extremely lax, up to 30 per cent of volunteers were rejected for medical reasons.14 The population of the British Isles in the early years of the nineteenth century was inherently unhealthy.
Once past the magistrate and the doctor, a man could enlist for either seven years or twenty-one, the seven-year option being a wartime-only concession. It is an indication of the insecurity of civilian life felt by potential recruits of the time that between 1811 and the end of the war only 10 per cent signed for the shorter period. The recruit was entitled to a bounty of ten guineas (£10.50) if he signed for seven years and fourteen guineas (£14.70) if he signed for twenty-one. Two guineas was paid once the man signed, or made his mark, the rest when he arrived at the training depot or his regiment. Recruiters had to keep an eye out for ‘bounty jumpers’ – men who took the two guineas and then disappeared, only to perform the same trick with another recruiting party. Those who were caught were tried by court martial (as they had signed, they were subject to military law) and those who had pushed their luck too many times risked being executed by firing squad.15
Many of the recruits – perhaps most – did come from the lower orders of society but that did not make them bad soldiers, and nor does it now. Men from an environment with no structure welcome boundaries; they like to know where the line is drawn, what they are permitted to do and what is forbidden. Men rejected by society, men who could not find a job in civilian life, men desperately trying to eke out an existence at a time of economic retrenchment – all found that the army became their family: if nobody else wanted them, at least the army did. Men performed their duties – and in the final analysis stood and died in the ranks – not for king and country, for king and country had done nothing for them, but for the regiment, for their mates, for their own officers whom, by this stage in the war, they knew and trusted, and out of sheer professional pride.
That said, there were undoubtedly a proportion of real bad hats, men who were incorrigible and who could only be kept under some sort of control by brutal discipline and frequent application of the lash. John Colborne, who served throughout the Peninsular War and at Waterloo in command of the 52nd Light Infantry, thought that there were around fifty men in every battalion who were hardened criminals; some of these would have been given the choice by the magistrates of joining the army or going to jail, others were drunkards, thieves, smugglers and forgers, similarly incapable of reform. These, he said, were the men who initiated every act of vandalism, who instigated the looting, who bullied and exploited the local peasantry, and whose example led otherwise well-behaved soldiers into crime.16 Sometimes ex-criminals could be an asset: poachers were much in demand to snare rabbits and catch birds when rations were short; and when Wellington discovered that on advancing into France in 1814 the French would not accept Spanish silver dollars, he was able to find forty ‘coiners’ (forgers of the currency, a capital offence) from the ranks who could melt down Spanish coins and produce French silver five-franc pieces (so accurately did they do their job that even today an expert cannot tell their products from the genuine article). But most military crime had – and still has – its origin in the over-consumption of alcohol.
One of the problems in the early days of the war with France was that the regular army was in direct competition for recruits with the Army of Reserve and its various types of unit – the Militia, the Fencibles, the Volunteers and the Yeomanry. By 1815 there were two types of militia. The Regular Militia, established by various Militia Acts of 1802, 1803 and 1808, was a conscript force composed of eligible males (aged eighteen to thirty and, theoretically at least, Protestant) selected by ballot. On payment of a fine ranging from £20 to £30, a man could find a substitute to do his service for him. The Regular Militia were full-time, could serve only in the United Kingdom and were intended to be a home defence force to allow regular troops to be sent abroad. Men served for five years, after which they were exempt until their turn came round again. The finding of substitutes was widespread: of the 26,085 men embodied in 1810, only 3,129 were those who had been drawn at the ballot; all the rest were substitutes.17 The Local Militia, originally founded in 1808 when there was an (unrealistic) fear of invasion, was a voluntary part-time force restricted to service within its own county; its members were required to carry out twenty-eight days’ military training a year. The Fencibles were part of the regular army, composed of full-time volunteers, but their regiments were required to serve only within the United Kingdom. The Volunteers were exactly that: a part-time force established in 1808 whose members were exempt from conscription into the Regular Militia. Although increasingly absorbed into the Local Militia, the Volunteers lingered on long after Waterloo and eventually became the Territorial Force, the Territorial Army and, from 2013, the Army Reserve. The Yeomanry were part-time local cavalry, first raised during the invasion scare of the 1790s. Some of its regiments found their own horses, and it was generally officered by the landed gentry of the area. It was frequently used to restore law and order in an age when there was no properly organized police force.
