But the six first-battalions present with the field army in May, 1809, were still at the front in fair strength at the termination of the war in 1814, and this, though two of them had been among the worst sufferers in the bloody field of Albuera. Indeed, there is throughout the war, I believe, only one case in which the first battalion of a complete regiment went out to the front, and was sent away before the end of the campaigning in 1814.
Reinforcements from Home
The reinforcements which were sent out to Wellington from 1810 to 1812 may be divided into two sections, of which the larger was composed of the reorganized and recruited battalions of Moore’s Corunna army. Of these, six battalions came out in 1810, nine in 1811, eight in 1812, and three in 1813–14. The greater number of them were first battalions, or putting aside the Guards and German Legion units, fifteen out of twenty-three: of these all save one (the 1/26th) fought out the rest of the war. Of single-battalion regiments there were four (2nd, 51st, 20th, 76th); of junior battalions belonging to corps which already had one battalion abroad, there were also only three (3/1st, 2/52nd, 2/59th). Of these two last classes the 2/52nd was soon sent home, after drafting its men into the 1/52nd. The 2nd got so depleted that it was cut down to four companies, and put into a provisional battalion in 1812 till the end of the war. The 76th on its return was only in the field for a few months in 1813–14, so that it had no time to get worked down. The 3/1st, though a junior battalion, belonged to a large regiment of four battalions, and for that reason never shrank below its proper size, there being a sister unit at home to send it drafts. We may therefore say that, of the eight battalions which were not first battalions of full regiments, only three saw long service, yet survived unimpaired to the peace of 1814 (20th, 51st, 2/59th); and of these three two only came out in 1812, and were less than two years in the Peninsula. It is clear, then, that the same rule prevailed in the reinforcements as in the original 1809 army; only first battalions could be relied upon not to melt.
The battalions sent out as reinforcements to Wellington which had not formed part of Moore’s Corunna army, were decidedly less numerous than the other class, amounting to only nineteen. Of these six were first battalions,[176] eight second battalions,[177] and five single battalion corps.[178] All of the first-named category fought out the whole war: but several of the other two were sent home, either when they had been depleted to reinforce their first battalions, or for other reasons. The proportion would have been larger but for the fact that several of them were among the last arrivals in the Peninsula, who only joined in the later autumn and winter campaigns of 1813–14, and had not time to get worn down.[179] One second battalion (2/58th) was worked as a four-company unit during the last two years of the war.
The net result of all the interchange of battalions, and of the sending home of weak units, was that in 1814, when the struggle with Napoleon had come to its end, out of fifty-six British line battalions present at the front, only thirteen were second battalions, and of these last five[180] were (as has been already mentioned) so depleted in numbers that they were being worked in pairs, being each only four companies strong, and not mustering more than 250 or 300 men.
The Walcheren Regiments
That such weak half-units were detained in the Peninsula was due to a resolve of Wellington’s, made after the campaign of 1811. During the latter part of that year the chief of his worries was that he had been sent out among his reinforcements a number of corps which had served in the Walcheren expedition, where almost every man had the seeds of ague in him, from a sojourn in the marshes of Holland. The heat of the Portuguese summer and the torrential rains of the autumn at once brought out the latent weakness in the constitution of men who were little more than convalescents, and regiments which had landed at Lisbon in July 850 strong showed only 550 in the ranks in October.[181] So appalling was the accumulation of fever and ague cases in the hospitals[182] that Wellington wrote home to beg that not another unit which had been at Walcheren might be sent out to him. He now made up his mind to keep old regiments, even when they had dwindled rather low in numbers, rather than to send them home to recruit, and to receive new battalions in their stead. The reason was that it took a corps many months before it learnt to shift for itself, and to grow acclimatized. During their first few months in the Peninsula, newly arrived units always showed too many sick and too many stragglers. For men fresh from barrack life in England were at first prostrated by the heat of the climate and the length of the marches. They had still to pick up the old campaigner’s tricks, and were very helpless. Veteran troops were so superior in endurance to new regiments from England, most of whom had been on the pestilential Walcheren expedition, and were still full of rickety convalescents, that Wellington determined to keep even remnants of old corps accustomed to the air of the Peninsula, rather than to ask for more unacclimatized battalions from home. Hence came the institution, in the end of 1812, of two of the “provisional battalions” already mentioned.[183] At an earlier period of the war they would undoubtedly have been sent back to England.[184] But now these fractions of depleted veteran corps were taken, with excellent results, all through the campaign of 1812–13–14.
Fate of Second Battalions
It is perhaps worth while to make a note how curious was Wellington’s attitude in face of that rather exceptional occurrence the appearance of two strong battalions of the same regiment in his army. If the second battalion was weak, he soon drafted it into the first and sent it home. But when, from some chance, both had full ranks, it did not by any means always strike him as necessary to brigade them together. For example, the 1/7th and 2/7th were both at the front from October, 1810, to July, 1811; but for several months of the time one was in the 4th Division, the other in the 1st. A still more striking instance is that of the 48th. Its two battalions were both from their first arrival placed in the 2nd Division, but they served from June, 1809, to May, 1811, in different brigades of it.[185] The occasions when the two battalions of the same regiment served for any time in one brigade were very rare—I only know of the cases of the 1st and 3rd battalions of the Foot Guards in 1813–14, of the two battalions of the 52nd between March, 1811, and March, 1812, and of those of the 7th Fusiliers, who (after some service apart) had been brigaded together in the 4th Division six months before Albuera. In the last two cases the first battalion presently absorbed the second, which was sent home as a skeleton cadre when its strength at last began to run low. All other cases of juxtaposition were so short that it would seem that Wellington only brought the two battalions together for the purpose of drafting the second into the first at the earliest convenient moment. In this way the 2/88th (long in garrison at Lisbon) were brought up to the front to be amalgamated in less than four months with the 1/88th (March-July, 1811). The 1/5th, coming out in the summer of 1812, seems to have served along with the 2/5th for about the same number of months, the latter being sent home in October. The 1/38th similarly arrived at about the same time, and served from June to November beside the 2/38th, which then departed. These are very different cases from those of the two battalions of the 7th, the 48th, and the 52nd, all of which were present for a year or more together in the army.
PLATE V.