INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF THE REGIMENT: THE RANK AND FILE
He who would make himself acquainted in detail with the many
experiments by which British Governments, from the rupture of the Peace
of Amiens onward, strove to keep on foot in full numbers the very large
army that it had raised, must satisfy his curiosity by studying the
admirable volumes of Mr. Fortescue. Here we are concerned only with
the methods which prevailed from 1809 till 1814, and gave Wellington
the invincible, though often attenuated, battalions which conquered at
Talavera and Bussaco, at Salamanca and Toulouse.
[Sidenote: Volunteers from the Militia]
In the Peninsular Army the system of territorial names prevailed for
nearly all the regiments of the line, but in most cases the local
designation had no very close relation with the actual _provenance_ of
the men. There were a certain number of regiments that were practically
national, _e.g._ most of the Highland battalions, and nearly all of
the Irish ones, were very predominantly Highland and Irish as to
their rank and file: but even in the 79th or the 88th there was a
certain sprinkling of English recruits. And in some nominally Scottish
regiments like the 71st Highland Light Infantry, or the 90th Perthshire
Volunteers,[213] the proportion of English and Irish was very large.
Similarly in almost all the nominally English regiments there was a
large sprinkling of Irish, and a few Scots. This came partly from the
fact that, though the corps recruited in their own districts, yet they
were often allowed to send recruiting parties to great centres like
London, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, or Dublin. But still more was it
due to the fact that the larger half of the recruits were raised not in
the old normal fashion, but by volunteering from the embodied militia,
and that in this system practically no attempt was made to confine
the choice of militiamen wishing to join the regular army to their
territorial regiment. Nothing, for example, was more usual than to
find such things as 100 of the King’s County Militia joining the 31st
or Huntingdonshire Regiment. When the 77th or East Middlesex Regiment
returned from India in 1808, it was completed, before going out to the
Peninsula, from the 1st West York, North and South Mayo, Northampton,
and South Lincoln Militia, but did not get a single man from the
Middlesex Militia.[214] The Shropshire Regiment (53rd) when allowed in
a similar case to call for volunteers, did get 99 from its own county
militia, but 144 more from the Dorset, East York, and Montgomery local
corps.[215] The 81st or Loyal Lincoln was filled up in 1808, before
sailing for Portugal, from the Dublin, King’s County, South Devon, and
Montgomery Militia. Instances might be multiplied _ad nauseam_. It was
quite exceptional for any English corps to contain a preponderance of
men from its own nominal district, and nearly all of them had from a
fifth to a fourth of Irish.
It is impossible to exaggerate the advantage to the Peninsular Army
of the system, the invention of Castlereagh when War Minister, which
enabled it to draw in such a heavy proportion on the militia for
recruits.[216] The men thus obtained had all had at least twelve
months’ drill and discipline, in a corps which had been under arms for
many years: they were trained soldiers of some little experience, much
superior in fact to the recruits who had been procured in other ways.
The permanent militia represented the force raised by the counties by
ballot, though substitutes rather than principals were procured by
that device. Being forced to serve at home for a period of years, the
militiamen freely volunteered into the line, from love of adventure,
dislike of dull country quarters in England or Ireland,[217] and,
it must be added, the temptation of the enormous bounty, running at
various times from £16 up to £40, which was given to those changing
their service.[218]
It is a mistake to make a point, as some writers have done, of the fact
that many regiments appeared in Spain with their ranks “full of raw
militiamen, who sometimes still bore their old militia badges on their
knapsacks.” So far from their being ineligible recruits, they were the
very best, for the militia of 1808–14 was not a body called out for
short service during one month of the year, but a permanent institution
which practically formed a second line to the field army. And no man
was allowed to volunteer into the regulars till he had served a full
year in the local corps in which he had enlisted. A regiment must get
drafts on active service, and these were the very best sort that could
be obtained. Of course a corps filled up hastily with a great number
of them, would want a little time to shake down, but it would take
far longer to assimilate a corresponding number of ordinary recruits,
hurried out from its regimental depôt—for these men would neither
have had a whole year’s drill, nor would they have been accustomed to
the daily economy of a full regiment—depôts seem to have been slackly
administered, in many cases by officers and sergeants invalided and
past service, or who had of their own desire shirked the service at the
front.
