History of the 95th - Articles (The Military Knapsack by Richard Rutherford-Moore)

Practical Observations on the Military Knapsack

An adventure in ‘experimental archaeology’ with some philosophical observations

By Richard Rutherford-Moore

Part One

“Any fool can be uncomfortable!”

A quote from a veteran Army Training Sergeant

made to the author during ‘outdoor survival training’

Before I begin relating my ‘campaign’ observations I should perhaps mention I was philosophically resigned to the fact that under pressure a tree bends to force rather than resist it and snapping so I knew that honestly recreating the experiment described below with anything like full historical authenticity would be impossible for me to attempt under certain imposed and unavoidable conditions at the time the opportunity to undertake the experiment arose. Like the aforesaid tree, I did my best up to a point before compromising or adapting. But: the degree and the duration of the compromise - outside relating to my survival or in an emergency - was open to consideration and were duly noted. Immunisation jabs against diptheria, typhoid, typhus, polio and tetanus, water purification steri-tabs certainly aren’t historically authentic but are very good examples to quote in relation to what I’m getting at as I’ve never heard of anyone who has gone that far in taking risks to faithfully recreate history. I’ve never personally experienced but I’ve also heard of criticisms made by academic historians against ‘hobby-historical reconstructionists’ after seeing or reading about articles from same and such statements as “It might be a very nice hand-sewn uniform to the correct period pattern - but it’s still modern machine-woven wool cloth.” I can stand the high expense and time of creation and study to pride myself on an equally high standard of knowledge and equipment - but - I set out to prove nothing to anyone, to just simply find things out for myself and have a good time to boot so bear in mind I accept suggestions and criticisms but I’m not prepared to suffer and risk serious illness and death just to prove a point …

After the first five years of recreating a 95^th Rifleman of the Peninsula War I perhaps looked with a more jaundiced eye at the regulations of the Georgian period governing military knapsacks and their complement of what they classed as camp necessities (i.e. things that the people in charge at that time said a soldier couldn’t do without and/or throw away at pain of paying for the replacement item) rather than the viewpoint of parade-ground martinet, military illustrator, wargamer - simply as a period re-enactor concerned with what it was like both to have to carry a knapsack and be able to live out of it. There is an advantage working within the Napoleonic period that more than a few soldiers were literate and left us with an invaluable archive and set of memoirs, many of which record and detail the daily life of the soldier as their priority over describing the great military events and battles in which they participated.

Campaigning overseas in terms of uniforms, kit and training jerks Facility back in the direction of Utility; a fact that is obvious to anyone who has studied military history and in particular to Georgian Era enthusiasts the period of warfare within The Seven Years’ War known as The French and Indian Wars in North America and Canada between 1750 and 1765. Items of uniform and kit and the training to go with them that have all been developed particularly over a long period of peace to look very well on a European parade-ground are suddenly expected to perform equally as well when crammed below decks in a square-rigged transport vessel at sea in a gale, marching through an expanse of deep dark damp forest or campaigning over a sandy sunburned windswept desert. It is equitable that in the Georgian period you might also know what you want in terms of kit but not be able to either acquire or afford it. As anyone who has served will know, when you lose a piece of kit stolen by someone, you generally steal someone else's to replace it to keep the continuity. The only discrimination is that you steal it from someone else's mess and not from anyone in your own particular group. ‘Corpse-robbing’ is not the only distasteful aspect of the Napoleonic Wars but without recourse to it soldiers would have died in greater numbers through lack of badly-needed replacement items; after each and every battle in the Peninsula survivors would be seen seeking out a pair of shoes and a pair of respectable trousers from the fallen and during the night a few real hard-cases - both men and women - with strong stomachs, no conscience and armed with sharp knives or pincers would seek out and remove certain other items such as gold teeth and rings, with cash and valuables to be found within the knapsacks of the enemy - often whilst the donor was still alive.

During my service 'on campaign' in the Crimea in 1992-1995 I found it to be generally a good place to campaign - where you are seasonally alternately roasted by the sun and frozen in sub-zero temperatures - and do a little dabbling in the sort of experiments described here but later came to love it for unspoiled country and the opportunity to research and experiment with military history. If in your imagination you could do away with the internal combustion engine and the camera, the evocative scenery framing long lines of tents, horses, artillery pieces and associated hardware was very period-atmospheric with the long-suffering local villagers cast in the part of Portuguese or Spanish peasants. Between August and November during the actual filming I was rarely out of my uniform, both on and off the film set and in fact it became my working clothes. My recreated kit as such got a rare opportunity to prove it's real worth under simulated outdoor field conditions (or ‘experimental archaeology’ as it is now popularly known on both sides of the Atlantic) at the cost of it becoming far more quickly worn-out than during the life of an average re-enactor. The area had seen more than it’s fair share of military combat; from pre-history through to successive Roman, Greek, Tartar and Turkish invasion and occupation, 18^th Century Russo-Turkish campaigns, the landing of a British-French force prior to the disastrous Siege of Sevastopol and the battles of Balaklava and Inkerman in 1854-56, White versus Red Russian during the 1916 Revolution and two mighty conflicts in 1942 and then 1944 during first a sweeping Nazi advance and then a Red Army liberation. One of the smaller hazards of moving around there was the WW2 military detritus and hardware in the form of left-over unexploded bombs and shells - if you needed more military atmosphere there was always the occasional discovery of the remains of a buried soldier.

