CHAPTER 6
‘tis the soldiers’ life,
To have their balmy slumbers wak'd with strife.
Othello, II, iii, 220–21.
MOST OF THE TYPICAL SOLDIER'S TIME WAS NOT SPENT IN BATTLES or sieges, but in the dull, usually arduous routine of campaigning and garrison duty. The former was sometimes punctuated by guerrilla attacks, skirmishes and ambushes. The latter could become a siege if the enemy made a concerted attack (see Chapter 9). In what Winston Churchill called ‘a well-written, soldierly account’, Sergeant John Millner of the Royal Regiment of Ireland described his experiences. They were typical of a veteran soldier. Between 1701 and 1712 Millner served in a garrison or was on furlough for 45.5 per cent of the time, mostly in the winter or early spring. During the summer and autumn he took part in twelve campaigns, being in the field for 73 months, and marched at least 5,082 miles on 446 days, an average of 11.25 miles per diem. The only year, recorded Millner, when ‘we had neither battling nor sieging’ was 1707; even so, ‘we were somewhat employed in marching.’1
Garrisons
During the winter or early spring most soldiers spent their time in garrison duty, or else went home, either on paid or unpaid leave, or without leave. In foreign-based units, especially towards the end of our period, sergeants and junior officers would be sent home to recruit. In the spring most troops, as well as recruits, would return to their garrisons for training, and then go off to campaign, wage battles and fight sieges. During the seventeenth century 87 per cent of the battles were fought between April and November.2 Some troops would remain in garrisons during the campaign season, protecting strongpoints. Up until 1558, for instance, there was a large English garrison in Calais. During the Thirty Years War and the British Civil Wars about half the troops were in garrisons.3 The proportion decreased during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Garrison duty could be pleasant. Accommodations in barracks, churches, private or (better still) public houses were certainly more comfortable, and kept out the weather more effectively than tents or barns, or even the bare earth used on the march. Food was usually superior and more plentiful. There were opportunities for graft. During garrison duty in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), Captain Richard Kane was in charge of collecting rent from his garrison's suttlers, those private merchants who supplied the troops. ‘The part of my office I liked very well, judging at once that something would stick to my fingers,’ he confessed. At the same time Peter Drake devised an equally profitable fiddle. He got a general to sign blank warrants for twenty-five soldiers, whose pay he collected. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ he chortled, happy to make ‘sixty ninepences’ from the scam and not to be caught.4
Garrison troops could invite their families to come and stay with them, or they found pleasures elsewhere. Some liaisons were casual: in 1715 Christine Forbes, a deformed Edinburgh beggar, without any legs, had a child ‘begotten in fornication with a soldier who went North’.5 Other entanglements were less fleeting. In 1675 Ensign John Bernardi met a young gentlewoman, worth £6,000, who wanted to marry him. ‘But she being of so prodigious a size,’ he confessed, ‘he had not the courage.’6 James Turner, the Scots mercenary, was billeted in Oldendorpe in the house of a Dutch widow. ‘She was very handsome, witty and discreet,’ he fondly recalled.7 With equal pleasure Captain Richard Kane looked back on garrison duty during the War of the Spanish Succession: ‘I spent my time between lace and the bottle’ (both apparently paid for by extorting from the suttlers). The Dublin garrison became so notorious that a Jacobite who spent the winter of 1690/91 there called it ‘a seminary of vice, an academy of luxury or rather a sink of corruptions, and a living emblem of Sodom’.8
Some English soldiers were less enterprising in looking after their creature comforts. For instance, during the French winter of 1522/23 Elis Gruffudd, the Welsh veteran, reported that many of his comrades did not bother to build themselves warm shelters, lying instead on the earth under hedges, as they moaned they wanted to be back home in bed with their wives. Some tried to keep warm by sleeping beside fires: one unfortunate got so close that he burned his shoes and feet without waking, so tired was he. Some died of the cold. Gruffudd, who believed in the old soldiers’ adage that ‘any fool can be uncomfortable,’ had found himself a warm bed ‘where I was as snug as a small pig’.9 In late October 1642, Captain Nathaniel Rich, who was serving with Essex's parliamentary levies in Lincolnshire, wrote that ‘The winter is already come, and our lying in the field hath lost us more men than have been taken away either by the sword or the bullet.’10 During their invasion of Scotland in 1650 most of Cromwell's army lacked tents, and thus lost four and a half thousand men to sickness.11 During the winter of 1689/90, unlike the Dutch and French regiments in William III's service, the English soldiers did not build themselves cozy huts of timber lined with straw. As a result, Captain Kane recalled, three-quarters of the raw recruits ‘died like rotten sheep’.12 Most men were not provided with tents on campaign until the War of the Spanish Succession.
