It had now become impossible to keep the ranks of the Legion filled with the genuine Hanoverians who had been its original nucleus. Communication with the electorate was completely cut off, and German recruits of any kind had to be accepted. Many of them were volunteers from the English prison camps, where thousands of Napoleon’s German troops were lying. Of these only a fraction were Hanoverians born. The large majority could not, of course, share in the loyalty and enthusiasm of the original legionaries, being subjects of all manner of sovereigns in the Rheinbund, who had marched at Napoleon’s orders. The quality of men was much worse, and many enlisted only to escape from prison life, and readily deserted when they reached the front, having no interest in the cause for which they were fighting. From 1811 onward desertion, not at all usual in the early years of the Legion, became very common, and plunder and misconduct (previously very rare) were also rife. Matters became still worse when, later in the war, German recruits of any sort became so hard to obtain that Poles, Illyrians, and miscellaneous foreigners of any sort[235] were drafted out to fill the shrinking ranks. But the splendid Hanoverian officers still continued to get good service out of a rank and file that was no longer so homogeneous or loyal as it had been when the war began, and the regiments of the German Legion, the cavalry in especial, continued to be among Wellington’s most trusted troops. The charge of Bock’s Heavy Dragoons at Garcia Hernandez, on the day after Salamanca, was, as has been already stated, considered by Foy to have been the most brilliant and successful cavalry attack made in the whole Peninsular War. After the peace of 1814 all the “mongrels” were discharged, and the officers and native-born Hanoverian rank and file became the nucleus on which the new Royal Army of Hanover was built up. The fact that the aliens had been discharged in 1814 was the cause of all the K.G.L. battalions appearing at Waterloo in the following year with very small effectives, in no case reaching 500 of all ranks.
Another foreign corps which served under Wellington from the end of 1810 till 1814 had an origin and a history much resembling that of the German Legion. This was the Brunswick Oels Jägers, whose history starts from 1809. The hard-fighting Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, the nephew of George III., had made a gallant diversion in Northern Germany during the Wagram Campaign. At the head of a small body of adventurers, he had thrown himself into the middle of Jerome Bonaparte’s Kingdom of Westphalia, and had stirred up an insurrection there, particularly in his own old hereditary states. He was joined by several thousands of patriotic volunteers, and inflicted a series of small defeats on the Westphalians. But surrounded in the end by overwhelming numbers of enemies, he cut his way to the sea, and embarked the remnants of his followers aboard English ships at Brake on the Frisian coast. The British Government at once offered to take the refugees into its service, and from them organized the Brunswick Oels Jäger and Hussar regiments, whose black uniform reproduced that of the duke’s old troops.
The Brunswick Oels Jägers
The kernel of this corps was originally excellent—the officers were North-Germans, largely Prussians, who had risked their lives by joining an insurrection contrary to the orders of their sovereign, and could never return to their homes: while the rank and file had been patriotic volunteers. But, like the German Legion, the Brunswick regiment could find no more recruits of this sort when it had left Germany, and soon had to depend for the continuance of its existence on the men in the English prison camps, who could be induced to buy a release from confinement by enlisting in the British service. It is clear that the German Legion got the best of these turncoats, and that the worst fell to the lot of the Brunswick corps. Not only Germans but Poles, Swiss, Danes, Dutch, and Croats were drafted into it. They were a motley crew, much given to desertion—on several occasions large parties went off together. One great court-martial in 1811 sat on ten Brunswick Oels deserters in a body, and ordered four to be shot and the rest to be flogged. Such men had all the vices of the mercenary, though in time of battle they displayed many of the virtues. Their officers had a hard task to keep them together, and they could never be trusted at the outposts. But the regiment was full of good shots and bold adventurers, and furnished several of the detached rifle companies with which Wellington strengthened the light infantry of his brigades.
