IMPEDIMENTA: THE BAGGAGE—LADIES AT THE FRONT
[Sidenote: The Baggage Animals]
The train of Wellington’s army was very heavy. In addition to the long
droves of mules and ox-waggons which carried public stores, there was
a very large accumulation of private baggage. The field equipment
of officers—especially of officers of the higher ranks—strikes the
modern student as very heavy, and was much commented on by French
observers at the time. “To look at the mass of impedimenta and
camp-followers trailing behind the British,” says Foy, “you would
think you were beholding the army of Darius. Only when you have met
them in the field do you realize that you have to do with the soldiers
of Alexander.” The cause of this accumulation was partly a survival
of the lax customs of the eighteenth century, but it resulted still
more from the character of the country over which Wellington’s host
moved. In the interior of Spain or Portugal absolutely nothing was to
be procured. The simplest small luxuries, tea, sugar, coffee, were
ungettable, save in the largest towns; to renew clothing was equally
impossible. He who required anything must carry it with him. It was
not like campaigning in France, Belgium, Germany, or Italy. At the
commencement of his term of command Wellington laid down the rule[270]
that no private baggage was to be carried upon carts: “those who have
baggage to carry, must be provided with mules and horses.” This order
is repeated again and again during later years.[271] A regular scale
of the amount of horses and mules allowed to officers of different
rank was shortly produced. Two subalterns must share one sumpter-beast
between them, a captain was allowed a whole mule or horse, and so on,
in a mounting scale.[272] But as early as September 1, 1809, it would
seem that a more liberal allowance was made legal. In a “general order”
of that day we get an elaborate table of rations of forage for all
ranks, from the commander-in-chief downwards. While subalterns are
allowed one ration each, the number rises enormously for the seniors,
a captain commanding a company is set down for five rations, a major
for seven, a lieutenant-colonel in charge of a battalion for ten, the
Adjutant-General for twenty, etc., etc. This was a far too liberal
allowance for the senior ranks, and led to an accumulation of beasts,
both riding horses and pack-mules, far surpassing what was reasonable.
To enable them to equip themselves for field service, all officers
(whether staff or regimental) when ordered for the first time to join
the army, were allowed to draw 200 days “bât, baggage, and forage
money.” This presumably would go towards the purchase of their animals.
The forage allowed was 14 lbs. of hay or straw of the country, and 12
lbs. of oats, or 10 lbs. of barley or Indian corn. When English hay was
procurable (as at Lisbon) only 10 lbs. of it might be issued instead of
the 14 lbs. of native stuff. On this system the captain would provide
himself with a riding horse, generally a small Portuguese nag, and have
a mule for his baggage. The subaltern must walk if he kept a mule:
but it seems that very soon the juniors also took to riding. At any
rate, lieutenants and other juniors often appear with a riding horse.
Nothing is more common in a diary than to find, on his first arrival in
Portugal the young officer procuring himself not one but two beasts,
generally a nag and a mule. Sometimes he brought out a horse of his own
from England.[273] More usually he bought—
“A mule for baggage, and a ‘bit of blood’”[274]
in the horse-market at Lisbon, of which one who had been through the
business writes:—
“The only convenient opportunity to make the purchase was at a sort of
fair held every Tuesday in the lower part of the town. There horses,
mules, and asses were bought and sold, and (as in all markets) the
price chiefly depended on the demand. The Portuguese horse-dealer has
all the avidity of the English jockey to pick your pocket, but is
not so _au fait_ at the business. At this Fair you buy or sell your
animal, the bargain is struck, the money paid, and the contract is
indissoluble. English guineas had no attraction: the dollar or the
moidore was the medium; but since the guinea has been introduced in
the payment of the army (1813) the Portuguese begin to appreciate its
value. It was customary for officers who wanted cash to give their
draft on some house in London; but it was purchasing money very dearly,
giving at the rate of six and sixpence for a dollar that would only
bring five shillings, so losing eighteen pence on every crown.”[275]
Good and large Spanish mules cost as much, or almost as much, as the
small horses of the country. Fifty to ninety dollars was an ordinary
price. Thirty to forty-five pounds was considered cheap for an English
riding horse.[276] A Portuguese nag might be bought for fifteen or
twenty.
