Riflemen

by TCW | Mar 27, 2020 | Book review, Napoleonic history

While I’ve been self-isolating (one very mild case of coronavirus in the house, over now) I’ve had the chance to finish Robert Griffith’s Riflemen, a history of the 5th Battalion, 60th (Royal American) Regiment.

The first thing to say about this book, and the most important, is that it is very, very good. Technically it’s not the first history of the battalion, because a couple were produced early in the 19th century, but it’s the first modern history.

I’m not an academic historian, so I’m probably not the right person to say how these things should be done, but this seems a remarkable piece of historical research. Rob has spent a spectacular amount of time with army pay lists and battalion details in the National Archives. This book is the product of a considerable amount of original study. (I know that reviews don’t normally refer to the author by given name, but Rob is a well-known figure on the army historical research scene and calling him anything else just seems odd.)

The 5/60th was formed in December 1797. Originally made up mainly of German (or vaguely Germanic) soldiers, it introduced many of the practices that distinguished rifle regiments, from tactics to the green uniform at a time when most British troops still wore scarlet. The 5/60th served the British Army until 1818 when it was lost with a reduction of the number of battalions in the 60th. Its impact on light infantry tactics, though, remained for many years.

The 5/60th was formed at a time when the 60th operated mostly in the West Indies – regarded as part of the Americas, hence the American (later Royal American) regiment. It was because the regiment served mainly in America that it was seen as a safe place to man almost exclusively with foreign soldiers, often with their own foreign officers. Despite this, the 5/60 first saw action in Ireland during the 1798 rebellion. Later it saw active service in Surinam and garrison duty in Nova Scotia as well as the West Indies. It was the Peninsular War, though, that made the reputation of the 5/60th (though the 95th Rifles is the regiment best remembered nowadays, partly because of the efforts of the fictitious Sharpe). The battalion was awarded 16 battle honours for its campaigns in the peninsula and across the Pyrenees into France. It was still fighting at Toulouse when Napoleon abdicated in 1814.

I have to admit I did not find this an easy read. It has over 400 pages and there are three distinct but interwoven threads throughout. Firstly, it is the story of the men who served. Rob provides an astonishing amount of detail about individual men, from their lives before joining the regiment, through their service with brilliant insights culled from court-martial records, to the time and nature of their deaths. Detailed accounts are sometimes given of the medical treatment they suffered (and I use the word advisedly) before their deaths and these can make uncomfortable reading. I had the pleasure of listening to Rob lecture on the men of the battalion at the National Army Museum. In many ways it was better than reading the book, because anecdotes about real people bring home the reality of the times so well.

The second strand is information that puts the battalion into the wider military context. We get details of the need to build up the army and how this was done, how men were recruited and trained, with a lot of detail on the tactics that were taught. There’s a discussion of the rifle and the way it was loaded and fired. (Lying down with your feet to the enemy and firing from that position is counter-intuitive but apparently could work.) We learn about garrison life in various colonial outposts and how officers lobbied for, or bought, promotion. There is a lot about life on campaign with details of provisioning, medical treatment and arrangements (or the lack of arrangements) for sheltering the troops. If you are interested in the nitty-gritty of life in Wellington’s army – mainly, but not exclusively, the light infantry – this is a must.

The second strand, in particular, comes and goes with whole chapters on various aspects of military life interspersed with a chronological account of the campaigns of the 5/60th, which are inevitably dominated by the Peninsular campaign. It helps, I think, if you already have some idea of Wellington’s war. I imagine most readers will, and when Rob is talking about a battle I know or I place I’ve visited, I found the accounts enlightening. Without that background, though, the incessant marching, counter marching, flanking, advancing and retreating can just become something of a blur. It’s massively better than my ‘O’ level history (where the Peninsular War, for some unfathomable reason, featured heavily) but still not nearly as clear as some fictional accounts. (Lynn Bryant’s Peninsular War saga, for example, gives staggeringly accurate and understandable accounts of many of the battles.) Riflemen does benefit from some nice maps, though occasionally significant details are missed off. Rob also adopts the standard use of differently shaded blocks to separate cavalry and infantry with colour distinguishing the British and French forces. Sadly, the maps are all in black and white, leaving room for considerable confusion and far too many jokes about shades of grey.

