[274] From that amusing piece of doggerel (strictly contemporary) The Military Adventures of Johnny Newcome.
[275] Notes to Johnny Newcome, p. 30.
[276] Grattan of the 88th, selling his horse on leaving the Peninsula at the Lisbon Horse-Fair, says that he got 125 dollars for it, equalling at the then rate of exchange £31 5s. Boothby, R.E., buying a red English stallion, considers himself very lucky to get it for 30 guineas. A donkey fetched about 15 dollars only.
[277] There are several court-martials on officers who (disregarding this order) kept a soldier-servant or bâtman out of the ranks.
[278] One officer relates that he came upon his own mule-boy, aged ten or twelve, deliberately beating out the brains of a wounded Frenchman, at Salamanca, with a large stone. Another diarist speaks of making a wounded Frenchman comfortable while he went for a surgeon, and returning to find him stabbed and stripped. A third (F. Monro, R.A.) says, “I found myself among the dead and dying, to the shame of human nature be it said, both stripped, some half-naked, some wholly so, and this done principally by those infernal devils in mortal shape, the cruel, cowardly Portuguese followers, unfeeling ruffians. The Portuguese pillaged and plundered our own wounded officers before they were dead!”
[279] See Ross Lewin’s With the 32nd in the Peninsular War, p. 205.
[280] Sergeant Anton’s Retrospect of a Military Life, pp. 60, 61.
[281] Rough Notes of an Old Soldier, vol. i. pp. 74, 75.
[282] Wellington (General Order of April 26, 1814) makes the concession that colonels may permit “a few who have proved themselves useful and regular,” to accompany the soldiers to whom they are attached “with a view to being ultimately married.”
[283] For details see Donaldson’s Eventful Life of a Soldier, pp. 231, 232.