[Sidenote: Concerning Messes]
“In consequence of the difficulty of transporting baggage,” writes
one of the liveliest commentators on daily life at the front, “a
regiment on active service could not keep up a regular mess, as in
England. Each officer was obliged to manage for himself: they generally
divided themselves into mess-parties by twos and threes. This greatly
incommoded the subaltern: allowed only the carriage of half an animal
[or at the most of one] it was not possible to admit, for the purpose
of having extra eatables, any addition to his share of baggage. The
mere ration was all that he got, with a camp-kettle for culinary
purposes. Besides we must recollect the difficulty of getting extra
food, and also the want of money. So the bit of beef and the ration of
biscuit was frequent fare for perhaps two-thirds of the officers—with
the allowance of ration-rum or wine (generally execrable stuff). The
prime luxuries were a drop of brandy and a segar. With respect to
articles of dress, the contents of a small portmanteau being all that
could be taken about, if a subaltern wore out or lost his regimental
jacket, he had to improvise a substitute, _e.g._ his great coat.
Waistcoats were as fancy directed, black, blue, or green, silk or
velvet.”
Nevertheless, though the officer, or at least the junior officer,
thought himself much stinted in baggage, the private mules of the
regiment, and in particular those of the senior officers, made up
quite a drove—at least some thirty or forty. In addition there were
the public mules of the corps, some thirteen in number—one for each
company’s camp kettles, one for entrenching tools, one for the
paymaster’s books, one for the surgeon’s medical paniers. If we add to
these the private riding horses of the senior officers and such of
the juniors as could afford them, there was quite a cavalcade—enough
to block a road or to encumber a ford. And unfortunately the mules
and horses presupposed drivers and attendants. Wellington set his
face against the withdrawal from the ranks of soldier-servants to act
as muleteers.[277] Each officer, of course, had one; but they were
supposed to be available for service, and could only look to their
master’s business in the halts and encampments. Hence native servants
had to be hired—even the poorest pair of ensigns wanted a Portuguese
boy to look after their single mule. The colonel had probably three or
four followers. Thus to take charge of its baggage, private and public,
each battalion had a following of twenty or thirty such attendants, a
few English, the large majority Spanish or Portuguese.
[Sidenote: The Camp Followers]
It cannot be denied that these fellows had a villainous reputation, and
largely deserved it. Though many decent peasant lads were picked up in
the countryside by the earlier comers, and made trustworthy and loyal
servants, the majority were not satisfactory. The sort of followers
whom the officers of a newly-landed regiment engaged at short notice
upon the quays of Lisbon, when only two or three days were given them
for selection, were mostly “undesirables.” If there were a few among
them who were merely “broken men,”—ruined peasants seeking bread at any
hand that would give it,—the majority were the scum of a great harbour
city, ruffians of the lowest sort. The best of the Portuguese were with
the army: the net of the conscription was making wide sweeps, and few
young men of the decent class escaped the line or the militia. Personal
service under an English officer, who was certainly an incomprehensible
foreigner, and might well be a hard and unreasonable master, was not so
attractive as to draw the pick of the Portuguese working classes. It
did, on the other hand, appeal to needy rascals who wanted the chance
of cheating an employer who knew nothing of the country, its customs,
and its prices. There was splendid opportunity for embezzlement.
