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For those who enjoy reading about the British Army
Misfires Ahead of Mastery
The Wandering Army
By Huw J. Davies Yale, 500 pages, $
38
BY WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY
THE BRITISH ARMY in the 18th century was hardly thought to be Europe’s best. The French had a better claim to the title, having shown themselves to be a major military power from the time of Louis XIV through Napoleon’s era of conquest. That said, Prussia took on the French (among others) in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and emerged victorious. Indeed, the military system under Frederick the Great made Prussia seem more like an army with a country than the other way around. Britain, for its part, relied primarily on its navy to secure its growing empire. The army played a supporting role.
Of course British troops still had a good deal of work to do and fought in a wide range of global environments—more varied than any of its European rivals. In “The Wandering Army,” Huw Davies offers an insightful survey of Britain’s land warfare in this pivotal era, tracing the army’s tactical errors and miscalculations and its gradual adaptations and refinements. It was an evolution that, by the first decade of the 19th century, prepared the king’s troops for success over Napoleon in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo.
The details that Mr. Davies offers show just how much the lessons from lived experience sharpen battlefield effectiveness, especially after a period of stagnation, when military thinking, once supple and alert, can harden into orthodoxy. At a certain point, recovering from defeat and learning from setbacks defined a British way of war—until, as Mr. Davies also shows, a new orthodoxy settled in, post-Waterloo, and lessons had to be learned anew. As Mr. Davies reminds us, the British army was once a potent force, not least during the War of Spanish Succession (1701-13), when Britain was part of an alliance fighting France over the fate of the Spanish Empire. At Blenheim (in Bavaria) and elsewhere, the Duke of Marlborough won stunning victories over Louis XIV’s troops. But the peace that followed had its own costs: Skills atrophy without active land operations. As one general noted, it takes hard service to make a soldier.
In the 1740s, the Anglo-French rivalry heated up again—first over the European balance of power, then over trade and colonies—resulting in decades of aggressive competition. It was in this period, Mr. Davies argues, that Britain’s “wandering army” had to relearn hard lessons and reconstitute itself. Mr. Davies, who teaches at King’s College London, begins with the British army’s defeat at the hands of the French at Fontenoy in 1745—a key battle (in current-day Belgium) during the War of Austrian Succession. In this war, it was the fate of the Habsburg Empire that was at stake. The French had invaded the Austrian Netherlands, triggering Britain’s involvement, and had also backed an uprising in Scotland—the Jacobite rebellion. The inexperience and weak discipline of Britain’s troops caused mistakes in both campaigns. In Scotland, the rapid charges of the Highlanders overwhelmed a British infantry trained to rely on coordinated musket volleys.
A bigger challenge arose soon after. Often called the first “world” war, the Seven Years’ War began in America’s Ohio Valley before spreading to Europe and India. In 1755, the French and Indians destroyed Edward Braddock’s forces along the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania. Britain’s (overconfident) troops lacked the skills, discipline and local intelligence for wilderness fighting. But lessons were learned. Lord Loudoun, the army’s commander in America, applied the experience he had gained while fighting in Scotland to rebuild British forces. He recruited colonists as rangers for irregular war and intelligence gathering and trained his troops for the wilderness, emphasizing mobility and adaptation to terrain. As for the command mind-set, Jeffery Amherst, who took over from Loudoun, planned methodically, taking into account all the factors that might affect a campaign. His subordinate James Wolfe, who captured Quebec, tolerated greater risk to win decisively.
The Seven Years’ War provided another testing ground for the British—in Germany. An ill-prepared force led by the Duke of Cumberland failed to defend the Saxon city of Hanover, leading to a humiliating armistice with the French. George II, stung by embarrassment, sent in the Duke of Brunswick. With flexibility and sharper logistics, he bested the French army at Minden while teaching officers like Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis—key figures in the later American Revolution—the art of Continental warfare. William Howe, an able tactician if a flawed strategist, led British efforts in America in 1775, with Henry Clinton as his second in command. Britain’s frontal attacks at Bunker Hill incurred heavy losses and induced caution at Brooklyn Heights the next year, where aggressive moves might have ended the war. Howe, Mr. Davies notes, “focused on conquer ing territory, believing this to be the quickest way to end the rebellion.” Clinton, as his successor, instead targeted the main American army through maneuver and indirect engagement. Rather than attack Washington head-on, he positioned his troops to force Americans either to retreat or to fight on unfavorable terms. Clinton also used dispersed attacks, requiring the enemy to cover multiple positions at once. It was a shrewd approach, but Clinton lacked the troops to make it work.
Mr. Davies believes he would have fared better —even perhaps winning—with a larger force.
WELLINGTON’S VICTORY ‘The Battle of Vitoria’ (1819) by William Heath.
Clinton’s subordinate Lord Cornwallis had another style of war. As Mr. Davies notes, he “disagreed as much with his commander as Clinton had with Howe.” Taking charge of Britain’s southern forces amid an insurgency there, he aimed to defeat the colonists’ regular army by striking hard and fast, to cut off the insurgents’ support. (Clinton, as one might expect, would have preferred to work in stages on several fronts.) In the event, Cornwallis won battles in the Carolinas but lacked supply depots to sustain operations and exploit advantages. Another lesson was learned: the need for posts to provision troops and consolidate gains. Strategic dissonance between Clinton and Cornwallis ended with defeat at Yorktown. British ministers who directed the American War from London remembered with horror, Mr. Davies says, but veteran soldiers carried its lessons through the empire—especially in India (a forcing house for military innovation during the 1780s and ’90s) but also in the Caribbean and Egypt.
The memoirs of British officers were widely read and consulted. Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington—who, we are told, spent a voyage to India in 1797 memoir-reading before going on campaign—applied such lessons to the Peninsular War.
A culture of adaptation and innovation thus emerged in the British army, especially as officers shared what they had learned, informally, in social and patronage networks. But after the Napoleonic Wars, things changed. There was an effort to limit the exchange of information across regions lest opponents get wind of British tactics and strategy. Histories of Wellington’s campaigns became a fixed template, to be applied without regard to varied circumstances or conditions. The effect was long-lasting, since the officers formed in Wellington’s era led the British army well into Victoria’s reign. The army’s decline after 1815 parallels the earlier stagnation, in the decades before the 1740s, with which Mr. Davies begins “The Wandering Army.” Only when the Crimean War (1853-56) again revealed British shortcomings did another cycle of reform begin.
Mr. Davies’s superb analysis, though centering on the British experience, implicitly raises broader concerns. How, during peacetime, can armies and the civilian authorities overseeing them avoid the errors of groupthink and sustain military capabilities? It is a perennial question to which—as the experience after later wars would show—there is no easy answer.
Mr. Hay is the author of “Lord Liverpool: A Political Life.” Military thinking, if once supple and alert to possibility, can harden over time into rigid orthodoxy—something the British discovered to their cost.
