From the earliest weeks of 1638 few people could doubt that Charles I faced the prospect of a rebellion in his ‘native kingdom’. Ostensibly Scottish agitation was triggered by the threat of religious uniformity being imposed by the king, thereby disregarding the Calvinist traditions of the Kirk in Scotland and resulting in the drafting and signing of the National Covenant in 1638. It is generally agreed that religious and political tensions in Scotland can be easily traced to the 1633 Scottish Coronation Parliament and even to the proroguing English Parliament in 1629. The Covenanting movement represented a revolutionary alliance comprising the majority of the nobility (especially the lairds), the commercial classes and the Presbyterian interest in Scotland. These combined to redress constitutional and nationalist grievances in the state as well as to uphold the Presbyterian version of the reformed tradition in the Kirk. Scrutiny of the political and religious discord will here only be touched on briefly where it informed the decisions of the Scottish military commanders who fought either for or against the Covenanter regime.

Introduction

For over three hundred years, the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) was the dominant power in north India, but by the first decade of the sixteenth century, it started breaking up. Several autonomous states emerged to challenge the political supremacy of the Delhi Sultanate in the Ganga-Jamuna doab (the fertile tract of land between the two rivers Ganga and Jamuna in north India). Deccan (the region between rivers Godavari and Krishna) and south India became independent of the Delhi Sultanate's control earlier during the mid-fourteenth century. The invasion of India by the Turkish warlord Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur in 1526 (Emperor 1526–30) resulted in the replacement of the Lodhi Dynasty ruling the Delhi Sultanate by the Mughal Empire. The Mughals (Moghuls) called themselves Chagatai Turks or Timurids. The Mughals claimed that from their father's side they descended from Amir Timur and from their mother's side, from the Chagatai Mongol branch. The newly born Mughal Empire was overthrown in 1540 by the Afghan warlord from east India named Sher Shah Suri. Babur's son Humayun staged a comeback in 1555. The ‘real’ founder of the Mughal Empire was Akbar (Emperor 1556–1605). Akbar put an end to the political chaos in north India by subduing the Afghans and the Rajputs. Further, he reorganized the administrative set up. By the time of Akbar's death in 1605, the Mughal Empire had established a stable administrative machinery in north and central India and was in the process of spilling slowly into Deccan.

New decisions and challenges faced Alexander Leslie, now first Earl of Leven, brought on by the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. His hopes of taking an army of 10,000 men to Germany in support of Elizabeth of Bohemia were dashed when that force was instead sent to Ireland. Their stated objective was to protect their Protestant brethren from the immediate threat posed by the Confederate Irish, who were believed to have massacred over 100,000 of their number. The first expeditionary troops under Major General Robert Monro arrived in April 1642; a second cohort of soldiers, composed largely of Campbells, was organized within months. By August the total force stood at just over 11,000, with Leven at its head. However, after a relatively brief sojourn in Ireland, Leslie returned to Scotland to serve on the various committees negotiating an ever closer alliance with the English Parliament, the body from which any British power in Ireland notionally derived. In the meantime, command of the Covenanter forces was again devolved to Monro. At the same juncture, and to complicate matters further, the English Parliament raised its own series of grievances against Charles I.

From the dawn of civilization to the present time, warfare in South Asia has been conducted by large armies. Neither the warlords nor the polities have had to resort to conscription to fill the ranks of the forces. Even during the two World Wars, when British-India maintained an army whose size exceeded one million, the Raj did not have to resort to conscription. The only exceptions are some of the insurgent armies of present-day South Asia who enforce conscription because of the limited regions under their temporary control. None of the polities in history have had any difficulties in hiring Indian military manpower owing to several reasons. The huge demographic resource of the subcontinent is an important factor. Even now the Indian economy is mostly agrarian. And surplus manpower from the agrarian sector provides an available pool for the recruiters. More than 10 per cent of the armed male population in the rural sector who could not be absorbed in agriculture, manufactured their own muskets and swords and were always available as ‘hired guns’ till late eighteenth century. Unlike in early modern Europe, military service has always been popular in the subcontinent.

However, certain nuances in the recruitment policies continue to operate even today. The landless agricultural labourers are denied entry in the armies. Despite the presence of underemployed and unemployed proletariat, the military forces in India for most of the time did not recruit from the cities and towns.

