Richard Holmes – Wellington: The Iron Duke (страница 4)
Both the regular army and the less reliable militia played a leading role in the preservation of order, and in doing so found themselves execrated by the populace and at risk of prosecution for murder if they killed anybody. In 1736 Captain John Porteous of the Edinburgh Town Guard ordered his men to fire on a crowd that indulged in stone-throwing at an execution, killing five or six. He was condemned to death for murder, and although he received a royal pardon, the mob burst into his prison, dragged him out, and lynched him. As the English constitutional lawyer Dicey put it:
The position of a soldier may be, both in theory and in practice, a difficult one. He may, as it has been well said, be liable to be shot by a Court-Martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it.13
There was an added shade of complexity. Jurors were, by definition, men of property, and while the military could shoot rioting weavers or colliers without much risk, matters were different if their victims were middle-class men with whom a jury might sympathise. In 1768 a magistrate ordered troops to fire on a crowd supporting the reformer John Wilkes: six were killed and fifteen wounded. The magistrate was tried for murder but acquitted by the judge before a jury (far more likely to take a hostile line) was empanelled, and it followed that the troops themselves could then not be convicted. The Gordon riots, however, aroused no middle-class sympathy. Troops were eventually given carte blanche, and duly dealt with the mob by volley-firing more suitable for a conventional field of battle.
Whatever the importance of its forays to bolster the civil power, the army was designed for use on battlefields and was shaped by the flintlock musket, the weapon carried by the bulk of the armies of the age. And while there were changes in the theory and practice of war during Wellington’s lifetime – for instance the development of the
It was the age of the flintlock. In the early eighteenth century the flintlock musket, its charge ignited by the sparks flashing out when flint struck steel, at last replaced the matchlock, which had relied on a length of smouldering cord. To load his musket the soldier tore open a paper cartridge with his teeth – a blackened mouth and brick-dry throat were amongst the lesser hazards of battle – and dribbled some powder into the priming pan of his musket, shutting the pan off by snapping a hinged striking-plate, the steel, across it. He then tipped the remainder of the powder down the weapon’s muzzle, following it with the round lead musket ball and then the empty cartridge, ramming it all firmly home. To fire, he first drew back the cock, which held a flint gripped firmly in its steel jaws. When he pressed the trigger the flint snapped forward to strike the steel, which swung forward, uncovering the pan. Sparks ignited the priming powder, which flashed through the touch-hole to ignite the main charge.
Misfires were common. Flints had a life of twenty or thirty shots and gave little warning of imminent failure: they simply failed to spark and had to be replaced. Sometimes flint and priming-powder both did their job, but resulted only in a ‘flash in the pan’ which did not ignite the charge. And even when the weapon did fire, it was shockingly inaccurate. In 1814 Colonel George Hanger suggested that although a musket might hit a man at 80 or even 100 yards, a man would be very unlucky indeed to be hit at 150 yards by the man who aimed at him. And that, of course, was the catch, for most infantry soldiers aimed not at individuals but at the mass of the enemy’s line. A Prussian experiment on a canvas target 100 feet long and 6 feet high demonstrated that there were only 23 per cent hits at 225 yards, 40 per cent at 150 yards and 60 per cent at 75 yards. In 1779 a battalion of Norfolk militia, many of its members no doubt more handy with the plough than the musket, hit a similar target with 20 per cent of its shots at 70 yards. These experiments were exactly that, and with an enemy returning fire, results in battle were likely to be far worse. With such a weapon, the volume of fire counted for more than its accuracy, and recruits were drilled repeatedly until the sequence of loading had become second nature and they could fire three or even four shots a minute. Drill was also important in enabling them to move forward in columns, the usual formation for covering the ground, and then to deploy into line so that the maximum number of muskets be brought to bear.
It was axiomatic that good infantry, drawn up in suitable formation (squares or oblongs were ideal) on favourable ground, should be able to resist the attack of cavalry. Although the cavalry of the age still sought to charge whenever possible, it often rendered more useful service by dealing in the small change of war. Cavalry in general, and especially light cavalry, provided a framework of pickets which screened armies in camp or on the march. Although Wellington figured briefly in the Army List as a light dragoon, he was never a real cavalry officer, and rarely showed the arm much sympathy, complaining that its officers had a trick of ‘galloping at everything’. Recent research has shown that he was as unfair in this as in some of his other sweeping judgements, and the achievements of the cavalry which served him were by no means derisory.14
Artillery had already begun its long rise that was to end in it dominating the battlefield a generation after Wellington’s death. Cannon were categorised by the weight of the iron roundshot they fired, with handy 6-pdrs to heavy 12-pdrs forming the mainstay of field artillery and more cumbersome pieces, like 24-pdrs and 32-pdrs, taking pride of place when it came to battering the walls of fortresses. The roundshot, pitched to hit the ground just in front of its target and then to ricochet through the enemy’s formation smashing limbs and striking off heads at every bound, was the most common projectile, with an effective range of about 800 yards and a maximum range of perhaps twice that. At close range gunners switched to canister, a circular tin containing a number of lead or iron balls. The tin burst open when it left the muzzle, turning the cannon into a giant shotgun. Almost half the balls from a British 6-pdr would hit a large target at 400 yards, making canister a lethal weapon. One of my abiding memories of the battlefield of Assaye is the sheer prevalance of canister shot, from small shot the size of a thumb-nail to big shot the size of a golf-ball. The path of the Maratha gun-line could almost be traced by the battalions of urchins pressing canister upon the unwary visitor.
A third artillery projectile, spherical case – known in the British service as shrapnel after its inventor, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery – consisted of an iron sphere filled with powder and musket-balls. The shell was ignited by a fuse composed of tightly-packed powder in an ash or beech plug; bursting range was regulated by cutting the end off the fuse.
Cannon, like infantry muskets, were muzzle-loading throughout Wellington’s service. They were horse-drawn, with field guns requiring teams of six or eight horses. In most artillery units the gunners marched behind their pieces, but in horse artillery, designed to keep pace with, and cross the same country as cavalry, all gunners rode. Finally, the rocket made a brief and inglorious appearance in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was not deemed a success, and Wellington in particular had poor regard for it. When told that sending a rocket troop away would break its commander’s heart, he snapped: ‘Damn his heart: let my orders be obeyed.’
The Georgian army was a mirror of the state it served. It was heterogeneous, decentralised and riddled with patronage and perquisite. The commander-in-chief at Horse Guards in Whitehall presided over the household troops (horse and foot guards), and the infantry and cavalry of the line. He was, however, subject to political control, itself unevenly applied by the two cabinet ministers with primary responsibility for military matters – the secretary of state for war and the colonies, and the secretary at war. The monarch also took an interest in military affairs, regarding the household troops as a personal preserve, and often becoming involved in that most fecund of royal pursuits, the design of uniform. Artillery and engineers were the creatures of the master-general of the ordnance, usually a peer with a seat in the cabinet, and proved the point by wearing blue uniforms rather than the red which characterised most of the rest of the army. Wellington served on both sides of the fence, both as commander-in-chief and as master-general of the ordnance, an unusual distinction.