Forward into Battle Page 5
To the right of Maitland Major-General Adam faced the advancing French with the 1st Battalion of the 52nd Regiment supported by some riflemen. He afterwards explained that ‘It was not judged expedient to receive this attack, but to move forward the brigade and assail the enemy, instead of waiting to be assailed.20
There followed an attack which must have been almost identical to Walker’s at Vimeiro. The 52nd swung forward its right flank, refused its left, and charged in with cheers and a volley. The flank of the enemy column put out a damaging fire while the manoeuvre was under way; but as soon as the British came to the assault the whole mass turned tail and ran.
On Maitland’s left Sir Colin Halkett’s Brigade had received a terrible battering during the campaign, and was reduced from four battalions to two weakened composite ones – the 73/30th, and the 69/33rd. The latter unit was apparently involved in the outskirts of Maitland’s battle at one point, yet it later gave a volley and made a charge in cooperation with the 73/30th against another enemy column. This French unit ran away with ‘inexplicable’ suddenness, and confirmed Major Macready of the 30th in his opinion that:
All firing beyond one volley in a case where you must charge, seems only to cause a useless interchange of casualties, besides endangering the steadiness of a charge to be undertaken in the midst of a sustained file fire, when a word of command is hard to hear.21
After their successful attack, however, there was a certain amount of confusion within Halkett’s Brigade, as there was also among the Brunswickers on their left flank. The inclination to retire was nevertheless eventually overcome, and a line was consolidated. Desultory long range shots were then exchanged for a while until a new French column attack appeared to be in preparation. This threat never actually materialised, and was finally chased away by the combined effects of an advance by the Dutch-Belgians from behind Halkett, ‘waving their shakoes on the ends of their bayonets’ by the forward movement of allied cavalry; and by the spread of despondency among the French following the defeat of their other attacks.
The Guard attack at Waterloo.
This group of actions illustrates quite neatly the variations in technique which were available to British infantry, and it confirms our impression that the bayonet counter-attack loomed large in their thinking. Macready’s comments are particularly interesting, since they emphasise one of the great weaknesses of sustained volley fire. This was its tendency to degenerate into a ragged ‘fire at will’ after the first command volley. When this happened the fire became very hard to stop, and words of command were drowned by the din. At the Battle of New Orleans early in 1815 General Pakenham was killed while unsuccessfully trying to make his storming parties cease fire and move forward. His fall, in fact, served only as a signal for the redoubling of the fire. At the assault on Buenos Aires in 1807, equally, some of the attacking forces disobeyed their orders to move forward without loading, and halted to fire. ‘From that moment their advance was at an end’, as one report put it.
Major Patterson, who served with the 50th in the Peninsula, made a similar point:
Inexperienced officers have repeatedly given orders to commence a fire, without either judgment or consideration as to whether or not it was the proper time to open a fusilade. This was their fault and not the men’s. However, the mischief to which it tended was, that after the first command was given, the soldiers of themselves, taking out a sort of carte blanche, blazed away, in the most independent manner, in all directions, until at length the utmost skill and energy of the most active officers was baffled, in their efforts to controul (sic) them; and when the ammunition was most required they found it was expended to little purpose, beyond that of raising noise and smoke.22
A number of British officers did come out of the Napoleonic Wars with the idea that a formal contest of musketry, as recommended by Dundas, was the best tactic; but it would seem that rather more took the opposite view, and put their faith in a quick volley followed by loud cheering and a bayonet charge. Believers in this doctrine were not deterred by the argument that only firepower killed people in battle, since they were less concerned with killing the enemy than with destroying the cohesion of his units and chasing him away from the places where he might be dangerous.
There is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that bayonets caused very few casualties in battle compared with the great majority of wounds which were inflicted by shot and shell. There are also remarkably few accounts of bayonets actually being crossed by two forces which were facing each other. If this happened at all it would normally be in circumstances where neither side could easily escape, such as in buildings, fortifications, sunken lanes or in a night surprise. There are admittedly several claims that genuine bayonet fighting took place in the open, as at Maida, 1806; Rolica and Vimeiro, 1808; Busaco, 1810; Barossa, 1811; or at Maya and Roncesvalles, 1813. In none of these cases, however, were very many troops involved, or, indeed, are the accounts themselves particularly conclusive. It seems that in the close fighting at Maya, for example, some of the troops preferred to throw rocks from a distance rather than close for true bayonet fencing.
We can therefore quickly dismiss the romantic notion that Napoleonic soldiers in open warfare habitually ‘… battered each other with musket butts and bare hands, they stabbed and clawed …’ (this from a description of the firefight at Albuera which appeared as recently as 1973!). If they came close enough to physically stab their enemies it was usually in pursuit of a beaten force, or to finish off wounded enemy soldiers. One officer of Pack’s Brigade at Waterloo did not believe that these latter practices took place at all, although his other comments ring true enough. He said that:
With regard to any ‘bayonet conflict’, I saw none. We appeared to charge, and disperse, and make a road through the [French] columns – the usual result of the British charge. This accounts for the absence of bayonet wounds, on which Colonel Mitchell builds his theory of the uselessness of that weapon. The weaker body generally gives way: after which what British soldier would bayonet a flying enemy?23
One answer to his final question is that at Busaco the 52nd Regiment turned an enemy column off the top of the ridge, and then ‘kept firing and bayonetting them until we reached the bottom’.24 Something very similar must have happened in many other battles, although it is not usually described in much detail by participants.
