Death or Victory

by Dan Snow

  Knox reports that these punishments could have the required effect. A few seasons before a soldier of his regiment was found by court martial to be ‘a notorious coward’. He was forced to ride a contraption called the ‘wooden horse’, a cruel instrument in the form of a bench raised too high off the ground for a soldier to rest his feet, which meant that as he sat astride it, his body weight bore down on his testicles. He rode the wooden horse for half an hour a day for six days, ‘with a petticoat on him, a broom in his hand, and a paper pinned to his back, bearing the inscription: Such is the reward of my merit’. The punishment aroused the ‘inexpressible mirth of the whole garrison, and of the women in particular’. In this particular case humiliation led to redemption; from then on the poor man apparently proved himself a ‘remarkable gallant soldier’.27

  Contrary to the depiction of this period in florid historical novels and films, the British soldiery was not a cabal of rapacious criminals, never far from mutiny and held in check only by the threat of Draconian punishment. They certainly had their moments; constant immersion in destructive violence and the prolonged exposure to life-threatening situations mixed with strong alcohol is enough to loosen the hold of civilization over anyone. There was also a small minority of actual criminals who had escaped a long, rotting prison sentence or the gallows by ‘volunteering’ for the army. On the whole, though, it is surprising just how willing the men were to be led into battle, showing great courage and devotion to their officers throughout years of campaigning.

  The massive concentration of men of fighting age in any one place requires strict regulation. Discipline was very harsh but it should be seen in the context of a society that still executed adults and children for a number of crimes and inflicted physical punishments for many others. The notorious ‘Black Act’ of 1723 increased the number of capital crimes by about fifty, most of which dealt with those who sought to interfere with the property of Britain’s booming commercial classes. Large crowds turned out for executions, which in Britain were public until 1868, and the pillorying of homosexuals, who were sometimes stoned to death. Armies are, by their nature, composed of the younger, more aggressive, and often more brutalized members of the society from which they are drawn and it is not surprising that discipline was even more savage. In 1750 Wolfe had informed the soldiers of the 20th Regiment in which he was a major and effective commander that ‘a want of honesty and fidelity will be attended with the worst consequences to themselves, and that whoever acts the part of the villain must expect the full rigour of the strictest justice’.28

  Opposition to flogging and capital punishment could be found only in the very wings of radical opinion, the kind of Utopian dreamers who also believed in the abolition of slavery. One of the most daring acts of the French revolutionary government was to ban the thrashing of men only two generations after the Seven Years War. Floggings in the British army and navy happened regularly. On ship the captain judged whether to take ‘the cat out of the bag’ to punish a miscreant. On land the decision of five regimental officers gathered together in a court martial was enough to sentence a man to a savage whipping of up to three hundred strokes, but only with the consent of the commanding officer. Some were notable floggers, others rarely used the lash. If a man was to be flogged it happened in the centre of his regiment drawn up in a hollow square. He stripped to the waist, was tied to an iron frame while a drummer took the cat o’nine tails out of the bag. At a word from the commanding officer the drummer laid into the unfortunate offender. The sergeant major called out every stroke as the knotted rope whip with multiple tails cracked across the victim’s back. Within a few strokes the back was a mass of blood and flayed skin. The commanding officer regularly interceded to reduce the number of blows. Partly as a result of their role as floggers, drummers were a caste unto themselves, paid as NCOs, fourpence more per day than privates, but widely shunned by the rest of the regiment.

  The attack at Montmorency had demonstrated that, despite the existence of a terrible disciplinary code, the army was not simply motivated by fear. When well led, the Georgian redcoat was enthusiastic in battle. Morale differed vastly from unit to unit. Fraser’s 78th Highlanders were a homogeneous group, commanded by traditional clan officers, and seemed to have a high self-imposed standard of behaviour. Flogging was virtually unknown. Other units were hastily assembled by poor officers who hoped to disguise their inability with repressive brutality. Some units with the worst records were assembled rapidly on the outbreak of hostilities by scraping the barrel of new recruits and being given drafts from other regiments, usually of their most dispensable men. As a result these units performed terribly. The 44th and 48th Regiments who found themselves on the receiving end of the Franco-Native American attack on the Monongahela were composite units, newly inducted men and the cast-offs from other regiments. They felt little loyalty to their new officers or the strangers around them in the ranks and the result had been utter rout.

  A very different example is provided by Gentleman Volunteer Cameron on 16 August outside the Montmorency camp. Cameron, as a volunteer, was an aspirant officer with Lascelles’ 47th Regiment. As he was leading a patrol of NCOs and eighteen men, they were attacked, Wolfe told Monckton, by ‘at least 200 Indians’. Rather than panic and fly, Cameron led a ‘gallant defence’ in a farmhouse. The Native Americans pressed the attack so boldly that they even poked their muskets through the broken windows to fire at his men.29 A message was sent back to the camp and Wolfe himself immediately set off with the grenadier company of Bragg’s Regiment. They ‘hastened to the assistance of their friends’, Wolfe later announced to the army, ‘with very great spirit’.30 Meanwhile, Wolfe had ordered rangers and light infantry to plunge into the woods to cut off the Native Americans’ retreat to the ford across the Montmorency.