NOTE This particular form of discovery whether a German from 1944 or a Brit from 1854 always made me pause for thought in what I was actually doing out there ‘playing at soldiers’ … and on two later occasions caused me an awful lot more than thought.

One of the things about a Frenchman's calfskin knapsack is the advantages it has over the British ‘Trotter’ pack (so called as a Mr Trotter of Soho Square, London designed it in 1805) which you don't usually read about. In cold weather, you can empty the cowhide pack, fill it with straw and put your feet in it to keep them warm; you can do this with a regulation pack but when a Trotter pack is damaged, it is more difficult to repair - in a serious tear without wrapping the contents up in the blanket and utilizing the pack’s harness to contain it, you will struggle to carry it. A cowhide or goatskin knapsack can be re-stitched or simply bodged-up in many ways using scraps of leather, thread or sinew and a sharp awl and stout needle. The French pack didn’t have the chest-strap and the design of the harness makes it comfortable - but the main disadvantage of the French calfskin pack is that it ‘drops’ when worn to sit very snugly in the small of the back, generating a lot of heat on the march on a hot day as there is no gap to permit air circulation; this you can regulate to a degree by adjusting the length and fittings of the shoulder-straps and moving the pack up and down at intervals on the march (even so low as to rest on the top of the buttocks if you have a condescending officer and don’t mind looking really sloppy and sit so high as to be on line with the shoulders by ‘crossing the shoulder-straps’ to the opposite arm). A second disadvantage to both packs is that if worn high in action the rolled blanket makes it difficult to get the head far enough back to take an aimed shot in the prone position; and wearing the pack lower down the back can restrict or block your access to the cartridge box. The only way for a Rifleman to do this comfortably and efficiently really is to carry the knapsack by the left shoulder-strap in action and throw it forward onto the ground to take a shot, lying beside it using the pack as a rifle rest then reloading in the same prone position. It takes a moment to pick up the knapsack by the same strap and flick it onto a shoulder to move on. If you are in the Line Infantry you’d probably have to stand, grin and bear it whilst shooting but to a Rifleman this method would be possible. I’ve tried it in experiments with muzzle-loading ‘combat accuracy’ and it works. The waist-belt caused a few concerns in the early days as it was suggested that in wearing these - as with the cavalry - it would cause pressure-damage to a man’s liver and kidneys. Redcoats sometimes used their musket-slings as a belt to secure box and bayonet to their bodies ‘in action’ - but of course riflemen didn’t have that problem. Even sticking the sword-bayonet into the ground and using the handle as a rifle-rest would improve accuracy.

Both of the above knapsacks rub in places on the uniform and over time may require the addition of a patch to cover a potential hole. Trotter packs with wooden frames have been noted to inflict these rub-marks and inflict noticeable damage on a new recruit’s re-enactment uniform after even a single days’ wear. You can of course remove the soft-wood frame from your Trotter pack and use it to supplement the campfire; the knapsack can still be packed and worn more comfortably. It’s shape roughly holds to the square and the wear and tear on both pack and uniform is lessened. Removing the frame also permits more kit to be packed inside as the pack can now develop a ‘bulge’ whereas it couldn’t develop one when containing the frame. A surviving infantry uniform jacket from the Napoleonic period shows under a magnifying glass how the surface of the wool has worn on the shoulders and under the arms because of the rubbing of the shoulder-belt and knapsack straps; the poorer the quality of the wool, the quicker a hole would develop. But - on campaign the canvas pack won’t serve you half as well as a calfskin pack as it is quicker to wear out and a lot harder to repair.

