Fusiliers (52 page)
The duke’s letters home to George III became increasingly breathless with their expressions of Prussophilia. The experiment of the twenty-nine battalions in line ‘never was attempted before … it succeeded surprisingly well’; a similarly gargantuan manoeuvre of thirty-five squadrons of cavalry produced a declaration that ‘their cavalry is infinitely superior to anything I ever saw … there was not a single horse out of place’. The Duke of York faithfully echoed Dundas rather than Cornwallis in accepting that such vast movements were impracticable in battle, but were enormously impressive, a pattern for all of Europe.
Cornwallis, however, had already spotted that the Prussian infantry were ‘much slower in their movements’ than the similarly trained Hessians used in America and he knew well enough that even those troops had been regarded as quite leaden in battle. Dundas himself
conceded that 19 August’s great advance of twenty-nine battalions had been preceded by one hour and twenty minutes of forming up. What exactly did Dundas or the Prussian king expect any vaguely enterprising enemy to do during all this dressing of ranks and correcting of lines? They would either strike first or leave the field if they wished to avoid an engagement (as Washington had done during the early years of the American war).
With the conclusion of the 1785 Prussian manoeuvres it was clear to Cornwallis and others that they were losing the argument about the future training of the British army. The Duke of York had spent five years being schooled in the European art of war, taking lessons at the feet of the Duke of Brunswick and ‘Old Fritz’, Frederick the Great. If his Germanophilia was natural under these circumstances, Colonel Dundas exhibited something altogether less pleasant. He had been quartermaster general in Ireland since 1779, and had grown increasingly contemptuous of officers coming back from America or the Caribbean thinking they had discovered some great new secret of war. Dundas could not accept that the trend, begun by General William Howe in 1776, to get the whole of his army to adopt light infantry tactics had produced an army capable of fast, fluid movement.
The bitterness of Dundas towards officers returning from America, where he never served, could be gauged in the following passage that he wrote about light infantry: ‘Instead of being considered as an accessory to the battalion, they have become almost the principal feature of our army, and have almost put grenadiers out of fashion. The showy exercise, the airy dress, the independent modes they have adopted have caught the minds of young officers, and made them imagine that they ought to be general and exclusive.’
Dundas had turned the Irish garrison into a bastion of reaction against the ‘American style’ of fighting. He organised drills of his own at Phoenix Park in the early 1780s to demonstrate that buttoning up, in dress, movement or attitude, was the key to success. The emergence of the German or Continental school was a turning back of the clock which naturally upset those officers whose hard-earned experience convinced them that the 1781 army in America was infinitely more effective than the one that had opened the campaigns at Boston. One veteran of Burgoyne’s Saratoga army, serving in Canada in the summer of 1785, seeing a regiment just arrived from Dundas’s Irish establishment, wrote sadly that the fresh corps were ‘all young men,
great martinets, but so completely Germanised both in dress and manoeuvres that it was some time before we could think them our brother soldiers’.
In the months and years that followed the Duke of York’s trip to Prussia, Dundas won the battle to define the army’s future drill and tactics. In 1788 he published
Principles of Military Movements, Chiefly
Applied to Infantry
, a blueprint for the Prussification of the British army. The following year a modified version was issued in Dublin as official regulations for the army, and in 1791 a London edition completed the process. Dundas insisted that the Prussian system had allowed Frederick to achieve ‘actions not to be paralleled in antiquity’. The American war, he maintained, had been a one-off due to its lack of heavy cavalry and wooded terrain. Burying the experience of the American veterans was actually a matter of life and death for Dundas, as he wrote: ‘There is a great danger in an
irregular
system becoming the
established
one of a British army; and the most fatal consequences may one day ensue.’
Earl Cornwallis was removed from the scene of these debates to the chief command of British forces in India. As he departed, even some of those who had fought under him were converted to the new orthodoxies. Colonel Banastre Tarleton, for example, in publishing his history of the southern campaigns several years before, had already suggested that his defeat at Cowpens cold be partially blamed on ‘the loose manner of forming which had always been practised by the King’s troops in America’. General Henry Clinton had always had his doubts, too, that such tactics would work on European battlefields with their abundant cavalry. There was also a feeling that what might vanquish a bunch of half-trained rebels could hardly deliver results against the European masters of war. Had not Yorktown demonstrated the superiority of French arms?
There was, though, a secret of the American and West Indies campaigns that those around the Duke of York simply did not understand. Colonel Dundas might have grasped it, had he wanted to, since there were officers on the Irish establishment who were witness to the one or two occasions where formed bodies of French infantry (as opposed to the proficient engineers and gunners who had won Yorktown) had tested themselves against the redcoats. In these rare moments, the ‘flimsy’ British line had caused the French horrendous casualties. The French had been beaten back from the British defences
at Savannah in October 1779. Before that, in December 1778, French troops had suffered an even worse defeat on the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Advancing on the peninsula of La Vigie, they had been engaged by the 5th Foot and some British light infantry. The British ‘gave their fire and retired’, wrote the Serjeant Major of the 5th, ‘but doing it quite in a light infantry style, dispersing, forming again in small parties according to the advantages of trees or ground, a style which [the French] since confessed they were perfectly unacquainted with.’ After this initial blooding, the disordered French threw themselves into disastrously unsuccessful assaults on a British fieldwork.
