The Battle Read Online Free PDF

recalled the Angluches, they were still surprised by the rigid class lines that divided the men from their officers. According to the French, English soldiers obeyed blindly; if they commited a fault, they were punished with the whip; and when off duty, they got fabulously, unconscionably drunk. The noncommissioned officers were excellent; "they never rise higher in rank; the concept of class is so ingrained in them that they take this to be the natural order of things." As for the officers, "they are, for the most part, quite courageous, but fairly ignorant of their trade, for the English education is not directed toward the profession of arms; moreover, all their manners are those of aristocrats: haughty and disagreeable." The impression that the British and their army made on the French was a reflection of undeniable social realities. As one of Napoleon's veterans remembered, "The officers were all upper-class, all nobles or gentlemen, and the soldiers, who were all from the working class, obeyed them without question."
    A more modern attitude, the notion that troops should be treated more humanely, was just beginning to manifest itself in English society; but Great Britain was still the country where a person could be sentenced to death for any one of more than sixty different crimes, and where women or half-grown children were hanged every day for the theft of a piece of fruit. Unsurprisingly in such a society, army officers, particularly those of the old school, maintained a rigid, pitiless discipline. Even for minor infractions, a soldier could be condemned to hundreds of lashes, which grew to one or two thousand in the most serious cases. Lashes were administered with a cat-o'-nine-tails until the victim fainted. In the weeks that preceded Waterloo, several sentences of this type were carried out in public, to the disgust of the Belgian citizenry and the dismay of the local authorities, who appeared before the British high command and requested them to put a stop to these barbaric displays.
    Not all officers, however, were members of the aristocracy. Among the lower-ranking officers in the British regiments, many were the sons of clerks or shopkeepers, members of the hardworking urban middle class that was creating England's wealth. Still, such officers were unlikely to receive much advancement; lacking the money to buy a higher rank, they grew old as lieutenants or captains. Indeed, the customary way to obtain promotion in the army was to purchase a "commission," which was both a rank and an appointment to a command. There was a comparable practice in all the old monarchies, where all public offices were for sale to the highest bidder. In every respect, the acquisition of a rank was an investment; if an officer grew tired of military life, he could always sell his commission. The War Ministry limited itself to ratifying the transaction and to making sure that no one skipped one or more grades, for an officer on his way up in the army was required to occupy all the ranks, one after the other. The rich were still able to advance quickly, buying a commission to the next-higher rank as soon as one was offered in any regiment whatsoever. Before he became the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley had been an ensign at the age of eighteen and a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four; in six years, he had received five promotions, all of them in return for payment, and he had passed through seven different regiments, without having served a single day in battle.
    Nonetheless, promotion based on merit was not totally unknown in His Majesty's army, and there were several astonishing cases of men who started at the bottom and came up through the ranks. Sir John Elley, a colonel in the Royal Horse Guards, wounded at Waterloo while serving on Wellington's staff, was a porter's son who had enlisted in the army as a simple soldier. The criterion the ministry followed was to grant promotions on merit only in order to replace officers