Crowded conditions in garrison promoted accidents and disease. In Dublin in the winter of 1597, 140 barrels of prime gunpowder exploded, killing 126 people.13 At a siege in 1704 a pig destined for the slaughter escaped, and a soldier fired his pistol at it: he missed, hitting forty-five barrels of gunpowder instead. An officer sleeping beside the magazine was blown to smithereens, his limbs ‘being found separate a vast distance from each other’.14 The pig's fate is unrecorded. Men often slept in promiscuous proximity, with scant sanitation. Germs readily spread, leading to outbreaks of typhus, influenza and pneumonia—the latter being known as ‘leaguer sickness’. Latrines overflowed, contaminating drinking water. Between March and August 1600 the sick rate for the English garrison at Lough Foyle, Ireland, rose from virtually zero to 60 per cent. It fell to 14 per cent by the following July, rising to 32 per cent in September. Of the fourteen thousand soldiers sent to the West Indies in 1740–42, only a thousand died in combat: tropical diseases killed 93 per cent of the victims.15
Going to the Wars
Most of those who left home to go and campaign and fight had to part from loved ones, a painful experience, since many rightly feared that they would never meet again—at least in this world. Soon after he left for the War of the Spanish Succession, Corporal Matthew Bishop wrote to his wife, ‘My Dear! It grieves my soul to part from you.’ His commander, the duke of Marlborough, wrote to his spouse, ‘It is impossible to express with what a heavy heart I parted with you, when I was by the water's side. I could have given my life to have come back.’16 A few contemplated what might happen after their death. To ‘My Dearest Betty,’ R. W. wrote in 1678, ‘I do not know what ghosts do or where they inhabit after Death: but I am sure, that if they retain any tincture of our souls, whilst you live, mine would sometime be so kind, as if to whisper in your ear, that I died yours.’17
Wives, of whatever rank, desperately missed and feared for their husbands off fighting. As a ballad put it in 1743:18
Oh, there he goes, my dear is gone
Gone is my heart's desire
Oh, may the bullets miss my John
That's all that I require.
Susan Rodway was terrified that her husband, Robert, a private in the London Trained Bands, who was fighting at the Siege of Basing House, Hampshire, in 1644, would be killed, and she be left a widow. She ended a letter to him: ‘So I rest ever praying for your safe return.’ At the other end of the social scale Mary missed her William with equal fervour. ‘My heart is ready to break every time I think in what perpetual doings you are,’ she wrote to her consort, William III, away at the Irish wars. Being the queen, she confessed, Mary II could not show any weaknesses or fears for his survival in public, but in private ‘my heart is ready to break … I cannot sleep nor eat.’ King William outlived his Mary; almost certainly, Private Rodway never made it home, and Susan never knew how and when her Robert died.19
Going to the wars not only produced countless widows and orphans, but deprived many women of the opportunity of getting married, and enjoying what was thought to be the natural and most felicitous state for females. The death of so many mainly unmarried males in battle left behind roughly as many women for whom there were no mates. In addition, a huge number of young men, mostly unmarried, left their native lands to serve overseas, where they might take foreign wives, have families and never come back home. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand did so. According to one estimate, during the first half of the seventeenth century one in five young males fled Scotland as mercenaries.20 In August 1644, when Civil War casualties peaked, John Denton wrote to his great aunt Isham, ‘I think if these times hold there will be no men left for women.’ And as if to prove the point his aunt Susan, a middle-aged spinster long past making a good match, fell in love and married Captain Jeremiah Abercrombie, a rugged Ulsterman. ‘I think few of her friends like it a bit, but if she had not him she would not have any,’ sniffed great aunt Isham.21 Abercrombie was killed a few months later, leaving Susan a widow. In the early modern period men believed that once awakened in marriage, a woman's physical appetites continued undiminished in widowhood. So by making large numbers of lusty widows they feared that war could result in sexual tumult. This did not, of course, take place, but the large number of pamphlets written on the subject shows that, while they were fantasies, men's fears were real.22
