Sir John Moore(1761–1809)

John Moore was born in Glasgow on 13 November 1761, the son of a doctor and author who became travelling tutor to a young duke, and the boy spent much of his youth on the continent acquiring the languages and polish that would mark him out as one of the most cultivated officers of his army. He was commissioned at fifteen and learned his trade the hard way across thirty years of service: in the American war, in Corsica, in the West Indies, in Ireland, in Holland and in Egypt, wounded again and again, rising on a reputation for courage, intelligence and an unusual care for the welfare and dignity of the common soldier.

His most lasting work was done not on a battlefield but on the training ground. Given command of a camp at Shorncliffe on the Kent coast in the first years of the nineteenth century, Moore developed there a new kind of soldier and a new way of soldiering: the light infantryman, trained to think and to act on his own initiative, to skirmish and shoot accurately, and to be led by trust and self-respect rather than by the lash. The regiments he formed at Shorncliffe became the famous Light Division, the finest infantry in the British army, and the methods he pioneered shaped it for a century.

In 1808, in the war against Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula, Moore was given command of the British army in Spain and advanced boldly into the north to threaten the French communications. When Napoleon himself turned against him with overwhelming force, Moore faced a stark choice, and he chose to save his army: he led it on a long, brutal midwinter retreat across the snow-bound mountains of Galicia to the port of Corunna, drawing the weight of the French emperor's strength after him and away from the rest of Spain, and holding his rearguard together through terrible conditions.

At Corunna on 16 January 1809, with the transport ships at last in the harbour behind him, Moore turned and gave battle to cover the embarkation of his army, and beat back the French attacks. In the moment of success, with the field held and his men getting away safely to the ships, he was struck in the shoulder and chest by a cannon shot. He lived long enough to learn that the army was saved and the enemy repulsed, said that he hoped his country would do him justice, and died that night. His men buried him in the ramparts of the town as the rearguard prepared to leave, a scene made famous in one of the best-known poems in the language.

The army he saved came home to fight again, and the light infantry he had made went on to be the backbone of Wellington's victories across the rest of the war. The Moore name carries his memory as the general from Glasgow who reformed the British soldier, brought his army out of a hopeless position by a feat of endurance and command, and fell at Corunna at the very moment of the victory that covered its escape.