If the success of a bayonet attack could scarcely be measured in terms of the casualties inflicted on the enemy, however, there was at least one solid index of victory which had more than a passing interest for the Napoleonic soldier. This can be summed up in the word ‘booty’. When a body of infantry turned in flight each man would normally hasten his departure by discarding his – highly plunderable – heavy equipment. Thus when Pack’s Brigade at Waterloo was at one stage brought face to face with a French column:
… some British officer called ‘Charge! Charge!’ (he was directly knocked over with the word in his mouth), on which the head of the French column got confused, threw down its arms, accoutrements, and knapsacks, and surrendered.25
Many other accounts speak of lines of knapsacks being left on the ground at the spot where a unit had turned tail. These items were an extremely heavy encumberance to movement, and attacking troops might sometimes leave them behind deliberately to facilitate their movements – as Kempt’s men did at Maida, and as the 43rd and 52nd Regiments did on the Bidassoa. Normally, however, they were far too valuable for soldiers to part with except in the direst emergency. They contained food, blankets, spare woollens, and a host of other personal effects which could make life on campaign almost bearable. When a unit involuntarily abandoned its knapsacks, therefore, it was a sure sign that it had been truly beaten.
The champions of firepower are right to say that musketry was more lethal than bayonets; but this is not to say that it was more decisive. The most damaging form of musketry, after all, was aimed skirmish fire: a type of action which was specifically designed for attrition and
not for reaching a decision. Troops formed into close order found it much harder to aim effectively than dispersed skirmishers, and it was only rarely that they were expected to aim at all. Volley fire was thus an extremely wasteful process. Most Napoleonic authorities calculated that only something like 0.3 per cent of all musket balls fired would hit anyone in battle. (See discussion in the additional section at the end of this chapter.)
Yet the myth of sustained British volley fire persists, even down to some very anachronistic and inflated claims for the Brown Bess musket itself. Because it fired a slightly heavier ball than the French 1777 musket, some modern commentators have assumed that it must therefore have been a greatly superior weapon. The officer we have quoted from Pack’s Brigade, however, said of the French that:
Their fine, long, light firelocks, with a small bore, are more efficient for skirmishing than our abominably clumsy machine.…
He went on to say that the British muskets were:
… of bad quality; soldiers might be seen creeping about to get hold of the firelocks of the killed and wounded, to try if the locks were better than theirs, and dashing the worst to the ground as if in a rage with it. I believe this was quite common throughout the war in Spain.26
The truth of the matter is that both sides believed their enemy had superior muskets, just as in Vietnam both sides believed the enemy had the better assault rifle. It is only natural, after all, that one should imagine a weapon is more dangerous if it is carried by an enemy rather than by a friend.
The real secret of the British volley was not that it was delivered particularly well or accurately, but rather that it could be delivered at all at such close range: almost at bayonet range, in fact. Waiting without firing until the enemy came close enough to charge must have been a nerve-racking business which tested the coolness and discipline of the troops to the limit. Having delivered the volley, it took yet more steadiness not to reload, but to launch immediately into the assault. Paradoxically, therefore, we can say that it was the British ability not to fire at the wrong moments, rather than their skill in musketry, which enabled them to get the best from their weapons. Other armies fired more and at longer ranges, but found the final result less satisfactory. Colonel Mitchell, for example, said the French were always ready to ‘… faire le coup de fusil, as they termed it, for hours and days together. But who ever saw them await a bayonet onset?’27
But the palm must go to the Spanish at Talavera. Noticing a few enemy horsemen at about a kilometre’s range, the entire Spanish line opened fire with its muskets and then all ran away in panic. They were ‘frightened only by the noise of their own fire’, as Wellington put it. This sort of thing represents the diametrical opposite of what the British could achieve in their controlled counter-charges.
We have now analysed Oman’s theory of British firepower at some length, and found that contrary to expectation it was apparently the French, if anyone, who preferred firing to making a bayonet charge ‘while the English invariably seek to close with their enemy’.28 Insofar as Oman believed the British fought primarily by volleys he was certainly wrong; but we must ask if he was also wrong to deny Colin’s theory, and say that the French did not want to develop a firing line of their own in these battles. It is time now for us to turn to the French side of the hill.
We are much less well served with French eyewitness accounts of tactical actions than with British. The bulk of the French forces, and especially the élite units which tend to produce most memoirs, fought on the ‘Eastern Front’. They came to Spain only for the campaign of 1808–9, when most of the opposing armies were Spanish; and they met the British only in 1815 at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. Remarkably few French generals fought more than one or two battles against the British, so they perhaps thought of those experiences as something of a flash in the pan. Most accounts of their tactical methods gloss hastily over their inglorious performance against Wellington’s infantry, and concentrate on the more successful and important battles fought against the vast armies of Eastern Europe.