Apart from the Civil Wars, going to the wars meant going overseas—a psychological as well as a physical transition. The movement usually began with typical military chaos. ‘This day our regiment embarked’ for Flanders, Captain Blackadder wrote in his diary for 7 March 1707, ‘all has been noise, bustle and confusion.’23 Most troops had never before left their native land or sailed across the sea. Some died; more were frightened and seasick; all found the voyage arduous. When Elis Gruffudd left for Calais in 1527, a storm blew up, not unusual for January. The sailors threw out the anchor, but it would not hold, prompting them to beseech various saints for succour. Gruffudd joined the chorus, promising to go on a pilgrimage to St Winifred's Shrine, North Wales, if God saved him. The vow seemed to do the trick. After the ship ran aground on the Goodwin Sands, where the crew jettisoned most of the cargo, the storm abated, enabling them to reach Calais. (Gruffudd never visited the shrine.) Lieutenant Richard Pope had a similar experience in 1702. On his way to join Marlborough's forces on the continent, a storm killed forty horses and nearly wrecked his ship on the Goodwin Sands.24 Private John Deane's five-day trip from Scotland in 1707 was less perilous, although equally unpleasant. Jam-packed aboard, the Grenadier Guardsman slept on the deck, short of food. Landing in Flanders, Deane recalled, ‘we bid adieu to the wooden world, being translated from Purgatory to Paradise, from pinch gut to whole allowance’.25
‘A bad irregular way of living’
To get into combat men had first to campaign, an experience that the majority of them regarded as the most wretched part of military life—worse, in many ways, than battles or sieges. Thomas Raymond, an English veteran of the Thirty Years War, made this point: ‘I cannot but think that the life of the private or common soldier is the most miserable in the world, and that not so much because his life is always in danger—that is little or nothing—but for the terrible miseries he endures in hunger and nakedness, in hard marches and bad quarters.’ In 1581 Barnaby Rich wrote that campaigning was ‘nothing but pain, travail, turmoil, disquiet, cold, hunger, thirst, penurie, bad lodging, worse fare, unquiet sleep’.26 A decade later Robert Hitchcock, a grizzled captain of pioneers who had served under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, described campaigning as ‘sharp services, penury, hunger, cold lying on the ground, and a hundred hazards, dangers and hard adventures’.27 Writing from Maastricht to his uncle and aunt back home in 1631, Amias Steynings, an officer in the regiment (The Buffs) of Lord Horace Vere, baron of Tilbury, lamented, ‘We have passed through a great many miseries both by sea and land since we left England, and are now in great want for lack of victuals.’28 ‘Long and quick marches in hot summer weather,’ agreed Donald Lupton in 1641, ‘cannot but be wonderfully burdensome.’ George Carleton recalled, ‘We had little to do but marching, and countermarching all the campaign’ in the Low Countries in 1691.29 ‘Done nothing this campaign but march and countermarch, to very little purpose,’ wrote Captain Roger Pope in August 1703. Two years later John Blackadder wrote in his diary, ‘Sabbath. Marching all the day.’ ‘Still marching,’ began his entry for 10 June. It continued, ‘One day too much heat, another too cold, a bad irregular way of living.’30
Four things made campaigning such a bad, irregular way of living:foul weather; numbing tiredness; poor accommodation; and lousy food, drink and clothing.
