Rifles - Mark Urban [164]
In 1828, William Napier began publishing his History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France – a six-volume series that he only completed in 1840. As a veteran of the 43rd Light Infantry, it was inevitable that Napier would have much to say about the Light Division’s fights. But he had even more to say about the character his troops had shown in action. He wrote of the British infantryman: ‘The whole world cannot produce a nobler specimen of military bearing.’ Napier managed to turn the epic fights into a page-turner, and the prejudices exhibited in his prose simply enhanced its appeal. In places, he was unashamedly populist: ‘Napoleon’s troops fought in bright fields where every helmet caught some beams of glory, but the British soldier conquered under the cold shade of aristocracy; no honours awaited his daring; no dispatch gave his name to the applauses of his countrymen, his life of danger and hardship was uncheered by hope, his death unnoticed.’
Fired up by such eulogies, the public would want to hear more from these unsung heroes. Memoirs had started appearing, and many extolled the valour of the Rifles. Major Blakiston’s, for example, published in 1829, noted, ‘I never saw such skirmishers as the 95th.’
The stage was set for the Rifles to tell their own story. John Kincaid led off in 1830 with Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. While many such books had a print run of only two or three hundred copies, Kincaid’s is thought to have been double or treble this figure. Not to be outdone, in 1831, Jonathan Leach, the only officer of the 1st Battalion to have gone uninjured all the way through the events of 1809–14, followed with his Rough Sketches. The books sold out almost immediately. Kincaid followed up with Random Shots from a Rifleman in 1835. In 1838 the publishers issued a second edition of Kincaid’s Adventures and Leach wrote three more books.
Kincaid and Leach adopted a similar style: laconic, picaresque, heroic in an understated way. Consciously or not, they pandered to their public and its preconceptions about the British character in adversity. They are stirring accounts and the evergreen nature of their appeal is such that it is easy to buy reprints even today. Their philosophy of soldiering neatly dovetailed with the requirements of the market; there were many anecdotes about officers and ordinary riflemen. While avoiding any personal trumpet-blowing of the kind favoured by French diarists, they did not refrain from hyperbole in describing the feats of Wellington’s Army in general or the Light Division in particular. One wrote that ‘there, perhaps, never was, nor ever again will be, such a war brigade’.
In the Kincaid and Leach accounts there was hardly a mention of the flogging that punctuated their marches, and none at all of incidents such as the resignation of the cowardly Lieutenant Bell after Badajoz or the flight of a hundred or so men at the battle of Waterloo. Some other indiscretions, such as the large-scale larceny on the campaigns or the bullying of Second Lieutenant Sarsfield, were briefly recounted, but presented as humorous episodes. The memoirs did discuss the execution of the Ciudad Rodrigo deserters, presenting it as a tough but justified measure, but kept from the reader how many other riflemen deserters had escaped this draconian fate.
The memoir writers were perhaps most guilty of selective memory or indeed hagiography in their treatment of General Robert Craufurd. Both Leach and Kincaid, it is true, acknowledged his unpopularity in a coded way. Neither, however, was willing to share the intense hatred felt for him during the campaigns with their readers. Indeed Leach – one of the general’s bitterest critics – seemed to reverse some of his views in the most perverse way. In 1809 in his (unpublished) journal he had castigated Craufurd for issuing the ‘most tyrannical and oppressive standing orders that were ever compiled by a British officer’; but in one