Of the many challenges Canada has faced since Confederation in 1867, none has involved such an expenditure of blood and treasure as its participation in overseas wars. Today, cenotaphs all across the country's 3,000-mile expanse commemorate the sacrifices its soldiers have made in foreign wars. From the South African veldt in 1899–1902 to Flanders Fields, Normandy, Korea and Afghanistan, so greatly has expeditionary warfare come to dominate the profession of arms in Canada that it almost completely overshadows the traditions of an earlier era when the country's wars were fought on its own soil.

Throughout the nineteenth century, British North Americans adhered to a model of amateur military service that was transplanted to the new world by English settlers, where it became a founding military tradition of both Canada and the United States. With its entire focus on home defence, the Canadian militia was a part-time force based on universal liability to military service and intended to act as an auxiliary to the British army. Provisions for a levée en masse had been set in place at the time of Upper Canada's founding in 1791, shortly after its Loyalist settlers arrived as refugees from the newly independent United States. Meanwhile, the militia traditions of French-speaking Lower Canada drew back even further to the French regime and the ancient obligation of habitant farmers to render military service in time of war. So while the precise form and organization of these amateur forces differed in each of the British North American colonies before Confederation, all were based upon an underlying principle of obligatory service for almost the entire adult male population. Though seldom resorted to, these powers of conscription would remain in the country's statutes until the revised National Defence Act of 1950.

Companies or regiments of embodied militia throughout the period 1837 to 1899 were nearly always organized around a single community or county. At the outset of the Victorian era, the nominal rolls of the Sedentary Militia included all able-bodied males between the ages of 16 to 60 in Lower Canada and 18 to 60 in the upper province.

As the last chapter demonstrated, late sixteenth-century Scotland was rich in manpower but lacked a standing army. Nevertheless, it was a nation with a history stretching back to the Middle Ages of raising expeditionary forces for the benefit of allies. A systematic survey of the more important of these expeditions dating to Alexander Leslie's formative years illustrates clearly the way in which he and his fellow generals of the Thirty Years' War honed their military skills and were able to perfect them to a point where they became the teachers rather than the taught in the ‘art of war’. Of special interest to this study are James VI's and his government's authorizations to raise regiments to be sent to the aid of France, the Dutch Republic and England. The latter example was actually composed of troops sent to Ireland and merely continued an existing tradition of Highland expeditionary forces across the Irish Sea. The participants were known by a range of names, including galloglass (gallóglaigh), catteran (ceithearn) and redshanks. One such levy is of particular relevance for a number of reasons, not least as it shows the continuing potency of the western seaboard as a recruiting ground for Scottish armies on the cusp of the seventeenth century.

It is sometimes argued that 1639 marked the end of any meaningful Scottish contribution to the Thirty Years' War as this year saw the departure of so many veterans from European armies to participate in the British Civil Wars. However, there was never a moment in the ‘German wars’ that did not see active Scottish regiments and commanders still based on the Continent. The most visible of these were the regiments of the Scots-Dutch Brigade and those in the French army, largely because they were flagged as Scottish units. Detecting the Scottish presence within the Swedish army is more problematic, given the steady integration of Scots throughout Swedish and German regiments. As noted in Chapter 5, a condition of the release of Alexander Leslie and his cohort in the 1638–40 period was that many Scottish officers were required to stay in Swedish service. Nevertheless, the sudden removal of so many of their comrades necessitated a reorganization of those remaining behind, in addition to finding replacements for those who had left.

In writing this book we have encountered numerous language variants for place and personal names. We have tried to keep these to the most appropriate language version, with alternatives given where these vary dramatically from the version given in the original source. In terms of Scottish surnames, we have standardized names to single versions to avoid confusion, especially where numerous alternatives exist, such as Colonel Patrick More, who is variously also recorded as Mòr, Moor, Muir or Mohr. Variant forms of Scottish first names, for example Hans, Johan and John, have also been standardized. More complicated, perhaps, is the rendering of the names of the many ethnic Scots in the book as these are often recorded completely differently among various communities. For example, the Finnish-born Major General Arvid Forbes was called by his fellow Scots ‘Alexander Finnese Forbes’; Major General Jacob Duwall went by the name James Macdougall in Scottish company; while Colonel Johan Skytte naturalized as a Scot under the name Sir John Skite. Where such alternatives are present, we have indicated them in the text.