When the militia was originally established, its members were forbidden to enlist into the regular army, but this rule was rescinded in 1805 and from then on the militia was one of the best sources of recruits; indeed, by Waterloo almost 50 per cent of private soldiers were ex-militiamen. A militia soldier could not join as a regular until he had served one year in the militia, and the great advantage for the regular army was that they not only got a better type of recruit but he had already received military training. In many cases a militia regiment would be paraded and representatives of various regular regiments who sought recruits would extol the advantages of their various corps and hope to persuade the listeners to join – as many of them did, although more often than not they joined not their supposedly local regiment but another, perhaps on the ‘grass is greener’ principle. One of the attractions of transferring from the militia to the regular army was the bounty, which was larger than that for recruits who had no military training and varied from £16 to £40 depending on the state of army manning at the time.
Another, albeit much less satisfactory, method of obtaining recruits was by privatizing the process to civilian contractors, who for a fee would provide the numbers needed. Known as ‘crimpers’, many of the persons who got the contract by submitting the lowest tenders were of very dubious natures and on the borders of criminality. It was in their interests to obtain as many men as possible in the shortest time at the lowest cost, and this included bribing doctors and magistrates to pass men who were totally unsuitable for military service. The men were often of very poor quality, and crimpers were not above kidnapping vagrants and orphans and keeping them under lock and key before persuading or forcing them to take the shilling and then cheating them out of much of their bounty. Once enlistment from the militia was authorized, however, the responsibility for finding recruits was much less likely to be contracted out to crimpers, and by 1815 they had virtually disappeared.
Although most regiments had in theory a local affiliation to a particular county, this had little effect on its composition. Regiments recruited where they could and a majority of recruits came from the disadvantaged parts of the kingdom where there were few alternatives as an escape from poverty. There were very large numbers of Irish soldiers, and not only in Irish regiments. When Thomas Graham, assisted by Rowland Hill, raised the 90th Perthshire Regiment of Foot, many of its soldiers did indeed come from Perthshire, but in 1796, of a total strength of 746 Other Ranks, 165 were English and ninety-five Irish.18 At Waterloo in the 71st Highlanders eighty-three men were English and fifty-six Irish.19 Looking at the muster rolls of the regiments that embarked for the Waterloo campaign, a very large number of the men have Irish names. Some may, of course, have been of families long resident in Liverpool or in other colonies of Irish émigrés, and some may have enlisted under false names, but from contemporary accounts it does seem that at least 20 per cent and perhaps considerably more of the soldiers of the British army at this time were Irish, and Catholic. (The Protestants of the North do not appear to have enlisted as readily as their economically less favoured southern countrymen.) Although it was an offence for a soldier to attend a Catholic church service in England (but not in Ireland), Wellington had always allowed his men to attend when abroad, provided, he said, that they were not there ‘merely to gawk’. There can be little doubt that it was the religious make-up of his army that persuaded the Protestant Anglo-Irish Wellington to support Catholic emancipation and to force it through against the wishes of the king and much of the nobility when prime minister in 1829.
The other group over-represented in the ranks of the army were the Scots, and while many were indeed soldiers of economic necessity, they tended to be better behaved and more amenable to discipline than the Irish, who had a distressing tendency to get drunk and indulge in mindless violence.* Scottish society was less mobile than that in England and many Scottish regiments were still officered by local men, whom the soldiers knew. It was said that, if a Scottish soldier misbehaved, the worst punishment that could be inflicted was to have his name posted on the door of the kirk back home.
