Blood and Famine (Man of Conflict Series, Book 4)

by Andrew Wareham

  "I shall pass the word that men who have the desire to join you are permitted to do so. Is there a set of restrictions for service in your ranks, Sir Septimus?"

  "They must not be too short, ma'am, and should be of man's estate and the Surgeon must be satisfied that they carry no overwhelming disease. Simply expressed, ma'am, they must have the strength to carry a firelock and hold it to their shoulder, and to march with a sixty-pound pack on their shoulders. I have seen your men, ma'am, and have no doubt of their physique - they may not be as large as many of ours, but they are no weaklings."

  "You have no place for boys whose voices have yet to break?"

  "Very few, ma'am. We use our older, less fit men as drummers in this battalion. In fact, most regiments do so - the drummer boy of song is a rare sight and is generally a son of the regiment, his father a soldier in our ranks. One or two may assist the doctor or act as servants to officers, but we have not the call for boys such as there is in the navy. Mind you, ma'am, you know what they say of sailors!"

  She did not in fact; he enlightened her.

  "Really, Sir Septimus?"

  "So they say, ma'am."

  "How strange! That might of course explain why the marquis... Never mind!"

  She said no more on the topic.

  More than fifty men and youths came forward and almost all were acceptable, though the Regimental Surgeon was inclined to refuse some of the older candidates on the spurious grounds that grey hairs were not desirable in the ranks.

  "Premature whitening of the hair, doctor! Their hard lives tend to give them a semblance of advanced years. For that matter, sir, my man swears he has seen grey on my head, and I do not believe that I may be called 'elderly', sir!"

  The Surgeon hastened to agree; it would have required a far braver man than he to so stigmatise the colonel.

  In the end a pair of boys of no more than ten years were the only ones rejected, and they were advised to make their way to Lisbon where there were ships always in search of hands.

  Major Perceval, a second in command, was much involved in the recruitment, though doing very little other than to commend the work of his juniors.

  "Are we to establish a training company, sir?"

  "No. Better to fit the new men into their places immediately. We shall not march out for a few days, at minimum, probably not before the thaw in spring. These are men who had led a hard life and who will fit into their platoons with some ease, or so I suspect. Importantly, they will be speaking English within the month if they are mixed in with the other private soldiers. Keep them separate and they will find the language far more difficult to come by."

  The new recruits almost without exception fitted easily into the army life. They already possessed habits of obedience, living in a nearly feudal and very poor agricultural society where the cult of the individual had never flourished. All of their lives they had had to fit in, to do as they were told and, most importantly, to obey apparently irrational orders without query.

  Drill made no sense to the new men, but they did not question it - if their new masters wished them to walk in a peculiar fashion in a pointless direction, well, that was their privilege. In more than fair exchange, they ate oatmeal in the morning, bread at midday and a meat stew or bread and cheese of an evening; they drank hot liquids as well, which was welcome on the cold days of winter. The English told them the hot drinks were called 'tea'; the Portuguese had another name for the flavour, but it was better than cold and often dirty water. While their bellies were full they were not likely to question any order.

  Marching with a full pack was a minor chore to men who had often pulled a plough or harrow by hand through their stony fields and had habitually carried one hundred and forty pound sacks of flour over the hills to market. Septimus was intrigued by that latter discovery - he wondered why it was that flour sacks were identical in Portugal and England at sixteen to the ton. Perhaps the two countries had traded together for so many years that they had come to share some of their weights and measures; it was very strange.

  Live firing of the muskets was more difficult to master; some of the men had used fowling pieces or hunting rifles and they had to force themselves into the cadences demanded by the sergeants. Particularly, they wanted to take aim - powder was expensive and it seemed ludicrous to waste it by firing to order.

  Far the best thing about the new men was that they were not drunks; none of them was in the habit of reducing himself to alcoholic coma, never having had the money to do so. They stood out in the ranks for always being sober, a most unusual habit among the soldiery.

