Hervey 07 - An Act Of Courage
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Authors: Allan Mallinson
AN ACT OF COURAGE
ALLAN MALLINSON
Contents
Chapter One: Honoured In The Breach
Chapter Three: Planting The Standard
Chapter Eight: The Chance To Display
Chapter Ten: The King’s Commission
Chapter Eleven: Charge, And Counter-Charge
Chapter Twelve: The Smoke and The Fire
Chapter Fourteen: The Night Horse
Chapter Fifteen: The Work of Cavalry
Chapter Sixteen: A Battle For a Peerage
Chapter Seventeen: A BACKWARDS STEP
Chapter Eighteen: An Officer’s Word
Chapter Nineteen: Long Shadows
Chapter Twenty-One: Resolution
Chapter Twenty-Two: Veiled Speech
Chapter Twenty-Three: Brave Horatius
Chapter Twenty-Four: Battle Honours
Chapter Twenty-Five: Unhappy Returns
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Grand Old Duke
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Family Regiment
Chapter Twenty-Eight: A New Order
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Copyright © Allan Mallinson 2005
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To
Duggie
Lieutenant-Colonel C. R. D. Gray
Skinner’s Horse
1909–2004
The Ultimate Cavalryman
Also by Allan Mallinson
A CLOSE RUN THING
THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS
*
A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR
A CALL TO ARMS
THE SABRE’S EDGE
RUMOURS OF WAR
*
Published outside the UK under the title HONORABLE COMPANY
FOREWORD
The cuts in the British infantry announced last year will change the face of soldiering for ever. Regiments whose names the Duke of Wellington would have seen each day in the ‘morning states’ during the long years of the Peninsular War and Waterloo will disappear – the Royal Scots, Green Howards, Cheshires, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Black Watch, to name but a few. No longer will a man – commissioned or enlisted – join a tight-knit band of six hundred brothers, his county regiment, and stay with them throughout his service as they move as a body from post to post. Instead an infantryman will go from one battalion to another within a large ‘regional’ unit – what is known as ‘trickle posting’. It is, of course, a judgement as to what effect these cuts will have – how continuing commitments and new contingencies will be met by fewer battalions – and what effect the enormous change in regimental organization will have on recruiting, retention and cohesion, the three areas in which the county regiments have been so strong. However, from the long perspective of military history – which is the perspective of my tales – it appears there is but one unvarying lesson of war: there is never enough infantry. Vide Iraq.
This, I believe, is the first
lesson
of war because the man himself is the first
weapon
of war – all too easily forgotten in an age of beguiling and expensive technology. The man and the regiment are inextricably linked: trust and cohesion in battle come from soldiers living and training together, long term, and acquiring a sense that they are part of something bigger than just the collection of individuals who answer the roll call on a particular day. It was never planned thus. Ironically, the regimental system, which the historian Sir John Keegan has called ‘an accidental act of genius’, grew out of the eighteenth century’s penny-pinching arrangements for raising more troops.
In the period of which I write, the danger in not keeping infantrymen together in the battalions in which they train is well illustrated by a letter from one of the Duke of Wellington’s generals after the Battle of Talavera (where, in
An Act of Courage
, we shall find Matthew Hervey in the thick of things once more). Complaining of the poor performance of a ‘detachment battalion’, one in which the men were cobbled together from half a dozen different regiments, the general observes, ‘They have no
esprit de corps
for their interior economy among them, though they will fight. They are careless of all else, and the officers do not look to their temporary field-officers and superiors under whom they are placed, as in an established regiment. I see much of their indiscipline.’
So the new ‘mobility’ of infantrymen, as they change from one battalion to another, was not unknown in Wellington’s day. In Wellington’s army, too, the
officers
– both infantry and cavalry – would often move from one regiment to another as vacancies occurred, since that was what promotion by purchase required. The duke himself served in half a dozen regiments on his way to becoming lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot, which was renamed The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in his honour (and which is now also to be disbanded).