1875
On a Sunday morning in early June, just before the church bells begin
to ring, there is wont to be held the annual general parade and
inspection of the Corps of Commissionaires, on the enclosed grass plot
by the margin of the ornamental water in St. James's Park. On the
ground, and accompanying the inspecting officer on his tour through the
opened ranks, there are always not a few veteran officers, glad by
their presence on such an occasion to countenance and recognise their
humbler comrades in arms in bygone war-dramas enacted elsewhere than
within hearing of London Sunday bells. No scene could be imagined
presenting a more practical confutation of the ignorant calumny that
the British army is composed of the froth and the dregs of the British
nation, and that there exists no cordial feeling between British
soldiers and British officers. It is good to see how the face kindles
of the veteran guardsman at the sight and the kindly greeting of Sir
Charles Russell. Doubtless the honest private's thoughts go back to
that misty morning on the slopes of Inkerman, when officer and private
stood shoulder to shoulder in the fierce press, and there rang again in
his ears the cheer with which the Guards greeted the act of valour by
the performance of which the baronet won the Victoria Cross. There is a
feeling deeper than a mere formality in the half-dozen words that pass
between Sir William Codrington and the old soldier of the 7th Royal
Fusiliers, to whom the gallant general showed the way up to the Russian
front, through the shot-torn vineyards on the slopes of the Alma. When
one feeble old ex-warrior is smitten suddenly on parade with a palsied
faintness, it is on the yet stalwart arm of his old chief that he
totters out of the ranks, and the twain do not part till the superior
has exacted a pledge that his humble ex-subordinate shall call upon him
on the morrow, with a view to medical advice and strengthening comforts.
Notwithstanding that in the true old martial spirit it shows what in
the Service is known as a good front, it is not a very athletic or
puissant cohort this, that stands on parade here on the grass within
hearing of the church bells. The grizzled old soldiers, sooth to say,
look rather the worse for wear. There is a decided shortcoming among
them of the proper complement of limbs, and one at least, in speaking
of the battlefields he had seen, might with truth echo the old soldier
in Burns's _Jolly Beggars_--
And there I left for witness a leg and an arm.
They carry no weapons; to some may belong the knowledge only of the
obsolete "Brown Bess" manual exercise; and not many have been so
recently on active service as to have learnt the handling of the modern
breech-loader. On the whole, a battered, fossil, maimed army of
superannuated fighting men, scarcely fitted to shine in the new tactics
of the "swarm-attack" by which the battles of the future are to be won
or lost. But you cannot jibe at the worn old soldiers as "lean and
slippered pantaloons." Look how truly, with what instinctive intuition,
the dressing is taken up at the word of command; note how the old
martial carriage comes back to the most dilapidated when the adjutant
calls his command to "attention." Age and wounds have not quenched the
fighting spirit of the old soldiers; there is not a man of them but
would, did the need arise, "clatter on his stumps to the sound of the
drum." There are few breasts in those ranks that are not decorated with
medals. In very truth the parade is a record of British campaigns for
the last thirty years. Among the thicket of medals on the bosom of this
broken old light dragoon note the one bearing the legend, "Cabul 1842"
within the laurel wreath. Its wearer was a trooper in the famous
"rescue" column. The skeletons of Elphinstone's hapless force littered
the slopes of the Tezeen Valley, up which the squadron in which he rode
charged straight for the tent of the splendid demon Akbar Khan. He rode
behind Campbell at the battle of Punniar, and won there that star of
silver and bronze which hangs from the famous "rainbow" ribbon.
"Sutlej" is the legend on another of his medals, and he could recount
to you the memorable story of Thackwell's cavalry operations against
the Sikh field works, and how that division of seasoned horsemen
reduced outpost duty to a methodical science. "Punjab" medals for
Gough's campaign of 1848-49 are scattered up and down in the ranks. The
sword-cut athwart this wiry old trooper's cheek he got in the hot
_mêlée_ of Ramhuggur, where a certain Brigadier Colin Campbell whom men
knew afterwards as Lord Clyde, found it hard work to hold his own, and
where gallant Cureton and the veteran William Havelock fell at the head
of their light horsemen as they crashed into the heart of 4000 Sikhs.
