Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes
same place. Having discovered them, they then proceeded to dress them and drill them until they lost some of those qualities that had made them such admirable light troops in the first place.
Hussars, light cavalry introduced into the French army in 1692, were modelled on wild horsemen from the great plain of Hungary. However, the efforts of military tailors speedily made them heavier, first converting the fur-trimmed cap to the towering busby with the cap itself surviving only as the vestigial busby bag hanging down on one side. They then made the dolman (short jacket) and breeches skin-tight, and eventually converted the pelisse, initially an extra jacket handily slung from the shoulders, into a relic as vestigial as the busby bag but a good deal more inconvenient.
The Austrians exacted universal compulsory conscription on the Military Border of Croatia and Slavonia, raising, by the 1790s, seventeen regiments of Grenzer infantry. They were traditionally trained as light infantry – or, rather, untrained, for it was believed that much of their value sprang from their experience of hewing a living as free peasants in a tough border area. However, conventionally-minded senior officers increased the amount of formal training given to the Grenzers, effectively converting them into second-grade line infantry, leading Major General Joseph Klein to complain that men with less formal training had provided ‘a much better light infantry than the present regulated and drilled Grenzer.’38 It is no surprise that the first bout of Austrian military reforms in 1798–9 included withdrawing Grenzer regiments from the line and combining small sharpshooter and free corps units into fifteen light battalions. The second reform period continued the movement, but it was clear to promising young commanders that Austrian skirmishers were still too rigidly controlled to take on the French with confidence. Something precious had been drilled out of the army, and as late as 1813 the future Field-Marshal Radetzky admitted that ‘fighting en tirailleur should be done only in very restricted fashion, because neither we nor the Russians have mastered the manière de tirailleur.’39
However, at the height of their powers, during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the Grenzer had been formidable light infantry. Hussars and Croats formed a screen which Frederick the Great’s intelligence agents found hard to penetrate; they snapped up isolated detachments and cruelly galled the Prussian line if it came within reach of the covered positions they favoured. At Kolin, in 1759, Croats lurking in a cornfield provoked an engagement which soon got out of hand and ended in what was intended as a flanking attack heading, disastrously, for the front of the Austrian line. In 1758 Frederick told General Philip Yorke that ‘he was more upon his guard against them than against any other troops…that it was impossible for them [the Prussians] to oppose anything equal to them in that kind, and that he did not like to be always sacrificing his regular infantry in that kind of war.’40 Lacking native light infantry of his own, Frederick raised ‘free battalions’ from disparate regions of his empire, but it was not a happy experiment: one battalion murdered its commanding officer and deserted en masse, complete with its pay chest and a cannon.
The British army first discovered the need for light troops in the forests of North America. Hostilities between Britain and France had begun there in 1754 without formal declaration of war. This was partly because of friction between the thirteen British colonies and the smaller French colonial population, chiefly concentrated in the St Lawrence Valley between Quebec and Montreal. The French had built a string of forts to prevent British penetration, and Major General Edward Braddock made for one of them, Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), at the forks of the Ohio where the Monongahela and Allegheny meet. He had 1,200 men, including regulars from the 44th and 48th Foot – both regiments brought up to full strength by drafting in men from other units and less than cohesive in consequence – and some American irregulars, the young George Washington, of the Virginia Militia, among them.
Near the Monongahela River, Braddock was ambushed by a smaller force of Frenchmen and Indians. The battle was not wholly one-sided, for the French commander was killed by the first volley: most of his men fled and the Indians were only kept in the battle by the courage of the French officers leading them. But after the first shock – and there were rarely times when encountering the rolling volleys of redcoats in line was not a shock – the Indians and remaining French steadied to their task, firing from cover, where they presented poor targets, and they concentrated on the enemy officers. Braddock lost 63 of his 86 officers killed or wounded – with 914 NCOs and men – and was himself hit in the arm and lung. He died four days later, after saying: ‘We shall know better how to deal with them another time.’
Shortly after Braddock’s defeat, the British raised a new, large regiment, the 60th Foot (Royal Americans), some of whose battalions were trained as marksmen. ‘In order to qualify for the Service of the Woods,’ ran a contemporary account, they were ‘taught to load and fire, lying on the ground and kneeling…to march in Order, slow and fast, in all sorts of Ground…[to] pitch and fold their Tents, and be accustomed to pack up and carry their necessities in the most commodious manner.’41 Each battalion of line infantry was given a light company, whose training emphasised skirmishing and marksmanship, in 1758. These light companies – ‘light bobs’ – were paired with the pre-existing grenadiers to form what were termed flank companies, with the grenadiers parading on the right of the battalion’s line and the light company on its left.
This polarity was as much ideological as ceremonial, with the grenadiers – ‘tow rows’ – epitomising the wheel and pivot of the old world, and the light bobs the stalk and scurry of the new. In 1763 American Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region rose in a rebellion known from the name of the Ottawa chief who led it, as Pontiac’s. Amongst the troops who opposed it were light companies, serving away from their parent battalions, who looked markedly different to Braddock’s redcoats. An officer described the sombre dress of British light infantry.
The ground is black ratteen or frieze, lapelled and cuffed with blue;…a waistcoat with sleeves, a short jacket without sleeves; only arm holes and wings to the shoulders (in like manner to the grenadiers and drummers of the line) white metal buttons, linen or canvas drawers;…a pair of leggings of the same colour with their coat which reach up to the middle of their thighs…and, from the calf of the leg downwards, they button…[The light infantry man] has no lace, but, besides the usual pockets, he has two, not quite so high on his breast, made of leather, for balls and flints…His knapsack is carried very high between the shoulders, and is fastened with a strap or web over his shoulder, as the Indians carry their pack…42
However, the army tended to revert to formal type in peacetime, and light companies disappeared after the Seven Years’ War, though they were later reinstated. It was not just that conventionally-minded officers argued that they were of little value on European battlefields, where the fortune of the day would be decided by the volleys of the line, but that whole ethos of light troops was inimical to formal discipline. During the American War of Independence when conditions again made light troops an indispensable component of the army, one British officer described them as:
For the most part young and insolent puppies, whose worthlessness was apparently their recommendation for a service which placed them in the post of danger, in the way of becoming food for powder, their most appropriate destination next to that of the gallows.43
There was a palpable tension between the light infantry ethos, with its emphasis on practical uniform, individual skills and relaxed discipline, and the older notion of unthinking obedience.
By the time the Wars of the French Revolution broke out in 1792 British light companies had little, apart from their shoulder-wings, to mark them out from their comrades in battalion companies. William Surtees, born in Northumberland in 1781, had always wanted to be a soldier, and in 1799 he joined the 56th Regiment. It was known as the Pompadours because its purple facings were allegedly Madame de Pompadour’s favourite colour – or, as some smutty warriors alleged, the colour of her drawers. Surtees was almost immediately