  An additional bonus was that the bulk of the Portuguese were not in the habit of handling cash and simply did not notice that they had not been paid.

  Septimus had sent messages to headquarters pointing out that his people had not seen a paymaster since arriving in Portugal. The only response had been that the whole army was eagerly awaiting a shipment of coin from London. A staff galloper who brought orders explained the problem, as he understood it.

  "Silver, sir, is in short supply at the moment. The East India Company buys up all there is on the market to take to China to pay for silks and tea, so the Mint cannot get hold of enough for use in England, let alone out here in Portugal. We have Spanish dollars, and a small amount of bar silver, but almost none of Portuguese Joes or their smaller coins, so we cannot pay the men in money they can use."

  The Portuguese would not trust paper money and were too poor to cope with gold and so there was no quick solution. Mr Black, the quartermaster, was able to lay his hands on some barrels of good quality salted cod, brought up from the coast and sold that to the men on credit, to be redeemed on payday, but it was not an entirely satisfactory solution.

  Money apart, the battalion was well-found. The villages had salvaged almost all of their harvest and rather than take it to market had sold to the quartermaster, happy to accept his credit because they had never seen the cash themselves in the past. Under the old system the marquis had taken the money as his feudal due, the villagers holding back a sufficient part of their crops to live on, if all went well, and surrendering all of the rest to their masters. In good weather and peacetime they survived; war would bring additional taxes, to be paid from the villagers' share rather than that of the marquis, and that inevitably meant hunger. Now, they had no marquis and the soldiers ensured that every man, woman and child ate at least one good meal a day, irrespective of taxes and dues. The Portuguese were now much inclined to offer their loyalty to the British Army rather than to their own traditional masters, an outcome that the marchioness did not believe desirable.

  "You must speak to your cooks, Sir Septimus! They are over-generous in their meals to the peasants and will bring them to bad habits. The children especially expect to eat their fill. They must be reminded that hard times will come again and that they should not live in expectation that they will be pampered. When the tax collector comes they must be ready for short commons."

  "Can you not pay the taxes so that they will not go hungry?"

  "Why ever should I do that? They are peasants! Hunger is their lot. The family needs the money - there are demands on us that they cannot comprehend. We must attend the Court and dress properly, and our sons and daughters must be sustained in their position in life. It is the Will of God that it should be so!"

  Septimus was not wholly convinced; it seemed to him that God tended to say just what his rich audience wanted to hear. It made sense, of course: a God who made trouble for the King and his government would not be at all popular and his bishops and priests would very soon find themselves in trouble. As well, the bishops seemed always to be recruited from rich families - they would not be in the way of preaching against their own kind.

  It was not his country, and he could not change its ways, but he rather hoped that the Portuguese who had become soldiers would not return meekly to their state of subservience. The men deserved better than that.

  The snow came in hard tha
t winter, much to the pleasure of the men. They could do very little other than sit round their fires and talk and drink whatever was to hand; that was the sort of soldiering they liked. They wondered just how the French were faring, knowing that they normally lived off the country.

  "Goin' to be some mighty thin Frogs come the spring, lads!"

  The tracks behind the Lines were kept open and convoys trickled in, charcoal and sea-coals from the ships at Lisbon the bulk of the supplies they carried. Orders came through as well, mostly trivial routine but including the instructions to prepare to march in spring. Septimus found himself called to headquarters in mid-February.

  It was a two days ride over the snow-blocked tracks, rarely faster than a walk and cold despite his leathers and furs. His escort, in the nature of things worse equipped than he was, were blue in the face.

  The Army had taken over a large village, which was all very well but the houses themselves were small and ill-made - they were short of the luxuries of life.

  Septimus was first introduced to his brigadier, an overdue meeting, he felt. The battalion had been detached from the brigade while it held the Castle but must inevitably rejoin when they marched, and it would be useful actually to have met his officer in command.

