Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes
contract he could not do less than acknowledge it, and begged that I would accept a 100 Louis…33
He admitted that ‘I did not kick him or knock him down,’ but spoke so sharply as to ‘prevent my being again insulted in the like manner’.
What irritated many soldiers was the Commissariat’s insistence on a bureaucratic exactness seemingly at variance with the demands of the field. In 1854 Sergeant Timothy Gowing of 7th Royal Fusiliers was sent to Balaclava with a working party to draw blankets. After:
trudging through mud for nine miles I presented my requisition to the Deputy-Assistant-Quartermaster-General, who informed me that it was not signed by the Quartermaster-General of the Division, and that I should not have an article until it was duly signed. I informed him that the men were dying daily for the want of blankets. He ordered me to be silent and…informed me he did not care – a correct return or no stores…I was ordered out like a dog.34
A military transport service was tried briefly in 1794, and in 1799 a Royal Wagon Train was raised for the campaign in Holland. By 1814 it numbered almost 2,000 men with their own wagons. The unit was unkindly known, from the colour of its coats and the supposed origin of many of its members, as ‘The Newgate Blues’, and in 1814 Commissary August Schaumann wrote scornfully of ‘Fat General Hamilton…with his useless wagon corps.’35 Yet it was not without its own remarkable achievements. At Waterloo, when the garrison of the crucial farm complex at Hougoumont, in Wellingon’s right centre, was running short of ammunition, Private Joseph Brewster of the Royal Wagon Train drove a tumbril of ammunition down to the farm complex, under fire the whole way. Wellington regarded retention of Hougoumont as fundamental to his success, and Brewster’s achievement can scarcely be over-rated.
Even when at its maximum strength, the Royal Wagon Train could not provide for all the army’s transport requirements, and most draught and pack animals, carts and drivers were hired locally. In 1776–80 the British army in North America employed an average of 739 wagons, 1958 horses and 760 drivers, some of them procured in England as a result of a contract with a Mr Fitzherbert. Muleteers and ox-cart drivers were hired in the Peninsula, and followed the army like a comet’s tail of disorder and dishonesty. The carts themselves had fixed wheels and rotating wooden axles, ‘making the most horrible creaking sounds that can be imagined…almost sufficient to make anyone within reach of the sounds pray to be divested of the sense of hearing.’36
The army’s medical services plumbed the depths of administrative chaos. There was nothing approaching what would today be termed a medical corps. A physician-general and surgeon-general – both civilians with private practices in addition to their military duties – had existed since the time of Charles I, and an inspector-general of hospitals had been established in 1758. In 1794 an army medical board, on which these worthies sat, was set up, largely at the instigation of the Duke of York, in an effort to give more coherent direction to the medical services. Beneath them came the inspectors and deputy inspectors of hospitals, the physicians, surgeons and their mates who served in the hospitals, and the administrative officers who ran them. Each regiment had its surgeons and two mates, later termed assistant surgeons. In the eighteenth century they were essentially the colonel’s employees, who purchased their positions, received an allowance collected by captains from their company funds, and were given a grant from which they were expected to purchase all their medical necessities.
Their status improved with reforms introduced after medical catastrophes in Holland in 1793–94. However, it was not until the more far-reaching reforms after the Crimean War that the army’s medical services were put on a proper footing, with the creation of the Medical Staff Corps, forerunner of the Royal Army Medical Corps, in 1855. The keen but unqualified Sergeant Roger Lamb served periodically as assistant surgeon to the 9th and 23rd Regiments in the American War. Even the great James McGrigor, who became Wellington’s surgeon-general and was to do so much to improve the medical services and the lot of those in their care, joined the 88th as a surgeon in 1793 without having completed his degree. Dr Hugh Moises declared that: ‘I have known men who have served not many months behind the counter of a country apothecary…admitted to a regimental practice…Mere apprentice boys were appointed as surgeons and mates without exhibiting the proper testimonials of their knowledge or abilities.’37 A London surgeon observed that military medicine was no place for ‘a man of superior merit’, who would ‘soon abandon the employment for the more lucrative the more respectable and the less sordid work of private practice.’38 It was not impossible to combine private practice and military employment: the London-based John Leslie remained surgeon to the 3rd Foot Guards until advancing age and a successful private practice persuaded him to resign.
The medical profession was dominated by physicians. It was not until 1754 that the Company of Surgeons at last severed its connection with the barbers, and only in 1800 that the Royal College of Surgeons was founded. Military doctors, whether physicians or surgeons, were poorly regarded: Moises complained that when the king reviewed his unit in 1788 ‘no surgeon was allowed to kiss his hand’. Things improved, albeit only slowly. In 1796 surgeons were given captain’s status when quarters were allocated, their assistants became commissioned officers, ranking as lieutenants, and both were to be regularly paid and provided with medicines (though not their medical equipment) by the government. In 1798 it was ordered that physicians must hold a medical qualification, while assistant surgeons were required to pass a medical examination before being appointed. However, regulations accorded them ‘no claims whatever to military command’. It was not until 1850 that medical officers were at last eligible for admission to the military division of the Order of the Bath. The Lancet believed this ‘great triumph – for triumph it is – to be the greatest step ever made by our profession towards obtaining its just recognition by the state…It is the removal of a professional stigma.’39 The low status of military doctors was mirrored by the limited resources placed at their disposal throughout the period. Many would have agreed with William Gibney, surgeon to the 15th Hussars at Waterloo, that many men died who might have been saved had time or resources been available. It was the hardest part of their job ‘to be obliged to tell a dying soldier, who had served his king and country that day, that his case was hopeless.’40
Military surgeons, like commissaries, ran the whole gamut from the idle and incompetent to the zealous and committed. And most, as we shall see, were often so busy that they overlooked the obvious. In 1812 Lieutenant William Grattan of the 88th was helped to a field hospital by Dan Carsons, his batman, and the doctor only looked at the entry wound made by the musket-ball which had hit him. Carsons insisted that his officer should be turned over, and the doctor was able to extract a large piece of cloth from his coat, driven into his body by the bullet: ‘The doctor looked confounded; Dan looked ferocious…’
Some doctors became so fond of the military life that they laid scalpel and bone-saw aside and took up combatant commissions. William Grattan (another member of the widely-branching Irish family) studied surgery in Dublin and became assistant surgeon of the 64th on the eve of its departure for the American War. While overseas he decided to become a combatant officer, and purchased an ensigncy and then a lieutenancy. In the words of the admiring Sergeant Roger Lamb, a fellow Irishman, he:
lived with economy and frugality, and in the course of a few years, he purchased a company [captaincy]. Captain Grattan possessed a strong understanding, sound judgement, and deep penetration; these, with a perfect knowledge of his profession, made him an invaluable officer. He became the soul of his regiment, which he never exchanged for another. Merit like his could not be hid.41
Wounded in America, he died in Ireland during the rebellion of 1798, catching a chill after