Even though campaigning took place roughly from April to November, this was no guarantee of decent weather. Although it was early May, the weather in the Mourne Mountains, Ireland, in 1642 was the worst Sir James Turner had ever known, notwithstanding his experiences on the continent during the Thirty Years War. Rain, hail and wind blew down the tents, making sleep, a fire, and even warm food, impossible. Several troopers died of hypothermia. ‘Great fatigue and toil, a very spare diet, lying on the ground, little sleep, constant watching,’ was Turner's verdict.31 From Derry in 1600 Captain Nicolas Dawtry complained to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, that in twenty days’ campaigning his clothing had never once been dry. ‘Such weather was not known by the age of man,’ a dragoon wrote to his family from Portugal in March 1703, ‘with rains, and winds we could keep no tent standing.’32 From Flanders at midsummer of the same year the Reverend Samuel Noyes reported enduring ‘the worst day's march I ever saw: ‘twas very cold, winds very high.’33
Sometimes campaigning in bad weather was deliberate. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, completed the conquest of Ireland in 1603 because he fought during the winter, giving the enemy no respite. Neither they nor his own men liked this. In December one of Blount's soldiers, Nicholas Dawtrey (a putative prototype for Shakespeare's Falstaff), wrote home that the weather was the worst for thirty-seven years, that his clothes were always wet, and that although he ‘plied his troops with whiskey and wine, I could not stop them from dropping from the country disease'—most likely dysentery or malaria.34
With its exhausting marches, carrying heavy loads over bad roads, getting by on little sleep and few vittles, campaigning was very tiring. No wonder Napoleon observed that the first quality demanded from a soldier is enduring fatigue, the second being courage.35 Colonel Blackadder made this point to his wife in September 1709. ‘Danger, though it be great, yet soon over,’ he wrote, ‘seems to me a small thing in comparison of a constant trial of fatigue either of body or mind. The former rouses the spirits, the other sinks them.’36 In another letter, written after riding for thirty-four hours non-stop, Blackadder called exhaustion ‘a hell on earth’. Tiredness wears men down, being a chief cause of post-traumatic stress disorder. Pikeman Raymond recalled how a season's campaigning turned the enthusiastic gallants who had volunteered to fight in Sir Philip Pakenham's company during the Thirty Years War into worn-out hulks of their former selves.37 Practically every day from May 1689 to October 1690, Trooper R. Alexander was on the move, being involved in many skirmishes and ambushes, in one of which he was wounded. Eventually, he broke down and attacked the Sergeant of the Guard, but seems to have escaped punishment, pleading what we would call ‘combat fatigue’.38 Campaigning wore out even the best of units. ‘I verily believe,’ wrote Charles Croke, a member of the five cavalry troops sent to Portugal in 1662, ‘there was never a more gallant company sent out from England … they came into the country full of money and gallantry, and those which survived it left as full of poverty and necessity.’ Three months later Croke was cashiered for desertion.39
An obvious result of fatigue was being unable to stay awake. During the Siege of Guienne (1588) some English Troops fell asleep during combat. On the retreat from Devizes in 1643 Richard Atkyns, the royalist captain, admitted:40
I fell off my horse twice upon the Downs, before I came to Farringdon, where I reeled upon my horse so extremely that the people took me to be dead drunk. When I came to my house I desired my wife's aunt to provide a bed for me: the good woman took me to be drunk too. I slept at least fourteen hours together without waking.
Most soldiers went into battle bone-tired. Afterwards the victors could enjoy a good night's rest. Following their triumph at the Boyne in 1690 one of Williams III's men recalled, ‘We shifted as well as we could without tents and servants and slept very heartily upon the ground.’41
On campaign the ground was frequently a man's bed—sometimes his sickbed. Four weeks of sleeping rough, out in the open, in 1643 cost Sir Thomas Barrington's regiment more men than they had lost in combat. The following year, during a sixty-nine-day campaign, Sir William Waller's army slept outside on twenty-one nights.42 At least the ground was firm. ‘For our comfort at night we had a base bog to lie upon,’ recalled Captain Stevens about campaigning in Ireland.43
In theory, soldiers on campaign were supposed to be billeted in peoples’ houses, churches, taverns, or warehouses. A quartermaster with his assistants would go ahead of the army, and place tickets (or billets) on the doors of buildings, listing how many men they could accommodate, and from which units. Here troops might spend the night in relative comfort, cooking a warm meal. In practice, things could be very different. Private James Sharloe remembered being billeted in a hut behind an alehouse in March 1698. They had no fire, there was hardly room for his eight-man squad to lie down, the two bundles of straw they were issued were not enough to sleep on, and the innkeeper's wife would not let them use her kitchen until all her other customers had eaten. That night it rained, and unable to sleep Private Carter amused himself by killing rats with his bayonet.44 Richard Coe had a different problem in 1644. Billeted in a salt cellar in Salwich, Worcestershire, we ‘grew so dry that we drunk the town dry’.45
‘Lack of food,’ observed Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, the Chindit commander, ‘is the biggest single assault on morale.’ Marlborough agreed that ‘No soldier can fight unless he is properly fed on beef and beer.’46 The anonymous author of An Essay on the most effective way to Recruit the Army (1707) boasted that ‘The English are the best soldiers in the world so long as their Beef and Pudding lasts.’ In theory, troops were supplied with two pounds of bread and one pound of meat a day plus two bottles of beer, amounting to 4,800 calories—plenty enough to support rigorous exercise. In addition, soldiers needed shoes, uniforms and ammunition. To maintain an army of sixty thousand men on the continent during the War of the Spanish Succession required 245,274 tons of food and fodder, including 15,155 tons of bread. If all these had to be exported from England, 441,339 tons of shipping were needed.47
Since tea, coffee and chocolate were unknown until the end of our period, when they were very expensive, troops did not often enjoy hot drinks. Frequent ‘brew ups’ were unknown. Unlike twentieth-century soldiers, who constantly smoked, there are few mentions of the use of tobacco in combat. The most poignant comes from the Siege of Rathbury Castle, Ireland, in 1642, when Christopher Rosgill, a tenant farmer, and one Tantalus, a barber, were so desperate for a smoke that they slipped out of the castle to scrounge tobacco. As they were sitting on a riverbank enjoying a puff, thirty royalists surprised them, hanged Tantalus, and speared Rosgill with a pike.48 Even in those days smoking could kill.
