Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

by Robert Graves

  You may well imagine what a night was that!

  ***

  In May, 1783, Captain de Saumarez, who was one of the twelve captains who had drawn lots for their lives at General Washington’s order, led the Royal Welch Fusiliers, unbroken in spirit, back to the army in Staten Island. Colonel Balfour was already at New York, Charleston having been evacuated by the British some months before; I added my recruit company to the Regiment and on December 5th we sailed all together from Sandy Hook. As I watched the coasts recede, I remarked to Sergeant Collins who stood by me: ‘Pray, Collins, how do you feel on this solemn occasion?’ He replied: ‘Well pleased at having seen so many interesting sights and scenes, but without the slightest desire ever to revisit that shore. I have had my belly-full of fighting too. Dr. Franklin was not far out when he declared that there was never a good war, nor a bad peace. Let the Americans keep America, I say: it will be both their reward and their punishment. They are a lively, sensible and not ill-natured folk: but if the Archangel Gabriel himself descended from Heaven to govern them, they would the next day indict him as a bloody tyrant, a profligate and a thief—so jealous are they of their liberties.’

  When Sergeant Collins had gone below, the words of Richard Plantagenet in Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, in which he mourns the loss of British possessions in France, came involuntarily to my lips. I declaimed in a melancholy voice to the gulls that sailed in our wake:

  Is all our travail turned to this effect?

  After the slaughter of so many peers,

  So many captains, gentlemen and soldiers

  That in this quarrel have been overthrown,

  And sold their bodies for their country’s benefit?

  &c., &c.

  After a short and prosperous voyage we landed at Portsmouth in England. From Portsmouth we marched to Winchester, where I requested my discharge, though I had very great privileges allowed me in the Army and was making money fast. Colonel Balfour kindly and humanely reasoned with me, in order to prevail on me to remain in the Service; but I had a notion to return to my own land.

  He regretfully signed my discharge and with a number of my companions marched up to London in order to pass the board. Here I was considered too young to receive the pension, and likewise, it was judged, had not been long enough in the Service. I left the Metropolis, which I visited for the first and last time, on March 15th and four days later landed in Dublin, to the inexpressible joy of my aged mother and two surviving sisters.

  The Ninth Regiment had also returned from captivity in the Spring of 1783, but sadly shrunken in numbers. They were soon brought up to strength and given the title of the East Norfolk Regiment, but they are now more generally known in jest as ‘The Holy Boys’. They are still rough and ready; for the characters of regiments do not change. How heroically and steadfastly both they and the Royal Welch Fusiliers have conducted themselves in the wars against Napoleon Buonaparte is common knowledge.

  Jane Crumer and her husband remained at Little York together with a number of married villagers. However, as it proved, I was later to renew my acquaintance with this very admirable woman.

  On my arrival at Dublin I had determined, after long cogitation, that my duty to my Country had by no means terminated upon the battlefield, and that the frequent solicitations made me by Americans to remain in their townships in the quality of schoolmaster were clear signs of the destiny that Providence had marked out for me. Returned to Ireland, I would devote the rest of my life to educating the poor children of my fellow-countrymen in moral virtues and the simpler requirements of the useful citizens: viz. to read, write a fair hand, and cast accounts.

  My affectionate recollections of Sergeant Fitzpatrick, to whose children I had first served as a teacher, suggested that I should undertake the charge of a new free school at the Methodist Chapel in White Friar Lane; where I soon had forty boys confided to me. We met daily in the Chapel lobby until, after some years, a school house was by subscription erected for me at the back of the sacred edifice. In the autumn of 1785, Mrs. Jane Crumer returned to Dublin. I met her again at the house of Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s widow, her aunt. Poor Cramer, her imbecile husband, had been killed in Little York by the fall of a rotten pine. Since she and I agreed very well together, we were married by banns on January 15th, in the following year, in the Parish Church of St. Anne’s, Dublin. We have had together a numerous progeny, many hard trials and much to be thankful for. I may add that my wandering feet have long ceased to travel. I have now taught in the same crowded school, with, I believe, an equal fidelity to that I gave my Regiment, for more than thirty years.

  Before my marriage, I revealed to my dear wife the story of Kate Harlowe and the lost child; and was glad in the event that I had done so. For, ten years later, a handsome young female sought me out, having obtained my address from a soldier of The Ninth, and declared herself my child! She had with her my silver groat, wrapped in a paper on which was written:

  The gift of Roger Lamb, Sergeant of the Ninth Regiment, to his daughter: Eliza Lamb.

  K. H.

  This charming young creature whose face and form recalled that of Kate at her most enchanting, had, I learned, been taken from the Indians by an American officer who wished to adopt her as his child. But the bardash Sweet Yellow Head, of whom I have written in my previous volume, sought her out and carried her back to his Chief, Thayendanegea, or Captain Brant, who brought her at five years old to the house of the Quaker Josiah, that she might be among people of her own race. Upon the Quaker’s moving to Montreal she had been brought up in that city until the good man died, bequeathing her a modest competence. Shortly after her arrival in Ireland she married, with my consent, a man in the band of a militia regiment and soon made me a grandfather.

