IN 1763, all the light companies in the British Army were reduced; in truth, the tactical system of Frederick the Great offered no room for them. So it happened that the experiences gained during the wars, which had lasted intermittently from 1740 to 1763, were as rapidly lost as learnt. Nevertheless, a change was taking place, for as in France, so also in England, pipeclay, hair-grease and the clockwork manoeuvres of the drill square, though they cramped the efforts of the few able soldiers who still sought to carry on the traditions of Wolfe and Amherst, of Howe, Bouquet and Rogers, they could not completely cripple them.
In 1770, a company of light infantry was added to each battalion throughout the line ("The Annals of the King's Royal Rifle Corps," Vol. I., p. 296. Capt. Lewis Butler.) This addition seems to have been little more than a nominal one, for these light companies were looked upon as penal settlements, and were filled with the worst characters of the battalions. These light companies were so badly trained that, in 1774, General Howe, by order of King George III., formed a camp at Salisbury for the instruction of seven companies of light infantry in certain manoeuvres invented by General Howe (For these manoeuvres, see Appendix 1.) At this time, political mismanagement in our American colonies had produced a condition bordering on rebellion, and Howe, with his American experience, considered that no time should be lost in an attempt to recreate, if only partially, the fine British light infantry which had been raised in America during the Seven Years War.
This precaution to train a few men in light infantry tactics, so essential to success in America, was not taken a moment too soon, for the following year saw fought the first engagement of the war, the skirmish at Lexington.
On April 18th, 1775, certain flank companies, i.e., the light infantry and grenadier companies, were sent from Boston by General Gage to seize some military stores at Concord. On reaching Concord the light infantry occupied the bridges whilst the grenadiers destroyed the stores. The retirement of the British force, on the 19th, from Concord to Lexington proved all but a disaster, and, in spite of the fact that a considerable proportion of the force was light infantry, they were quite unable to cope with the American sharpshooters who, hidden behind houses, walls and trees, rained a continuous fire on the British troops. Had these latter been expert light infantry, under an able light infantry commander, such as Bouquet, the rebels would have been routed within a few minutes of opening fire, and the mile after mile of continuous "sniping" would never have taken place. The British force, on this occasion, through faulty training, more so than through faulty leadership, was in almost as precarious a position as the British force under Elphinstone, which years later, in 1841, ignorant of light infantry protective tactics, was destroyed in the Kood Kabul Pass by the sharpshooters of the Afghan mountains. Lexington, the first engagement of this war, carried with it a fair premonition of how it would end. Faulty peace training is worse than no training at all, for whilst troops faultily trained have, before they can learn, to unlearn what they have learnt, untrained troops can learn their lesson without this preliminary unlearning; besides, the instincts of man seldom lead him to such terrible acts of folly and stupidity as unthinking obsolescence.
Two months later, General Gage won Bunker Hill, but the very winning of it was a moral disaster; for though the British troops behaved with magnificent courage, they were at first severely repulsed by the raw American militia, the riflemen of which were told off in groups to pick off the British officers, whose glittering gorgets made excellent aiming marks.
Bunker Hill shows that a mediocre general, in spite of experience, remains mediocre. General Gage had much experience in the handling of light infantry; he had witnessed Braddock's disaster at the Monongahela, he had raised a battalion of light infantry, commanded it, and had been present with Abercromby and Howe at Ticonderoga; he was a contemporary of Bouquet, Rogers and Washington, and yet at Bunker Hill, in place of attacking the Americans as he had seen Beaujeu attack the redcoats of Braddock, he attempted, against expert riflemen, to carry a position by a direct frontal assault unprepared by a skirmishing fire fight. At this battle, the light infantry were employed under General Howe as heavy infantry in place of as skirmishers; the reason for this may have been that their light infantry training had been so neglected that they were found incompetent to fight in extended order.
It is interesting to note that at this battle, two regiments which, within thirty years, were to be selected as the two first permanent light infantry units in the British Army, fought side by side. These two regiments were the 43rd and 52nd Foot.
A little over a year later, in August, 1776, Lord Howe organised his light infantry into battalions; this, as we have already seen, had been previously done by Amherst and Wolfe.
