When the lieutenant-colonel in a battalion was dead, wounded, or sick, the unit was often commanded by the senior major—there were normally two of them—sometimes for many months at a time, till the absent officer returned, or his place was filled by promotion. Cases were known where, owing to great mortality or invaliding in the senior ranks, a captain might be found in command of the battalion for a certain space. I note that about the time of Bussaco the “morning state” of the army shows two units (both of the Guards) commanded by colonels, 30 by lieutenant-colonels, 16 by majors, one by a captain, and this, I think, was a fairly normal proportion.
In addition to the colonel and the two majors, an infantry battalion at full strength would possess ten captains and twenty subalterns, or a trifle more, giving the allowance of three officers per company, with a few over. How many of the subalterns would be lieutenants and how many ensigns (called 2nd lieutenants in the rifle regiments) was a matter of mere chance, but the lieutenants were nearly always in a majority.[195] A glance down the morning state of the Bussaco army of September, 1811, shows that one battalion (1/45th) had no more than one ensign, another (the 74th) as many as eleven. It was very rare for a regiment to have its full establishment of ten captains present; there were nearly always one or two companies commanded by their senior lieutenants. In addition to its company officers every battalion had its “staff,” composed of the adjutant, paymaster, quartermaster, and the surgeon, with his two assistant surgeons. The adjutant was usually a lieutenant, but occasionally an ensign; in the Guards (where most ranks counted a step higher than in the line), he was usually a “lieutenant and captain.” In addition to the officers regularly commissioned, a battalion had often with it one or two “volunteers”—young men who were practically probationers; they were allowed to come out to an active-service battalion on the chance of being gazetted to it without purchase, on their own responsibility. They carried muskets and served in the ranks, but were allowed to wear uniforms of a better cloth than that given to the rank and file, and messed with the officers.
The most astonishing case of devolution of acting rank through the death or wounding of many seniors was at the battle of Albuera. On the morning after that action the wrecks of the second brigade of the 2nd Division, temporarily united into one battalion because of the dreadful losses which had fallen on every one of the three units of which it consisted, were commanded by the senior captain of the 1/48th regiment—and he (as it chanced) was a French emigré, with the somewhat lugubrious name of Cimitière. The brigade had been reduced (it may be remarked) from a strength of 1651 to 597 in the battle, no less than 1054 officers and men being killed, wounded, or missing, and the brigadier, with five lieutenant-colonels and majors senior to Cimitière having been killed or wounded.[196] But the Albuera losses were, of course, the record in the way of heavy casualties; there is nothing that can be compared to them in the annals of Wellington’s army for general slaughter extending all through an army, though certain individual regiments in particular engagements suffered almost as heavily—e.g. in the storm of Badajoz and at Waterloo.
The chances of temporary command were sometimes curious. The gallant Colborne, whom I have already had occasion to mention, though only a lieutenant-colonel, commanded a brigade at Albuera, owing to the absence of the brigadier—he being the senior of four battalion commanders. He then commanded his own regiment only during 1811–13, but succeeded as senior lieutenant-colonel to the charge of a brigade of the Light Division for the last six months of the war. Though he had thus twice commanded a brigade with distinction in the Peninsula, we find him in the Waterloo campaign once more at the head of his own 52nd Foot, in Adam’s brigade. It is true that with his single battalion he there did more than most of the generals, by giving the decisive stroke which wrecked the attack of the French Guard.