  From my daughter I had news of Thayendanegea. She told me that he had visited London again in the year after I came to Dublin, and was presented to the King—but from some scruple of honour declined kissing his hand; observing, however, that he would gladly kiss that of the Queen. The Prince of Wales took a delight in his company and my daughter had heard Thayendanegea remark that the Prince sometimes took him ‘to places very queer for a prince to attend’. While in London he had attended a masquerade in the Prince’s company, at which were many of the nobility and gentry, appearing in war paint with one side of his face adorned with a black hand and his nose incarnadined. A member of the Turkish Embassy was so much struck with Thayendanegea’s appearance that he ventured to touch his nose, to satisfy curiosity. No sooner did he do this when Thayendanegea, much amused but simulating a rage, uttered a tremendous war-whoop and flourished his tomahawk about the ears of the terrified Ottoman. Men shouted and drew their swords, ladies screamed and fainted dead away; and His Royal Highness could scarce contain himself for laughing. This was the same year that Thayendanegea published the Gospel of St. Mark in the Mohican tongue. After a war against the American General St. Clair, whom he defeated and killed in the year 1791, at the battle of Miami, Thayendanegea settled down to farm his rich estate at Niagara, on the Canadian side, having thirty negroes under him, whom he treated with the utmost rigour. He died in the year 1807.

  POSTSCRIPT, 1823

  I was hob-nobbing with Smutchy Steel, a few days since, at his respectable tavern in Parliament Street. He asked me: ‘Now, Gerry, why do you look so pensive, and neglect your good porter?’

  I replied that I was meditating on the fates of the few American generals opposed to us who had come out of the war with honour. General Nathaniel Greene had died of a sun-stroke, on the fine estate presented him in Georgia, but before he could enjoy it; and General George Washington, by his surgeons over-bleeding him. This was after two difficult terms as President of the United States; during which popular rancour had forced him to relieve his character from the charge of peculation, and he was accused of ‘polluting the Presidential ermine to an extent almost irremediable’.

  ‘Now what happened to that whipper-snapper of a Frenchman, that Marqu
is de La Fayette?’ Smutchy asked.

  I informed him: ‘When the Revolution that he had fostered in America spread to his own country, the National Assembly declared him a traitor. He was immured in a fortress. Efforts were made to procure the intercession of England on his behalf, and the King himself was approached; but his Majesty cut the speaker short with but the two words: “Remember André!”’

  ‘Ay,’ said Smutchy. ‘But, as you have shown, those that condemned the poor Major to hanging, never had much luck after. I wonder they had the heart to tuck up so handsome, so sentimental, so officer-like a gentleman. Our people would never have done so, had he been a dog of Rebel. We were ever too soft-hearted in such matters.’

  ‘Yet even Major André’s melancholy fate,’ said I, ‘was preferable to that of the man who occasioned it: General Benedict Arnold. He sought to end the war at a stroke and without bloodshed, for the betterment of his country. Had he succeeded, he would have won imperishable glory and the thanks of posterity. He failed, and was constrained to carry fire and sword against his own people. The war ended, America was lost. He came to England, and though he was brought into the Royal presence leaning upon the arm of Sir Guy Carleton, was avoided by the best society, and publicly hissed when he entered the playhouse. He died twenty years later, bitter, broken and debt-ridden.’

  Then said Smutchy: ‘Yet I would rather a thousand times have been in General Arnold’s shoes than in another’s—a hearty, well-intentioned, bustling man whose standing upon a point of honour plunged two worlds into death and disaster—who becoming aware of the incestuous alliance of his favourite daughter with his natural son went mad; and was put away for many years; and was daily whipped by his keepers; and went blind, and lingered on and on among the wreck of his hopes, and could not die—’

  ‘His gracious Majesty the late King George, ay, truth,’ I said, fetching a deep sigh, ‘in whose service we suffered terrible things. I believe that even the Americans who wrote with such detestation of him in their Declaration of Independence must have forgiven the poor Royal creature before he died.’

  ENDNOTES

  1 Not reproduced in this edition.

  2 This expression, often heard in New England, refers to the two famous Swordsmen and Regicides from whom the general pardon was withheld at the Restoration. They had fled to New England, where they lived under assumed names in the town of Hadley. Goffe once routed a swaggering fencing-master who came to give a display at Boston, himself armed with only a wet mop and a cheese, tied in a napkin, which he used as a shield. The fencing-master, whose sword was at each lunge received in the cheese, and his face dabbed with the mop, cried out: ‘Who are you in the name of God? You must be either Whaley, Goffe or the Devil himself.’ R. L.

  3 These spurs, worn by Major Toby Purcell, who was with the Regiment at the Victory of the Boyne, are kept in the possession of his successor, the senior major of the Regiment, and displayed every year at the Feast of St. David. R. L. [They were destroyed in a fire at Montreal when the Regiment was stationed there in 1842; but the toast is still drunk at the St. David’s Day dinner. R. G.]

  4 That is to say French soldiers who subsist upon thin soup. —R. L.

  5 1814.