One of the things that strikes you when reading Saul David’s history of the British soldier is the role that chance plays. Not just in a soldier’s life, but also in an author’s, because it is impossible to read this history – started six years ago – without judging it by the standards set by last year’s magnificent Soldiers, Richard Holmes’s paean to the British Tommy from Charles II to the war in Afghanistan.
That is not to say that this book is no good. It is very good. David takes us through the formation of the various regiments from the nervy days after the Glorious Revolution through the superlative organisation of the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns and then onto Wolfe’s men storming the Heights of Abraham above Quebec in 1759.
For lack of material in the way of soldiers’ private diaries, David gives us a well-told account of the careers of the Army’s most famous generals and their battles. A few details stand out: after 1689 the Army was mostly staffed by Dutch officers, and that on their long march down the Danube to Blenheim, Marlborough’s men started at daybreak and finished at 9am. This was so they did not get tired. No wonder the men affectionately called him “Corporal John”.
It is only during the wars in America that David gives us a better idea of a soldier’s life. There were three daily drill sessions, each lasting for two hours. The first was devoted to fitness, the second to “many complicated manoeuvres that made up both infantry and cavalry exercises” and the third was “to put these various motions into practice at company level”.
The teaching of British history when I was a boy concentrated solely on those wars we won, so I was less familiar with the various cock-ups that ceded the colony to the Americans. It did not help that the Howe brothers – one of whom led the British Army, the other the Royal Navy – were sympathetic to Congress, and had an agenda of their own. They could have destroyed the American army on numerous occasions but did not do so, in order to encourage Congress to come to terms and then build on the defeated army. That way they could return to Britain wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
David points to another reason the war was prosecuted so half-heartedly: Jamaica alone brought in six times the revenue than the rest of North America, and just like today, money – or the lack of it – takes more soldiers from the battlefield than any amount of cannon. Budget cuts after the various wars have always been deep. Soldiers are forever being laid-off and abandoned to penury. The result has always meant the British Army has struggled to make up the numbers and the quality when a new war starts.
Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, discovered this during the disastrous Flemish campaigns of 1793, and again after the break in the fighting between 1812 and 1815.
David deals with Wellington’s campaigns in depth, describing the actions in Portugal – where he draws on soldiers’ diaries (especially that of Private Thomas Pococke) – in wonderful detail. He conveys the temper of their daily lives and their attitude to fighting beautifully and his description of the Battle of Waterloo makes one’s heart beat faster. But for all his avowal that this is about the British soldier, David’s interest is more in the Duke of Wellington than the humble Tommy.
Too often David is forced to quote “a historian of the British Army”. It is not always Holmes (it could be Fortescue or any of Wellington’s biographers) but these references reinforce the sense that wherever he goes, someone has been there before. Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly engaging account and David might be forgiven if he were to use the Newton defence to suggest that by standing on the shoulders of giants he has been able to see farther.
All the King’s Men: the British Soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo
by Saul David
373pp, Viking, t £23 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £25, ebook £14.99)