The army at the time was not, therefore, in any sense representative of the nation, in the way that Napoleon’s army was, although it was composed of a wide spectrum of backgrounds. Apart from the criminal element, there were apprentices running away from a hard master, boys fleeing over-strict parents, farmhands bored behind the plough, swains crossed in love and those escaping a forced marriage, shop assistants, shepherds, weavers, the urban unemployed and, in at least one case, a failed actor. There were even a few gentlemen rankers: men of education and breeding who had fallen on hard times, usually through gambling or drink or both, and who enlisted as the only alternative to starvation or to escape their creditors. Only a very small number made good, but they could be useful as writers of letters for their illiterate comrades, or as company clerks (one per company) – although few were employed as such owing to the temptation to embezzle the company funds, keeping the accounts of which was the responsibility of the clerk.
Once a recruit had been formally attested, he was marched to his regimental depot, or if he was an ex-militiaman, direct to his regiment if it was in the United Kingdom or to a holding unit to await drafting if it was overseas. The standard of training in depots varied widely. In some it was very good, staffed by officers and NCOs who knew their business; in others it was at best rudimentary and at worst brutal and uncaring and staffed by rejects, invalids and those who wished to avoid active service. The recruit had to learn military discipline, to obey orders without question, to perform tactical movements, to maintain his equipment, to march carrying around forty pounds’ weight in addition to his weapon and ammunition,* and to handle his weapon. Unlike European armies, the British paid serious attention to musketry, with regular range practice both as individuals and in platoon firing.
A man who proved himself capable, loyal and professionally competent could be promoted to NCO rank. There was one sergeant major in a battalion. Equivalent to the regimental sergeant major (RSM) of today, he was the most senior NCO in the battalion,* and the commanding officer’s right-hand man in all matters relating to welfare and discipline and promotion of Other Ranks. The establishment of a company included one colour sergeant, three sergeants and three corporals. The rank of colour sergeant was instituted in 1813, and he was the equivalent of today’s company sergeant major and company quartermaster sergeant rolled into one. Although colour sergeants supposedly acted as escorts to the colours in battle, this task was more usually delegated to sergeants who had annoyed the sergeant major, as it was one of the more dangerous positions to hold in action. The British had copied the French method of indicating rank by chevrons, but in the British case with the point downwards. The sergeant major wore four chevrons on his upper arm; the colour sergeant a single chevron surmounted by crossed swords, the union flag and the royal crown; the sergeant three chevrons; and the corporal two. The rank of lance corporal had not yet been introduced, although many regiments recognized a need for a transitional stage between private and NCO and had appointed what were known as ‘chosen men’, who acted and were paid as senior privates but would become corporals when a vacancy arose.
The pay of a soldier varied depending upon what arm of the service he joined. The cavalry were paid more than the infantry and the Guards more than the line. Annual rates of pay for the infantry of the line – the bulk of the army – at the time of Waterloo were:
£54.75 |
|
Colour sergeant |
£42.55 |
Sergeant |
£32.92 |
Corporal |
£23.94 to £26.93 depending on length of service |
Drummer |
£20.54 |
Private |
£17.95 to £20.95 depending on service |
Soldiers in the Guards got an extra old penny per day (£0.41, or £1.49 per year) and corporals and privates in the cavalry were paid around double that of the line infantry.