His neighbour took part in the storm of Mooltan, and saw stout,
calm-pulsed Sergeant John Bennet of the 1st Bombay Fusiliers plant the
British ensign on the crest of the breach and quietly stand by it
there, supporting it in the tempest of shot and shell till the storming
party had made the breach their own. This old soldier of the 24th can
tell you of the butchery of his regiment at Chillianwallah; how Brooks
went down between the Sikh guns, how Brigadier Pennycuick was killed
out to the front, and how his son, a beardless ensign, maddened at the
sight of the mangling of his father's body, rushed out and fought
against all comers over the corpse till the lad fell dead on his dead
father; how on that terrible day the loss of the 24th was 13 officers
killed, 10 wounded, and 497 men killed and wounded; and how the issue
of the bloody combat might have been very different but for the
display, on the part of Colin Campbell, of "that steady coolness and
military decision for which he was so remarkable." Scarcely a great
show on a troop-horse would this bent and gnarled old 12th Lancer make
to-day, but he and his fellows rode right well on the day for which he
wears this "Cape" medal, with the blue and orange ribbon and the lion
and mimosa bush on the reverse. Because of its prickles the Boers call
the mimosa the "wait-a-bit" thorn, but there was no thought of waiting
a bit among the 12th Lancers at the Berea, when they charged the savage
Basutos and captured their chief Moshesh. This one-armed veteran of the
Royal Fusiliers was left lying wounded in the Great Redoubt on the
Russian slope of the Alma, when the terrible fire of grape and musketry
forced Codrington's brigade of the Light Division temporarily to give
ground after it had struggled so valiantly up the rugged broken banks,
and through the hailstorm of fire that swept through the vineyards.
This still stalwart man was one of the nineteen sergeants of the
33rd--the Duke of Wellington's Own--who were either killed or wounded
in defence of the colours on the same bloody but glorious day. A few
files farther down the line stands an old 93rd man. The veteran
Sutherland Highlander was one of that "thin red line" which disdained
to form square when the Russian squadrons rode with seeming heart at
the kilted men on Balaclava day. He heard Colin Campbell's stern
repressive rebuke--"Ninety-third, ninety-third, damn all that
eagerness!" when the hotter spirits of the regiment would fain have
broken ranks and met the Russians half-way with the cold steel; he saw
the Scotch wife chastise the fugitive Turks with her tongue and her
frying-pan. Speak to his tall, shaggy neighbour of the "bonny Jocks,"
and you will call up a flush of pleasure on the harsh-featured Scottish
face; for he was a trooper in the Greys on that self-same Balaclava day
when the avalanche of Russian horsemen thundered down upon the heavy
brigade. He was among those who heard, and with sternly rapturous
anticipation obeyed Scarlet's calm-pitched, far-sounding order, "Left
wheel into line!" He was among those who, when the trumpets had sounded
the charge, strove in vain by dint of spur to overtake the gallant old
chief with the long white moustache, as he rode foremost on the foe
with the dashing Elliot and the burly Shegog on either flank of him; he
was among those who, as they hewed and hacked their way through the
press, heard already from the far side of the _mêlée_ the stentorian
adjuration of big Adjutant Miller, as standing up in his stirrups the
burly Scot shouted, "Rally, rally on me, ye muckle ----!" Mightily
knocked about has been this man with the empty sleeve, but he does not
belie the familiar sobriquet of his old regiment; he was one of the
"Diehards," a title well earned by the 57th on the bloody height of
Albuera, and it was under their colours that he lost his arm on
Inkerman morning. There is quite a little regiment of men who were
wounded in the "trenches" or about the Redan. There is no "19" now on
the buttons of this scarred veteran, but the number was there when he
followed Massy and Molesworth over the parapet of the Redan on the day
when so much good English blood was wasted. Shoulder to shoulder now,
as oft of yore, stand two old soldiers of the Buffs both of whom went
down in the same assault; and an umwhile bugler of the Perthshire
Grey-breeks "minds the day" well also by reason of the wound that has
crippled him for life. As he stands on parade this calm Sabbath
morning, that maimed man of the 60th Rifles can remember another and a
very different Sabbath--the 10th of May 1857 in Meerut--day and place
of the first outburst of the Mutiny; a fell Sabbath of burning,
slaughter, and dismay, of disregard of sex, age, and rank, of fierce
brutality and of nameless agony. He was one of the rifles whose fire in
the assault of Delhi covered the desperate duty of blowing open the
Cashmere Gate, performed with so methodical calmness by Home, Salkeld,
and Burgess; and his comrade hero with the maimed limb, when the hour
had come for a rush to close quarters, followed Reid and Muter over the
breastwork at the end of the serai of Kissengunge. Proud, yet their
pride dashed by sadness, must be the soldiering memories of this stout
northman, erstwhile a front rank man in the old Ross-shire Buffs, a
regiment ever true to its noble Celtic motto of _Cuidichn Rhi_. At
Kooshab, in the short, but brilliant Persian War, he fought in the same
field where Malcolmson earned the Victoria Cross by one of the most
gallant acts for which that guerdon of valour ever has been accorded.
