The Age of Elegance (3 page)

inquired what he should do during the battle, 'Do your duty!' "
^J
Under their rough exteriors these men were philosophers and humorists. Before a fight jokes and quips ran through the ranks; "Ah! if me poor mother saw me now!" the men of the 28th would shout when things went awry, rocking with rude laughter at the time-honoured sally. In the same spirit, when the famous rub-a-dub of the French
pas de charge
was heard, the riflemen called out to one another from behind the boulders, "Holloa there! Look sharp! for damme, here comes Old Trousers!"

Among the Irish, who crowded the ranks of almost every regiment, this joking spirit was often carried to the point of riot. "A parcel of lads that took the world aisy," they tended to turn their surroundings into a Donnybrook Fair. They nearly drove Wellington's Provost Marshals mad with their plundering; a few minutes after they bivouacked, the sheep and hens would start bleating and cackling for miles round. Nor, though their escapades sometimes brought them to the gallows, were they ever at a loss for an answer. "And I know you, sir, and the 'boys of Connaught' know you too," replied a Connaught Ranger whom General Picton had observed from the far side of an unfordable river making off with a goat, "and I'd be sorry to do anything that would be displaising to your honour; and, sure, iv you'd only let me, I'd send your sarvent a leg iv him to dhress for your dinner, for, by my sowl, your honour looks cowld and angry—hungry I mane." After which, this experienced campaigner, knowing himself safe, held up the old goat by the beard and shook it genially at the General's aide-de-camp.
²

No discipline could wholly tame such inveterate plunderers. "I have no fear of your conduct in face of the enemy," Wellington told an Irish regiment, "I know you. You are where you wish to be, leading the army. But if I hear of any straggling or irregularities in pursuit, I'll punish you as severely as the worst corps in the army, and
you know me."
Upon which there arose from the rear rank an agonised cry of "Glory be to God! there'll be no plundering, after ah!" The "Patlanders' " wives, who did the army's washing, were as incorrigible. "Bad luck to his ugly face—the spy of our camp!" cried Mrs. Skiddy of the 34th after one of her brushes with the

¹
Journal of a Soldier,
22,24. See also Donaldson, 211; Bell,
1,
26-7, 83; Charles Napier,
1,
163-4, 172; Blakeney, 204; Grattan, 112; Gomm, 226; Simmons, 80, 134, 249; Bessborough, 221.

²
Grattan, 21. See also
idem
87,123-5, 128, 136-8; Blakeney, 18-19,105; Schaumann, 23, 202; Leslie, 97.

Provost Marshal, "may he niver see home till the vultures pick his eyes out, the born varmint!" Bestriding the rocky hill-tracks on her celebrated donkey, "the Queen of Spain," the little, squat, turtle-backed woman, with her uncontrollable tongue and invincible courage, was the type of all her. ragged race. She and her sisters were always ready to risk their lives to be in at the bivouac before their husbands and "have the fire and a dhrip of tay ready for the poor craythers after their load and labour."

For fighting's sake these "Teagues" would endure without complaining an almost Roundhead discipline. In the whole army no corps was so severely drilled as the Connaught Rangers, the celebrated 88 th—a regiment, as one of its veterans wrote, whose spirit it was impossible to break. If a man coughed in the ranks, if the sling of his firelock left his shoulder when it should not, if he moved his knapsack when standing at ease, he was punished. "Yet, if it came to a hard tug and we had neither rations nor shoes," wrote Captain Grattan, "then indeed the Rangers would be in their element and outmarch any battalion in the Service! Without shoes they fancied themselves at home, without food they were near
ly at home." An officer of anoth
er regiment has left us a picture of them as they passed him in a moment of crisis, merry as larks, singing and cracking their jokes, with bronzed faces and frames hard as nails, and as eager for the fight as for a ration of rum. Danger seemed to inspire them; George Napier recorded how one worthless, drunken dog ran up to a thirteen-inch shell which had dropped into a crowded trench and, knocking off its spluttering fuse, presented it to him with a "By Jasus, your honour, she'll do you no harm, since I knocked the life out of the cratur!"

With its "hard cases," inveterate drunkards, and gaolbirds—one colonel reckoned the criminal element at from fifty to a hundred men in every battalion—the British Army was no school for saints. The recruiting sergeant took what he could get. Yet nearly all were game-cocks in a fight; as one of their officers said, there never was such an army. And many of these rough men displayed at times a touching affection and kindness. George Napier, when wounded, was visited by an Irish private of his company who, after having his arm amputated, walked seven miles to assure himself of his captain's safety. His brother, William Napier, related how John Henessy of the 50th, a drunken, thieving brute, sev
eral times flogged for his evil
ways, who was captured with him at Corunna, tramped two hundred miles on his return home in order to deliver to Napier's sister a silver spur entrusted to his charge.

