To its military renown we mainly owe the preservation of the Highland dress; but our kilted campaigners in India and Africa are not, as a rule, men of the same breeding as those whose martial virtues were first enlisted on the side of loyalty and order. No common soldiers were the privates, some of whom rode to drill attended by a gillie to carry their arms and uniforms. All of them would be fellow-clansmen or belonging to the same district, serving under their natural chiefs, and forming a happy regimental family, easily disciplined by leaders who understood their manners and would humour their sensibilities. They had the name of being “lambs in the house as lions in the field”; welcomed after experience by poor folk upon whom they came to be quartered, who at first might have shrunk from them as half-naked Scythians. Stewart of Garth, himself an officer in the Black Watch, is most emphatic as to the good conduct of this regiment, among whom for many years the lash was never used, as it was daily in other corps. At a general punishment parade the Highlanders would be excused from attendance, such an example being held needless for them. When one of them did at last come under the cat, he was banned by his fellows as plague-stricken; and the men, we are told, would sometimes subscribe to buy out a bad character, lest he should bring disgrace upon his company. These stern warriors feared above all a threat to tell of their misconduct at home. Out of their sixpence a day they, in at least one case, joined to pay a chaplain of their own, organising themselves into a church with elders elected from the ranks. Not a few of them sent part of that poor pay home to the old people; while others had sold their bodies to the king on condition of a farm lease given by the laird to the father they might never see again.
CAWDOR CASTLE
The Highlanders in those days were as noted for sobriety as for valour, declares General Stewart, in proof of which he asserts that when rum was served out on a campaign, the Highland soldiers alone could be trusted with three or four days’ allowance at once, like officers. There is indeed reason to hold that the Highlands have not always deserved a name for intemperance. The former drink of the people was ale, if not water; whisky does not figure in their ancient songs and proverbs, as does the Pictish “heather ale,” the secret of making which is long lost. With Pitt’s excise laws, we are told, began the smuggling and illicit distillation that did so much to demoralise a race which, if all stories are true, has sadly fallen away from primitive virtue. So Stewart protests as to the temperance of the early Highland regiments; yet more critical observers in George I.’s reign speak of whisky houses as already a curse to the country from which those troops were raised; and indeed all travellers of that date who got themselves into print are apt to touch on a habit of “correcting” or “qualifying” the rawness of Highland air, where a funeral, as well as a feast, was like to end in a drunken fray, when dirks served for forks.
General Stewart, it must be confessed, looked back on the Highlands through a haze of full-dress tartan, glittering with silver settings and jewelled memories! One can excuse this Gael for a little idealising the memory of his fathers in arms. He admits that the first Highland soldiers had some military failings, especially from the martinet’s point of view. They could be led, but not driven. Like Red Indian warriors, they took the warpath eagerly, but thought no shame of dropping off at their own whim or convenience. Like Swiss mercenaries, they often suffered acutely from Heimweh, drawing them back to their beloved mountains. Desertions were frequent in early days, till the clansmen had learned what it was to be soldiers. The wonder is they were not more frequent among soldiers often enlisted by pressgang methods. The discontents which repeatedly drove them into open mutinies were bred out of misunderstandings, either on the part of men whose ignorance of English blinded them to the nature of their engagement, or of officers who could not make allowance for their susceptible character; and they had real grievances in the bad faith of the Government when they found themselves ordered abroad or drafted into other regiments, contrary to the terms of their enlistment.
The 42nd—originally the 43rd—Regiment was first formed out of the companies of the Black Watch in 1739. Three years later they were marched into England, to their surprise and suspicion, soothed by a representation that the king wished to see the finest regiment in his service. Over the border they found themselves regarded with such curiosity as to-day would be excited by the sight of our Maori or Sikh auxiliaries; then their good conduct and imposing array were worth a friendly reception, that for a time lulled their distrust. But this awoke again in London, where rumours ran that they had been decoyed so far to be transported to the American plantations; and the Cockneys of that day, as well as the clowns of southern counties, seem to have been more inclined to coarse jests than the northern English, who had better cause for respecting the wild Highlandmen. Traitors were also at work among them, putting into their heads the idea that “after being used as rods to scourge their countrymen, they were to be thrown into the fire.”
Having been reviewed on Finchley Common by Marshal Wade, the regiment gave itself leave to start bodily homewards, under the leadership of a Macpherson corporal, taking a line across country between the two great north roads, and dodging from wood to wood, so that for two or three days their march could not be traced by the amazed authorities. In a wood a few miles from Oundle they were intercepted and surrounded by a force from Northampton; then, no doubt half-starved and much bewildered, after some parley they surrendered. Three men were shot as an example in the Tower. The rest let themselves be shipped over to Flanders for a baptism of foreign fire at Fontenoy, where their conduct proved so excellent that they were trusted with the service of covering the retreat. After 1746 they had a long term of exile, from which, out of more than a thousand, not a hundred men came back to their native heath. Ever since—
We have sailed owre many a sea, my lad,
We have fought ’neath many a sky;
And it’s where the fight has hottest raged