To put those pay rates into perspective, in 1815 a shipwright in Plymouth might earn £86 a year, a mason in London £82 (but in Glasgow only £51), a skilled carpenter £45.50, a cotton weaver in Belfast £35 (but a linen weaver in England £19.50), a fully trained merchant seaman £33 and an unmarried farmhand £15.33.20 These figures do not, however, tell the whole story, for they assume that the man was employed for the entire year. In fact the wages of carpenters and masons were expressed as daily rates, so from the salary given Sundays and any days not worked must be deducted. Similarly some occupations – farmhand and sailor, for example – were provided with free board and lodging, and agricultural workers were normally paid a bonus over the harvest. Nevertheless, after deductions for his food (£2.33 per year) and ‘necessaries’ – those items of clothing and equipment not provided free by the service (£2.93 per year) – and one shilling (£0.05) per year towards the upkeep of Chelsea Hospital, a private soldier, who was paid for Sundays and was accommodated, was not badly off compared to his peers in civilian life. And unlike his peers, he could qualify for a pension of £7.50 a year after fourteen years’ service, and, depending on rank, anything between £36.50 for a sergeant major to £18.25 for a private after twenty-one years. Men invalided out of the service through wounds before reaching the point at which a pension was payable got between £3.72 and £11.20 a year depending upon the degree of disablement.21
Discipline in the army was regulated by the Mutiny Act of 1803, which gave a legal basis for the various Articles of War that were to be applied in the United Kingdom, and not just overseas, as had been the case hitherto. On the face of it, the offences listed and the possible punishments were draconian: after a trial by court martial, a wide variety of offences ranging from mutiny to desertion, from plundering to striking a superior, from disobeying orders to aiding the enemy, could attract the death penalty, although some only if committed on active service. This would be inflicted either by firing squad or by hanging. The one organization that could sentence a man to death and carry it out on the spot was the provost, the ancestors of the military police, if they caught a man in the act of committing a capital offence. In practice it was rare to inflict the supreme penalty. Wellington did not execute deserters, unless they took service with the enemy, nor did the provost often hang plunderers on the spot, however much Wellington would fulminate against looting (on the grounds that it would alienate the local population and turn them against the British). In the Peninsula one man was executed for buggery, and as this is an activity that requires two participants, we can assume that the other was a civilian and thus not subject to British military law.
The form of an execution was prescribed in great detail. The units of the man’s brigade were formed up in hollow square, and there was a procession of a fatigue party carrying the man’s coffin, followed by the prisoner escorted by men of his own regiment, then a chaplain, then the firing party of (usually) twelve soldiers of the man’s regiment commanded by a sergeant, with the provost marshal bringing up the rear. The whole entourage paraded along the line of assembled troops while the band played the Dead March from Handel’s oratorio Saul. The prisoner was then placed on the open side of the square, his hands tied behind his back, blindfolded and ordered to kneel. Orders to the firing squad, positioned ten paces away, were normally given by hand signals, and should the condemned not be killed instantly, he would be finished off by the provost marshal with a pistol. The body was then placed in the coffin and the whole parade slow-marched past the body, with recruits ordered to pass as close as possible to it – presumably as a warning about their future conduct.22
While soldiers could be imprisoned, this was rare – a man in jail escaped duty and was out of danger, which may have been what motivated him to sin in the first place – and the most common punishment was flogging. Men could be sentenced to receive up to 200 lashes by a general court martial, 150 by a district court martial and 100 by a regimental court. Again, the man’s battalion was paraded and the miscreant tied to a ‘triangle’, originally made of sergeants’ halberds, but as by 1815 many sergeants no longer carried halberds, it was often purpose-made of wood. The sentence was carried out by drummers using a ‘cat of nine tails’, a whip with a short wooden handle and nine knotted cords each sixteen inches long, and a medical officer was in attendance. The punishment was usually inflicted on the man’s back, but in the case of a man who had recently been flogged and whose back was in no state to take any more, it might be on the buttocks. The strokes were counted out loud by the drum major, and after every twenty-five lashes the drummer was changed. In some regiments the man flogged was required to pay the cost of the cat used to lash him, and in the case of a really nasty recipient drum majors would alternate right- and left-handed drummers to administer the punishment more thoroughly.