The British soldier's incurable vice was drink. An old woman of Pontalegre, after four years' acquaintanceship with Wellington's army, always assumed, when an Englishman asked a question, that he was after wine. To obtain it, he would commit every species of depredation; rob a house, plunder a church, steal from his comrade and strip his own dead officer after death. Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th, who wrote an account of life in the ranks, thought that the craving for liquor was often pathological—the result of harsh usage and brutal punishment. Soldiers had to endure so much and had so few normal pleasures that they turned automatically to drink when they relaxed. Men who could take three or four hundred lashings without a groan, chewing a musket ball or a bit of leather to keep themselves from crying out while the blood ran down their backs, were scarcely likely to restrain themselves when they got into a wine vault.

Yet Wellington's remark that the bulk of his men enlisted for drink concealed the representative character of his army. Though poverty was its recruiting ground, many of its soldiers were thoughtful and serious men of refinement and education. One Scottish private related how he found a comrade on guard reading Cromek's
Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song;
another how the eyes of himself and his comrades filled with tears as they sang the songs of their native land before a battle.
¹
And running through the tough fibre of the rank and file was a strain of chivalry. Foul-mouthed, obscene, irreligious, they would yet give their last bit of biscuit to a starving Portuguese peasant or shoulder the burden of a woman or child. When he was sober and his blood not roused, the British soldier, so fierce and implacable in battle, could show an almost childlike tenderness towards an enemy: would tear the shirt off his own back to bind his wounds, carry him to safety or share the contents of his flask. Having never known invasion at home, he seldom evinced the revengeful spirit of his German and Iberian allies. A Scottish sergeant who was shot at by a wounded Frenchman for whom he had gone to fetch a drink, after a moment's reflection with raised firelock, quietly went on with his mission of mercy. A private of the same

¹
Donaldson, 180;
Journal of a Soldier,
115-16.

race, finding a Portuguese muleteer robbing a peasant girl, faced his knife with his bare fists and knocked him down.

Among the officers this chivalrous sense of honour was more than an instinct; it was a code. They were almost too ready to take on a bully or punish a cheat; Charles Napier flattered himself that his leg was as straight a one as ever bore up the body of a gentleman or kicked a blackguard. He regarded the treatment of women as the measure of civilisation; tenderness towards the helpless and adherence to one's word constituted for him the tests of a gentleman. A man who broke his parole was beneath contempt; George Napier held it up to his children as the unforgivable offence—that and cowardice. One rode straight, spoke the truth and never showed fear. There was little outward religion in Wellington's officers; skylarking and often uproariously noisy, they were like a pack of schoolboys. Yet under the surface was a deep fund of Christian feeling; their
beau idé
al
was a man like John Colborne of the 52nd— upright, fearless and gentle—or John Vandeleur, whom his friends never heard speak harshly of any man. "The British Army is what it is," Wellington said long afterwards, "because it is officered by gentlemen; men who would scorn to do a dishonourable thing and who have something more at stake than a reputation for military smartness."
¹

It was this that kept them so staunch at the testing time. They fought, not for public applause, but for an inward satisfaction that each man bore in his soul. "I should never have shown my face again," wrote one of them of a bout of fever, "had I applied for sick leave." They took their knocks as they came, believing that nothing mattered so long as they were true to code and comrade. "How did you sleep?" asked a young officer of a newcomer after a night in the clouds on the march to Arroyo-Molinos. "Slept like a fish," came the reply, "I believe they sleep very well in water." "Bravo," said he, "you'll do!" "Begin to like my trade," wrote the same apt novice a few weeks later, "seeing all my comrades as jolly and fearless as if they were fox-hunters."
²

The Prussian rigidity, which the Horse Guards with pipeclay and

¹
Fraser, 207; Charles Napier, I, 316; Gomm, 375; George Napier, 55, 76, 174-S, 218, 221; Grattan, 57, 229, 303; Kincaid,
Random Shots,
288; Tomkinson, 222: Blakeney, 178, 281-2; Leslie, 193-4. 198; Bessborough, 231; Oman, V. 453; Anderson, 14;
Journal of a Soldier, 106;
Boothby, 159; Costello, 74; Donaldson, 200; Bell, I, 42, 83-4; Smith, I, 46-7.