Unlike a modern army, where as few as one soldier in sixteen actually fights, and logistics comprise 90 per cent of the organization's efforts, in early modern armies practically every soldier was engaged in combat. Supply and support were the responsibilities of civilians, such as soldiers’ ‘wives’, or suttlers and carters hired for the campaign. Yet until the development of railways, supplying armies remained an intractable problem. It depended on horse or ox-drawn carts which, often moving on bad roads, could only make a dozen or so miles a day, and required huge amounts of fodder, further compounding supply problems. During the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession armies tried to pre-position supply dumps, which limited their mobility, while increasing their size. Sometimes, as in the conquest of Ireland or during attacks on Scotland, armies tended to march along the coast or rivers, so as to be supplied by ship.49 Frequently, soldiers had to live off the land. They issued IOUs for requisitioned goods, which might or might not be honoured. All too often they resorted to outright plunder. As the Elizabethan soldier, Sir John Smythe, put it, unpaid and unfed soldiers had to survive ‘on the spoil and misery of the common people’.50
But who could blame them? Ellis Gruffudd remembered having to eat ‘old butter grown so mouldy, and of so many colours that a man had to hold his nose’. Unable to find any food, Thomas Raymond tried tobacco, but ‘it made me sick and ill all day’, so he switched to brandy, which, as the equally hungry Private Bishop observed eighty years later, ‘nourished the inner man’.51 Usually, generals faced less onerous privations. Echoing generations of future Englishmen overseas, on the march to Blenheim Marlborough complained he could not get a decent cup of tea. The earl of Leicester's tribulations were more serious. ‘We starve on every side,’ he wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham during the 1586 Netherlands campaign, ‘If our people should be no better relieved, I look for the foulest mutiny.’52
Until the medical advances of the First World War, disease killed more men than the enemy.53 As ‘Pestilence’ boasted in Thomas Dekker's play Dialogue Between Ware, Famine and Pestilence (1604):54
Say that an army forty thousand strong
Enter thy crimson lists, and of that number
Perchance the fourth part falls, marked with red death.
Why I slay forty thousand in one battle.