During this war, the tactical successes gained by the Americans were nearly all in irregular fighting. Not until well into the war did the English light infantry and light cavalry become equal to the American backwoodsmen and sharpshooters; but, during the last three years of it, the English had so well adapted themselves to its nature, that they were in no way inferior to their opponents. Roger Stevenson in his "Military Instructions for Officers detached in the Field," p. 2, published 1779, lays down that the American wars proved that the following establishments were most suitable for light troops: A Company: 1 Captain, 1 First and 1 Second Lieutenant, 4 Sergeants, and 96 men, including 4 Corporals and 2 drummers. A troop: 1 Captain, 1 First and 1 Second Lieutenant, 1 Quartermaster, 2 Sergeants, and 48 horsemen, including 4 Corporals and a trumpeter and farrier.
The American riflemen well knew the helplessness of the British private without his officer, and it was their custom, during this war, to single out British officers for destruction. We have seen that this happened at Bunker Hill. Another instance was that of the action of Bemis Heights, 1777, in which engagement the American riflemen, perched up in the trees, picked off officer after officer, their rifles being far superior to the British musket. Colonel George Hanger states that he saw an American rifleman fire at him and Colonel Tarleton, and kill an orderly's horse which was standing close by them; the rifleman was at least 400 yards away. "The Book of the Rifle," p. 30. Hon. T. F. Freemantle. The French sharpshooters did the same during the Peninsula War in Spain. The names of some of the American irregular leaders of the day give a fair idea of the tactics one might expect of them. They were: Marion, "The Swamp Fox"; Charles Lee, called by Indians "Boiling Water"; Sumter, "The Game Cock," etc,, etc.
It must not be imagined that all cunning and craft lay on the American side, for as the war progressed such admirable British and German partisan leaders as Emmerich (Captain Emmerich was a German partisan; during the Seven Years' War he had fought against the French, and later went to America. When the Revolution broke out he raised a corps of volunteers and was greatly dreaded by the Americans. After the war he returned to Germany, took an active part in the Revolutionary Wars, and completed his adventurous career by attempting to kidnap Jerome Bonaparte, for which act he was shot at Cassel in 1809. "The German Soldier in the Wars of the United States," p. 73. J. G. Rosengarten. 2nd Edition,) Simcoe, Tarleton, Ferguson and Ewald carried terror into the American lines. Neither must it be forgotten that the English were such apt pupils in guerilla warfare that at the close of the war they proved themselves, time after time, adepts in the very tactics which had destroyed so many of them at Lexington and Bunker Hill. At the Battle of Guildford, March 15th, 1781, the British light infantry and the Jaegers proved themselves superior to the Americans in bush fighting, and there can be little doubt that if Cornwallis had been handsomely reinforced by the Home Government, he could have carried on the war indefinitely, and with his war-trained troops must have sooner rather than later closed the campaign victoriously. The troops under him had become magnificent fighters, and their leaders, especially those of his light troops, were as skilful as any in the history of the British Army
Simcoe and Tarleton are perhaps the best known of the British partisan leaders in this war; the former, though not so dashing, was the sounder officer of the two. His mixed light cavalry and infantry corps, known as the Queen's Rangers, became famous under his leadership, and not only did he employ his men as light cavalry and infantry, but prepared them for their work by a careful system of training "until he could beat the guerilla leaders at their own game" ("The British Army, 1783-1802," p. 83. Hon. J. W. Fortescue.)
Tarleton was a mounted infantry leader; his pursuit of Colonel Burford's force in May, 1780, was a memorable feat. He and his men rode one hundred and five miles in fifty-four hours, surprised Burford's column, three hundred and eighty strong, killed one hundred and captured two hundred of them, himself sustaining a loss of three officers and sixteen men killed and wounded.. A few months later, Tarleton took one hundred mounted men and sixty infantry and surprised a column of eight hundred strong, under Sumter, whilst it was lying in camp. He killed one hundred and fifty, captured two hundred, two guns, a great quantity of stores, and released one hundred British prisoners who were in the hands of the Americans, at the cost of one officer killed and fifteen men wounded ("History of the British Army," Vol. III., p. 320. Hon. J. W. Fortescue.)