²
Bell, I, 13-14. 22. See also Simmons, 193; Tomkinson, 22. "I knew no happier times, and they were their own reward." Kincaid,
Random Shots,
252.

lash had imposed on the eighteenth-century Army, had long been shed. Wellington's force was as knowing, adaptable and individualistic as a field of fox-hunters. After four years' campaigning in the toughest country in western Europe, it could, he claimed, go anywhere and do anything. Its courage was the cool, resourceful kind of men with complete confidence in their own skill. "Now, my lads," said Colonel Colborne, "we'll just charge up to the edge of the ditch, and, if we can't get it, we'll stand and fire in their faces."
¹
Alert and wiry veterans as the French were, they had met their match. "Their soldiers got them into scrapes," Wellington replied when asked to explain his success, "mine always got me out." They were up to every trick of the game and, like their hardy adversaries, able to make themselves comfortable anywhere. Captain Leslie of the 29th and Kincaid of the Rifles have each described the scene at their nightly bivouac: the rough sedge-mats spread under a tree, the accoutrements hanging on the branches, the parallel trenches dug on festive occasions to form a table with candles stuck in the sockets of upturned bayonets, the soup made from stewed ration-beef and vegetables; the partridges and hares roasting on a turning thread suspended from a tripod of ramrods; the rough wine of the country cooled under moist cloths in canteens hung from the trees. Then with a bundle of fine branches to lie on and a green sod or saddle for pillow, the young victors would sleep in their cloaks till reveille. "The bugles sounded," wrote Ensign Bell, "I rolled my blanket, strapped it on my back and waited for the assembly call."

It was not the French now who hunted the British, but the British the French—"to pot them, kill them and cook them in their own fashion." "Damn my eyes," the men shouted to one another when on short rations, "we must either fall in with the French or the Commissary to-day; I don't care which!" "It was like deer-stalking," wrote another, "a glorious thing to whack in amongst a lively party with their flesh-pots on the fire of well-seasoned wood, a chest of drawers, perhaps, or the mahogany of some hidalgo in the middle of the street blazing away and the crappos calling out,
'Bonne soupe, bonne soupe!
"
Officers and men were always thinking out new ways of surprising and harrying the enemy; Captain Irvine of the 28th taught himself to sling stones with such accuracy that, if he

¹
Random Shots,
273. "I am confident if Colborne was suddenly woken out of his sleep and told he was surrounded by treble his numbers, it would only have had the effect of making him, if possible, still more calm and collected." George Napier, 220-1.

encountered two or three Frenchmen, he would bowl one over with a well-placed rock, flatten another with his firelock, and petrify a third with a shout, tripping him up or, if he bolted, pelting him with pebbles—a spectacle which never failed to delight his men.
¹

It was this offensive spirit—itself the outcome of perfect training, fitness and teamwork—that made Wellington's army so formidable. It was always on its toes; healthy, collected, well-provisioned, wary, impudent and out to make trouble. Apart from the old Scots champion, Sir Thomas Graham, and Picton, who was fifty-three, the average age of its divisional commanders in the spring of 1812 was slightly under forty. Stapleton Cotton, who commanded the cavalry, was thirty-eight; Alexander Dickson of the Artillery, thirty-four; George Murray, the Quartermaster-General and Chief-of-Staff, forty.

Of those they led, the crown and exemplar was still the Light Division—capable, as Harry Smith claimed, of turning the tide of victory any day. "There perhaps never was, nor ever again will be," wrote Kincaid, "such a war brigade as that which was composed of the 43rd, 52nd and the Rifles/' Its officers, who took a pride in being gay of heart, were always ready to enter into whatever amusement was going—a practical joke, a hare or fox-hunt, an impromptu donkey-race, a day after the partridges, a dance with guitar, cakes and lemonade in some draughty, candlelit barn where the raven-haired, garlic-scented village senoritas, screeching with excitement, pinned up their dresses for
bolero and fandango.
At the head of this famous Division went the green-jacketed Rifles—"the most celebrated old fighting corps in the Army"—who in the whole war never lost a piquet. And the scarlet-coated 43rd and 52nd—that beloved corps of George Napier's, "where every officer was a high-minded gentleman and every private a gallant and well-conducted soldier"—were their equals. "We had only to look behind," wrote Kincaid, "to see a line in which we might place a degree of confidence equal to our hopes in Heaven; nor were we ever disappointed." Grattan of the 88th—though a member of the rival 3 r
d Division— acknowledged the 43
rd to be the best regiment in the Army.
²

There were many competitors: the peerless Fusilier regiments

¹
Bell, I, 163. See
idem,
I, 24, 64, 81-2; Grattan, 176;
Johnny Newcome,
170; Tomkinson, 137; Kincaid, 33, 42-8, 60, 211;
Random Shots,
87-90; Leslie, 83-5; Donaldson, 206-7; Tomkirison, 37; Simmons, 15-16, 57.

⁸
Grattan, 120; Bell, I, 12, 37, 54-5, 156; George Napier, 207-8; Kincaid, 96, 153-4, 179*.
Random Shots,
16; Simmons, XXI, 279; Smith, I, 185, 190; Schaumann, 339; Larpent, I, 89, 102; Costello, 148; Cooke, 71-2.