[Sidenote: 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]
[Sidenote: 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]
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: Concerning Sergeants]
The responsibility of the non-commissioned officer cannot be
exaggerated. It was easy to make sergeants, but not easy to secure them
of the proper quality. Too often the man promoted for an act of courage
or of quick cleverness had to be reduced to the ranks again, for some
hopeless failing—he was prone to drink,[229] or he was an over-harsh or
an over-slack administrator of discipline. One of the commoner types of
court-martial was that of the non-commissioned officer who connived at
and profited by the misdeeds of the men under his charge—whose silence
was bought by a percentage, when peasants were plundered, or convoys
lightened of food, shoes, or clothing. It was often difficult to get at
him—to prove that he had known of what was going on, and had contrived
to see nothing. But the numbers of reductions to the ranks were
notable, and lashes were often added when part of the _corpus delicti_
was found in the sergeant’s pack.
However, the ideal sergeant was not unfrequently found, and when
found he was invaluable; he had to be a steady man with a modicum of
education and a sense of duty, who could be relied upon neither to
connive at his men’s graver faults, nor, on the other hand, to be
perpetually spying on them and reporting them to their captains for
every minute breach of discipline. Tact was as necessary as the power
to get orders carried out. The bullying sergeant would, in the end,
get left in some quandary or dilemma by the men that he was always
harrying, while the considerate sergeant would get the benefit of his
popularity by receiving loyal and intelligent service instead of mere
obedience.
Most important of all non-commissioned officers was the sergeant-major,
concerning whose position I cannot do better than quote the homily of a
Highland soldier more given to philosophical disquisitions than most of
the diarists from the ranks.[230]
“The sergeant-major has an arduous duty to perform; in all the
arrangements of regimental duty he takes, or ought to take, the most
active concern. He has, of course, been considered by his colonel a
meritorious man, before he appoints him to this highest step to which
a non-commissioned officer can attain: and, as it is frequently found
necessary to consult him on the interior economy of the regiment, if
he is possessed of any talents they are sure to be seen and called
forth. Fortunate is the regiment which possess a good sergeant-major.
His rank is not such as to make him above associating with and advising
the other non-commissioned officers: his own personal example is
the means of swaying their actions: he cautions them against unjust
oppression, yet shrinks not from pointing out the cases which require
coercive measures. He recommends for promotion those who meritoriously
aspire to rise from the ranks. His commanding officer is seldom
troubled with complaints, for he settles them to the satisfaction of
the accuser and accused. No mercenary motive actuates his conduct
in reconciling differences, and his hands are never soiled with the
gift of an inferior. To those who are unacquainted with the influence
which sergeant-majors generally possess this may seem a hyperbole;
but to me it appears a fact; I speak not of one regiment but of many.
A sergeant-major, on the other hand, can be a little tyrant in the
corps, without the knowledge of his colonel: his unnecessary acts of
oppression may be made to appear to his superiors as laudable zeal, and
his severity as merit deserving reward.... If the commanding officer
be of an easy, complying turn, or again of a repulsive, haughty,
_don’t-trouble-me_ disposition, and the adjutant (which is often the
case) not over well informed, the sergeant-major is consulted on all
occasions. His opinion is asked as to character, he can establish or
injure at pleasure, for who will be called in to contradict him? In
short he has much more to say between the non-commissioned officers
and the colonel, concerning the poor soldiers’ conduct, than all the
captains and subalterns of the regiment.”[231]
[Sidenote: The Sergeant’s Self-Respect]
The gap between the sergeant and the men in the ranks was necessarily a
well-marked one. The non-commissioned officers kept together and formed
messes of their own. “Pride and propriety” kept them from joining in
the carouses of the rank and file. “He who has once joined the company
of sergeants is disincluded for any other,”[232] writes one veteran
proud of well-deserved promotions. The non-commissioned officer who was
too familiar with his inferiors was generally one of those who profited
by their misdeeds, and would some day be convicted of sharing their
plunder, or conniving at their excesses.