I have always been interested in how Wellington moved from the often defensive warfare, largely in the south and west of Spain, to taking the war to the enemy and crossing the Pyrenees and this book gives a good overview of this. I do understand now why so many writers seem to overlook what should be a dramatic end to the story of the campaign. In fact, the move into France seems to have been very scrappy with few clear victories and defeats and even more marching to and fro than in Spain, but now with the added bonus of extreme cold. I honestly struggled with this bit, but I don’t think it’s Rob’s fault. Almost 400 pages in, accounts of the tides on the Adour robbed me of the will to live. I think the soldiers (with rather more excuse) were beginning to flag too. A disproportionate number of the 5/60th died in these last weeks of the war while the French, fighting on their home ground with decent numbers of men, were unable to turn the tide. I think both sides knew the war was over and were by now going through the bloody motions without conviction. The weariness the reader may well feel at this point is probably a fair reflection of the subject matter.

Obviously I found some parts of this book better than others and, for me, it could well have been a bit shorter. But other people will be gripped by exactly the bits I skimmed over while they may find the accounts of courts-martial (all gripping stuff in my view) irrelevant and dull. The fact is that this isn’t really a book to read carefully cover-to-cover (unless you are a very serious military history nerd, in which case your dreams have all just come true). It’s the definitive history of one battalion which had a disproportionate role not only in the war against Napoleon but also in developing the infantry techniques of the British Army. It’s an astonishing work of scholarship and an invaluable reference for anyone with a serious interest in this period. If you have a passion for almost any aspect of the British Army of the time, there will be something in this book for you.

Robert Griffith is to be congratulated on this excellent work.

A word from our sponsor

My interest in the Napoleonic era stems from the research that I’ve done for my books about James Burke. Burke was real person and although most of his adventures are fictional a lot of research goes into making the backgrounds authentic (though nothing like the level of research that Rob Griffith does). Eventually it gets to the point where I spent more time writing stuff like this than I do writing fiction. (I am working on a non-fiction account of the background to Waterloo, if anyone knows a publisher who might want it.) Nobody pays me for writing these blog posts, although I do now accept donations if anybody wants to buy me a coffee. What I would really appreciate, though, is if you bought one of books. They are all available on Kindle and cost £2.99 or less.

Thank you.

The Walcheren Campaign in fact and fiction

by TCW | Feb 28, 2020 | Book review, Napoleonic history

The Fiction

Lynn Bryant studied history at university and her books, though an exciting read if enjoyed as pure invention, are excellent primers on the history of the Napoleonic Wars. It does mean that any review of her books ends up being a discussion/instant summary of historical incidents, so I’m moving this from my occasional Tuesday book review slot to here on Friday. People said they wanted more blog posts about history, so history you will get.

‘This Blighted Expedition‘ is the second in a series of books about Hugh Kelly, the Manx captain of the fictional HMS Iris. You’ll probably enjoy it more if you read the first in the series (‘An Unwilling Alliance’) but you don’t have to have read that to enjoy this one.

The Walcheren Campaign: the facts

Captain Kelly is off to Walcheren, arguably Britain’s greatest military disaster of the early 19^th century. Never heard of it? That is so often the way with great military disasters. (Don’t cite the Charge of the Light Brigade: this was a whole different level of awful.) Walcheren was an island that commanded the approach to Antwerp, where the French had a large number of ships that the British quite liked the idea of sinking. To do this, they would need to land on Walcheren and then leapfrog troops to Antwerp to capture the town. This was to be achieved by transporting around 40,000 troops in one of the biggest fleets ever assembled. What could possibly go wrong?

The answer is: practically everything. Delayed by poor administration and bad weather, the fleet set off so late that the French were prepared for them. Adverse winds meant that the Navy couldn’t provide the Army with its promised support. Maps were unreliable and details of French defences were out of date. The weather was appalling. Worst of all, it turned out that Walcheren was a breeding ground for mosquitoes that carried malaria.

The Army was struck down by plague of almost biblical proportions: four thousand died of malaria or typhoid fever. (Only 106 died in combat.) Many of the survivors were plagued with recurring bouts of fever for the rest of their lives (a typical problem with malaria). Wellington complained that troops sent to joint his Peninsular campaign after Walcheren were often hit with fever on arrival and were unfit for service.

So what line does the book take?

