Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  The light infantry was one of the companies on the wings of the battalion. The members were to operate in pairs (one loading while the other fired) in front of the rest of the battalion and were supposed to be marksmen. Once deployed in the open, they would harass enemy formations and generally create havoc. Like a cloud of mosquitoes, they were difficult to get away from or kill.15 They fired at individual targets, acting at times as snipers aiming at high-value targets. When deployed with the rest of the battalion, however, they volley-fired like everyone else. The light infantry soldiers at the time were equipped with rifled muskets, although the technology to make them widely available was still more than fifty years in the future. The worries Frederick had expressed about desertion by the Prussian forces did not apply in the British army. One can imagine that desertion in a war zone would be minimal since all fighting was outside Britain: where would one go if home was not available? There was also the aspect of being something of an elite. Good soldiers provide their own discipline through unit pride, comradeship, and support from their fellows.

  The cavalry in general was usually overlooked in favor of the actions of the infantry. In the early 1790s the British cavalry arm numbered less than 15,000 men, about 17 percent of the army total. By 1795, with war against Napoleon definitely decided upon, the number of horsemen went up, but their percentage of the overall force remained the same or declined. From 1807 to 1815 the total number was between 26,000 and 29,000.16 In India, few British cavalry units served; instead the Indian forces depended more on locally recruited manpower. Going into the Napoleonic era the basic horsemanship training was not standardized but developed at the regimental level, as were tactics. Each regiment numbered just over 500 men divided into three squadrons of two troops each; the troops numbered 70 privates plus officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs). Although there were basic similarities in required uniforms and equipment, the cavalry regiments showed a variety of uniform styles dependent on the taste or wealth of their commander, who was responsible for acquiring the clothing from private contractors. Regiments were officially designated as heavy cavalry or light, but in practice there was little difference. Unlike the dragoons, cuirassiers, and hussars of Frederick’s army (and Napoleon’s), British cavalry was used for scouting, skirmishing, or assault as needed.

  The basic weapon of all British cavalry was the saber. Debates raged over the relative merits of straight-thrusting swords and curved slashing blades. Not until 1796 were two styles officially mandated. The regiments designated as heavy cavalry received a straight sword without a sharpened tip, but with both edges of its 35-inch blade sharpened for some 12 inches back from the tip. Thus, it was not a thrusting sword as its straight blade would imply; not until 1815 and later was the point sufficiently sharp to use as a stabbing weapon. The light cavalry received a slightly curved 31-inch blade designed for the slashing cut. Its effectiveness was described in a number of accounts, one of which describes cuts to the Frenchmen’s heads: “the appearance presented by these mangled wretches was hideous.… as far as appearances can be said to operate in rendering men timid, or the reverse, the wounded among the French were far more revolting than the wounded among ourselves.”17 The cavalry carried firearms, but they were of irregular and generally poor performance. Attempts at standardization failed, and the sword remained the cavalryman’s primary weapon. Lances were not used in the British army to any great extent, although Wellesley employed irregular cavalry in India that did carry them. In the Indian cavalry forces each horseman had a carbine and two pistols, all flintlocks.

  Tactics were straightforward: deploy in two long ranks and charge. Walk to 250 yards from the enemy, then trot to 80 yards, then break into a gallop to contact. Usually this was performed well enough. The problem came after initial success. Since the first use of horsemen in combat, maintaining order in the pursuit had always been far more the exception than the rule. Wellesley regularly cursed his cavalry for overpursuing, losing cohesion, and being ripped apart by counterattacking French horsemen. The primary uses of light cavalry, scouting and screening, were not extensively taught in British service, although they were part and parcel of warfare in India. In spite of its lack of training, however, the British cavalry proved itself able when it counted: the scouting patrols made sure that British forces were never surprised by French troops in the Portuguese or Spanish campaigns.

  As for artillery, it was a matter of the gunners rather than the guns in most cases. British cannons were not greatly different from those of other European powers.18 Guns were organized into brigades of between six and twelve cannons (the term battery came into use later). As seen in previous chapters, the guns varied in size and were designated by the weight of the shell they shot. Horse artillery were normally 3-pounders, field artillery was more a variety of 6-, 8-, 9-, and 12-pounders. Anything heavier was siege artillery (or artillery of the park) and not normally deployed unless walled cities needed reduction. All the field artillery fired solid round shot as well as canister (or case) shot in which a can of musket balls was fired to give a shotgun effect. This latter was only used at close range, and the majority of the ammunition carried by all armies was round shot. Horse artillery was normally used for covering advances or retreats, rather than as the quick-moving direct-support guns that Frederick had designed in the Seven Years’ War.

  Most gunners were still more engineers than anything else, looked down upon by “real” soldiers. Horse artillerists, however, were not only more widely accepted but actually came to be regarded as elites. Both, however, rose by seniority rather than merit or purchase since commissions were not for sale in the Royal Artillery. Still, there were generals of artillery, and one Corsican artillerist in French service actually became the emperor of France. In India the nature of the gunners was much the same, but horse artillery was more widely used. All members of the Indian service were recruited locally from both the Indian and European populations and were under the direct control of the East India Company. Artillery proved to be a multifunctional tool for both offense and defense, attempting to destroy both enemy defenses and the enemy guns damaging one’s own army.