British infantry soldiers wore scarlet tunics and light-grey trousers. In practice, with contracts for uniforms let to contractors who submitted the lowest tenders, the quality varied enormously, and mostly it was bad. After a few weeks’ campaigning the scarlet tunic was more of a rusty brick-red, and the trousers bore the stains of the scarlet dye that had begun to run in the first shower of rain. Boots were not issued as right or left boots but as boots, and the man made his own lace holes with a nail or an awl if he could not persuade a cobbler to do it for him.*
Worst of all was the web equipment. This was a mass of straps and buckles that held the man’s cartridge pouch, bayonet frog, water bottle, bread bag and knapsack. It was made of white buff and had to be kept white by applications of pipe clay; it looked very smart on parade, but with its straps and cross-belts pulled tight it was hugely uncomfortable and restrictive in movement, unless worn loose, which in most units after years of war it was, at least when not on parade. The standard issue Trotter pack, called after its inventor, was made of lacquered canvas stiffened with leather. Although Mr Trotter, based in Soho, was a supplier to the army (and was hauled before various parliamentary committees on several occasions and accused of corruption in regard to his methods and products), it was up to the colonel of the regiment to select a supplier, although all patterns were roughly the same as Trotter’s. All could be polished and made to look very smart indeed, but depending on the supplier ranged from merely uncomfortable to agonizing to wear, and many old soldiers suffered from ‘Trotter’s Chest’, a respiratory ailment caused by long years of the chest being restricted by the straps of the pack. Old soldiers were also easily identified by tiny black pockmark-like specks on the right cheek, caused by the ignition of the powder in the pan when firing the musket.
Also at Waterloo as part of the British army was the King’s German Legion. When George I ascended the British throne in 1714 as the first of the Hanoverian dynasty and the nearest male Protestant relation to Queen Anne, who died with no surviving children, he retained the electorate of Hanover. Hanoverian troops served under British command at Gibraltar and at one stage in India. In 1803 France invaded Hanover and absorbed that state into the kingdom of Westphalia, to be ruled over by Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme. Napoleon hoped and expected that the Hanoverian army would enlist in the Légion Hanovrienne but was disappointed, as apart from a few, the majority opted to continue the war from England and were removed by the Royal Navy. Until it was decided what to do with them, it was first proposed to billet them on the Isle of Wight, as English law forbade the stationing of foreign troops on the mainland of the United Kingdom. When it was argued that, foreign though they might be, they were subjects of the same king, they were first stationed in Bexhill, in Sussex, then Lymington, in Hampshire, and then in various towns on the south coast. They formed the King’s German Legion, some of the British army’s best troops, and served throughout the Peninsular War. As time went on, the supply of Hanoverian recruits dried up and eventually any German was allowed to join, but standards were not allowed to slip. Commanded by their own officers and equipped, dressed and paid exactly as British troops, they were in the process of being converted back to the Hanoverian army when Napoleon returned from exile, and at Waterloo they provided two light and eight line battalions of infantry, four regiments of cavalry and eighteen guns.
Other Germans to fight under British command were the newly constituted Hanoverian army, with seventeen battalions of infantry, a regiment of cavalry and twelve guns, and the Brunswick contingent. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick and Luneberg, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Jena-Auerstädt, and when the French included Brunswick in the kingdom of Westphalia, the new duke, Friedrich Wilhelm, went into exile in Austria. When Austria returned to the fray in 1809, the duke mortgaged his principality of Oels, raised a contingent of troops and fought his way across French territory to the mouth of the Weser, from where he and his men were evacuated to England by the Royal Navy. As they were cut off from their source of recruits in Brunswick and as the best Germans joined the King’s German Legion, the Brunswick-Oels were reduced to recruiting what they could get – prisoners of war, Poles, Dutch and indeed any European who spoke German. They had a reputation for deserting, but fought well in the Peninsula, and at Waterloo they provided eight infantry battalions, one regiment of cavalry and sixteen guns. Finally the Nassau contingent provided eight infantry battalions at Waterloo. Not to be confused with Orange Nassau, which fought as part of the Dutch army, Nassau was a German state in the Confederation of the Rhine. As the Nassauers were suspicious of Prussian motives, they elected to fight under the British rather than the Prussians.
Although from 1815 the Kingdom of the Netherlands included Belgium, the Dutch and the Belgian armies had different origins and at Waterloo were still separate, with Belgian units looking to the Belgian Legion, raised by the Austrians, and the Dutch looking to the traditions they had inherited from the French. As we have seen, both nations had been under French control for nearly twenty years and had fought for Napoleon for most of that time, so loyalties were mixed. The situation was not helped by the blue of the tunics that the new army of the Netherlands would wear – the colour was too easily mistaken for French blue – nor, of course, by the fact that some units had not yet received their new uniforms and at Waterloo were still in French kit, with merely the addition of an orange cockade on the hat. Organization, tactics and badges of rank were French, but on closer inspection Dutch units could be seen, confusingly perhaps, to wear the Austrian shako, while Belgian ones wore one similar to that worn by the British. Most of the rank and file of the army of the Netherlands were conscripts, while most of the senior NCOs were professionals. The language of the Dutch units was Dutch and that of the Belgians French, which did not ease communication to or between the two.