The British partisan leaders were, however, not always so fortunate, and the destruction of Ferguson's force at King's Mountain, on October 6th, 1780, by the American backwoodsmen is, from a light infantry point of view, most instructive.
Early in the American War, Major Patrick Ferguson, of Pitfour, raised a corps of British marksmen to meet the American sharpshooters; this corps was armed with a breech-loading flintlock rifle invented by Ferguson himself. In spite of its novelty, it does not seem to have met with the approval of Sir William Howe, then Commander-in-Chief in America, who, when Ferguson was wounded, seized the opportunity to reduce this corps and return the rifles to store. And this, after an action had been fought In which seventeen Rangers had been killed at the cost of two riflemen wounded, which was due to the act that Ferguson's men could load their rifles whilst lying down on the ground ("Two Scottish Soldiers," p. 121. James Ferguson. Ferguson himself was a dead shot. Tarleton would narrate how Ferguson, creeping through the woods upon his belly, would pick off rebels, and reload his weapon with a celerity which commanded the respect of men trained to compete with the Red Indians in cypress swamps and tangled thickets of "black jacks" or dwarf oaks. "Two Scottish Soldiers," p. 118. James Ferguson.)
At King's Mountain, Ferguson, in command of eleven hundred (Fortescue in his "History," Vol. III., p. 323, gives this number. Ferguson gives 70 Rangers and 600 Militia) troops, mostly militiamen, was surrounded by the backwoodsmen and destroyed by tactics very similar to those which all but annihilated Braddock's army. He was on the march to Charlottetown when he found himself pursued by three thousand backwoodsmen and was forced to take up a defensive position. "These fierce backwoodsmen were not men to whose hands arms were new, but had been trained from youth to the wildest partisan warfare in bloody conflict with the Indians. . . . Well appointed for their work, moving rapidly, and ready at once to seize any advantage, they were, in such a country, awkward antagonists for the best light troops, and an enemy terrible to raw militia." The backwoodsmen divided about one thousand of their number into three columns - right, centre and left - and attacked in skirmishing order. Ferguson volleyed and charged the central attack. "The British," writes General de Peyster, "depended on their discipline, their manhood, and the bayonet. The Americans took to the trees, shunned anything like personal encounters, and while safe under cover shot down their enemies one by one, just as the Indians of the present day slaughter our troops in the West."
As Ferguson charged the central attack, it slowly fell back keeping its pursuers in check "by a biting fire from behind trees and boulders until a storm of bullets in Ferguson's flank showed that a second division of his enemy was lying in wait for him." As he turned against this second column, the third column, hidden on the opposite flank, attacked him in rear.
Ferguson lost four hundred killed and wounded, and seven hundred lay down their arms after he himself had been killed (These are Fortescue's figures. Ferguson gives 51 of the Rangers killed and wounded, and 190 of the militia killed and wounded.)
The losses of the backwoodsmen were eighty-eight. "Their exploit," writes Fortescue, "was as fine an example as can be found of the power of woodcraft, marksmanship and sportsmanship in war." . . . "Ferguson," writes Draper, "trusted too much to the bayonet against an enemy as nimble as the antelope" (Condensed from "History of British Army," Vol. Ill., p. 323. Hon. J. W. Fortescue, and "Two Scottish Soldiers," pp. 89-108. James Ferguson.) The truth appears, however, to have been that Ferguson was defeated by force of numbers as much as by marksmanship. His men lacked skill and training; he was compelled to take up a defensive position, and was beaten, as was only to be expected; for, when a force is inferior in numbers, it can only hope to equalise this inferiority by an increased mobility; this the defensive seldom, if ever, permits of. Therefore, for an inferior force to assume the defensive against an active foe is tantamount to committing suicide. Had Bouquet been at King's Mountain, another tale would, in all probability, have been told; for, in his system, his aim was to use a defensive dispostion to lure his enemy on, and then, when he had disorganised him, to destroy him by a vigorous attack.