Officer of Rifles.
1809.
Private, Infantry of the Line.
1809.
The working unit of the Peninsular Army was always the ten-company battalion, commanded by a lieutenant-colonel. When, as in the exceptional cases just named, it chanced that two battalions of a regiment got together, the senior of the two commanding officers had no authority over the other. Both were directly responsible to the brigadier. The battalion theoretically had thirty-five officers and 1000 rank and file, besides sergeants and drummers. A pestilent practice prevailed in all British general returns, of giving in statistics of the larger sort only the number of rank and file (i.e. corporals and privates), officers, sergeants, and musicians being all omitted. To bring the figures up to the real general total in such a case, an allowance of about one-eighth or one-ninth has to be added to the number given. Fortunately detailed returns of all ranks are always available, when absolute correctness is required, from the fortnightly general states at the Record Office.
The theoretical establishment of about 1150 of all ranks for a first battalion was, of course, hardly ever seen in the field. Regiments which landed at Lisbon with a full complement soon dwindled, even before they got to the front, and nothing was rarer than a battalion in line of battle with a total strength in the four figures.[186] A good well-managed corps which had not been in action of late, and had not been stationed in an unhealthy cantonment, might keep up to 700 and even 800 men throughout a campaign. The Guards battalions, which had a decidedly larger establishment than those of the line, were frequently up to 900 men or more.
On the other hand, a battalion which had seen much fighting, which had not received its drafts regularly, and had long starved on the bleak mountains of Beira, or sweltered in the pestilential valley of the Guadiana, often worked down to 450 men or less, even if it were a first battalion which had landed with its full 1000 rank and file. A second battalion under similar circumstances might shrink to 250 or 300. At the end of the very fatiguing campaign of 1811, which had included the toilsome pursuit of Masséna, the Fuentes de Oñoro fighting, and the long tarrying on the Caya during the unhealthy summer heats, of forty-six battalions present with Wellington’s main army only nine (all save one first-battalions, and two of them belonging to the Guards) showed more than 700 of all ranks present. Sixteen more had between 500 and 700, ten between 400 and 500. No less than eleven were down to the miserable figure of under 400 men, and it is to be noted that of these nearly all were either second battalions or single-battalion regiments; there were six of the former three of the latter among them. The average of the whole, it may be seen, was about 550 men per unit; the extreme variation was between 1005 for the strongest battalion and 263 for the weakest.[187] At this time, it should be noted, the army was more sickly than it had ever been before, having over 14,000 men in hospital to 29,300 present with the colours. Wellington was never again so encumbered with sick, save for one period of a few weeks—that which followed the end of the retreat from Burgos to Ciudad Rodrigo in October-November, 1813. During the first months of this winter the troops, tired by incessant marching in the rain, and low feeding, sent into hospital a number of cases not less distressing than those which had been seen in September, 1811. But a short period of rest served to re-establish their health, and in 1813–14 the troops were very healthy, even during the trying weeks when many of them were cantoned high among the snows of the Pyrenean passes.
The Cavalry Regiments
So much for the infantry regiments. A few words as regards the cavalry must be added to this chapter on organization. From first to last Wellington had under him twenty-one regiments of British horse, besides four more of the light and heavy cavalry of the King’s German Legion. But at no time had he such a force as would be represented by this total. He started in 1809 with eight regiments. Before he had been many weeks in command one of his units (a fractional one, composed of two squadrons of the 20th Light Dragoons) was taken from him and shipped off to Sicily. Before the end of the year another (23rd Light Dragoons), which had been badly cut up at Talavera, and lost half its strength there, was sent home to recruit. Thus he had only six regiments[188] on January 1, 1810, and as only one joined him that year,[189] seven was his total force, till he at last received large reinforcements in the late summer and autumn of 1811. But he started the campaign of 1812 with sixteen regiments,[190] which was almost the highest figure that he was to own. For although during the campaign of 1813 he was sent four new Hussar regiments, yet at the same time four depleted corps were sent home to be recruited and reorganized. This would have left his total at the same figure of sixteen units as in 1812, if he had not also received a large composite regiment (or weak brigade) composed of two squadrons from each of the three units of the Household Cavalry. By this addition alone did his cavalry force in 1813–14 exceed that which he had possessed in 1812. If we reckon the Household squadrons as roughly equivalent to two units, the total at the end of the war was eighteen regiments.
Faults of Raw Cavalry
Unlike the infantry, the cavalry of the British Army was organized without exception in isolated units, as it is to-day. A corps sent to the Peninsula left a depôt squadron behind it, and there was no source except this depôt from which it could draw recruits. Nothing resembling the sister-unit on which an infantry battalion depended was in existence. Hence if a cavalry regiment sank low in numbers, and exhausted the drafts which the depôt squadron could send out, it had to return to England to recruit. During the whole war only one corps (the 23rd Light Dragoons at Talavera) suffered a complete disaster, corresponding to that which the 2nd Infantry Division incurred at Albuera, and this unlucky regiment was sent home that autumn, when the British Army had retreated to the Portuguese frontier. But four others worked down so low in strength, and especially in horses, during the campaign of 1812, that, although they had none of them been thinned down in a single action like the 23rd, they had become ineffective, and had to quit the Peninsula. It is most noteworthy that all of these four corps were comparatively recent arrivals; they had come out in 1811, and in little over a single year had fallen into a state of inefficiency far exceeding that of the regiments whose service dated back to 1809, and who had seen two years more of hard campaigning.[191] The moral to be drawn is the same that we have noted with the infantry: the regiments which had served Wellington since his first arrival had become acclimatized, and had learnt the tricks of the old soldier. They could shift for themselves, and (what was no less important) for their horses, far better than any newly-arrived corps. We find bitter complaints of the defective scouting and outpost work of the new-comers. After a petty disaster to the outlying pickets of two of the lately-landed regiments Wellington wrote: “This disagreeable circumstance tends to show the difference between old and new troops. The old regiments of cavalry throughout all their service, with all their losses put together, have not lost so many men as the 2nd Hussars of the Legion and the 11th Light Dragoons in a few days. However, we must try to make the new as good as the old.”[192] This was evidently not too easy to accomplish; at any rate, at the end of the next year it was four of the new corps[193] which were sent home as depleted units, not any of the seven old ones. All these, without exception, endured to the last campaign of 1814, though they nearly all[194] had to be reduced from a four-squadron to a three-squadron establishment in the autumn of 1811, owing to their shrunken effective. But they never fell so low as the four corps condemned to return to England in the next year. No more regiments went home after the winter of 1812–13; the campaign of Vittoria and the Pyrenees did not bear heavily on the cavalry, most of whom, during the mountain fighting in the autumn, were comfortably cantoned in the Ebro Valley. They only moved forward again in the spring of 1814 for that invasion of France which was brought to such an abrupt end by the fall of Napoleon.