Military examinations for direct commissions in those long-ago days were held at Chelsea Hospital, and extended over a week. On the occasion of my public appearance an extraordinary incident occurred. Every precaution, it was stated, had been taken against the papers getting into unauthorised hands, but hardly had the first day passed when every candidate was aware that the tout of a sporting tailor was prepared to sell the paper of the day correctly answered at £2 a head. The conspirators met at the “Hans Hotel,” and donkeys incapable of spelling, and with no knowledge of any language but their own, passed examinations worthy of a senior wrangler.
The miscreant who thus tampered with Her Majesty’s stationery was one Pugh, and his employer (if I remember rightly) was one Cutler; but the golden shower came to an abrupt ending, as on one fateful morning (the last day) General Rumley ascended the gallery, and amid the silence of the Catacombs briefly announced:
“The late examination is cancelled; candidates will attend again next Monday.”
The consternation that ensued is beyond description. Jolliffe, who, I believe, had been measured for his uniform, did not join for at least a year after, and poor old Plummy Ruthven, who couldn’t spell six words correctly, abandoned all further idea of the Army. He was sitting next me on the first day, and I remember as if it were yesterday his whispered inquiry as to the correct reply to a mathematical question: “At what hour between two and three are the hands of a clock opposite one another?” The reply, it is needless to add, had to be “worked out” by figures, but thinking in the excitement he was asking the time I hurriedly whispered, “Twenty minutes to one,” and down it went on poor old Plummy’s paper. During the subsequent days his papers, I fancy, were vastly improved, as he was a constant visitor at the “Hans Hotel.”
The Aldershot of the sixties was a very different place to what it is to-day. Three rows of huts—as the lines of three regiments—constituted the North Camp, and about an equal number and two blocks of permanent barracks represented the South Camp. During the drill season everything else was under canvas, and heaven help those who ever experienced the watertight capacity of the regulation bell tent. I can well remember one night, when the windows of heaven had been open for days, a dripping figure in regimental great-coat and billycock hat appearing in the mess tent with, “The horse is disthroyed, and I don’t know what the Jasus to do,” and as he dripped at “attention” we realised it was only the adjutant’s Irish groom that had been washed out of the temporary stable.
These wooden huts were peculiarly adapted for practical joking. Within a week of my joining whilst contemplating with admiration, previous to turning in, my brand new possessions of portable furniture, I was astonished by a brick rattling down the chimney. Barely had I dodged it when bang came another, whilst not a sound disturbed the peaceful repose of the camp. “Great heavens,” I thought, “there must be an earthquake,” and rushing out frantically to give the alarm, I paused, and on second thoughts returned. But in the few seconds that had elapsed there must have been another violent shock, for everything in my room was upside down—the bedding was capsized, my boots were swimming in the tub, table-cloths, carpet, everything one huge mass. It was then that it dawned upon me, “this is the finger of man,” and I proceeded to adjust my belongings. “Anything up?” now sounded through the window, and the appearance of two brother ensigns explained the rest. I was never molested afterwards.
Practical joking, however, occasionally assumed serious proportions, and ended in courts-martial, as did the Crawley case. It was on this occasion that Sir William Harcourt first came prominently to notice by the brilliant oration he put into his client’s mouth: “Give me back my sword,” was the dramatic phrase with which the old bully ended his address. As if Crawley cared one rap what became of his sword so long as the £10,000 attached to his commission as colonel of the Inniskillings was safe.
The Robertson court-martial, of which I was an eyewitness, also created a stir in the long-ago sixties. The colonel of the 4th Dragoon Guards was at the time one Bentinck, who, despite his heirship to the Dukedom of Portland, was about as uncouth a being as can well be conceived. As field officer of the day, no matter how late, he never missed dismounting and walking through the officers’ guard room without a word, as if he were inspecting the married quarters, and it was this amiable creature who eventually prosecuted, in conjunction with Adjutant Harran, as harmless an individual as ever posed as a sabreur. Captain Robertson was the son of a Highland laird, and, if I remember rightly, had a very handsome wife. What it was all about I have long since forgotten, though the cloud of witnesses that radiated towards the Royal barracks is in many ways impressed on my memory. Captain Owen—an important witness as he described himself—was an officer of militia, and, more military than the military, he revelled in things military. His staple conversation was military; a sort of peakless cap his everyday head-dress; his very dressing-gown was frogged like a light dragoon’s frock coat; for gloves he affected the buckskin class, and carried glove-trees and pipeclay, at least whilst in Dublin. These peculiarities were grafted on my memory by his having doubled up for six weeks in my solitary room in Dublin. I had spoken to him on one occasion, and in a weak moment invited him to mess. How it all came about I have no recollection beyond finding him located on me; having every meal at my expense, and incurring a mess bill of over £8, which I eventually had to pay. “D— it, old man,” he often said, “this is like old times” (when the annual training was on, presumably); “I can’t tear myself away from the bugles.” And he didn’t, till peremptorily requested to go.
Other witnesses of a more desirable type also swarmed for weeks at our mess. Ginger Durant, who had never been out of London since he left the 12th Lancers, was daily to be heard bellowing “To the rag, to the rag” to the tune of “Dixey’s Land,” and General Dickson, a grand old warrior (happily still as fresh as paint) who commanded the Turkish contingent in the Crimea, champed his bit and cursed the necessity that detained him in Dublin.
At Aldershot was a regiment that was supposed to have stormed some place with ours a hundred years before, and in those days of “Regent’s allowances” and tolerably hard drinking the occasion of again meeting in camp could not be allowed to pass without various reciprocal hospitalities. Their colonel was an old toper who never consumed less than fifteen brandies-and-sodas after dinner, and well I recollect hearing a mess waiter, as he helped him on with his coat, expressing the hope, in a whisper, that if a man came before him in the morning for being drunk, he would not think it necessary to give him forty-eight hours cells. But the interchange of civilities was by no means over with the dinner, and a dozen of our heroes insisting on seeing their guests home, deliberately swam the Canal, and their comrades not to be outdone, insisted on seeing our contingent back, till the innumerable duckings restored sobriety and every one retired to his respective hut.