For one thing, soldiers were poorly fed and subject to intense physical demands. ‘By continual drinking of water, they cannot but be made weak,’ observed Queen Elizabeth, as she urged her troops fighting in Ireland to drink beer.55 Medical care was often poor, even non-existent: not a single surgeon accompanied the thirty-two thousand troops during the 1544 Boulogne campaign. Some soldiers resorted to patent remedies. Barnaby Gouge claimed to have cured himself of dysentery by drinking water out of ‘a rusty skull’. More pleasant was James Cathcart's medication. In command of Fort Phillipina in Flanders in 1702, ‘a melancholy spot’ where ‘my men died like rats’, he attributed his survival to drinking a bottle of claret a day.56 Poor weather, cold, rain, even snow added to men's miseries, especially when they could not change into dry clothes or find warm shelter. So as a rough rule of thumb, for every six months a unit spent in the field it could expect to lose half its strength, most to disease and a few to desertion. In the spring of 1585 Thomas Digges reported that over half the soldiers who had landed in France the previous August and September were dead, while many of the rest were so sick and feeble they would be better off in hospital at home, rather than drawing soldiers’ pay abroad. Statistics do not convey the human cost of war-related disease. Take Colonel Christopher Codrington of the 1st Foot Guards (the Grenadiers), who caught a fever during the 1702 Guadalupe expedition. He was ill for four months in considerable pain, and lost his sight from taking too much laudanum. ‘I am so spiritless,’ he scribbled to a friend, ‘that I am not able to hold up my head.’ Codrington never fully recovered his health, dying eight years later.57
‘For many of us never better’
Notwithstanding its stresses, privations and horrors, campaigning had its satisfactions. ‘We live well and eat and drink all that we can get and lie upon the straw, and for many of us never better,’ Thomas Coningsby wrote home from Rouen in 1591.58 Of his service in the Thirty Years War, Thomas Raymond concluded ‘so long as money lasted we had a merry life.’59
Campaigning, especially overseas, brought new experiences, which some soldiers lapped up as avidly as modern tourists. Pikeman Raymond found the Catholic churches and friars in the Spanish Netherlands especially intriguing. During the First Bishops’ War in 1639 John Aston thought the parish church architecture in the north of England particularly pleasing (although he did complain that as they got closer to the border, ‘the price of drink increases').60 Richard Symonds's diary often reads more like a travelogue than the military journal of a cavalier captain.61 The same might be said of the memoirs of Ensign Charles Croke of the Horse Guards, who fought in Portugal in 1663. Like devotees of the Michelin Guide, he and his brother officers made detours to see particularly worthwhile sights, which added variety and made their perambulations more enjoyable. They ate new foods, such as figs, olives, oranges, lemons and pomegranates, and were fascinated by papist hermits ‘wearing nothing but hairy gowns’.62 As a younger son, Captain Henry Herbert had been denied going on a Grand Tour. Yet his service in the British Brigade in the 1670s made up for it—at least in part. Of Cologne he wrote, ‘The cathedral here is not so great nor so sumptuous as we expected.’63 Everything about the country impressed another English officer who campaigned in the Netherlands in 1689, except for the women: ‘Fat, burly and unsightly’ was his judgement.64
More than anything else, what made campaigning bearable, even pleasant, was the friendship of comrades. Captain John Hodgson remembered that during the Scots campaigning of 1650 someone found a large barrel full of cream, which he brought to the officers’ mess. They drank it by the dishful, some filling their hats with cream. When the churn grew low two officers turned it upside down over a third's head, so he could lick the inside as the cream dribbled down all over his clothes. Everyone thought it hilarious, including Oliver Cromwell, who paused to watch the fun.65 Captain Josiah Bodley fondly recalled a New Year's Eve he spent with two brother captains, Caulfield and Constable, in Governor Richard Moryson's lodgings, during the brutal conquest of Ireland. Having taken off their coats they talked of various things, Caulfield on food, Constable about hounds, as they drank mulled Spanish wine laced with nutmeg, ginger and sugar. An hour later they went into dinner, a magnificent feast, after which they retired to a bedroom for pipes of tobacco and more drink. ‘The wine also had begun to operate a little upon us, and everyone's wits became somewhat sharper: all gabbling at once.’ They all said many witty things that afterwards they could not recall. Finally, they played what might best be described as ‘officers’ mess games’, laughing until tears streamed from their eyes.66
The company of women brought a different sort of pleasure. In 1633 in the Netherlands a soldier had a ‘pretty young wench, which lay with him in his hut’. A comrade—if that is the right word—under the impression that the man was on guard duty stole into the hut, to steal a kiss, if not more. Feeling a set of hairy lips, he leapt out of bed, chased by the hirsute trooper who stabbed him a couple of times in the buttocks.67 But women were much more than a source of discord or bawdy humour. On the march, in garrisons, during sieges, and even battles, they were a means to survival. Whether or not blessed by the clergy, army ‘wives’ were a source of vittles and succour. They nursed the sick and wounded. They foraged for food and firewood. As Sir James Turner recognized, ‘As woman was created to be a helper to man, so women are greater helpers in armies.’ Quite simply, without camp followers early modern armies could not have functioned.68
Atrocities
Shortage of food, and a blindly malicious sense of fun, led soldiers to steal from the civilians through whose territories they marched. Captain Henry Herbert recalled about the 1672 campaign in Holland that both the French and English ‘loving mischief for mischief's sake, would kill cattle and leave them to lie to infect the air having no need for them.’ Chaplain Noyes wrote that ‘We plundered and burnt almost all the villages to right and left,’ as Marlborough's men marched through Germany in July 1704, ‘our men could not be restrained from plundering.’69 Sometimes troops stripped the land bare. ‘The country is so wasted there is nothing to destroy,’ observed Captain John Brende, as he trekked through the Scottish Lowlands in 1548.70
Irish troops were particularly eager plunderers. During the 1544 Boulogne campaign they ranged the French countryside to find a bull, which they tormented with flaming torches. The poor creature's bellows attracted cows, who were led back to camp for slaughter.71 This—and their habit of cutting the heads off enemy prisoners of war—prompted the French to torture and mutilate any Irish they could lay their hands on.72
Afterwards soldiers had the problem of disposing of the loot, for unlike sailors they could not transport it home on their ships. Stolen food and drink were readily consumed. Gold, silver coins and precious stones could be sown into the linings of uniforms. But most goods were too heavy to be carried on the march. Sometimes a market would be held after a city had been sacked, at which troops disposed of their spoils at knock-down prices. Cattle, sheep and horses were easily moved, so in localities such as Ireland or the Scottish Borders, where they were a significant form of wealth, rustling became endemic.
