Book Review - All the King’s Men: The British Redcoat in the Era of Sword and Musket
All the King’s Men: The British Redcoat in the Era of Sword and Musket
Written by: Saul David,
Penguin, 2013,
ISBN 9780141027937, 592pp
Reviewed by: Major Tim Inglis
The centenary of the Gallipoli campaign is not the only military anniversary in 2015. It will also be the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo, which ended the revolutionary era and drew the Napoleonic Wars to a close. It is therefore hardly surprising that military historians are busy revisiting the events that led up to the battle. One of the best accounts in circulation is in the closing chapters of Saul David’s All the King’s Men, in which he reviews the entire Waterloo campaign including the critical forerunner actions at Quatre Bras and Ligny. This is a well- researched account that steps outside traditional Wellington hagiography and avoids facile explanations of how Napoleon snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. There is sufficient breadth in David’s account to see the ebb and flow in the fortunes of war; yet there is detail enough to catch glimpses of the early stirrings of manoeuvre warfare in opposing commanders’ use of gaps and surfaces, occasional application of mission command and serendipitous assembly of de facto combined arms teams. From a command and control perspective, there are hints at the consequence of an early form of the staff system among Blucher’s Prussians and specifically in its impact on combat effectiveness.
All the King’s Men is the most recent work from the author who brought us the poignant Churchill’s Sacrifice of the 51st Highland Division, Victoria’s Wars, The Indian Mutiny and Zulu. David’s strength as a specialist in Britain’s colonial wars explains the authority he brings to this broad sweep from Marlborough to Wellington, a period in which Britain suffered only one major military defeat, in North America. The scope of this book includes the evolution of tactics through the developments in military technology, training methods, command and control. Thus we see how Marlborough exploited sprung supply wagons to give his army a logistic edge, how the rolling musket volley came into being, and when the foundations of defence in depth were laid.
David is at his most incisive when he examines the shibboleths of popular wisdom, such as the claim that the British learned nothing from the revolutionary war with America. His assertion that Moore applied the lessons learned to raise a brigade-level unit for rapid deployment and flexible operations is pursued to its conclusion with Moore’s fighting retreat to Corunna. Moore died of his wounds in the field, without the glory that surrounded Wolfe’s assault on the Heights of Abraham. But he snatched a significant part of the British army from the enemy’s grasp, diverted Napoleon’s attention to northern Spain and established a role for light troops. David’s treatment of Wellington’s rise to pre-eminence has a compelling objectivity. He properly recognises Wellington’s battlefield courage as common currency among his subordinate commanders, but notes other qualities that enabled Wellington to function more effectively, such as his ability to learn quickly from his own errors, his intuitive sense of territorial opportunity, and his almost herculean sense of public duty.
There is an irony in Saul David’s headline title All the King’s Men, since the record is more generous to the generals and their campaigns than to their men who fought so doggedly in this century and a half of British military dominance. Perhaps this title hints at the deep-running loyalties that united Britain’s generals during this period of almost uninterrupted success. For those who like to live dangerously and go straight to dessert, the last two chapters are as good a revision as you could find for commemoration events in June 2015. But those who do make the time to read this book from cover to cover will be rewarded with many fine insights into the rise of the redcoat.