When you have to carry your home on your back for long periods and in rough country you evolve a necessary classification in terms of priority of all the items in your kit and pack. It was after one such night spent by necessity on a cold bare mountain in the Crimea I re-classified my liquor flask as a 'camp necessity' rather than a personal luxury. Tobacco also underwent the same promotion and moved well up the priority list. But - does this hold true for the prospect of carrying a heavy pack filled with the Regulation Items on or during a long hard march? Would you discard your spare soles and heels, blackball, pipeclay, brushes, shaving tackle and all the other small bits and pieces associated with keeping clean and looking smart of the parade ground faced with increasing heat and fatigue? Would the prospect of a later flogging for a willful loss or neglect of your camp necessities cause you to reconsider discarding these items? These are imponderables to many re-enactors; the decision on this would perhaps - to a soldier marching in 1809 in the July sun from Lisbon to Talavera under a harsh / considerate / indifferent commanding officer - differ from the choice of a military adviser recreating 'campaign conditions' in the Crimean Mountains enjoying off-duty freedom in 1992-5. As a recreated soldier enjoying a certain amount of freedom in my military disciplines, I was able to make several amendments to my kit but still stay in the parameters of an interpretation of a Napoleonic soldier. Philosophically, as a man living day-to-day never knowing if a bullet (or a microbe) would end my days on Earth, I dumped most of the hard-stuff and started again with my list of kit; worrying about tomorrow when tomorrow came. It led to a bit of suffering at odd times but overall gave a good performance in satisfying my requisite demands and without burdening me unduly on the march. As I ‘slimmed down’ over the first weeks on campaign by losing ten pounds of flab I did begin to feel better and look more ‘able-bodied’.

I kept the rifle as without it I ceased to be soldierly and couldn't defend myself or protect my personal property. Keeping the cartridge box, ball-bag, powder horn and tool-bag followed suit as part of the rifle maintenance kit. The sword designed as a bayonet for the Baker rifle did not see much use in that direction and caused balance problems to boot if shooting when the sword was fixed to the rifle but the sword itself did serve as a versatile camp tool - fetching wood for the fire, fashioning shelters (but employed in this way some period swords did notoriously break), digging up roots, carving up chunks of meat and toasting bread. Any fascine knife or billhook can be safely discarded unless you plan to build some seriously large field fortifications; in the same fashion, I never actually ever required a spade for any purpose that the sword-bayonet wouldn’t serve for (such as overnights in warm weather digging a hole for my hip-joint in light soil but more generally digging a hole to squat in for latrine purposes). With the old infantry short-sword or hanger having been discarded a few years earlier no doubt the sight of British red-coated regulars in 1756 carrying their camp hatchets in their belts to use as tomahawks and sheath knives for scalping the enemy would have caused a few raised eyebrows and gasps of astonishment back on Horse Guards Parade in London.

The greatcoat after three trials proved to have advantages over the wool blanket - carrying both I saw right away as being far too heavy and bulky and this was reflected in a General Order of 1813 by the Duke of Wellington himself directing the soldiers - but note, only after the general issue of tents for the first time - to carry greatcoat or blanket but not both. Several examples remain of period greatcoats; all have varying designs. Single-breasted private soldiers’ greatcoats appear to be a rather thinner weave of wool than officers double-breasted greatcoats and lined in the body only. A example here in a UK military museum turned out to be a civilian watch-coat with three capes and which reached to the ankles, made from very thick wool and lined with wool and also some sort of unidentifiable waterproofing. The greatcoat can be much heavier and thicker if you create it from recommended modern wool - period private soldier greatcoats probably weren’t as thick in weave as civilian ones and were not fully lined but their quality before wartime short-cuts set in was probably good.

NOTE The mistake was rectified afterwards when it was found that the military greatcoat in question was actually in another Museum of Costume gracing the shoulders of a figure of a typical Georgian gentleman! Surviving soldiers’ greatcoats in both British and French military museums are mostly made from what in the Napoleonic period would have been seen by any civilian tailor as a cheap weave of wool but the examples have notably never been hemmed as the quality of the weave of this wool prevents fraying at the edges; not something you would see from using the modern equivalent of it.

The greatcoat is heavier but you can sleep in it and be warmer than using the thin ‘army’ blanket carried by most re-enactors. In the really cold weather my blanket never seemed to stay in the same place twice even when pinned up with blanket-pins. It didn't keep me warm on the move - even worn as a matchcoat, it was awkward - and even worse, it didn’t keep me warm when I was asleep wearing it. In heavy rain or freezing cold, you can find any improvised shelter and your sleeping arrangements leave much to be desired! I tried sleeping, greatcoat on over all, feet to the fire, knapsack as pillow. In faith with many a period soldier-memoir, I tried sleeping with my feet through the greatcoat sleeves - but have you ever tried this yourself? You take off boots and gaiters, struggle into the coat with trousers tucked into socks (they don't stay in there for long though) button it up, put boots on, then discover your neck and ears are cold! The coat only comes up chest-high and despite your best attempts to sleep, your greatcoat ends up all over the place as you toss and turn. A woolly scarf and later a sort of shawl was ‘acquired’ (from someone’s washing-line) to wrap around my head, face and neck and mittens for the hands improvised from some spare socks. If I had ever had to turn out to face an alarm quickly in these days I would have provided an amusing spectacle to any observer if he could see me in the darkness - jumping up and down tripping over and struggling with an upside-down buttoned-up greatcoat, belts, boots and blanket-pins. No wonder Lord Wellington said when it came to over-nighting on campaign that ‘… even the very worse house is better than the very best tent’.