An army emerges with honour
Hugh Cecil
REDCOATS: THE BRITISH SOLDIER AND WAR IN THE AMERICAS, 1755-1763 by Stephen Brumwell CUP, £25, pp. 349, ISBN 0521807832 The Seven Years War, from 1755 to 1763, was Britain's most successful imperial war, sweeping her French rivals from North America and India, though leading, inexorably, to the secession of her American colonies a few years later. Round the redcoats of Britain's 'American Army' simplistic myths were to grow: the first, dominating British patriotic history up until the mid-20th century, concentrated on their imperishable courage under General James Wolfe, the heroic, increasingly forgotten, victor at Quebec, dying in his hour of triumph.
It is the United States myth, however, which now dominates film and fiction: founded on a hostile view of Britain's later conduct in the War of Independence, this depicts the redcoats as over-dressed, brainwashed cannon fodder, led by incompetent aristocratic fops whose shamefully protracted conflict against a numerically inferior French foe was really won by sturdy American-born farmers with an intimate knowledge of the wild.
In Steven Brumwell's fascinating study of the British 'American Army' (not to be confused with the similarly named Redcoat, by Richard Holmes, published last year), the redcoats emerge as individual personalities, unearthed by the author from mem oirs, court-martial proceedings, collections of orders, veterans' registers, recruiting instructions, petitions to the War Office and correspondence from every rank.
They also emerge as successful. Emphasising their courage and 'damn the French poltroons' tenacity after initial disasters, Brumwell dismisses the role of Pitt the Elder in their victories, or that of the British navy, except in its effective landing of troops, a development important for army capability in later wars. As for the accusations of lamentable British slowness despite superior numbers, he points out that the French had advantages more crucial than mere size: interior lines, efficient waterway communications, knowledge of the terrain and numerous Indian allies, whose eventual desertion came too late to work decisively against them.
Far from the backbone of the 'American Army' being recruits from American colonial homes, Brumwell shows that these joined unwillingly after the first year: the mass of recruiting was from the British Isles, more than half coming from Highland Scotland and Ireland. Undoubtedly, too, the French Canadian militia, fearsome guerrilla fighters, were superior to the American colonial recruits who were chiefly armed labourers rather than hardened combat troops, though the exceptions included such respected units as George Washington's Virginia Regiment and the famed Rogers Rangers, masters of irregular warfare.
In England, where a professional standing army still seemed a threat to liberty, the ordinary soldiers were not hailed as heroes, though the victories were popular. Even their own leaders spoke of them contemptuously: Wolfe described General Braddock's men as 'rascals, canaille — terrible dogs to look at'. However, officers also took a paternalistic, noblesse oblige attitude towards the men, many of whom wept when Wolfe was killed. His comments, typical of a hierarchical age, were less than justified. Not all were scum, 'enlisted for drink', but some were men from worthy trades. Officially it was a 'volunteer' army which people joined for adventure as well as from desperation; but some were pressganged and many were tricked by recruiting sergeants into taking the king's shilling. Recruits had to be 'free from ruptures, convulsions and infirmitys', at least 5'5" high, unless still growing, and aged between 18 and 40. By the end of the war, however, at least one man of 4.6" was accepted, and some veterans rejoined in their sixties. Few were well educated: William Vernon of the 3rd Foot, whose sonnets were read by his colonel and officers, was a rarity.
Brumwell does not believe that commission by purchase made for many bad officers. Usually they were experienced, competent and dedicated; one third were commissioned on merit alone, though an 'inappropriate background' was likely to be a bar even when the applicant could afford to pay. Honour and reputation were allimportant. One officer fought a duel with another for calling him a 'dirty rascal'. He was cashiered, but reinstated and his insulter discharged from the army.
Punishments for other ranks were far more savage. Sentences of 1,000 lashes (as for drunken insubordination) were not uncommon, delivered over an extended period to avoid killing the man. Deserters were often sentenced to death, with horrible variations — such as making men cast dice between themselves for a reprieve. Humiliation was sometimes used to 'cure' a coward — one youth, put astride a wooden horse, wearing a petticoat and carrying a broom, apparently turned into a 'remarkable gallant soldier'.
Where men had joined a regiment from a single local community or trade, it reinforced the bond of comradeship, as it was to do in 'Pals' battalions in the first world war. Esprit de corps perhaps more than fear. and certainly more than patriotism, kept most of these browbeaten soldiers from deserting or running away, despite disagreeable conditions. Scurvy was rife, the diet in the freezing winters being chiefly rusty salt pork or beef. Men robbed farmsteads for fresh food.
The British army, typically, started with the wrong training for campaigning in 'a vast inhospitable desert': noble in the natural beauty of its huge rivers, mountains and lakes, every tree in 'these hellish woods' might conceal an Indian with a musket ball that could carry away a life or an eye. Discipline, hard enough to preserve during withering close-quarter fire in the open countryside of Europe, became almost impossible during the ambuscades in dark American forests. Soldiers fumed in vain against the 'unsporting' elusiveness of the half-savage coureurs des bois and sharpshooting Indians whose experience of firearms reached back over a century. Eventually, British light infantry companies were formed, with simpler coarse woollen uniforms, fur collars, irregular tactics and tomahawks instead of swords, though few members adapted as fully as Lieutenant Quintin Kennedy, who learned Mohawk, married a squaw and joined scalping expeditions. Light infantry took on woodland fighters on their own terms, and skirmished alongside the traditionally trained, powdered and pipe-clayed soldiers in their conventional battles against French equivalents.
The native American tribes gave a memorable character to the war: redcoats were terrified by their war-whoops and appearance, with mutilated ears, scalping knives, paint, and sinewy bodies smeared with bear fat to escape capture. Rumours of their atrocious cruelty to captives were not exaggerated; but sometimes they offered friendship: Robert Kirk, a soldier who had been tortured all day by Shawnees and expected to be burned alive was suddenly identified as a divine replacement of a brave's lost brother; he was dressed in an Indian breech clout, acquired a wife, a son and a cornfield and spent a year as a tribesman, trapping and trading until he escaped to a British fort. Others caught by Indians renounced Britain completely and scalped and tortured their fellow-countrymen, as one confessed at the gallows foot after his capture by the British.
The French connived at their allies' atrocities. British propaganda made much of 'Monsieur's' barbarity, but the British also used North Americans, and both white peoples perpetrated their own carnage. Captain Alexander Montgomery massacred French prisoners who had been offered quarter and the Rogers' Rangers wiped out the men, women and children of an Abenaki Indian village, in a manner that recalls My Lai. All this took the Canadian war out of the realm of 18th-century European fighting with its rudimentary restraints on mistreatment of non-combatants and prisoners, and left no race unbesmirched.
By and large, however, the redcoats of 'the American Army' emerge with credit from this fearful war. Unfortunately for Britain, by the time of the War of Independence, disease in the West Indies had disastrously undermined this experienced fighting force. This is an excellent, challenging book, convincingly argued through many vivid stories and original research.
Hugh Cecil is the author, with Mirabel Cecil, of Imperial Marriage, a life of Lord and Lady Edward Cecil, published this year by John Murray.
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