Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword: The British Regiment on - download pdf or read online

Although an army’s luck is usually measured in conflict results, its victories depend upon strengths that could be much less visible at the box. In Sickness, ache, and the Sword, army historian Andrew Bamford assesses the effectiveness of the British military in sustained campaigning through the Napoleonic Wars. within the approach, he bargains a clean and debatable examine Britain’s army process, exhibiting that good fortune or failure on crusade rested at the day by day reviews of regimental devices instead of the military as a whole.

Bamford attracts his name from the phrases of Captain Moyle Sherer, who through the wintry weather of 1816–1817 wrote an account of his provider in the course of the Peninsular warfare: “My regiment hasn't ever been very approximately dealt with within the box. . . yet, sadly! What among affliction, agony, and the sword, few, only a few of these males at the moment are in existence.” Bamford argues that these day-by-day scourges of such often-ignored components as noncombat deaths and equine power and losses made up our minds results at the battlefield.

In the 19th century, the British military used to be a set of regiments instead of a unmarried unified physique, and the regimental approach bore the accountability of providing manpower on that box. among 1808 and 1815, while Britain was once combating a world clash some distance more than its army functions, the approach approximately collapsed. just a couple of benefits narrowly outweighed the army’s expanding lack of ability to satisfy manpower necessities. This publication examines these severe dynamics in Britain’s significant early-nineteenth-century campaigns: the Peninsular struggle (1808–1814), the Walcheren excursion (1809), the yank warfare (1812–1815), and the transforming into commitments in northern Europe from 1813 on.

Drawn from basic records, Bamford’s statistical research compares the big disparities among regiments and diverse theatres of warfare and enhances fresh reviews of healthiness and ailment within the British Army.