French discipline was rarely as rigid as Steuben might have wished. When Napoleon III met Franz Josef of Austria at Villafranca in north Italy in 1859, a French officer noted that while the Austrian hussar escort remained rock-steady, troopers of the Guides, crack light cavalry escorting Napoleon, craned and jostled to get a good view of the two emperors. They were Frenchmen, and that was just what he expected.
Important though the concept of the citizen-soldier was, its practical effects were limited. Even the French soon drew back from democratic notions like electing officers, and although the harsh disciplinary code of the old regime (which had included beating with the flat of a sword, in an effort to produce a punishment that was painful yet not dishonourable) was jettisoned, its replacement was scarcely benign, and miscreants were consigned to the boulet, confinement with a roundshot attached to them by a chain. Napoleon’s ‘iron marshal’, Louis Nicolas Davout, had looters shot, but even this could not restrain his men, and when the French briefly occupied Moscow in 1812 his own quarters were pillaged. However, Napoleonic discipline in general – tough little Davout was something of an exception – was regarded as more relaxed than British. Some French deserters in Spain served with the British (this trade worked both ways, though it was always fatal for a deserter to be captured by his former comrades) but soon re-deserted because they found their new discipline far too severe.35
Napoleonic officers sometimes struck their men like the drillmasters of an earlier generation, yet even here the assault might have a distinctively French edge. During the Champagne campaign of 1814, when the Prussians, Russians and Austrians were closing in on Napoleon east of Paris, Captain Charles Parquin of the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard hit a corporal across the back with the flat of his sabre when he found that he had dismounted against his express orders. The man spun round, pulled open his coat to show his Legion of Honour, grasped his sabre, and said: ‘Captain, I have served my country and my Emperor for twenty-two years. I won this cross two years ago and now, in a matter of seconds, you have dishonoured me for ever!’ Parquin – ‘appalled at having lost my temper with an old soldier’ – replied: ‘Listen, corporal. If I were your equal in rank I should not hesitate to give you satisfaction, for I am not afraid of you. But I am your captain and I am apologising to you. Will you shake hands?’ The corporal, declaring that there was no ill-feeling on his part, shook hands, and Parquin records that: ‘Half an hour later he was sharing my modest supper which was, none the less, made all the more appetising by a bottle of brandy.’36
The concept of the citizen-soldier made few inroads into the British regular army, although it found more fertile ground when part-time Volunteer and Yeomanry units were raised during the French Revolutionary Wars. Some units balloted the whole corps to select officers, who were then duly commissioned by the lord-lieutenant of their county. It was a common practice for units ‘to pool their government remuneration and distribute it evenly among all ranks…’37
The second major influence on the armies of the period was initially tactical, although, as it questioned many of the assumptions dear to apostles of brick-dust and pipe-clay, it became philosophical, political and organisational too. There were times, especially in forests, woods or on broken ground, when serried ranks and measured volleys were simply inappropriate. European armies discovered the need for light troops in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and, providentially, discovered some of the men to meet the need in exactly the same place. Having discovered them, they then proceeded to dress them and drill them until they lost some of those qualities that had made them such admirable light troops in the first place.
Hussars, light cavalry introduced into the French army in 1692, were modelled on wild horsemen from the great plain of Hungary. However, the efforts of military tailors speedily made them heavier, first converting the fur-trimmed cap to the towering busby with the cap itself surviving only as the vestigial busby bag hanging down on one side. They then made the dolman (short jacket) and breeches skin-tight, and eventually converted the pelisse, initially an extra jacket handily slung from the shoulders, into a relic as vestigial as the busby bag but a good deal more inconvenient.
The Austrians exacted universal compulsory conscription on the Military Border of Croatia and Slavonia, raising, by the 1790s, seventeen regiments of Grenzer infantry. They were traditionally trained as light infantry – or, rather, untrained, for it was believed that much of their value sprang from their experience of hewing a living as free peasants in a tough border area. However, conventionally-minded senior officers increased the amount of formal training given to the Grenzers, effectively converting them into second-grade line infantry, leading Major General Joseph Klein to complain that men with less formal training had provided ‘a much better light infantry than the present regulated and drilled Grenzer.’38 It is no surprise that the first bout of Austrian military reforms in 1798–9 included withdrawing Grenzer regiments from the line and combining small sharpshooter and free corps units into fifteen light battalions. The second reform period continued the movement, but it was clear to promising young commanders that Austrian skirmishers were still too rigidly controlled to take on the French with confidence. Something precious had been drilled out of the army, and as late as 1813 the future Field-Marshal Radetzky admitted that ‘fighting en tirailleur should be done only in very restricted fashion, because neither we nor the Russians have mastered the manière de tirailleur.’39
However, at the height of their powers, during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the Grenzer had been formidable light infantry. Hussars and Croats formed a screen which Frederick the Great’s intelligence agents found hard to penetrate; they snapped up isolated detachments and cruelly galled the Prussian line if it came within reach of the covered positions they favoured. At Kolin, in 1759, Croats lurking in a cornfield provoked an engagement which soon got out of hand and ended in what was intended as a flanking attack heading, disastrously, for the front of the Austrian line. In 1758 Frederick told General Philip Yorke that ‘he was more upon his guard against them than against any other troops…that it was impossible for them [the Prussians] to oppose anything equal to them in that kind, and that he did not like to be always sacrificing his regular infantry in that kind of war.’40 Lacking native light infantry of his own, Frederick raised ‘free battalions’ from disparate regions of his empire, but it was not a happy experiment: one battalion murdered its commanding officer and deserted en masse, complete with its pay chest and a cannon.
The British army first discovered the need for light troops in the forests of North America. Hostilities between Britain and France had begun there in 1754 without formal declaration of war. This was partly because of friction between the thirteen British colonies and the smaller French colonial population, chiefly concentrated in the St Lawrence Valley between Quebec and Montreal. The French had built a string of forts to prevent British penetration, and Major General Edward Braddock made for one of them, Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), at the forks of the Ohio where the Monongahela and Allegheny meet. He had 1,200 men, including regulars from the 44th and 48th Foot – both regiments brought up to full strength by drafting in men from other units and less than cohesive in consequence – and some American irregulars, the young George Washington, of the Virginia Militia, among them.
Near the Monongahela River, Braddock was ambushed by a smaller force of Frenchmen and Indians. The battle was not wholly one-sided, for the French commander was killed by the first volley: most of his men fled and the Indians were only kept in the battle by the courage of the French officers leading them. But after the first shock – and there were rarely times when encountering the rolling volleys of redcoats in line was not a shock – the Indians and remaining French steadied to their task, firing from cover, where they presented poor targets, and they concentrated on the enemy officers. Braddock lost 63
