Rifles - Mark Urban [172]
– ‘Many of the battalion’s subalterns and even captains carried a rifle’: Costello states wrongly in his memoir (written many years later, of course) that he cannot see why officers did not carry rifles too. It is obvious from various accounts that Leach and Crampton among captains in the first battalion did, likewise many subalterns.
– ‘As soon as the rifleman has fixed upon his object’: this quotation comes from Regulations for the Exercise of Riflemen and Light Infantry and Instructions for Their Conduct in the Field, London, 1803. This was a translated and slightly edited version of the first regulations produced five years earlier by the commanding officer of the new 5th/60th, Colonel Rottenburg.
32 ‘posted behind thickets, and scattered wide in the country’: this account of the American war is related in an article about the formation of the Rifle Corps (which became the 95th) in The English Military Library, no. XXIX, Feb 1801.
– ‘Rules and Regulations for the Army as a whole’: these are General Dundas’s Rules and Regulations for the Formation, Field Exercise and Movement of His Majesty’s Forces, 1792.
– ‘Dundas thought any large-scale skirmishing’: these quotations come from Dundas’s Principles of Military Movements, Chiefly Applied to Infantry, London, 1788, a work that formed the basis of the later Rules and Regulations. The fight between conservatives and reformers on tactics is also debated at length in David Gates’s The British Light Infantry Arm c. 1790–1815, London, 1987. Moore’s quotation is also cited in Gates.
– ‘ape grenadiers’: this phrase was used by Leach in Rough Sketches to deride the orthodoxy.
33 ‘One was to stress the limited roles of the light-infantry’: this and the ‘born not made’ explanation emerge in Essai Historique sur l’Infanterie Légère, Comte Duhesme, Paris, 1814. Colonel F. de Brack, an experienced French officer, stated in his classic Light Cavalry Outposts that ‘a man must be born a light cavalry soldier’.
– ‘The rifle, in its present excellence, assumes the place of the bow’: this quotation is from Scloppetaria: or Considerations on the Nature and Use of Rifled Barrel Guns, London, 1808, published by Egerton. The author is given as ‘a Corporal of Riflemen’ but was actually Captain Henry Beaufroy of the 95th. The references to Egypt and Calabria are to recent British military expeditions (of 1801 and 1806) in which the British had acquitted themselves well against the French.
– ‘No printers, bookbinders, taylors, shoemakers or weavers should be enlisted’: this is Colonel Von Ehwald (sometimes spelt Ewald) in A Treatise Upon the Duties of Light Troops, London, 1803. This work, another of Egerton’s, was translated from German and contains many fascinating ideas. Colonel William Stewart’s notions on recruiting in Ireland, cited later, seem to owe something to Ehwald. The decision to publish his works in English was a deliberate attempt to keep alive lessons of the American war, in which Ehwald had served as an officer in the Hessian Jaeger Corps.
– ‘if it were smaller the unpractised recruit would be apt to miss’: another quotation from the 1803 Regulations for the Exercise of Riflemen.
– ‘The more experienced riflemen had trained in techniques for shooting at running enemy’: the use of little trolleys with targets mounted on them is described both by Beaufroy and Sergeant Weddeburne of the 95th, Observations on the Exercise of Riflemen, Norwich, 1804.
– ‘Eight out of ten soldiers in our regular regiments will aim in the same manner’: William Surtees, Twenty Five Years in the Rifle Brigade. I used the 1973 reprint.
– ‘One of the 95th’s founders had written in 1806’: this was Sir William Stewart, and his outline for the reform of the Army is quoted from in the Cumloden Papers, privately printed in 1871.
34 ‘Plunket, however, swore blind he would shoot the first officer’: this is based on Costello’s version of the incident.
35 ‘back in