  All three branches of the service were of a high quality in India: just like the infantry and cavalry in Britain, the gunners in India were well trained and very professional in combat.19 This is interesting given that it was to an extent a private (or at best semigovernmental) army raised and operated by the East India Company with somewhat limited input from the military authorities in London. Indeed, it was only in the late 1700s that the English began to seriously pursue a policy of hegemony in India rather than trade.

  The Opponents

  AFTER HIS EXPERIENCE IN HOLLAND, Wesley spent the next several months of 1795 in garrison duty in Dublin. He lobbied for an active posting, or at least a higher political position than aide-de-camp to the governor-general of Ireland, but nothing came of it. The 33rd Regiment was ordered to join a force sailing for the West Indies, but an extended period of severe weather led to its cancellation. This was the third time Wesley had potentially been posted to the West Indies, where he certainly would have served in obscurity if not died of the multiple maladies that ravaged European armies in the area. Finally, in mid-1796 his regiment sailed for India; it arrived in February 1797. This would prove to be the first major step on Wesley’s road to greatness. He finally achieved full colonel in May 1796, and he began to look on India as his path to prominence. He took along a well-chosen library to immerse himself in the ways of Indian warfare.20 For a year Arthur was on his own, without the assistance his brother Richard had given him throughout his career. In April 1798 the relationship was reestablished when Richard was appointed governor-general of India. It was at this point that the family name was officially altered from Wesley to Wellesley.

  The British Indian Army was made up of three types of units. The first were on loan from the English government, the so-called king’s troops. Then there were units consisting of primarily English so
ldiers, which had been raised by the company. Finally, there were units recruited locally, made up of Indian troops and NCOs (sepoys) but with English officers. The artillerists were all English, some recruited locally and some in England, but most of them had trained at the gunnery school at Woolwich in England. The officers of the king’s soldiers were considered to be superior in rank based on length of service instead of assigned rank. This occasionally made for some testy relationships on campaign. The Englishmen in Indian service thought themselves better soldiers but envied their counterparts’ ability to purchase commissions, which was not the practice in the company’s army.

  The Indian subcontinent in the late eighteenth century consisted of a variety of principalities technically under the leadership of the rapidly declining Mohgul Dynasty but in reality very independent. India had been a center of Anglo-French rivalry since before the Seven Years’ War, and most local armies had European officers in command or advisory positions. This does not mean that the locals knew nothing of warfare outside their traditional environment and fought well only because of the outside training, however. Indian warfare was sophisticated before the Europeans arrived, and since the Portuguese first entered the Indian scene in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth, the Indian military had been adapting itself to foreign weaponry. Military leaders were quick to study European methods of warfare, as well as learn from the Persians. Indeed, Indian metalsmiths quickly developed improved versions of European weapons. Portuguese officials writing to their home government commented on the fact that artillery produced in India was generally superior to that produced contemporaneously in Europe. The local smiths had thousands of years of collective experience and excelled in the production of steel, brass, and bronze.21 Muskets had already been in use for generations, and the Indians were masters of irregular cavalry warfare.

  Every principality maintained armed forces, but the most warlike of the Indian ethnopolitical groups were the Marathas. In the early sixteenth century, Marathas served as mercenaries in armies of Muslim kings of the Deccan region of central India. The great Maratha leader Shivaji between 1664 and 1680 created the powerful Maratha Confederation.22 The confederation became much looser after Shivaji’s death, but the Marathas honed their skills in the mercenary trade. Like all mercenaries, they had to be good to stay employed so they were quick to adopt anything that would enhance their abilities, whether weapons or tactics. For example, they developed artillery-based fire superiority before the Europeans did and introduced it as an antipersonnel weapon instead of one used primarily against defensive positions.23 As the Marathas had defended their lands with chains of forts, they were used to employing artillery on the defensive as well.

  From the European point of view, however, the Marathas were primarily a light and irregular cavalry force. Indeed, that was traditionally the case. For more than a century and a half prior to Wellesley’s arrival the Marathas had been used what were called bargi-giri, predatory light horse tactics, mainly against Mughal army supply lines.24 The Maratha and other Indian armies also employed pendharis (guerrillas), who were used as harassing forces on enemy supply lines and were paid with whatever loot they could acquire. Thus, the British came mistakenly to believe that the Marathas were little more than brigands. When necessary, however, the Maratha cavalry could form up and charge in line like any European force.

  It was the infantry that the British most overlooked. Comments by multiple observers prior to the Second Maratha War dismiss the Maratha infantry with barely a second thought. They learned differently when the war began. Although Shivaji was a master of guerrilla warfare, he used infantry to hold a chain of forts to protect and define Maratha territory in western India. He also developed combined operations with infantry and cavalry. This technique became more solid under the leadership of Peshwa Baji Rao I, who used his infantry to better employ his outstanding artillery force.25 Still, in the time between Shivaji in the mid-1600s to Baji Rao in the late 1700s, the emphasis in Maratha armies had become predominantly placed on cavalry, with infantry just beginning to come back into favor as the British military presence and ambitions grew. Peshwa Baji Rao I made use of both column and line, with linear tactics predominating. At the Battle of Babhoi in 1731 the Marathas showed their talent for artillery coverage of their infantry advance. As this was an intertribal battle it went unnoticed by the Europeans in India at the time, hence they had not learned these lessons when they met the Marathas later.26 Perhaps the major Maratha defeat at the hands of the Afghans at Panipat in 1760 convinced the Marathas to upgrade their infantry.