  The Native Americans withdrew at the advance of reinforcements and ‘retreated to the spot the Light Infantry had orders to possess themselves of’. But as Wolfe’s ‘Family Journal’ explained, ‘the difficulties in marching through the woods prevented their being there quite time enough, 10 minutes earlier would have thrown them into their jaws: the enemy afterwards discovering the march of the Light Infantry, ran off’. 31 Wolfe told Monckton that the light infantry got within 150 yards of them, ‘but they were off so precipitately that he could not get above 6 or 7 shot at them’.32 Yet again the British force had not been quite quick enough through the unfamiliar woods to trap a sizeable body of Native Americans, but it was a heartening episode among a month of setbacks and disillusionment. Wolfe told Monckton, rather optimistically, that the Native Americans had met with ‘a very severe check’, while ‘our little detachment brought off one scalp and a number of trophies’.33

  Cameron was rewarded by being made an officer. In a letter written on 22 August Wolfe apologizes to Monckton for interfering with the latter’s unit, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal American Regiment. As well as being a brigadier, Monckton was colonel of this unit and patronage was a jealously guarded prerogative of military command. Sons of friends and political allies could be rewarded with commissions. Wolfe was hugely apologetic for imposing Cameron on him. He explained: ‘you know I promised Mr Cameron the first vacancy in the army, or no recommendation whatever should have interfered with yours in your own regiment’.34

  Cameron joined the approximately one-third of officers in the British army of the eighteenth century who were promoted on merit without money changing hands. The other two-thirds bought their rank. The ability to purchase in this way did lead to the occasional warped situation where rich, well-connected young men rose extraordinarily fast. Lord John Lennox, second son of the Duke of Richmond, was made a Lieutenant Colonel at 20 years old in 1758. Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, was a Lieutenant Colonel at 25. Examples like these have helped earn the Georgian army its reputation for being led by wealthy amateurs, dull younger sons of the great aristocratic families. In fact, this rapidity was very unusual. The army was officered overwhelming
ly by men who had served since their teens and had learnt their trade over years of campaigning or garrison duty. The purchase of commissions did not occur in an anarchic free market. There were firm controls on who was allowed to buy what rank; no one could purchase a rank more than one above his own, and a seller was supposed to offer it first to the next officer in seniority in his own regiment. There was a clear tariff for each commission. No man was supposed to become a captain without having served ten years as a subaltern. Above all the crown had the right to block any purchase of which it did not approve. George I, his son, George II, and grandson, the Duke of Cumberland, all took this aspect of their role very seriously. They made regular inspections, knew the names, strengths, and weaknesses of most of the just over two thousand officers in the army in 1755, and reacted ferociously when politicians attempted to interfere with this vast patronage machine.

  The British political class actively approved of the purchasing of commissions. It ensured that the army was officered by men who held a stake in the status quo, men of land, property, and influence. Their interests were those of the state. These men would not play the role of a Cromwell, a low-born adventurer who stood to benefit from the subversion of King, Church and State. It also meant that officers had a powerful reason to behave well. In the event of them being thrown out of the army, or ‘cashiered’, they were not allowed to sell their commission.

  Many though, like Cameron, faced the daunting challenge of scaling the ranks without money, connections, or political influence. This was not as hopeless in Britain and Ireland as it was in the French army where the nobility were fighting an aggressive campaign to exclude nonnobles from the officer corps entirely. By 1781 they had succeeded in getting the King to sign an ordinance making it impossible to rise beyond the rank of Captain unless you were a noble. It was a final act of hubris of a class that would soon face annihilation. There was snobbery in Britain, and senior ranks were dominated by nobles, but no attempt was made to mimic the French; partly because there were simply not enough aristocrats to go round. France had more than a hundred thousand nobles in the middle of the eighteenth century. Britain had less than three hundred peers. Well over half of the senior officers in the British army were made up of aristocrats or grand gentry but at a junior level they made up only a quarter.35 The rest were sons of lesser gentry, churchmen, provincial merchants, and, of course, army officers. An officer from a modest background like Cameron could expect a widely differing reception by his fellow officers depending on the culture of the regiment. In some ‘smarter’ units men promoted from the ranks would be bullied; in others, particularly newly raised units, they would have found that they were among men in the same position as themselves. Chances of further promotion depended on the course of the war. Peace was an anathema. In wartime officers could cover themselves with glory; new units were raised whose officers were professionals, appointed by the crown rather than being open to purchase. War also vastly increased the turnover of officers as musket balls and disease made vacancies in the ranks which, in these circumstances, could not be sold but had to be filled by the next officer in the battalion in seniority. Cameron could reasonably hope to end his life as a major, and further progress was not out of the question. During the Seven Years War no less than 400 men were commissioned as officers having served in the ranks as soldiers.36 War offered men like Cameron an opportunity to clamber a few rungs up the well-defined social ladder.

