BRITISH OTHER RANKS IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS - PART ONE
The past few weeks’ essays have looked at how the British Army found it’s officers. Now I should like to examine how it filled its ranks.
The British army has never found it easy to recruit, but although there was no conscription for the regular army, that is not to say that there were not other means of compulsion – many of them economic. The authorities had to rely on persuasion, and occasionally coercion, to attract sufficient men to fill the number of units needed to fight the war. Britain had an empire, which needed garrisons spread all over the world, so the army was always, on paper at least, larger than that required solely to fight the French. Recruiting was not, like now, a central responsibility, but was devolved to regiments, which adopted a number of ways of enticing men to join. The simplest, and most common, method was to send recruiting parties round the towns and villages to appeal to patriotism, greed, escapism, love of adventure or simple economics in order to find the number of men needed. Each party would normally consist of a sergeant, a drummer and two or three old soldiers, with an officer in overall command for the county.
One of the most common myths about the British army of the period is that its ranks were filled by criminals, ne’er-do-wells, simpletons and others from the lowest strata of society, lured into the service when drunk or deceived into accepting the king’s shilling by subterfuge. While there were undoubtedly some of those types in each regiment, there were also men who were motivated by the attractions of a military life, the prospect of adventure or who wanted to see the world. Recruiting parties did frequent the ale houses because that was the social centre of the life of those whom they hoped to enlist, and there were certainly cases of men being plied with drink to persuade them to join. The qualifications were relatively few: the man must not already be in the Army of the Reserve (Militia, Volunteers, Fencibles, Yeomanry), be no older than thirty-five for the line infantry and cavalry, and twenty-five for the Guards and the Artillery, and at least five feet four inches tall (five feet eight inches for the Guards and Artillery). Within twenty-four hours of a man agreeing to enlist, he had to be taken before a magistrate and declare that he wished to do so of his own free will, that the decision was taken when sober and that he had not been subject to any threats. This was one of the reforms put in place by the Duke of York to stamp out old practices such as the slipping of a coin into a man’s beer tankard so that he had in law ‘taken the shilling’ and had therefore enlisted, or the getting of a man so drunk that the recruiting sergeant could claim he had agreed to enlist despite the man having no recollection of it.
Once the man had confirmed that he really did want to be a soldier, he had to be passed by the doctor. The medical requirements were lax in the extreme and while the potential recruit was supposed to be examined for all sorts of ailments, including ophthalmia, ruptures, rheumatics and ‘damaged limbs’, many of the conditions that would bar a man from joining now – poor eyesight, deafness, flat feet, lack of intelligence, wetting the bed et cetera et cetera – were passed over, with the only medical requirement stringently applied being that the man had to have four front teeth, two on the top and two on the bottom. This was because the loading drill for the musket required the ripping open of the cartridge with the teeth. If a man did not have any front teeth, he could not load a musket and was therefore useless. In an age when dental hygiene was hardly thought of and the cure for toothache was to pull out the offending tooth, young men with few or no teeth were common. Even with medical examinations that were cursory, up to 30 per cent of volunteers during the period were rejected for medical reasons. The population of the British Isles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was inherently unhealthy.
Once past the magistrate and the doctor, the man could then enlist for either seven years or twenty-one, the seven-year option being a wartime-only concession from 1811. It is an indication of the insecurity of civilian life felt by potential recruits of the time that between 1811 and the end of the war in 1815 only 10 per cent signed for the shorter period. The recruit was entitled to a bounty of ten guineas (£10.50) if he signed for seven years and fourteen guineas (£14.70) if he signed for twenty-one. Two guineas was paid once the man signed, or made his mark, the rest when he arrived at the training depot or his regiment. Recruiters had to keep an eye out for the ‘bounty jumpers’, men who took the two guineas and then disappeared, to perform the same trick with another recruiting party. Those who were caught were tried by court martial (as they had signed they were subject to military law) and those who had pushed their luck too many times risked being executed by firing squad.
Many of the recruits – perhaps most – did come from the lower orders of society but that did not make them bad soldiers, and nor does it now. Men from an environment with no structure welcome boundaries; they like to know where the line is drawn, what they are permitted to do and what is forbidden. Men rejected by society, men who could not find a job in civilian life, men desperately trying to eke out an existence at a time of economic retrenchment, all found that the army became their family: if nobody else wanted them, at least the army did. Men performed their duties – and in the final analysis stood and died in the ranks – not for king and country, for king and country had done nothing for them, but for the regiment, for their mates, for their own officers whom they knew and trusted, and out of sheer professional pride.
That said, there were undoubtedly a proportion of real bad hats, men who were incorrigible and who could only be kept under some sort of control by brutal discipline and frequent application of the lash. John Colborne, who served throughout the Peninsular War and at Waterloo in command of the 52nd Light Infantry, thought that there were around fifty men in every battalion who were hardened criminals, some of whom would have been given the choice by the magistrates of joining the army or going to jail, or were drunkards, thieves, smugglers and forgers and similar, incapable of reform. These, he said, were the men who initiated every act of vandalism, who instigated the looting, who bullied and exploited the local peasantry and whose example led otherwise well behaved soldiers into crime . Sometimes ex-criminals could be an asset – poachers were much in demand to snare rabbits and catch birds when rations were short, and when Wellington discovered that on advancing into France in 1814 the French would not accept Spanish silver dollars, he was able to find forty ‘coiners’ (forgers of the currency, a capital offence) from the ranks who could melt down Spanish coins and produce French silver five-franc pieces, so accurately that even today an expert cannot tell their products from the genuine article. But most military crime had – and still has – its origin in the over-consumption of alcohol.
Your explanation of why soldiers joined is almost exactly the same as India. Martial glory is a famously helpful recruiter, though I have come across Zamindars persuading their tenants to join up