There was, however, one foreign regiment which was even more tiresome to manage than the Black Brunswickers. This was the Chasseurs Britanniques, a corps formed early in the Revolutionary War from French royalists, and taken into the British Service in 1801. It was recruited entirely from deserters of all sorts when it came out to Portugal in the spring of 1811. At absconding it was far worse than the Brunswickers—the latter were raised from many races, but at least they were not born Frenchmen as were the most important section of the Chasseurs. A glance down the names of the rank and file of the corps seems to show that after Frenchmen the next most important section were Italians, and that there were a few Poles and some Swiss, the latter supplying the men with Teutonic names. It seems to have been the working rule with the officers who accepted volunteers from the prison-camps to draft French and Italians into the Chasseurs, while Germans of all sorts went into the Legion or the Brunswick Corps, and Swiss partly into the Chasseurs, partly into Watteville’s old Swiss regiment: Poles and Croats went anywhere. Now a German prisoner who volunteered into the British service might do so from patriotic motives, and make an excellent soldier. A Swiss or an Italian or an Illyrian could not be very heavily blamed for desertion—he had been conscribed, and sent to fight for Napoleon, in a quarrel that was not his own. But the French deserter was no longer an old royalist, like the emigré soldiers of 1794, but one of two things. Either he was a man who enlisted in the Chasseurs simply to get a chance of deserting back to his own friends, or else he was a mauvais sujet, a man without patriotic feeling or morality, who was ready to fight against his own countrymen for pay or plunder. Both classes were amply represented: the former fled back to the French ranks when they could, often taking valuable information with them. The latter were the worst class of mercenaries, since they had no inspiring cause to keep them true to their colours, while individually they were for the most part bad characters who had been the curse of their regiments while in the French service.
The Chasseurs Britanniques
The unenviable task of keeping together this body of deserters and adventurers fell to a body of officers who were almost without exception furious French royalists, the second generation of the emigrés. They looked upon the war with Bonaparte as a family feud, in which they fought under any colours (many of their kin were in the Russian or the Austrian, or the Spanish service) in order to avenge the death of Louis XVI., the atrocities of the Terror, or the Massacres of Quiberon. With old loyalty to the Bourbons, and personal hatred for the new French régime as their inspiration, they were fierce and desperate fighters. They kept the miscellaneous horde committed to their charge under an iron discipline, and used the lash freely. All that their personal courage could accomplish was done, to make the Chasseurs an efficient fighting force. But they could not stop desertion, nor frequent misconduct. The most astonishing court-martial in the war was that held on October 5, 1812, upon no less than 18 Chasseurs who had deserted in a body, two corporals and 16 men, of whom all but two bore Italian names.[236] This was only the largest case of a constant series of defections. The regiment melted away whenever it came near the French lines, and Wellington had a standing order that it must never be trusted with the outposts. Yet as a fighting body it had no bad record—as witness Fuentes de Oñoro and many other fields. This was the work of the zealous service of its officers—and was indeed a wonderful tour de force. The material with which they had to work was detestable.
These were the only foreign corps, strictly speaking, in Wellington’s army, but there were two more units which had a large, indeed a preponderating, German element in them, though they were numbered in the British line. These were the 5/60th, the rifle battalion of the “Royal Americans,” and the 97th, a single-battalion corps which started its existence as Stuart’s “Minorca Regiment,” but got a place in the British line in 1804 as the “Queen’s Germans.” Neither of these battalions were purely German either in officers or men: of the 5/60th the disembarkation roll on its original landing in Portugal shows eighteen officers with German and ten with British names.[237] The colonel, De Rottenbourg, was a foreigner, but the second in command, Davy, an Englishman. The British element was not proportionally so strong in the rank and file at the commencement of the war, but was apparently increasing as it went on. English and Irish recruits were drafted in, in order that such a fine corps might not be spoilt with the bad class of German recruit such as was alone procurable in 1812 or 1813. When the corps returned from the Peninsula in 1814 it had only nine officers with German names and twelve with British, and I fancy the balance in the rank and file between the nationalities had changed in the same way. When amalgamated with the 1/60th, after the end of the war it had certainly 400 British to something under 300 Germans in its ranks.
This was a most distinguished corps: the green-coated rifle companies which it supplied to many brigades of the Peninsular Army were universally praised for their cool courage and admirable marksmanship. The battalion had very few deserters save for one period in 1808–9, when it had received a batch of recruits from Junot’s Army of Portugal, who proved unsatisfactory. It would be an absolute insult to the 5/60th to class them with the Brunswickers or the Chasseurs Britanniques.
The 97th being a single-battalion corps, with nothing to maintain it but a depôt which could only collect German recruits in the same fashion as the K.G.L., wasted down to a very small remnant after two years of war, and was sent back to England in 1811, with a handsome epitaph of praise by Wellington. It never got to the front again, remained at home on a very weak establishment, and was disbanded at the end of the war. Like the 5/60th it was not wholly German; among the officers we find individuals with British names like Carter, Biscoe, Wilson, Lyon. Its colonel and one of its two majors were English, and there was a proportion of non-Germans among its rank and file. Its Peninsular record if short was distinguished.