Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears (50 page)

The lowest rank was private man. In a muster roll, for instance, he was entered as ‘Private John Smith’; he was addressed by all ranks, however, simply as ‘Smith’. In the Sixth and regiments like them he would be referred to as a dragoon. The practice of referring to him as a trooper came much later; the cavalry rank ‘trooper’ only replaced ‘private’ officially after the First World War. In Wellington’s day, a trooper was the man’s horse – troop horse; an officer’s horse was known as a charger (which he had to buy for himself – two of them at least – along with all his uniform and equipment).

A dragoon, a private soldier, would hope in time to be promoted corporal, and he would then be addressed as, say, ‘Corporal Smith’ by all ranks. The rank of lance-corporal, or in some regiments ‘chosen man’, was not yet properly established, though it was used unofficially. In due course a corporal might be promoted sergeant (with a ‘j’ in the Sixth and other regiments) and perhaps serjeant-major. The best of these non-commissioned officers (NCOs – every rank from corporal to RSM, i.e. between private and cornet, since warrant rank was not yet properly established), if he survived long enough, would hope to be promoted RSM, and would then be addressed by the officers as ‘Mr Smith’ (like the subaltern officers), or by subordinates as ‘Sir’. In time the RSM might be commissioned as a lieutenant to be adjutant, QM or RM.

All ranks (i.e. private men, NCOs and officers) were armed with a sword, called in the cavalry a sabre (the lance was not introduced until after Waterloo), and in the early years of the Napoleonic wars with two pistols. Other ranks (all ranks less the officers) also carried a carbine, which was a short musket, handier for mounted work.

And of course there were the horses. The purchase of these was a regimental responsibility, unless on active service, and the quality varied with the depth of the lieutenant-colonel’s pockets. Each troop had a farrier, trained by the farrier-major, responsible to the captain for the shoeing of every horse in the troop, and to the veterinary surgeon for the troop horses’ health. Hard feed (oats, barley, etc.) and forage (hay, or cut grass – ‘green forage’) were the serjeant-major’s responsibility along with other practical details such as the condition of saddlery, allocation of routine duties and, par excellence, discipline.

Although the cavalry often worked independently, sending detachments on escort duty, patrols and pickets, regiments were usually grouped into brigades of three or more, commanded by a brigadier who was a full colonel or major general (brigadier at this time was an appointment not a rank), with a brigade-major as his staff officer. Brigades could in turn be grouped into divisions (most spectacularly in the retreat to Corunna under the command of that quintessential cavalry general Lord Uxbridge, later Marquess of Anglesey) or attached to an infantry division or to a corps of two or more divisions. The cavalry were prized for their flexibility, though Wellington complained that they were too frequently unmanageable in the field, with the habit of ‘galloping at everything’.

The independent-mindedness of cavalry officers had in part to do with the manner of their commissioning. The cavalry (and the infantry) were the responsibility of the commander-in-chief – for most of the period of these cavalry tales the Duke of York, whose headquarters were at the Horse Guards in Whitehall. On the other hand, the artillery, engineers and other technical services were the responsibility of the Master General of the Ordnance, whose ‘explosives authority’ gave him a seat in the Cabinet. To make matters even more complicated, the commissariat and transport were the direct responsibility of the Treasury.

Officers of the MGO’s arms were appointed to their commissions without purchase and promoted on seniority and merit. Those of the cavalry and infantry, with a few exceptions, purchased their commissions and promotion. They actually paid several thousand pounds for the privilege of serving. When it came to their turn on the seniority list, they bought promotion to the next higher rank, which in practice meant selling their present rank through the regimental agents to someone else and paying the difference in price for the higher one. In fact a rich and influential officer did not need to bide his time on the seniority list: he could offer an officer in another regiment more than the going rate for his rank – called paying overprice. The exception was during active service, when the death of an officer meant that the vacancy passed without purchase to the next regimental officer on the seniority list. Hence the officers’ black-humoured toast, ‘To a bloody war and a sickly season!’

The iniquities of the purchase system are obvious, principally in the widespread abuse of the supposedly strict and fair rules. The advantages are less so, but they were nonetheless significant (space precludes a worthwhile discussion of the purchase system here, and I commend instead the essay in the first volume of the Marquess of Anglesey’s
History of the British Cavalry).
There is no doubt, however, that with so many men under arms, England (which in Wellington’s time was shorthand for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) was on the whole well served by it.

It did mean, though, that men such as Matthew Hervey, a son of the vicarage, of the minor gentry – the backbone of Wellington’s officer corps – who had little private money, had to watch while others less capable and experienced than they overtook them in the promotion stakes. There were promotions for meritorious service occasionally, but the opportunities were few even in so large an army, and when peace came to Europe in 1815 the opportunities became even rarer.

This, then, is the army in which Matthew Hervey is making his way – a slow, sometimes disheartening progress, but with the advantage of knowing that he serves among friends who face the same odds, and with NCOs with whom he has, so to speak, grown up. The strength of the army was this regimental system, because the regiment was largely self-supporting and self-healing. It remains so today. It is threatened more than ever before, however. For who that has not served in a regiment, directly or indirectly, can truly appreciate its strength? Certainly not the Treasury, and, I begin to doubt, even ‘the War Office’.