  Colonel Dudley was a determinedly bluff and hearty gentleman, a back-country squire of the oldest sort. He had soldiered for nearly thirty years and must very soon be made major-general by seniority; he was happy to have his brigade because that made it very probable that he would continue to be employed after his promotion. Brigadier was an appointment, rather than a rank, although it gave him command of other officers of his substantive status of colonel; civilians were sometimes puzzled that the one gentleman might be addressed with propriety either as ‘Brigadier’ or as ‘Colonel’ at one and the same time, but it was quite clear to soldiers, as a general rule.

  Dudley was shortish, stoutish, baldish - everything was understated, nothing would ever be taken to an extreme, allowed as an absolute statement. Septimus thought him wishy-washy, neither one thing nor another. He showed sufficiently friendly; Septimus had wondered whether he might not resent that the Hampshires had been detached from his command for the winter, but he showed no sign of animosity. That might of course mean that he was a back-stabber rather than a man who would be open in his hostility.

  "Welcome, Sir Septimus! You come with a reputation, sir, are known to be a fighting man, and have one of the larger battalions in the Army. Although we have two other battalions of foot, sir, neither is of more than six hundred strong so you add a substantial amount of weight to us. You will be acquainted with many of the officers, I believe, having served initially with the First Battalion of the New Foresters, and you may have met the Wiltshires, they also being South Country."

  "I served beside the Wiltshires in the Sugar Islands, sir, when I was a far younger man. The New Foresters were my first home, sir, and I might say that I left them unwillingly, sent out to the Hampshires in India."

  "Very good, Sir Septimus - it makes for a more effective brigade when the officers know each other. We have a pair of batteries of horse artillery with us, and so may be sent out on detached service the more easily. Always better to be out than part of the great mass of the army, I believe, sir!"

  Septimus agreed politely - it made little difference, in his opinion. Fighting was the same whether one was part of a long line or a short.

  "I have my standing orders, of course, Sir Septimus, and like it if all of my people keep to them. It is only a number of minor matters, but it helps if we all work together. If each battalion stands to at the same time in the morning then we can march off the more easily. In my experience simply saying to bring the men to order at dawn is not quite good enough - for one may easily disagree by ten minutes on the exact moment of first light!"

  It was a legitimate point - Septimus had noticed that the bugles sounding Reveille in Denmark had blared out over a period of at least a quarter of an hour every morning. A column could easily straggle if its time-keeping started with slackness every day. He made a comment to that effect.

  "You were at Corunna as well, of course, Sir Septimus, and you may have noticed a number of other instances where control of the men could have been more efficiently maintained."

  "Very nearly every possible instance, sir. The retreat was disgracefully ill-managed and had it not been for a few battalions and regiments - the Germans especially stood out - every man could have been lost. Proper management at brigade and division would have been much appreciated."

  "That was my impression from all I have heard, sir. I would add that I was told that the Hampshires 'stood out', as you express it."

  "My officers and, particularly, the sergeants served the battalion well, sir. I was proud of them."

  "Well said, sir! I do like to see the men uniformed properly, of course, Sir Septimus. Shining boots and their stocks properly polished - all add to the air of pride, I believe."

  "I am sure you are right, sir. My men take great care of their appearance when on parade, sir. Naturally, when they are in the field a little of mud is unavoidable, and the stock, of course, is kept in their knapsack, being purely of ceremonial function. I have discovered that the leather stock interferes with the men's musketry, sir, preventing them from settling their chin on the butt as it should be. I am certain you will agree, sir, that accurate musketry is far more important than a scrap of leather at their throats. Add to that, as you must know, sir, powder smoke tarnishes the leather to an unacceptable degree so that they cannot possibly wear the quaintly old-fashioned object in the field!"

