Another comment is—
“The Commander of the Forces cannot but feel that both his time, and that of the officers composing court-martials, is occupied very little to the advantage of the public service, in considering the unbecoming and ungentlemanlike behaviour of officers to each other.”[251]
The mildest form of punishment for officers was the reprimand, which varied much in shape. It might amount to no more than the publication of the fact that an officer was reprimanded in the General Orders, without any further publicity. Or, on the other hand, the sentence of the court-martial might be directed to be read out to his regiment, or even to his division, in the most public fashion. And to the sentence there might be added a caustic and scathing postscript by the Commander-in-Chief. Take, for example, “This person may think himself very fortunate that the sentence of the court has been so lenient. A different view of the evidence on the charge would have rendered his dismissal from the service necessary under the Articles of War. The Commander of the Forces hopes that he will take warning by what has occurred, and will in future conduct himself on all occasions as a gentleman should. This reprimand is to be read to him by the commanding officer at the station where he may happen to be, in presence of the officers and troops, paraded for that purpose.”[252]
Reprimands were generally the punishment for the smaller derelictions of duty, such as failing to report arrival at a station, striking a soldier who was insolent instead of arresting him, brawling with a civilian or a Portuguese militia officer, or boisterous and unseemly conduct in the streets when off duty.
There was no court-martial on an officer for desertion during the whole war, and only one case of the sort in the commissioned ranks. This was that of an Irish lieutenant who passed over to the French outposts while Masséna’s army was lying behind the lines of Santarem in February, 1811. He was discovered to be insane or suffering from delusions, being captured during Masséna’s retreat, while wandering in an objectless way in the rear of the enemy’s march: he was sent to a mad-house.[253]
Executions for Desertion
As to the punishments of the soldier, the heaviest was death, either by the bullets of a firing party, or by the Provost Marshal’s gallows. Shooting was almost exclusively reserved for the military offence of desertion to the enemy; but it was two or three times awarded for mutiny and striking an officer or sergeant, and once only (as far as I can make out) to a non-commissioned officer for robbing valuable stores which he had been set to guard.[254] It would have been more usual to hang for the latter offence, and I do not know why this particular case was punished with shooting. There seem to have been 78 men shot in all during the war, of whom 52 were British, and 26 foreigners. The disproportion, of course, is enormous, as there were some fifty or sixty British battalions in the army, and only ten foreign battalions.[255] Among the last the main body of deserters were supplied by two battalions only, the Chasseurs Britanniques and Brunswick Oels Jägers, both of which corps were largely recruited, as has been already explained, from Germans, Italians, Poles, and other aliens from prison camps at home. They had volunteered into the British service in order to get the chance of escape, and took it at the first opportunity. The deserters from the King’s German Legion were in proportion very few. During the last two years of the war many of these foreign deserters were not shot, but given life service in a colonial corps, in places such as New South Wales, from which they could not desert again. Some others got off with a heavy sentence of flogging.
The Punishment of Hanging
Hanging was the penalty for practically all capital offences except desertion to the enemy. It was not so frequent as shooting. The records of the General Court-Martials show a total of about forty executions, and a few more were apparently carried out by the Provost Marshal on criminals caught flagrante delicto murdering or wounding peasants.
The punishment of hanging covered many offences. It is rather surprising to find that two men who killed their officers (one in the Buffs, one in the 42nd) were hanged rather than shot—but apparently each case was ruled to be one of private spite, and not of mutiny, and was treated as simple murder. There were six or eight instances of men who slew a comrade in the ranks, by deliberate assassination, not in a quarrel, and were hanged for it. It may be noted, however, that one private who stabbed an unfaithful wife, at the moment of detection, was found guilty of manslaughter and given one year’s imprisonment only. Far the most frequent cause for the use of the gallows, however, was the killing or wounding of peasants who attempted to defend their houses or cattle from plunder. This was a crime for which Wellington seldom if ever gave pardon; he was as inflexible on the point in the hostile land of France as in the friendly Spain and Portugal. It did not matter whether the peasants were killed or not—the use of musket or bayonet against them in pursuit of plunder was the thing that mattered. There are certainly some most atrocious cases in the list, where a whole family had been murdered or left for dead. But in others, where the violence had been no more than a blow with a butt-end, or a bayonet prod in the shoulder, the offenders seem to have been unlucky in not getting off with a sound flogging. But in Wellington’s code petty stealing without violence was punished with the lash, but armed robbery with death.