Rifles - Mark Urban [119]
Cameron, always comfortable in the role of curmudgeon, felt strongly that young subalterns needed whipping into shape – indeed, this may have been the sole basis of his antipathy to Gairdner. During the final weeks of 1812, Cameron tried to obtain the recall of Second Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell, whose regimental career had lasted a bare three months in 1811 before secondment to the Quarter Master General’s staff. Mitchell, ironically, was a young man who had come into the Army almost bereft of interest, volunteering like Cameron himself had done long before. This, though, brought no sympathy whatsoever and Cameron had written angrily to Headquarters: ‘2nd Lieut Mitchell being a young officer and entirely unacquainted with his duty as a Regimental Officer, I have to beg that his Excellency the Commander of the Forces will be pleased to order him to join his Regt forthwith, being deficient in subaltern officers.’ In order to ram home his point, Cameron recalled Mitchell’s servant, a private rifleman, to the regiment.
Mitchell, however, had proven himself an exquisite map-maker and the staff needed his services. Cameron soon found he had bitten off more than he could chew. The Quarter Master General himself wrote to Wellington that Cameron’s actions in castigating Mitchell and recalling his servant ‘appeared to me such a measure of harshness and irregularity that I wrote to M General Alten intending to lay the whole matter before the Commander of the Forces’. Little could the commanding officer of the 1st/95th have imagined that in trying to exercise his rights over a penniless pipsqueak barely in his twenties, he would end up having to explain himself to General Alten and Lord Wellington. Cameron stood his ground, though, falling back, as military pedants were apt to do, on regulations, insisting that Second Lieutenants were too junior to be attached to the staff. Mitchell sheepishly returned, doubtless further improving the brittle dinner-table atmosphere in Alemada. The matter did not rest there: a new QMG arrived, someone in whom Wellington had complete trust, and a few weeks after he had appeared in his regiment, Mitchell packed his bags once more and rode back to Frenada.
In a number of small ways, then, Cameron’s character and the limitations of his command became known to those in charge of the Army. All of this must have been extremely vexing for him, since he was a man who believed in solving problems, as far as he was able, inside the regimental family. For example, when Private George Stratton was caught by Don Julian’s guerrillas trying to make his way to the French lines, having robbed some of his comrades, Cameron resolved to deal with the matter himself. The battalion was marched out to witness the punishment of four hundred lashes, and Cameron told him: ‘I ought to have had you tried by General Court Martial – in which case you should have been shot – but the high character the regiment has borne in the army prevents me from having it mentioned in General Orders that a man of the Rifles could be guilty of the heinous crime of desertion.’ The case of Almond and the others one year before appears to have taught the officers that execution would not operate in the deterrent manner that Wellington had hoped and that it was best to resolve these matters in ways that would not make it into the newspapers at home.
Cameron, for all his clumsiness in dealing with brother officers, understood the soldier’s mentality well, and told the assembled regiment, ‘If his own company shall be answerable for his good behaviour, I shall forgive him.’ Nobody spoke up for Stratton. The soldiers were happy enough as the buglers started laying on the lash. After all, someone who stole from his messmates ranked second only to a skulker in their book of villains. After sixty or seventy strokes, though, one of the men did call out, a private called Robinson whom Cameron said was as bad as Stratton. Reluctantly, the colonel halted the punishment.