Single-battalion regiments not on active service are those which are found with the smaller establishments—of such figures as 716, 696, etc. Not being expected to take the field, they have not been brought up to the higher establishment, either by drafts from the militia or by specially vigorous recruiting.
The three regiments of Foot Guards had much higher establishments than any line battalion. The three battalions of the 1st Guards mustered no less than 4619 of all ranks, the Coldstream and Scots Fusiliers each 2887. Thus the former could easily send abroad two strong battalions of 1100 or 1200 men apiece, and the two latter one each, while leaving behind a battalion and a big depôt on which to draw for recruits for the active service units. Therefore a Guards battalion in the Peninsula seldom fell under 800 men, and was sometimes up to 1000. The Cadiz detachment of the Guards, which fought at Barrosa, was made up from the home battalions as a sort of extra contribution. It consisted of six companies of the 1st Guards, two of the Coldstream, and three of the Scots Fusiliers. They are sometimes called a brigade—for which they were too small in reality—sometimes a provisional regiment. Their total force was about 1200 or 1300 of all ranks.
With these figures before us, we begin to see why individual battalions came and went in the Peninsular Army. A regiment which had two battalions, one at home and one in Portugal, was always able to keep up the strength of the service unit by regular and copious drafts from the home unit. Or if the original one serving in the Peninsula was a second battalion, the first could be sent out to relieve it. Second battalions were never sent out to replace first battalions, it being always the rule that the senior unit had a right to preference for active service. But occasionally both battalions of a regiment were absent from Great Britain, and in a few cases they were both in the Peninsula.[166] When this happened the second battalion was invariably sent home after a time, discharging its effective rank and file into the sister battalion, and returning to Great Britain as a cadre of officers and sergeants, with a few old, unserviceable, or nearly time-expired rank and file.
Having laid down these general rules, we shall see how it came to pass that of Wellington’s original army of 1809 some battalions stopped with him for the whole war, while others were successively sent away and replaced by fresh units.
The greater part of the British Army which had been in the Peninsula in 1808 went home from Corunna at the end of Sir John Moore’s retreat. Of these units some never came back at all to share in Wellington’s triumphs;[167] others returned only in time to see the end of the war in 1812, 1813, and 1814.[168] Only Craufurd’s three famous light infantry battalions, the 1/43rd, 1/52nd, and 1/95th came back, after an absence of no more than a few months, in the summer of 1809.
The Original Peninsular Regiments
The real nucleus of the permanent Peninsular Army was composed, not of the regiments which had operated under Moore, but of that small fragment of the original landing force of 1808 which had not followed Moore to Salamanca, Sahagun, and Corunna, but remained behind in the Peninsula.[169] To this mere remnant of eleven battalions and one cavalry regiment there were added the reinforcements which preceded or accompanied Sir Arthur Wellesley when he came to take up the command in April, 1809, which amounted to twelve battalions more, with four regiments of cavalry.[170] The whole, when first divided into brigades and organized as an operating force at Coimbra on May 4, 1809, only amounted to 23,000 men—a modest nucleus for the army which was destined not only to save Portugal, but ultimately to thrust out of Spain a body of invaders which at this moment amounted to over 200,000 men, and which in 1810–11 was brought up to 300,000, a figure which it maintained till drafts began to be made upon it for the Russian War in 1812.[171]
Moore’s host had been, as he himself wrote to Castlereagh in a noteworthy dispatch, not so much a British army as the only British army fit for the field. Since no more than an infinitesimal fraction of this picked force was able to return to the Peninsula at once, it followed that Wellesley’s army of 1809 was composed, for its greater part, of troops that had been considered of secondary quality, and less fit for service than the battalions which had been put hors de combat for a long space by the exhaustion which they had suffered in the terrible retreat to Corunna. Excluding the Guards and the King’s German Legion units, Wellesley’s Field Army in July contained eighteen British battalions, of which only six were first battalions of regiments of full strength, two (the 29th and 97th) were single-battalion corps, and the remaining ten were junior battalions, i.e. were the usually depleted home-service units of regiments which already had one battalion abroad, or of which the first battalion had just returned from Corunna unfit for immediate use.[172] It was an army whose quality was notably inferior to that of the force which had marched into Spain under Moore six months before. And the second battalions were invariably under strength, because they had, until their unexpected embarkation for the front, been engaged in supplying their sister units abroad with the necessary drafts for foreign service. Many of them were woefully weak in numbers, showing, instead of the theoretical 900 bayonets, such figures as 638, 680, 749, 776, which, after deducting sick and men on command, meant under 600 for the field. Indeed, a few months later, at Talavera,[173] six of the second battalions and both the single-battalion corps showed less than that number present, all ranks included.
Bearing in mind the fact that a British regiment, owing to the difficulties of recruiting, in a time when men were scarce and bounties high, could not as a rule provide drafts to keep up to strength more than one battalion on active service, we can already foresee the fates that were destined to attend the battalions of Wellington’s original Peninsular Army. Nearly all the second battalions in time were worn down by the exhaustion of war to a figure so low that they could no longer be worked as regular battalion units. When they had reached this stage one of two things happened to them. If their first battalions were available, being on home service and fit for the field, they came out to the Peninsula and replaced the depleted second battalions. But if the first battalion of any corps was already abroad in India or elsewhere, the Peninsular battalion was, during the earlier years of the war, sent home to recruit, and its regimental number disappeared from Wellington’s muster-rolls. In the later years of the war this was not so regularly done: for reasons which will be explained, several of the veteran second battalions, which had survived at the front till 1812, were retained with the army, but cut down to four companies each, and worked together in pairs to make a unit of serviceable size. Of the eight original second battalions of 1809, two were drafted into their first battalion, which had come out to the Peninsula;[174] one (2/87th) was sent away for a time to Cadiz, though it returned to the field army in 1812; four were cut down in 1811–12 to half battalions.[175] Only one, the 2/83rd, remained continuously in the Peninsula as a full battalion till the end of the war.
The same fate attended the single-battalion regiments, which had no sister battalion at home to draw upon, but only a depôt. Both the 29th and the 97th went home, reduced to skeletons, in 1811.