Another factor which restricted the debate on minor tactics in the French armies was that the very idea of tactics was conceived on a much more grandiose scale than in the small and closely-knit British force. For a French commander the important thing was to manoeuvre large formations – whole divisions and army corps – into contact with the enemy, whereas the British could afford to give more individual attention to the action of brigades and even single battalions. This meant that the French were thinking of tactics at a higher level than the British, and perhaps tended to be rather slap-dash about the details.
We cannot avoid the impression that there was no French ‘standard procedure’ for minor tactics comparable to the informal British agreement on close range counter-charging. Every French general appears to have experimented with drills and formations of his own, and these were never standardised. Napoleon had intended to produce a manual for tactical guidance around 1812; but this resolution unfortunately became yet another casualty of his Russian campaign. As with the British the only drill book remained based on eighteenth century practice, and was honoured as much in the breach as in the observation.
Some commentators have claimed that the French lack of standardisation in minor tactics was actually a strength, and that it demonstrated the flexibility and professional skill of their generals. The bewildering variety of their formations is hailed as proof of innovative or original thinking, and Napoleon himself is particularly praised for his use of the ‘ordre mixte’. This was a mixture of columns and lines designed to get the best out of both; but one suspects that in practice it more often managed to produce the worst aspects of both. It was rarely seen on the battlefield, for although Napoleon frequently recommended it to his generals they tended to abandon it hastily as soon as he was out of sight.
Praise for these ‘experiments’ in tactics really stems from Bonapartist hero-worship, and has on occasion been linked to such astonishing statements as ‘Wellington was no match for the Emperor as Waterloo proved’.29 If we look at the matter more objectively, however, we can see the French tacticians struggling to evolve methods for manoeuvring formations which were much larger than those envisaged by the 1791 drill book. They actually succeeded in this as far as bringing troops into musket range was concerned, and that was no mean achievement. They failed, however, when it came to the moment of contact itself.
This failure to resolve the problem was noted by the British Colonel Mitchell, writing in 1833. He was amazed that:
… French writers have actually discussed the point, whether columns were intended to fight, or only to move, so that it seems they do not yet know the object of the very formation with which they all but conquered continental Europe.30
A later French authority, Colonel Ardant du Picq, came to the same conclusion. ‘The cavalry has definite tactics;’ he wrote, ‘essentially it knows how it fights; the infantry does not.’31
The French infantry did at least pride itself on the particularly high proportion of officers and NCOs in their battalions, as well as upon the cadres of veterans who set an example to the raw recruits and gave a solid backbone to each unit. This system of leadership was called ‘surveillance’, whereby there were always plenty of old hands to watch over the new arrivals. It was very successful in maintaining the resilience of units which had to be renewed only too often as the wars dragged on; and it quickly inducted fresh troops into the arts of foraging and survival on campaign. Where it was apparently less successful, however, was in the realm of tactics.
Each French regiment usually sent a number of its battalions into action together, so that the regimental commander had several battalion commanders of the rank of major under his hand. This compares unfavourably with the British practice of fielding only one battalion from each regiment, directly under the regimental commander himself. The French system was thus over-officered at company level, but relatively under-officered at the level of battalion command. Regimental commande
rs had too many sub-units, and they were tempted to keep them too closely bunched together in order to maintain personal control. Each sub-unit was also rather too small, since following the decree of 18th February 1808 there were only six companies in each battalion as compared with the British ten. When the wars were over this was a point which attracted a great deal of criticism from French military writers.
Another source of trouble, as both Jomini and Oman pointed out, was that in most of the French battles against continental enemies there had been little call for massed infantry to do very much real fighting at all. Their mere appearance within musket range of the enemy had been sufficient to decide the issue, or if not, there had been adequate supports at hand to bail them out. Massed action by cavalry and artillery was far more a feature of these battles than it was in the Peninsula, and Sergeant Bourgogne said of Borodino, for example, that ‘This, like all our great battles, was won by the artillery.’32 It was noticeable that in Napoleon’s only battle against Wellington, at Waterloo, it was the artillery which decided the timing of the whole action, and cavalry attacks which took up a good half of it.
The superiority enjoyed by the French in their continental battles must have led them to regard infantry attacks as somewhat expendable. They would start by softening up the enemy with artillery and skirmish fire, and then send in a first wave of massed infantry. If this attack failed it would not usually be sent back pell mell, as it would have been by a British counter-charge. Instead, it would be allowed to remain at musket range of the enemy and act as a thickening for the skirmish screen which was already in place. The pressure on the enemy would be increased, even though the attack itself had technically been defeated. The second wave could then be sent in, and if that also failed then the pressure against the enemy would nevertheless have increased yet again, and so on. General Brun de Villeret gives us a description of this process in his ‘Cahiers’. At the Battle of Bautzen in 1813 he was ordered to assault a Russian hill position with two battalions from his brigade. He did so: