The Normal Recruit
The other moiety of the recruits who came out to the Peninsula, to fill up the never-ending gaps in the ranks of a battalion at the front, were on the whole worse material than the militiamen. They were the usual raw stuff swept in by the recruiting sergeant—all those restless spirits who were caught by the attraction of the red coat, country lads tired of the plough, or town lads who lived on the edge of unemployment, and to whom a full stomach had been for some time a rarity. We have autobiographies of runaway apprentices who had bolted from a hard master,[219] and of village Lotharios who had evaded an entanglement by a timely evasion.[220] Sons of hard fathers, and stepsons of intolerable stepmothers drifted in, and still more frequently the rowdy spirits who were “wanted” by the constable for assault and battery, or for some rural practical joke which had set the parish in an uproar. The oddest cause of enlisting that I have come upon is that of a son of a respectable Edinburgh tradesman’s family, whose account of the fortunes of the 71st in 1808–15 is one of the best written of all the soldier-biographies. A stage-struck youth with a little money in his pocket, he had often gone on (no doubt as a super) at the Theatre Royal, carrying a banner or a five-word message. At last the summit of his ambition came—a friendly manager gave him a short part, where he had actually some share in the action. He invited all his friends to the performance to see his glory, came on the boards, and was suddenly struck with stage fright, so that he stood gaping and silent before the audience, and heard the laughter and hooting begin. The poor wretch bolted straight away from the stage in his costume and paint, ran down to Leith, and enlisted with a sergeant of the 71st, whose party was sailing that night for the South. Anything was preferable to him rather than to face next morning the jeers of the friends to whom he had boasted of his histrionic powers, and who had come to see his début.[221]
Undesirable Recruits
But these were the better spirits. There was a much lower stratum among the recruits, drawn from the criminal or semi-criminal classes, whom the enormous bounty offered for volunteers had tempted into the service—generally with the purpose of getting out of it again as soon as possible. Not only were there poachers, smugglers, and street-corner roughs, who had been offered by the local authorities the choice between enlistment and the jail, but pickpockets, coiners, and footpads, who had made London or some other great town too hot for them, often enlisted as a pis aller, intending to desert and “jump another bounty” when they could. But sergeants were lynx-eyed when they found that they had enlisted a slippery customer, and the evasive recruit often found himself kept under lock and key in a fort, and shipped off to Spain before he got his opportunity to abscond. The number of these “King’s hard bargains” varied much between different regiments, but Colborne, a good authority, says that the battalion was lucky which had not its fifty irreclaimable bad characters, drunkards, plunderers, stragglers, would-be deserters, actual criminals “whom neither punishment nor any kind of discipline could restrain; for the system of recruiting was defective and radically bad.”[222] It was this scum, a small proportion of the whole, but always swimming to the top when there was mischief to be done—peasants to be plundered or churches to be pillaged—that provided the subject-matter for court-martials, and engrossed the majority of the attention of the Provost Marshal. Officers of undoubted humanity, and men in the ranks who knew what they were talking about, unite in stating that there was a residuum in the Peninsular Army which could only be governed by the lash.
This small percentage of irreclaimables provided the nucleus around which misconduct sometimes grew to a great scale, in moments of special privation or temptation. In abominable orgies like the sack of Badajoz, or the lesser but still disgraceful riots at Ciudad Rodrigo and San Sebastian, it was the criminals who started the game, but the drunkards—a far more numerous class—who took it up. When the drink was in them, the mob was capable of any freak of wanton mischief or cruelty. Wellington more than once complained that the most reckless and ungovernable of his rowdies were the newly-joined Irish recruits. It seems that when in liquor they became irresponsible madmen, and had not undergone enough of discipline to get them into a habit of obedience, which might serve as a substitute for moral sense. And I can well believe this from casual evidence picked up in the diaries of his obscure subordinates. The account of the difficulties of officers and sergeants in getting a large draft of Irish recruits from Cashel to Deal, which I met in one soldier-diary reads like a nightmare[223]—or a glimpse of some primitive pagan heaven, in which all was objectless fighting in the intervals between frequent and limitless potations. As a side-light on the national failing, I may quote the fact that going through the complete record of general court-martials for the whole period 1809–14, I found that after putting aside all trials of officers, non-combatants, and foreign auxiliaries (the last almost always for desertion) there was an unmistakable over-percentage of men with Irish names, just as there was an under-percentage of Scots. The offences for which the former were tried were generally desertion and crimes of violence, plundering or maltreating the peasantry.[224]
The way in which the habitually criminal element makes itself visible in this list of court-martials is in the not infrequent cases of scientific and habitual burglary, robbery of the convoys going to the military chest, or of the private property of officers, and the stealing of church plate—all offences often punished with death, for Wellington rarely pardoned the professional thief, though he sometimes let off a deserter with a sound flogging. But the queerest glimpse into the lowest stratum of the army is the curious anecdote recorded in Napier’s fifth volume. Nonplussed in the winter of 1813–14 by the refusal of the French peasantry to accept the dollars or the guineas which were all that he could offer, Wellington determined to set up a mint of his own, which should melt down Spanish and Portuguese silver and recoin it in the form of five franc pieces. He sent private appeals to the colonels to find him all the professional coiners that they could discover in the ranks, collected as many as forty at St. Jean de Luz, and with their aid struck a large quantity of money, of which he was careful to see that the weight and the purity were both correct.[225]
The Gentleman-Ranker
Occasionally the gentleman-ranker was to be found in a Peninsular regiment. He was generally an “undesirable,” who had enlisted in consequence of some disgraceful quarrel with a family who had refused to do anything more for him. Persistent drink, gambling, or dishonesty were the usual causes that had broken him—not undeserved misfortune or dire poverty. Occasionally he pulled himself together, became a good soldier, and was ultimately promoted to a commission. More often he sank into a persistent drunkard or a criminal. Surtees of the 95th, in an interesting chapter, gives the biographies of the four privates of this class that he had known.[226] One conducted himself well for some years, became a paymaster-sergeant, and then broke out into a wild fit of dissipation, embezzled the company’s money, and committed suicide on detection. The second was always in scrapes: finally he was caught deserting to the French, and was lucky to get off with penal servitude for life instead of death. The third, “always excessively wild,” was once made a corporal, but was not fit for that or any other rank. The fourth was one of the exceptional cases—being a retired lieutenant without friends or means, who had enlisted as a private in sheer poverty. He was an exemplary and deserving man, who was soon made secretary, or private clerk, to his colonel, behaved excellently, and was in the end restored to his former rank in the army by interest made in his behalf.
A regiment on Peninsular service depended for its strength on the regularity with which it was fed from its home-battalion or its depôt. Whenever a convoy sailed from Spithead, it contained an immense number of small detachments, varying from a few scores to over a hundred men, under charge of officers newly gazetted to the service battalion, or returning from sick leave. There was often much wrangling on shipboard (unless the weather reduced every one to the same level of nausea and helplessness), not only between the men but between the young officers in charge of them. After an angry comparison of the exact date of commissions, which settled seniority in the choice of berths, and in dealing with the transport-captain, two ensigns in charge of detachments would often settle down to a feud destined to last for the whole voyage to Lisbon. Their men gleefully joined in the wrangle. There are some absurd sidelights, in court-martials, on these frequent shipboard quarrels, which sometimes ended in affrays and “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”
When a detachment landed at Lisbon, the officer in charge, often a lad of sixteen, had to shepherd his flock to the front, perhaps over 200 miles of mountain roads. Neither officers nor men knew a word of Portuguese, or had the slightest notion of the manners, government, prejudices, or food of the peasantry. They went forward in a perpetual haze of mistakes and misunderstandings. Every draft had its percentage of undesirables, or even of criminals. Hence the young officer, responsible for their safe delivery at the front, found himself embroiled in constant disputes with the natives, often ending in his arrest on his final arrival at headquarters. We must feel nothing but sympathy for the unfortunate young man who delivered only twenty-nine out of a detachment of forty-one entrusted to him; or the other who found that fourteen men out of twenty had privately disposed of their new blankets.[227] The only way of managing the draft was by reliance on the sergeant or two who formed a part of it: and if the sergeant was himself a sluggard or a tippler, ill fared his superior. Imagine the feelings of the second-lieutenant who having left his one non-commissioned officer behind, to hunt up footsore stragglers, found no one arrive at the nightly billet, and returning for miles to seek the lost ones, discovered his sergeant dead drunk and snoring in the middle of the high-road.[228] Ability to conduct a draft to the battalion was one of the greatest tests of the character and capacity of a junior officer.