In 1805 Anton joined the 42nd, and his professional life as a soldier began.
ABOUT SOLDIERS' WIVES
Anton's officers were quick to discover his steadiness, his frugality, his methodical loyalty to every duty of a soldier. He was first put on recruiting service, and then had his reward in the form which most delighted him. He was allowed to marry. Only to a certain proportion of soldiers in each regiment was granted this privilege; and Anton, who was an odd combination of soft domestic instincts and hard soldierly pluck, welcomed with a joy which he takes no pains to conceal the permission to impose on the object of his affections the hardships and the perils which must befall the wife of a soldier who accompanies her husband on active service.
Anton plainly showed all his usual Scottish sense in his choice of a helpmate. She was a hardy peasant girl, plain-featured and strong-bodied, as frugal, as uncomplaining, and as canny as Anton himself; and one chief merit of Anton's memoirs is the picture it offers of a woman's experiences, caught in the rush and whirl of the great history-making campaigns of the Peninsula.
Anton was still happier when, on his regiment being ordered on active service, he was allowed to take his wife with him. This was a very rare privilege indeed. Only four women were permitted to follow each company of the regiment; and Anton tells how, when the regiment had reached Ostend, at the beginning of the Waterloo campaign, even this privilege was suddenly narrowed, and instructions were received that only two women could be allowed to go with each company. Half the women of the regiment were thus left stranded, penniless and friendless, in a foreign port, and saw their red-coated husbands march off into space with many a backward look at their weeping wives.
But the hardy women of the barracks are not easily defeated. "We had been only two days in Ghent," says Anton, "when the women left at Ostend found their way to the regiment." They had marched on their own account in the regiment's track, and presented themselves bedraggled and footsore at its quarters in Ghent. The authorities were inexorable, and the weeping women were again conveyed back to the same place from which they escaped, and there closely watched. But woman's wit and wiles proved too much for the sentinels. In a week or two the forsaken but enterprising wives eluded the vigilance of the sentries, and joined their husbands once more; and as no official reports were made to their prejudice, they were allowed to follow the fortunes of their husbands during the campaign.
Anton, somewhat ungratefully—considering the devotion and sufferings of his own wife—says that, in his judgment, women ought not to be allowed to accompany the soldiers through a campaign. He writes:—