Moreover, many looked for more lucrative, if more dangerous gains. The
diaries show that a very considerable proportion of the hastily-hired
muleteers and servants absconded, after a few days, with their master’s
mule and portmanteau, and were never seen again. Those who did not,
were looking after the plunder of the battlefield, the camp, and
the wayside. It was they who robbed drunken soldiers, ill-guarded
commissary stores, or lonely villages. They slunk out at night to
make privy plunder in the lines of the regiments in which they were
not employed. On the battlefield they were ruthless strippers of the
wounded—English and Portuguese no less than French—as well as of the
dead. Unless report much mistreats them, they habitually knocked
a wounded Frenchman on the head, if they were out of sight of the
red-coats.[278] Considering the atrocities of which the French had been
guilty in Portugal, this might pass for not unnatural retaliation; but
it is certain that the British wounded were also frequently plundered,
and there is more than a suspicion that they were sometimes murdered.
The Spanish camp-followers passed as being even more blood-thirsty than
the Portuguese. Of course it was not the officers’ private employés
alone who were guilty of these misdemeanours; the public muleteers
of the commissariat staff, and other hangers-on of the army, had an
equally bad reputation. The most daring theft of the whole war, as has
been already mentioned, was done by two “authorized followers,” who
burglariously entered the house of the Commissary-General in 1814,
and got off with no less than £2000 in gold. They were detected, and
naturally suffered the extreme punishment of the law. By their names
one would seem to have been French, the other a Spaniard. There is an
awful story, told in two diaries, of a camp follower who in a time of
starvation sold to British soldiers as pork slices cut off a French
corpse.[279] He got away before he could be caught and shot. But enough
of these ghouls!
[Sidenote: The Soldiers’ Wives]
The followers of a British army were by no means exclusively foreign.
One of the worst impediments to the free movement of the host came from
the unhappy practice that then prevailed of allowing corps on foreign
service to take with them a proportion of soldiers’ wives—four or six
per company. Forty or sixty of these women, mostly mounted on donkeys,
formed the most unmanageable portion of every regimental train. They
were always straggling or being left behind, because they could not
keep up with the long marches that the army had often to take. Wayside
tragedies of this sort are to be found recorded in almost every
Peninsular memoir—often of the most harrowing sort. In especial we
may mention the number of these poor women who dropped in the Corunna
retreat, and died in the snow, or fell into the hands of the French.
The interesting little book of a married sergeant of the 42nd, who took
his wife about with him during the last three years of the war, is full
of curious little shifts and anxieties that they went through.[280] The
best description of this curious stratum of the Peninsular Army that I
know is in the autobiography of Bell of the 34th.[281]
“The multitude of soldiers’ wives stuck to the army like bricks: averse
to all military discipline, they impeded our progress at times very
much, particularly in retreats. They became the subject of a General
Order, for their own special guidance. They were under no control, and
were always first mounted up and away, blocking up narrow passes and
checking the advance of the army with their donkeys, after repeated
orders to follow in rear of their respective corps, or their donkeys
would be shot. On the retreat from Burgos I remember Mrs. Biddy Flyn
remarking, ‘I would like to see the man that wud shoot _my_ donkey:
faith, I’ll be too early away for any of ’em to catch me. Will you
come wid me, girls?’ ‘Aye, indeed, every one of us.’ And away they
started at early dawn, cracking their jokes about divisional orders,
Wellington, commanding officers, and their next bivouac. Alas! the
Provost Marshal was in advance—a man in authority, and a terror to evil
doers: he was waiting a mile or two on, in a narrow turn of the road,
for the ladies, with a party all loaded. He gave orders to shoot the
first two donkeys _pour exemple_. There was a wild, fierce and furious
yell struck up, with more weeping and lamentation than one usually
hears at an Irish funeral, with sundry prayers for the _vagabone_ that
had murdered the lives of the poor darling innocent _crathers_. ‘Bad
luck to the ugly face of the Provost, the spy of the camp, may he niver
see home till the vultures have picked his eyes out, the born varmint,’
and so on. The victims picked up what they could carry, and marched
along with the regiment, crying and lamenting their bitter fate. It
was wonderful what they endured—but in spite of this warning they were
foremost on the line of march next morning again. As Mrs. Skiddy, their
leader, said, ‘We must risk something to be in before the men, to have
the fire and a _dhrop_ of tay ready for them after their load and their
labour: and sure if we went in the _rare_ the French, bad luck to them,
would pick me up, me and my donkey, and then Dan Skiddy would be lost
entirely without me.’”