When using old tactics, quite similar to those being reintroduced by David Dundas in 1788, the 5th had suffered more heavily than any other regiment at Bunker Hill. Adopting the ‘light infantry style’, they had humbled the French three years later. Opening up formations, using cover, retiring at the run, had all given the redcoats the ability to pour fire on the packed French ranks without allowing them much of a chance to hit back. Serving later in Ireland, the 5th were expected to return to the formalism of a Prussian system. The American tragedy was complete, for no matter whether it was the veterans of St Lucia or men of the 23rd who had smashed the rebels at Camden by using light infantry tactics, they were told that none of this really mattered. As Dundas’s new regulations circulated in the army, events in France were taking a course that would ultimately prove just how mistaken the Duke of York and those around him had been. What was more, it would take a veteran of the 23rd’s American campaigns to show them.
TWENTY-FOUR
Or How Harry Calvert Made a Difference
The final days of June 1794 were fraught with a kind of crazy energy for the British army campaigning in the Low Countries. They marched each day in a scorching heat, their parched, dust-choked odyssey ending on many evenings with thunder, lightning and cloudbursts. The trajectory of this army was from west to east, away from the borders of Revolutionary France, towards Holland, where their commanders determined to make a stand on the far side of the River Scheldt.
This army of twenty-three British battalions under the command of the Duke of York was part of a larger coalition assembled to restore Europe to some kind of order after the French had overthrown and executed their king. But the campaign was not going well, for the combined armies had suffered a heavy defeat at Tourcoing in May. Following this setback, the Austrians, who had the chief command of the allied armies, had decided to abandon Flanders, their sovereign’s possession on France’s borders. A retreat by forces on each side of the Duke of York’s contingent made it impossible for the British to stand alone, so by a series of forced marches they were flying in front of the French, passing signposts to places like Mons and Waterloo. These were frenetic, suspicious days in British headquarters, for the duke and his staff felt that every gain their soldiers had made during more than one year’s campaigning was being thrown away by Austrian cowardice. Some found the abandonment of Flanders so perplexing that they suspected some kind of treason in the Habsburg court.
British headquarters lodged itself for several nights in the village of Renaix, a weaving town nestled in the rolling country of that region.
The main square that normally thronged with cloth merchants and those who sold the fruit of that fertile land was, on the evening of 1 July, a scene of military comings and goings. Staff officers cantered to and fro, columns of marching troops passed through, generals with staff in tow made their dignified entrance.
The Duke of York returned that evening from a conference at Braine l’Alleud with the Austrian commanders, who signalled their intent to make further retreats. At their quarters, they found that Earl Cornwallis had just arrived. He had lately commanded British troops in India but been called back to Europe by a government nervous that reverses in the Low Countries were exposing the king’s son at the head of the British corps to public ridicule.
More than twelve years had passed since Yorktown, and Cornwallis’s reputation within the British army was high. The King had made it clear upon the general’s return from America that he did not hold the earl to blame for the defeat in Virginia. In 1782 George wrote to Cornwallis noting his faith that ‘attachment to my person, to your country and to the military profession are the motives of your actions’. In order to defend his wider reputation, Cornwallis presented his side of the Yorktown story to various friends, prompting a public exchange of self-justificatory pamphlets with General Sir Henry Clinton. Cornwallis, above all, was a fighter, and it was his ‘zeal and activity’ that caused his stock to remain sound both at court and at the army’s headquarters at Horse Guards. During campaigns in India, their faith had been validated, since Cornwallis had won some important victories and extended British control.
When the earl arrived at Renaix, it was therefore as a commander of considerable reputation who might see how the situation could be rescued. Few people were more pleased to see him than Harry Calvert, who as a teenage subaltern in the 23rd had benefited from the general’s kind condescension during the Carolina campaigns. The young officer, indeed, almost idolised his former commander, remembering how well their little army had endured every hardship. Calvert had written to his sister that Cornwallis was ‘born to be the honour and salvation of the country he belongs to’. The general’s arrival in Flanders was ‘the only good news I can send you’. Calvert knew that his old chief had been sent because of the Ministry’s lack of faith in his new one, the Duke of York. The young staff officer felt that public criticism of the duke had been unfair, for Calvert opined, ‘I had rather that [York] should have
the approbation of that great and good man [ie Cornwallis] than of any other on this side of the grave.’
During the retrograde marches of the summer of 1794, a depressed Calvert had written: ‘I found myself in a situation which it has been my good fortune never to have been in before – namely in a beaten army.’ This, if any further proof were needed of Calvert’s reverence for the army that marched through the Carolinas in 1780–81 and the man who led it, showed that he never considered his former regiment to have been ‘beaten’ in America. The defeat at Yorktown was one thing, but the Americans had not broken them on the battlefield or ever driven them across the country in the way the French had in 1794. It was this officer’s view indeed, that the Low Countries campaign marked a low ebb for the British army, for he considered numerous problems of recruiting, administration and tactics to have produced an army worse than the one in America. In the view of many officers Cornwallis might be the saviour of the Low Countries army.
The Harry Calvert of the Flanders campaign was a more formidable figure than the callow subaltern who had joined his regiment in New York in 1779. In 1794 he was thirty-one years old, and his father, always anxious to buy his boy past any obstacle that might be created by the brewer’s trade, had in 1790 purchased Harry a commission in the Coldstream Guards. Under their curious system of seniority, Calvert’s Guards’ captaincy ranked him as the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the rest of the army. The one-time Fusilier enjoyed other advantages too: his uncle was a Member of Parliament, part of the political class. Calvert’s intelligence and fluent grasp of French had marked him out in 1793 for secondment to the Duke of York’s staff. Once there, he had soon impressed his royal patron and was entrusted with ever more sensitive and important missions.