Civilians could react to plunderers in two ways: by trying to pay them off or by fighting back. During the 1591 Rouen expedition peasants deserted their villages, leaving food and cider on their tables in the hope the English invaders would take them and do no further damage. Or else, like the Clubmen, a group of neutrals during the English Civil War, they could resist. As one of the Clubman ballads warned:73
If you offer to plunder or take our Cattle,
Be assured we will bid you battle.
George Carleton remembered that in the 1680s the Dutch peasants used their bread ovens to bake alive any marauders they caught. Three decades later Chaplain Noyes recalled that many plunderers became detached from their units, and that those captured by enemy hussars ‘were not only killed, but left miserably mangled’.74 Such a fate discouraged desertion, which during the War of the Spanish Succession fell to 5 per cent a year.
Plundering provoked atrocious reactions, which in turn could be followed by even bloodier reprisals. None was worse than that at Molain, Belgium. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession six hundred British soldiers advanced on the town, hell-bent on booty. When the inhabitants opened fire, killing several troops, the British went berserk, and drove the inhabitants into the church, which they set alight, burning four hundred alive. They plundered and then set fire to the town, before getting royally drunk.75
Skirmishes and Ambushes
As they campaigned, soldiers had to deal not only with hunger, tiredness, bad weather and hostile civilians, but constant small-scale enemy assaults. ‘There did hardly one week pass in the summer half year,’ wrote Captain Richard Atkyns of the English Civil Wars, ‘in which there was not a battle or skirmish.’76
Skirmishes are little battles, which usually occur when two sides bump into each other. Because of their almost spontaneous nature, and because there is rarely time beforehand to assemble large forces, few men on either side are involved. Unlike major battles or sieges, which are deliberate events to which both sides must agree and contribute considerable resources, skirmishes happen by accident. While they are less well known than battles, they could produce many casualties. For instance, only two of the 179 petitions submitted by wounded royalist veterans in Devon after the Civil Wars were for injuries suffered during a battle.77 Skirmishes often involved cavalry, who, as scouts, were often the first to come into contact with the enemy, usually another horse patrol. Thomas Churchyard described an especially brutal melee that occurred in France in 1557:78
The English band provoked the skirmish, and so the blood broil began hotter and hotter, and came to hand strokes, where many a lance was broken, and many a man lay grovelling on the ground, some under their horses.
When he was a schoolboy growing up in Myddle, Shropshire, during the Civil War, Richard Gough saw a skirmish similar to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others during the early modern period. Cornet Collins, an Irishman from the royalist garrison at Shrawardine Castle, stopped in the village that the king's men considered their territory, having plundered it the previous day, to have his horse shod. Unfortunately for him, a patrol of eight roundheads from Morton Corbett, under the command of Richard Maning, entered Myddle ostensibly to arrest one Nat Owen for theft and desertion. (Maning also suspected that Owen was having an affair with his wife.) The two patrols bumped into each other at Allen Chaloner's smithy. Collins jumped on his horse and galloped away, but was shot, toppling into the village pond. His two troopers fired at the roundheads, killing one of their horses, but managed to escape—only to be captured soon afterwards. Being Irish, they were hanged. The villagers pulled Collins from the pond, and carried him bleeding profusely to Chaloner's house, where they dumped him on the floor. Collins begged for a soft mattress to relieve the pain. There was none, Mrs Chaloner replied, presumably with a degree of satisfaction, explaining that when he plundered her house the previous day, he had thrown the mattress into the village pond out of spite. Nonetheless she retrieved the tattered, sodden paillasse and slid it under the officer, before summoning the local minister. ‘I went with him,’ recalled Richard Gough, ‘and saw the Cornet lying on the bed, and much blood running along the floor.’ That night a party took Collins back to Shrawardine, where he died the next day.79
Lieutenant John Creighton never forgot the equally brutal skirmish that took place at about five in the afternoon of 22 July 1680 at Ayr's Moss, Scotland, when his cavalry troop came across some covenanters under a Captain Fowler:
I gave him such a blow on the head with my broad sword, as would have cleaved his skull, had it not been defended by a steel cap. Fowler, turning about, aimed a blow at me, but I warded it off, and with a back stroke cut the upper part of his head off from the nose upwards.