  There are two people generally nominated as responsible for this resurgence of infantry in India. One was Hyder Ali, sultan of Mysore, in south central India. He still depended mainly on cavalry but employed both infantry and artillery with skill. He fought two wars against the British and held them at bay, but his son Tipu (or Tipoo) could not do so. Farther north in the Maratha Confederacy, Mahadji Scindhia brought in European aid by hiring the Frenchman Benoit de Boigne. De Boigne’s battalions quickly proved their worth to Sindhia and by 1789 had established him as the supreme warlord of northern India, including Delhi. De Boigne’s 2,000-man force bore the brunt of most of the fighting and showed training along the British lines rather than in use of the French tactics being introduced at the time.27 De Boigne’s leadership, rather than his organization and tactics, may have been the deciding factor in his success according to Randolf Cooper in his work on the Anglo-Maratha wars: “In the past many authors have portrayed de Boigne’s impact on Mahadji’s forces as nothing less than a military revolution in the ‘transformation’ of the ‘Maratha army’ with the introduction of ‘European discipline and drill.’ But those descriptions were essentially derived from nineteenth-century British military myths offered up as an explanation to answer the nagging question of how the Marathas—a supposed nation of ‘freebooters’—could pose such a credible military challenge to what was a historically contemporary superpower.”28 Whatever the truth of the matter, what remains is that the Maratha infantry at the turn of the nineteenth century was underestimated by British officers. They viewed it, moreover, as a mistake to strengthen their own infantry. This weakened their greatest strength, mobility, while it strengthened an arm in which their Anglo-Indian enemy was dominant.

  The British political authorities had slowly expanded their influence deeper into India by what were termed subsidiary alliances. If a local prince would agree to become subsidiary to the company, ceding his authority over foreign policy, the company would provide military protection with its army. The subsidiary prince would provide maintenance for these forces and extra troops in case of war. With this practice the company slowly reached into the Indian body politic from its original bases at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Weaker princes like the nawab of Oudh saw this policy as a way to keep themselves safe from enemies. Other princes saw the agreements as a way to supplement their own forces in conflicts with neighbors. This put company forces into a variety of temporary alliances with princes that alternately favored or opposed their subsidiaries. It was this system that ultimately led to wars against Mysore and the Marathas.

  The Maratha Confederacy by the 1790s was a political entity in name only. The titular head of the confederacy was the peshwa, originally the prime minister but now with little command authority. He was headquartered in the city of Poona, southwest of Bombay. The other Maratha states were led by Scindhia of Gwalior, Holkar of Indore, the gaikwor of Baroda, and the raja of Berar, all of whom had originally been generals who were awarded lands for their service. Gwalior and Indore were involved in a family feud, Berar was isolated from the capital to the far eastern part of the confederacy, and Baroda (just north of Bombay to the west) always maintained a friendly relationship with the British.29 Scindhia (in the northern part) was the strongest of the princes and had the latest Mughal emperor in his debt for helping him maintain the throne in 1791. Before he could use this authority to exercise serious infl
uence in the confederacy, Scindhia died in 1794 and was succeeded by Daulat Rao Scindhia, a teenager. Still, the confederate states cooperated one last time in a war against the nizam of Hyderabad, crushing him in 1795. Immediately afterward, the princes fell out among themselves in a dispute over the successor to the peshwa, whose estates were south of Bombay.

  This was the situation into which the Wellesleys arrived in India. The initial problem they faced was the reintroduction of French influence into India, thanks to negotiations between Napoleonic agents and Tipu, sultan of Mysore, who, while keeping up a seemingly friendly correspondence with the British, was at the same time secretly negotiating with Napoleonic agents from Mauritius. French officers trained his army.30 Richard Wellesley consulted Arthur for plans to deal with Tipu. He confirmed the analysis already given by the commander in chief in India, General Sir John Shore: it would take time to gather a siege train and wait out the monsoon season. Arthur soon showed himself to be quite an expert on India and its military situation, sending extremely detailed memoranda to Shore as well as his brother the governor-general.31

  In 1799 the company forces, allied with the nizam of Hyderabad, invaded Mysore—due south near the bottom of the subcontinent—with the intent of defeating Tipu and solidifying British authority. Colonel Arthur Wellesley served under the command of General Sir George Harris. Wellesley did not perform well in a night skirmish against a prepared position, but his troops cleared the obstacle the following day. After driving off a French-led force along the way, they laid siege to the capital city of Seringapatam from early April until 4 May. Wellesley commanded the third-line reserves as the other two forces assaulted a hole in the walls battered by a month’s cannonade. The city was taken and Tipu was killed.