voice against the din, the colonel gives a long drawnout preparatory command of ‘Thirty-Seventh’ and follows it three paces later, with ‘Halt’. The drums cease on the instant, lending emphasis to the order, and the battalion stands steady, looking down, across open ground speckled with scrub oak and cork trees, at the head of the oncoming column only 300 yards away. The colonel rides round the right flank of his battalion, and takes station just behind the colours. It is not until the French have come another hundred yards, though now, very evidently, a little more slowly than before, as the moral effect of the line’s steadiness makes itself felt, that he shouts ‘Front rank: Make ready’. The drummers beat the short roll of the ‘preparative’; captains step back behind the second rank; the front rank’s muskets come up, still perpendicular, but now with the left hand to the walnut fore-end and the right just below the lock, with those callused thumbs resting on the flint-gripping jaws of the musket’s cock. The soldiers of the second rank step half a pace forward and to their right, in a movement called ‘locking on,’ so that, when their turn comes to fire, they will have space to do so.
The column is now less than a hundred yards away. Many features of its members can be clearly seen now. Its colonel has the cross of the Legion of Honour, and is having trouble with his horse, but keeps it going straight with short reins and sharp kicks. His officers and NCOs are desperately urging their men to close up: ‘Serrez les rangs, serrez!’ For they know what is coming: it is too late – and too close to that line – to meet fire with fire, and so if they are to succeed the sheer momentum of their mass must not be lost. They are only fifty yards away, close enough now to see now that their enemy’s commander has a thin face and a sharp nose, when the command ‘Present…Fire’ rings out The British front rank fires a volley of shattering precision. Its muskets were carefully loaded in safety behind the crest: their flints and priming alike are fresh. Without delay the colonel orders: ‘Front rank: load and prime. Rear rank: Make ready…Present…Fire.’
In just over thirty seconds each rank has fired two volleys, a total of two thousand musket balls at a range so close that even the unreliable Brown Bess musket is hitting a mass target about once in every ten shots. The head of the column falls like corn before the reaper. Its colonel, an attractive target – not least to the man in the round hat, who has his own views on officers, British or foreign – has half a dozen fatal wounds within seconds. As men in the front ranks fall, their comrades further back are exposed to the winnowing blast of musketry. Men trip over the dead and dying. Some, deaf to the shouts of their own officers and NCOs, who know that if they are to win it will be by shock, not fire, stop to fire back, and others strive frantically to position themselves behind those in front.
A few brave souls get as far as the British line. One thrusts hard, musket flung out to the full stretch of his right arm, with all his weight behind it. His bayonet grazes the side of a front-rank man and jams deep in his pack. Before the Frenchman can recover it, the rear-rank man shoots him in the chest from such close range that his coat smoulders. Although the volleys are still quite regular and accurate, there are signs that this will not last; some men fire at threatening close-range targets as they present themselves, and others fire on the word of command; but, almost dazed by the noise and concussion, they seem to have little regard for where their shots are going.
The colonel’s voice and another drum-roll interrupt the firing. ‘Now, Thirty-Seventh, I am about to give the word to charge. Three cheers for the king.’ There are three harsh, barking cheers: on the word ‘Charge…bayonets’ the muskets come down to hip level, held across the body. Then the men are off down the slope, bounding over the dead and dying. There is a brief flurry of bayonet fighting where line meets the wreckage of the column, but most Frenchmen do not stay to meet the steel. A good number, huddling in a nervous clump, surrender. Most surrenders are accepted with good nature, but one man deliberately bayonets a Frenchman who offers no resistance but, stunned by the horror around him, is slow to drop his musket. The rest are away, running, free of musket and pack, and so much faster than their pursuers.
The colours move quickly down the slope, the pale ensign now wild with excitement, his sergeant, pike thrust out in front of them, again urging steadiness, but this time with a different cause. The action has had its tragedies, even for the victors. The king’s colour is now borne by a sergeant and back up the slope, in a thin tide-line of redcoated bodies, its fat-faced ensign lies flat on his back with a blue hole in his forehead and the back blown off his head. There will be a Gloucestershire vicarage for which Christmas will not be the same this year. The surgeon and his mate are busy bandaging and probing. Of the eighteen British wounded five, with bullet-wounds to the abdomen, are probably beyond hope. Three must have smashed limbs amputated, and are more likely to die than survive. The remaining ten have a variety of injuries – one unlucky fellow has had his jaw broken by the French colonel’s horse, kicking out in its death-throes as he rifled its saddlebags – but will live to fight another day.
At the foot of the slope the line rallies on the colours and the companies reform. Private Hobden, face and uniform smutty with powder-smoke, and mouth black with gunpowder from biting open his cartridges, pockets a gold watch and crucifix eased from a Frenchman’s pocket. He has also found a buckwheat pancake in someone’s discarded shako, and chews it quietly as he picks up his dressing, touching elbows to left and right, and squinting up to see the colours catching the first rays of sun to break through the smoke.2
Seven years later, in April 1815, a few weeks before the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was walking in a Brussels park with the radical diarist Thomas Creevey. Creevey asked the Duke how he thought the coming battle would go.
‘By God! I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.’
‘Do you calculate upon any desertion in Bonaparte’s army?’
‘Not a man, from the colonel to the private…We may pick up a marshal or two, perhaps, but not worth a damn.’
‘Do you reckon upon any support from the French king’s troops at Alost?’
‘Oh! Don’t mention such fellowsl No: I think Blücher and I can do the business.’
Just then a lone British infantryman appeared, walking about the park and gawping at the statues: Hobden, perhaps even Sergeant Hobden, although rather less scruffy then when we last met him.
‘There,’ said the Duke, pointing at the red-coated figure. ‘It all depends on that article there whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’3
This book is about ‘that article there’, the redcoated soldier of the British regular army, like Ezekiel Hobden of the 37th Regiment. And it is about Hobden’s father and son as well, for my period opens with the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 and ends with the Indian Mutiny just over a century later. During it the British infantry-man wore a red coat in battle and carried the muzzle-loading flintlock musket known (though the first printed reference to the name is not found till 1785) as Brown Bess. This weapon had several variants. Most encountered today were mass-produced during the Napoleonic Wars, and are the India pattern, introduced into the British service in 1794 by large-scale cession from the East India Company when arms manufacturers, domestic and foreign, were unable to keep pace with the demands of war against Revolutionary France.4 The first Brown Besses appeared in the late 1730s, and the last were carried – although they were by then long obsolete – by some combatants in the Crimean War of 1854–56 and even the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58.
THE