  Wolfe made much of Cameron’s escapade because it was unusual. August had brought little to be proud of. The weather added to the woes of the men. Periods of blazing heat were punctuated by summer storms which turned trenches and redoubts into baths of mud as the low clouds obscured the smouldering ruins of Quebec from Wolfe’s wistful gaze.

  Desertion, always the bane of armies in this period, rose to epidemic proportions. There was a vast array of reasons why men crept across to enemy lines including better rations and conditions or the fear of impending punishment. Many of the men were American settlers of mixed, German, or Dutch descent who felt no particular loyalty to either king and were happy to serve both. Some men were actually French. The Louisbourg Grenadiers, in particular, had recruited a number of the French defenders of Louisbourg, after its surrender the year before. These men now saw an opportunity to return to their old allegiance.

  Not that crossing the lines was as easy as it could be in Europe. The forests between the two armies were alive with Canadian and Native American troops, who terrified the British. Townshend recorded in his journal that these irregulars were partly there to stop any French troops crossing the lines. He was told by one such deserter that the Native Americans were ordered to be on the lookout for any French deserters and to scalp them if they found them. Many others, he told Townshend, had met such a grizzly end and ‘he himself was very nigh undergoing the same fate’.37 Montcalm attempted to encourage British desertion by assuring potential turncoats with a proclamation in French, German, and English

  that all who would desert the English Army, should receive the greatest favour and encouragement, and would have nothing to fear from the barbarity of the Savages;—they were directed to observe a particular method of holding their Guns (by the stocks) and that at this particular signal, the savages would fly to succour them; fire upon their pursuers, and conduct them faithfully and in safety to the French Camp.38

  This may well have worked as reports from both sides suggest that desertion increased throughout August. On the fourth a French officer recorded that ‘five new deserters came over to us today’.39 On the fifteenth no less than seven marines deserted from Point Lévis according to Townshend’s journal.40 Two days later ‘such of the marines as are foreigners’ were ordered aboard ship for the rest of the campaign to prevent any more desertion.41 Other precautions were taken to stem the flow of men. On 25 August Wolfe issued a General Order to the army, telling ‘the outposts and guards’ to be ‘more careful in the future in stopping all soldiers who are attempting to slip by them’.42 The next day a particularly embarrassing desertion took place in full view of the army as a sergeant from Otway’s 35th Regiment splashed across the ford at the foot of the Montmorency falls. One of the Louisbourg Grenadiers wrote that ‘our people fired several grape-shots after him’ but he dodged the hail of fire and ‘got clear off to the enemy’.43

  Not everybody was so lucky. A sailor from the Dublin, possibly one of the many foreigners serving with the Royal Navy, tried to swim the St Lawrence. But a British sergeant reported that ‘the current ran so strong, that he was driven on shore on the island side’. Here he was captured by a Louisbourg Grenadier and ‘carried on board his own ship again, stark naked’.44 The penalty for attempted desertion was death. Commanding officers often commuted this to a hideous flogging or tried clemency if they thought that this would prove a more effective deterrent. Often a mixture of the two was employed. Lieutenant William Henshaw, marching up from the New York frontier with Amherst, describes how two men were about to be shot for desertion. The first was killed and the second pardoned at the last possible moment.45 When a French prisoner was captured on the same front and he turned out to be a British deserter there was no chance of clemency. He was hanged, wearing his French coat with a label on his breast saying ‘Hanged for desertion to the French.’ He was then to be buried, ‘and his French coat with him,’ reported an officer on the expedition.46

  Captive soldiers faced with being half starved to death as prisoners of war often chose reluctantly to serve in their enemy’s ranks. These men then faced death if captured by their erstwhile masters or death if they attempted to desert during the campaign. It was a miserable plight endured by many, especially in North America where infantrymen were in short supply. Commanders could not just rely on savage coercion to keep their armies intact, however. Fair treatment of the men, acceptable rations, a tolerable workload, and at least occasional payment were the policies followed by the wiser generals.

  Wolfe was very particular in his
desire to personally interrogate enemy personnel. He ordered that ’when a deserter comes in from the enemy, the officer who commands the guard or post who takes him up, is immediately to send him to headquarters, and not permit him to be examined by any person whatsoever, until he is presented to the commander in chief’.47 It is extraordinary just how porous both armies were through the summer. Deserters happily divulged the camp gossip and prisoners were just as garrulous. During truces officers would discuss the course of the campaign and of the war in general. Rumours whipped right around the Quebec basin and there is a bewildering number of journal entries and references in letters of imminent attacks at one point or another, of operations planned and cancelled. Wolfe’s habit of never telling anyone anything, much to the frustration of his fellow officers, stemmed partly from the knowledge that nothing would stay secret on the St Lawrence for more than twelve hours.