As with her other books, Bryant neatly interweaves romantic threads and straightforward military history in a way that many other authors find hard to get right. Hugh Kelly is still married to Roseen, the girl he courted in ‘An Unwilling Alliance’. She is now the mother of his young son and, though she has travelled with her husband on non-combat missions in the past, she is now firmly left behind when he sails into danger. News of the sickness in Walcheren, though, has her abandon her son with friends to sail to the Low Countries so that she can help to nurse the sick. It’s a credible plot line and the story benefits from her perspective as well as that of the fighting men.

Not that Roseen is the only romantic interest in the story. There are two other women who appear, one taking a significant role while the other seems more likely to feature in future books. The formidable Katja de Groot, a Dutch businesswoman, is a well-drawn and fully realised character, who takes up with a British soldier who is billeted on her. The other, a British girl who is one of the startling number of hangers-on who have come to see the fun, is more sketchy. She’s a sweet young thing whose father is a brute and who is being shown-off to any putative husband with the money or connections to improve the family’s social connections. The ending suggests she will return. One of Dawson’s characters is smitten: “She is intelligent, witty and very lovely.” We are, I am sure, going to discover her hidden depths in the future.

The number of romances gives an idea of the sheer scale of Bryant’s book. We follow not only Captain Kelly and his remarkable First Lieutenant Alfred Durrell, but a lot of the soldiers they work alongside. Many of these are in the fictitious 110^th Regiment whose adventures in the Peninsular are the subject of her other series, the Peninsular War Saga, which allows her to have already fully developed characters available for this book. Reading the Peninsular War Saga may mean you enjoy ‘This Blighted Expedition’ even more, but I’ve read only the first in the series and I had no problems with understanding the nature of the 110^th.

Durrell is attached to Home Popham, the ambitious post-captain who, despite his lowly rank, is widely credited as the man behind the whole disastrous expedition. Durrell is also an acquaintance of Lord Chatham, the nominal commander of the enterprise. Through his eyes, we see the way that the expedition is led and some of the inter-personal and inter-service squabbles that contributed to the disaster.

It is a tribute to Bryant’s skill that, except for some junior officers, she keeps the vast cast well delineated so that even a moderately inattentive reader like me seldom finds himself muddling his characters together.

There is a certain amount of military action which provides some excitement, but most of the drama takes place in the meetings of senior officers. Bryant takes the line that Lord Chatham was set up to take the blame for Walcheren because it was politically expedient for him to become the scapegoat, although we are left in no doubt that Popham is the villain here.

More facts: the politics

Bryant’s research is impeccable. As a writer of military historical fiction myself, I am absolutely in awe of the depth of her research and the amount of detail she integrates into her plots. When it comes to the politics of the Walcheren campaign she relies a lot on Jacqueline Reiter’s book, ‘The Late Lord,’ which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It’s a reasonable approach as Reiter’s book seems to be the definitive account. She does, though, get caught up with Reiter’s interest in the way that Chatham was treated after Walcheren. There was an Enquiry by the House of Commons sitting as a committee and Chatham was, as the phrase goes, stitched up like a kipper (allegedly).

Once everyone is safely back in England, Bryant carries on with a view of the enquiry. Durrell is called as a witness, so we get to see things close up. Unfortunately the way that Lord This was trying to get one over on Lord That and that Mr Somebody was trying to do down What’s’isname requires more than a casual interest in the politics of the period. Pop quiz: who was the Prime Minister in 1810? If you don’t know (it was Spencer Perceval) then this will not be your favourite part of the book. It’s one of those cases where the history in historical fiction beats the fiction to a slow and painful death.

Conclusion: read this book

Don’t let the political coda put you off. Bryant makes it as interesting as it could be and there’s lots of fun with the characters we have come to love at Walcheren as they try to get back to normal life – or as normal as it could be in a country still at war.

There is still a young girl’s love to be won, reputations to be made and battles ahead to fight.

Bryant is a lovely writer with a nice prose style and the ability to fill a story with exciting incident. She blends real historical detail with complete fabrication in a way that leaves you unable to see the joins. It’s a book that kept me reading late into the night.

‘This Blighted Expedition’, despite its slightly damp-squib ending, is a fantastic read. The ending isn’t an ending at all, of course (always a potential problem with series books). To find out how everything finally works out, I’ll be reading the next book to follow the life and times of Captain Hugh Kelly and his wife as they sail on through the Napoleonic Wars.