bdft
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
I don't know if this should go here or in Blackpowder and Antiques but its too good not to share.
Hollywood is entertainment rather than history, though it tends to use the past as a vehicle for story telling, blurs fact & fiction so that the latter assumes, however unintentionally, the authority of the former. The redcoat has recently featured on the screen in a role depressingly reminiscent of the role assigned to the German army after the Second World War.
Brutal or lumpish soldiers are led by nincompoops or sadists with the occasional decent fellow who eventually allows a mistaken sense of duty to win a battle with his conscience.
Watch Rob Roy, Last of the Mohicans or, most recently The Patriot, and you will wonder how this army of thugs & incompetents managed to fight its way across four continents & secure the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
That it was an army born of paradox, forged in adversity, often betrayed by the government it obeyed & usually poorly understood by the nation it served, is beyond question. It drank far too much & looted a little too often, & its disciplinary code threw a long & ugly shadow onto the early twentieth century.
It sometimes lost battles: we shall see it ground arms in surrender at Saratoga in 1777 & Yorktown in 1781, wilt under Afghan knives on the rocky road from Kabul in 1842, & quail under Russian fire before Sevastopol’s Great Redan in 1855. Yet it rarely lost a war. In victory or defeat it had a certain something that flickers out across two centuries like an electric current.
Little of that was generated by a military organisation which was a characteristically British mixture of tradition wrapped in compromise, & fuelled by the quest for place, perquisites or status. And, important though high command was, this was the army that fought as hard when mishandled by Beresford at Albuera in 1811 as it did when commanded with genius by Wellington at Salamanca the following year.
It drew its enormous tensile strength not simply from the fear of punishment & the lure of reward, though both were important, but from the elusive chemistry that binds men together in the claustrophobic world of barrack-room & half-company, officers’ & sergeants’ messes, smoke-wreathed battle line & darkling campsite.
If I deplore its many faults, I love it for its sheer, dogged, awkward, bloody-minded endurance; the quality that inspired its exasperated adversary Marshal Soult to complain after Albuera, “There is no beating these British soldiers. They were completely beaten & the day was mine, but they did not know it & would not run.”
Professor Richard Holmes