In his haste to pursue the fleeing rebels, Creighton rode into a bog. With cuts to his back and ribs, he broke his own sword on a rebel's head, before being shot and hit on the head. He fell off his horse, and was left for dead. Recovering consciousness he tried to lift himself up, attracting the attention of a covenanter, who cackled, ‘God, the dog is not dead yet,’ and tried to run him through the belly. Creighton managed to deflect the blow, even though his sword was broken, prompting his enemy to run away. In great pain he staggered to his feet, and using a carbine as a crutch hobbled to find his horse. But it had been stolen by a rebel (who, Creighton noted with much pleasure, was captured and hanged the following year). It took Creighton a long time to recover from his wounds because some green cloth had been forced into one of them, presumably by a sword blow, and sewn inside by an incompetent surgeon. The gash festered. So lead tubes were inserted to allow the pus to escape, and to introduce brandy, which sterilized the abscess. Eventually the cloth seeped out, and the wound healed. Nonetheless, Creighton recalled, ‘I was never afterwards so able to bear fatigue.’80
Skirmishes were fast and frenzied. James Wallace, a covenanter, described one such encounter: ‘The two parties meet, and after fire given on both sides, they fall to it with their swords,’ until one side broke and ran. Captain Carleton knew how brutal skirmishes could be. In 1704 in Spain a Scottish dragoon, a fairly small man, used his huge broadsword to strike the head off an enemy as easily as lopping a poppy. For Carleton the definition of a skirmish depended on its size. ‘Although the common vogue has given it the name of a Battle,’ he wrote about the fighting that took place near Senoff, ‘in my humble opinion, it might rather have deserved the name of a confused skirmish. I found it impossible to distinguish one part from another.’81
Ambushes were different from skirmishes since they were deliberately set by one side to catch the other unawares. Captain Roger Williams described how his unit ambushed a Spanish convoy moving from Ghent to Bruges in about 1573. He positioned his men at dawn. As the convoy, with fifty cavalry in the front and as many in the tail, and infantry guarding the cannon and supplies in the middle, entered the ambush zone, the allies fired a musket volley, their cavalry charged the infantry, who ran, allowing the allied foot to capture the artillery and ammunition with little loss. Being ambushed was utterly terrifying. Sergeant Henry Foster remembered how the royalists surprised the London Trained Bands, retreating through narrow lanes near Aldermaston in September 1643. The roundheads panicked. Up went the cry, ‘Away, Away, everyman shift for his life, you are all dead men.’ Horses bolted, overturning carts, blocking the narrow road. An ammunition wagon caught fire, blew up, killing ten men: it scared the rest, and illuminated targets for the royalist snipers hiding in the hedgerows. Amazingly, the London Trained Bands (an elite parliamentary unit), regrouped, and following classical military procedure, charged the surprised ambushers who fled or were captured. In hot blood, helpless from terror, yet relieved to be alive, the Londoners smashed in the prisoners’ brains with musket butts.
Soon after Donald McBane enlisted in 1687, the Clan MacDonald ambushed his unit at Keppoch. ‘I was sadly affrighted, never having seen the like before,’ he confessed. ‘I took to my heels and ran thirty miles before I looked behind.’82 McBane (who has been described as ‘a soldier, pimp, thief, gambler and duelist') ran away to fight another day.83 In fact, over the next half century he fought in fifty-two sieges and sixteen battles, where he discovered all too well what it was like to experience high-intensity combat, which will be described in Chapter 9.