Rifles - Mark Urban [118]
That winter, the riflemen saw quite a bit of their Commander of Forces, since his headquarters was just a few miles away in Frenada. Every couple of days, Wellington hunted across the moorland. A blaring of horns and barking of hounds signalled the arrival of his party, consisting usually of the finely mounted sons of the aristocracy on his staff.
A sportsman like Leach would have liked nothing more than to join in such fun, but he did not have the money. ‘Lord Wellington’s fox hounds often met within reach of our cantonments, but such was the miserable state of our horses that the staff-men only could avail themselves of it,’ he wrote. The Rifle officers would look at their bony nags and call them Rosinantes. A fellow on the staff was expected to keep two or three horses to ride on, because he was about delivering orders day and night, and he therefore received extra allowances for forage. In truth, though, it was not simply a matter of a few shillings’ stipend here or there, since the young bloods would think nothing of spending a lieutenant’s annual pay on a horse and its upkeep.
Even the slowest-witted Rifles officers, seeing their well-bred comrades disappear to the staff, had concluded that such a post offered a far better opportunity for advancement than fighting with the 95th. George Simmons was wise enough to have grasped this early on, and his parents, learning these facts of military life from his letters, had begun their own efforts to help. Being straightforward Yorkshire folk, and bereft of any great interest, they had begun their campaign with the local Member of Parliament. George wrote back to them, touched by their efforts but clearly considering the case hopeless: ‘I am too well hackneyed in the ways of the world to for a moment imagine that a Member of Parliament would give me anything, or, in other words, ask for a company for a perfect stranger who had not given him the least assistance.’ Simmons’s father had evidently seen Harry Smith’s rise as a pattern for his own son, but George had to disabuse him that he could even aspire to such a thing: ‘You make me laugh with the idea of an aide-de-camp being the high road to a Brigade-major’s situation. Aides-de-camp are generally chosen by general officers through relationship or family connections or friends. My ideas of the world since I became a soldier are quite changed.’
Simmons was perfectly right, for he predicted Lord Charles Spencer’s departure from the regiment several months in advance. That officer exploited a family connection to get onto Major General Sir William Stewart’s staff, after serving around a year with the 95th.
The technique of using the dashing and dangerous 95th as a stepping stone into a somewhat safer and better-remunerated staff job was sufficiently well known to those officers without connections to generate some resentment. It was generally felt that one year’s regimental service was the bare minimum, Leach noting:
If there is one school worse than another for a youngster, on his first obtaining a commission, it is that of being placed, instanter, on the staff as an aide-de-camp, before he has done duty with his regiment for a year or two. If a sprig of aristocracy assumes any airs with his regimental