The soldiers’ wives were indeed an extraordinary community—as hard as
nails, expert plunderers, furious partisans of the supreme excellence
of their own battalion, much given to fighting. Many of them were
widows twice and even thrice over—for when a married man was shot, and
his wife was a capable and desirable person, she would receive half a
dozen proposals before her husband was forty-eight hours in his grave.
And since the alternative was a hazardous voyage back to relatives in
England or Ireland, who had probably broken off with the “girl who ran
away with a soldier,” most of the widows concluded to stop with the
battalion, with a new spouse and a new name. As the war dragged on many
of the men picked up Portuguese and Spanish helpmates, who joined the
regimental drove, and made it strangely polyglot. At the end of the
struggle in 1814 there was a most harrowing scene at Bordeaux, when the
general order was issued that all these foreigners who could not prove
that they had been legitimately married to soldiers, with the colonel’s
leave, were to be refused transport to the British Isles.[282] There
were hundreds of them, and only in a few cases could the men find money
to get them taken home in private merchantmen. The bulk marched back
to the Peninsula in charge of a brigade of homeward bound Portuguese—a
most melancholy and distressful assembly.[283]
[Sidenote: Ladies at the Front]
It is extraordinary to find that a sprinkling of the officers of the
Peninsular Army were unwise enough to take their wives with them to the
front—thereby securing a life of wearing anxiety for both, and of dire
hardship for the poor ladies. One of the best known cases was that of
Hill’s senior aide-de-camp, Captain Currie, whose wife I have found
mentioned half a dozen times as making tea for the second division
staff, and holding a little reception whenever the division was settled
down for a few days. Another was Mrs. Dalbiac, wife of the colonel
of the 4th Dragoons, whose adventures on the field of Salamanca are
mentioned by Napier.[284] But the best chronicle of the ups and downs
of a young married couple may be found in the breezy autobiography
of Sir Harry Smith, then a subaltern in the 95th Rifles. His tale is
well known—he rescued a young Spanish lady among the horrors of the
sack of Badajoz, married her two days later, and had her with him for
the remaining three years of the war. The story of their Odyssey, as
related by him, is one of the most touching narratives of loyal love,
and hardship cheerfully borne, that any man can read. They lived
together for forty years in storm and sunshine, and she survived to
christen the town of Ladysmith by her name, while her husband was
commanding the forces in South Africa. He gave his name to the sister
town of Harrismith, less well remembered now than the long-besieged
place with which the memory of Juana Smith is linked.
There is a sketch in Paris by the well-known artist, Colonel Lejeune,
who, when a prisoner at Elvas, made a drawing of an English military
family which passed him. As he describes it in his diary, “The captain
rode first on a very fine horse, warding off the sun with a parasol:
then came his wife very prettily dressed, with a small straw hat,
riding on a mule and carrying not only a parasol, but a little black
and tan dog on her knee, while she led by a cord a she-goat, to
supply her with milk. Beside madame walked her Irish nurse, carrying
in a green silk wrapper a baby, the hope of the family. A grenadier,
the captain’s servant, came behind and occasionally poked up the
long-eared steed of his mistress with a staff. Last in the procession
came a donkey loaded with much miscellaneous baggage, which included a
tea-kettle and a cage of canaries; it was guarded by an English servant
in livery, mounted on a sturdy cob and carrying a long posting-whip,
with which he occasionally made the donkey mend its pace.”[285] If
this picture is not exaggerated, it certainly helps us to understand
the strong objection which Wellington had for ladies at the front, and
all forms of impedimenta.