Rifles - Mark Urban [115]
Gairdner remonstrated with Cameron that the honour belonged to Lieutenant MacNamara, but he could not refuse his colonel’s order. Cameron told him: ‘You may think it a hard case and may be it is, but if you think so, do the duty first and make your complaint afterwards.’ The young lieutenant could not refuse a direct order and sloped off to find the sick party. Gairdner’s feelings were deeply hurt and he fumed in his journal: ‘I cursed the service in which a low-lifed brute can with impunity annoy an officer, even though he does not fail in one point of his duty, merely because he has a command. That Cameron dislikes me I know, but of his reasons for doing so I am perfectly ignorant.’
The following day, another young lieutenant was sent to take over the sick and tried to soothe Gairdner, telling him that Cameron had made an innocent mistake, not realising that he had called Gairdner out of his turn. But through glances or tone of voice the colonel and his aggrieved American lieutenant communicated their dislike for each other. The day before they marched into Alemada, Gairdner was 2nd Company’s duty officer and he felt the commanding officer hovering about him throughout the march, noting in his journal, ‘Col. Cameron … took every opportunity of finding fault with me and with the Company because I commanded it today – dirty low-lifed work!’
For a few days, Gairdner felt pleasantly surprised by the new arrangements in the officers’ mess. When Captain Jeremiah Crampton died (of the injuries sustained at Badajoz), Gairdner had bought his rifle; he now joined Leach in various hunting expeditions on the Beira moorlands, some partridge and other luckless beasts falling into his bag. ‘Between field sports by day and harmony and conviviality at night in our banditti-like mess house, we certainly do contrive not only to kill time but to make it pass very happily,’ wrote Leach. Their conversation ranged from unhappiness with the angry General Order that Wellington had published on 28 November, venting his fury on the Army for its straggling, to sad regrets about having to leave new-found friends in Madrid. ‘Up to this period Lord Wellington had been adored by the army,’ according to Kincaid. However, ‘as his censure, on this occasion, was not strictly confined to the guilty, it afforded a handle to disappointed persons, and excited a feeling against him, on the part of individuals which has probably never since been obliterated.’
There were other subjects too, relating to Britain’s interests in the wider world. The officers were all aware of Napoleon’s march into Russia and heartily wished every disaster possible on the Corsican upstart. The newspapers reaching them early in December seemed to answer these hopes. For some months these same papers had also charted a new and most curious conflict: one between Britain and the United States. Congress had declared war in June 1812, having become aggrieved at Britain’s attempts to shut it out of European trade and to press its citizens as sailors. While the American armies had suffered some reverses, their small fleet managed to humble the Royal Navy in a number of frigate actions.
For James Gairdner, who had been born and raised in Georgia, this new war provoked some anxiety, not least because the reinforcement of the British Canadian garrison might require the dispatch of some riflemen. Gairdner’s father would eventually write to him that he would have no option but resignation if the 95th received orders for America. Few in Britain felt much enthusiasm for