Not only did lieutenant-colonels practically become brigadiers, in an interim fashion, pretty frequently, but once at least an officer with no higher rank commanded a whole division for some months. This was Colonel Andrew Barnard, who after Craufurd fell at Ciudad Rodrigo, and the only other general with the division (Vandeleur) was wounded, had charge of the most precious unit of Wellington’s whole army for nearly five months, and headed it at the storm of Badajoz. There seems to have been a similar, but a shorter phenomenon of this sort with the 3rd Division, after the fall of Badajoz, when, Generals Picton and Kempt being both disabled, Colonel Wallace of the Connaught Rangers commanded the division for a week or two—till Wellington drafted in his brother-in-law, General Pakenham, to lead it, which he did with great distinction at Salamanca.[197]
The Purchase System
Promotion in the British Army at this period was working in the most irregular and spasmodic fashion, there being two separate influences operating in diametrically opposite ways. The one was the purchase system, the other the frequent, but not by any means sufficiently frequent, promotion for merit and good service in the field. The practice at the Horse Guards was that casualties by deaths in action were filled up inside the regiment, without money passing, but that for all other vacancies the purchase system worked. When a lieutenant-colonelcy, majority, or captaincy was vacant, the senior in the next lower rank had a moral right to be offered the vacancy at the regulation price. But there were many cases in which more than the regulation could be got. The officer retiring handed over the affair to a “commission broker,” and bidding was invited. A poor officer at the head of those of his own rank could not afford to pay the often very heavy price, and might see three or four of his juniors buy their way over his head, while he vainly waited for a vacancy by death, by which he would obtain his step without having to pay cash. The system of exchanges, which prevailed on the largest scale, also pressed very hardly on the impecunious; officers from other corps, where there was a block in promotion, managed for themselves a transference into battalions where there seemed to be a likelihood of a more rapid change of rank, by paying large differences for an exchange to those who stood at the head of the list. But there was also a good deal of exchanging for other reasons—officers whose regiments were ordered to unhealthy or unpopular stations, such as the West Indies or New South Wales, offered considerable sums to others who were ready to accept the ineligible destination in return for hard cash. By careful management of this sort, a wealthy officer could procure himself very rapid promotion—e.g. a lieutenant might buy a captaincy in a West India regiment for a comparatively modest sum, and then, as a captain in such a corps, exchange on a second payment with a broken or needy captain in some other regiment on a European station, to whom money was all-important, and so get well established in his new rank, without ever really having quitted home, or served in the corps into and out of which he had rapidly come and gone—on paper only. It is said that one young officer, who had the advantages of being wealthy, a peer, and possessed of great family influence in Parliament, was worked up from a lieutenancy to a lieutenant-colonelcy in a single year. This, of course, was a very exceptional case, and happened long ere the Peninsular War began; but it may be remembered that Wellington himself, was, through similar advantages on a smaller scale, enabled to move up from ensign on March 7, 1787, to lieutenant-colonel in September, 1793—five steps in seven years, during which he had been moved through as many regiments—two of horse and five of foot. He was only nineteen months a captain and six months a major, and he had seen no war service whatever when he sailed for Flanders in command of the 33rd at the age of twenty-three! The Duke of York later insisted on a certain minimum service in each rank before promotion could be obtained.
Contrast with such promotion that of the poor and friendless officer who, after twenty-five years of service, six Peninsular campaigns, and two wounds, found himself still a captain at the age of 43![198] But there were plenty of unlucky men who at the end of the war were still only lieutenants after six campaigns, and were placed on half-pay as such, at the great disbandment of the second battalions which took place in 1816–17. The juxtaposition of rapid promotion obtainable by influence and the purchase of steps, with absolute stagnation in a low rank, which often fell on the impecunious officer, whose regiment did not chance to have many casualties in action, was appalling and monstrous.
I take it that the most pernicious of all the disturbing causes which told against the right distribution of promotion was political influence. As a contemporary pamphleteer wrote: “Instances are very few indeed of preferment being obtained by other corrupt means[199] compared to the omnipotence of Parliamentary interest. Thence originates the shameful practice of thrusting boys into a company over the heads of all the lieutenants and ensigns of the regiment. The Duke of York has done something to check it, but he can never remove the Colossus of Parliamentary interest, an interest that disdains solicitation, and imperiously demands from the minister of the day that which no minister ever found it convenient to deny. To this species of influence the commander-in-chief must give way—for it is capable, when slighted, of removing both commander-in-chief and minister.”[200]
The King’s Hard Bargains