  Septimus maintained an expression of naive interest in the matter - it was not, he implied, of any significance at all. The brigadier had the choice of issuing a command that the stock must be worn, and thus seeming to put ceremony before efficiency in battle, or of supinely agreeing with his colonel. Give a man like Sir Septimus an inch and he would take a yard, Dudley thought, but if he did not make the concession then he would seem to be a petty tyrant...

  "Of course, Sir Septimus! It was the parade ground I was referring to."

  "I had thought it must be, sir. I will place a copy of your Standing Orders in my adjutant's hand at earliest, sir, and he will ensure that every officer is made familiar with them."

  Dudley noted Septimus' implicit promise to raise no other objections; it seemed probable that they would be able to work easily together, both understanding the nature of give and take.

  “What is your opinion of flogging, Sir Septimus?”

  “A couple of dozen applied to a bad soldier will make him no worse, and may well encourage others to be better. Where a man is normally of acceptable standard in his everyday life in the ranks, well then, sir, I will always be reluctant to take the cat to him. It is my opinion, sir, that if the sergeants are awake then most ill-conduct can be stopped before it starts. I do like to give the men little rewards for good conduct, sir, rather than offer punishments for bad. Mind you, sir, if a man has really misbehaved, then I shall find no mercy in me. I prefer the noose to the cat where the offence is gross – I have no use for these five hundreds and thousands except where there is a very specific purpose to them.”

  “I have heard it said that fifty dozen a week will tend to keep a battalion on its toes, Sir Septimus.”

  “I am quite sure that it will, sir. They will be made quick to run from battle and very fast at shooting their officers in the back!”

  “I am entirely certain that is something that has never occurred in an English battalion, Sir Septimus! The very idea of the men shooting their officers must be utterly abhorrent! It is the sort of thing that Frenchmen do!”

  “I can name one officer I certainly, personally, know to have been shot by a man from his own battalion, sir. I have been told, by officers I respect, of a dozen other cases. I know as well of an officer discovered in commission of a revolting crime who was shot and left crippled to wait for the French, in the immediate company of hi
s victims.”

  “But… what did you do, Sir Septimus?”

  “Nothing, sir, other than to offer silent thanks that a useless officer was no longer a menace to my people.”

  “Would you care to explain just how an officer and a gentleman could be a ‘menace’, Sir Septimus?”

  The meeting was no longer going well; Septimus decided he did not give a tuppeny dam.

  “Certainly, sir. I have known three main sources of menace, sir, other than the cavalry, that is. First, and most common, is the drunkard – irritable, unreliable, irrational; next are the idle who will neglect their duty and their men for lack of the energy to do better; least often to be found, but disastrously dangerous, is the coward, the man who hides away at the rear and drives his men into perils that he will not face.”

  “I cannot imagine that any gentleman could possibly be a coward, Sir Septimus!”

  “It is rare, and I do not believe I have ever myself come across a man who I would wish to set before a court. I have once or twice found occasion to order an ensign or new lieutenant to perform his duty, but I suspect that those were men who saw blood for the first time, and found it most unpleasant. I do not doubt that we all remember our first time under fire, sir.”

  It transpired that Dudley had never actually been under fire, though he had been present at a couple of very nasty riots.

  “No doubt you will discover the experience to be quite interesting, sir. We will undoubtedly be involved in action under the command of Lord Wellington. You will find standing in the front rank next to the men to be most invigorating, sir!”

  “I have no doubt you are right, Sir Septimus. Idle and drunken officers must also be extremely rare, one might imagine!”

  “Unfortunately not, sir. Idleness may be dealt with whenever it is observed. I watch my ensigns most carefully and have no hesitation in chasing and chivvying them until they work to my satisfaction. I would imagine that about one in three of the young men who choose to join the battalion finds it wiser to transfer to a more congenial environment; the remainder make the effort and tend to become good soldiers. For the drunks, of course, there is no cure. I harass them quite remorselessly until they either send in their papers or go to half-pay. I will not tolerate them, sir, I will not have them polluting my mess!”