He was in Mackenzie's company at Cawnpore when the Highlanders, stirred
by the wild strains of the war-pibroch, rushed upon the Nana's battery
at the angle of the mango tope with the irresistible fury of one of
their own mountain torrents in spate. And next day he was among those
who, with drawn ghastly faces and scared eyes, looked into that fearful
well, filled to the lip with the mangled corpses of British women and
children. He was one of those who, standing by that well, pledged the
oath administered by the bareheaded Ross-shire sergeant over the long,
heavy tress of auburn hair which a demon's tulwar had severed from the
head of an Englishwoman, that while strong arm and trusty steel lasted
to no living thing of the accursed race should quarter be accorded. And
he was one of those who, having battled their way over the Charbagh
Bridge, having threaded the bullet-torn path to the Kaiser-bagh, and
having forced for themselves a passage up to the embrasures by the
Baileyguard Gate, melted from the stern fierceness of the fray when the
siege-worn women and children in the residency of Lucknow sobbed out
upon their necks blessings for the deliverance. His rear-rank man is an
ex-Bengal Fusilier, wounded once at Sabraon, again at Pegu, and a third
time at Delhi. He will not be offended if you hail him as one of the
"old Dirty-shirts;" for it was in honourable disregard of appearances
as they toiled night and day in the trenches of Delhi that the
regiment, which now in the Queen's service is numbered 101, gained the
nickname. Time and space fail one to tell a tithe of the stories of
valour and hardship linked in the medals and wounds borne by men on
this unostentatious parade--a parade the members of which have shed
their blood on the soil of every quarter of the globe. The minutest
military annals scarcely name some of the obscure combats in which men
here to-day have fought and bled. This man desperately wounded at
Najou, near Shanghai; that one wounded in two places at Owna, in
Persia; this one with a sleeve emptied at Aroga, in Abyssinia--who
among us remember aught, if, indeed, we have ever heard, of Najou,
Owna, or Aroga? On the breast of this bent, hoary old man, note these
strange emblems, the Cross of San Fernando and the Order of the Tower
and Sword. Their wearer is a relic of the British Legion in the Carlist
War of 1837, and they were won under brave old De Lacy Evans at the
siege of Bilbao.
Over the modest portals of the Commissionaire Barracks in the Strand
might well be inscribed the legend, "To all the military glories of
Britain." But just as we have not long ago seen the pride of a palace
in another land on whose façade is a kindred inscription, abased by the
occupation of a foreign conqueror, so there was a time when the living
emblems of Britain's military glory were wont to undergo much
humiliation and adversity when their career of soldiering had come to
an end. Germany recompenses her veterans by according them, as a right,
reputable civil employ when they have served their time as soldiers;
the custom of Britain, on the contrary, has been too commonly to leave
her scarred and war-worn soldiers to their own resources, or to a
pension on which to live is impossible. We were always ready enough to
feel a glow at the achievements of our arms; but till lately we were
prone to reckon the individual soldier as a social pariah, and to
regard the fact of a man's having served in the ranks as a brand of
discredit. To this estimate, it must be allowed, the ex-soldier himself
very often contributed not a little. Destitute of a future, and often
debarred by wounds or by broken health from any laborious industrial
employment, he made the most of the present; and his idea of making the
most of the future not unfrequently took the form of beer and
shiftlessness. Recognising the disadvantages that bore so hard on the
deserving old soldier, recognising too, in the words of the late Sir
John Burgoyne, that "there are many qualities peculiar to the soldier
and sailor, and imbibed by him in the ordinary course of his service,
which, added to good character and conduct, may render such men more
eligible than others for various services in civil life," Captain
Edward Walter founded the Corps of Commissionaires. That organisation,
beginning with seven men, has now a strength of several hundreds, and
its ranks are still open to all the eligible recruits who choose to
come forward. The Commissionaire is no recipient of charity; what
Captain Walter has done is simply to show him how he may earn an honest
and comfortable livelihood, and to provide him, if he desires it, with
a home of a kind which the ex-militaire naturally most appreciates. The
advantages are open to him of a savings-bank and of a sick and burial
fund, and when the evil days come when he can no longer earn his own
bread, the "Retiring Fund" guarantees the thrifty and steady
Commissionaire against the prospect of ending his days in the
workhouse. Among the fruits of Captain Walter's devoted and gratuitous
services in this cause has been a wholesome change in the bias of
popular opinion as to the worth of old soldiers. No longer are they
regarded as the mere chaff and _débris_ of the cannon fodder--"no
account men," as Bret Harte has it; he has furnished them with
opportunity to prove, and they have proved, that they can so live and
so work as to win the respect and trust of their brethren of the
civilian world. The man who has done this thing deserves well, not
alone of the British army, but of the British nation. He has brought it
about that the time has come when most men think with Sir Roger de
Coverley. "You must know," says Sir Roger, "I never make use of anybody
to row me that has not lost either a leg or an arm. I would rather bate
him a few strokes of his oar than not employ an honest man that has
been wounded in the Queen's service. If I was a lord or a bishop ... I
would not put a fellow in my livery that had not a wooden leg."