Throughout this book a variety of monetary denominations have been used. The two most common are pounds and riksdaler. After 1603 the value of the Scottish and English currencies were fixed so that twelve Scots pounds equalled one English one. Where it is known, we have identified which currency is meant.

From the early eighteenth century, the East India Company (henceforth EIC) started spreading its tentacles from three centres in different parts of India: Madras in southern India, Bombay in western India and Calcutta in eastern India. In the course of the eighteenth century, these three centres were organized as three presidencies and each presidency maintained its separate military establishment. The Madras, Bombay and Bengal armies had both British and Indian personnel. The European military personnel were of two types: private military units maintained by the EIC and units of the British Army. After 1859, the private white army of the EIC was disbanded and all the British military personnel came under the ambit of the British Army. The bulk of the military personnel of the EIC (and after 1859 Crown Government in British-India) were Indians. This was because they were cheaper (three times compared to a British soldier), healthier and knew the terrain well in the Indian context.

During emergencies, the British Government in India (hereafter GOI, and also known as the Raj) raised auxiliary units or volunteer units. This chapter is mainly concerned with European volunteer units in British-India. Though part-time soldier is a more apt term, we will use the term volunteers because that is how the European civilians who undertook part-time soldiering in British-India described themselves. During the two world wars, the British male civilians, of course, were ordered to join the Indian Army (as officers) or the British territorial/auxiliary units. The GOI never resorted to conscription of its Indian citizens. All the Indian soldiers were long-term volunteers who willingly served the sahibs for social status and regular pay in cash. Unlike in West Europe, the Indians looked forward for thirty years’ service (reduced to twenty-one years in the late nineteenth century) because after that they became eligible for pensions in cash. In pre-British India, military service also resulted in upward social mobility. In the colonial context of economic underdevelopment and lack of opportunities in the civilian sector, military service under the Raj remained an attractive option for the small peasants of the countryside.

Sir John Fortescue described the work of the British army in the first ten years of the Wars as ‘vast … thankless … and unprofitable’. His assessment might well have been shared by many of the medical officers who laboured during those years in difficult and disease-ridden environments, overseeing the deaths of large numbers of soldiers, for little apparent strategic gain. The West Indian expeditions of the years 1793–8 have, in particular, attracted the attention of historians for their appalling death rates among British troops. These expeditions have also been identified by historians of medicine as an important contributor to the development of a distinct empirical and experimental approach to medicine particular to the tropics, and to the reform of the AMD. In contrast, the other major British military undertaking of the period, the Duke of York's campaigns in the Low Countries during the years 1793–5, has been largely ignored by historians both military and medical. However, the campaigns in the Low Countries were fundamental to the ways in which British military medicine, and the self image of British army medical officers, developed over the course of the Wars.

The campaigns in the Low Countries began in February 1793 when France declared war on Britain and Holland. Britain responded by entering an alliance with Austria and Prussia to protect the neutrality of Holland and to maintain the free access of shipping in the Scheldt. A meagre force of 2,500 British men was embarked under the leadership of Frederick Augustus, Duke of York.

Introduction

India's history begins with the emergence of the Indus Valley Civilization. However, the Indus script is yet to be deciphered. The existing archaeological evidence tells us that the Indus Civilization followed a sort of defensive fort based strategy; the coming of the Aryans with their horses and chariots marked an epochal change in the conduct of warfare. Gradually the pastoral society was transformed into an agrarian society generating adequate surplus for the genesis of monarchies. Literary and numismatic sources are available in adequate quantities to trace the trajectory of warfare and military manpower mobilization of the sedentary polities in the Indian subcontinent from 500 bc onwards. Technological and economic changes along with political fluctuations shaped the composition and size of the armies. Now, let us focus on the emergence of the first civilization in South Asia.

Armies and Warfare from the Indus Valley Civilization to the Vedic Age

River Indus constitutes the western boundary of the subcontinent. Indus separates the subcontinent proper from the arid zones of Persia and Central Asia. The Indus Valley Civilization along the banks of Indus came into existence around 3500 bc. The Indus Valley people used arrows made of bronze and copper. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin (nine parts copper and one part tin) and is harder than pure copper and thus better suited for making weapons. These arrows were flat and thin with long narrow barbs. The Indus people also used double edged swords.