The soldiers of the Prussian army in the Waterloo campaign were largely untried, although they had a cadre of experienced officers and senior NCOs to stiffen them. The Prussian army recruited on the Krümper system. Designed to allow them a far larger pool of trained manpower than the occupying French permitted, this system was based on conscripting men for a relatively short period, discharging five men from every company each month and taking in five new recruits. Prussian infantry companies were 150-strong, so a man would serve for thirty months before discharge to the reserve. A similar system operated for the artillery and the cavalry. This meant that the Prussians could keep to their treaty with France, which limited the Prussian army to 42,000, while in reality evading its restrictions. The system was proven when for the Waterloo campaign the Prussians mustered 130,000 men, around half of the units being Landwehr, or militia manned by men who had competed their thirty months’ service with the field army. Many of them were rusty and some had spent most of their thirty months in barracks, but all were motivated by a genuine patriotism, and while there was mass desertion after Ligny, those that remained were not at all disconcerted by the results of one defeat and the prospect of another.
Discipline in the Prussian army of 1815 was far removed from the brutality of the Frederician age, where men could be executed for what would have been considered minor offences elsewhere, flogged unmercifully, made to sit upon a saddle horse with weights tied to their feet, or forced to ‘run the gauntlet’ between a double file of soldiers, each of whom would batter the unfortunate as he tried to make his way between them. Now Prussian soldiers could be shot, but only for very serious offences such as mutiny. They were not subject to flogging but instead could be caned, but this was done in private and either on the back or on the buttocks. The Prussians regarded the British disciplinary process as cruel in the extreme.
About 14,000 of the Prussian army that was stationed in Flanders were of the Saxon contingent. Saxony had been the last German state to continue to fight for Napoleon, and many Saxons disliked and distrusted Prussians and had no wish to be under their command. Equally, many Prussians were suspicious of Saxon loyalty. Blücher was increasingly concerned that the Saxon contingent might change sides and decided to break it up and place Saxon brigades in Prussian corps. The reorganization was insensitively handled, and in May 1815 the situation erupted into a full-blown Saxon mutiny. Some Saxons even attacked Blücher’s quarters, and the grand old man had to flee via the back door. Blücher told the king of Saxony: ‘I shall restore order even though I be compelled to shoot the entire Saxon army.’23 Order was swiftly restored and only four Saxons were executed by firing squad. One of the most seriously affected Saxon battalions was paraded before their comrades and their regimental standard burned in front of them. As the standard had been personally embroidered by the queen of Saxony, this did little to improve Prussian-Saxon relations, and the entire contingent was sent home.
Here, then, were the men who would fight the campaign of Waterloo. Their training and motivations varied widely, as did the methods and traditions of their armies. Many had no experience of intensive warfare, while others had fought all over Europe and beyond. Whatever their different backgrounds and ambitions, the vast majority fought bravely for a cause in which they believed, and all would fight under commanders who were not only experienced in war, but who were also well aware that for them this campaign could have only two outcomes: glory and riches for the victors, defeat and ignominy for the losers.
* A marshal was normally a corps commander. His equivalent in the British army, a lieutenant general, received £1,383 and, unlike the marshal, was not likely to be able to boost this by looting.
* See page 11, second footnote.
* About the same weight as is carried by an infantry soldier today, although now it is much better distributed about the body.
* Not yet a warrant officer – that does not come until 1879.
* One of the many scandals involving army procurement revolved around a consignment of boots delivered to the army in Spain in 1810, which fell apart after the wearers waded a stream. The contractor had soled the boots with cardboard painted black.