Rifles - Mark Urban [166]
Kincaid’s Adventures were reprinted in 1900 and 1909. George Simmons’s journals and letters were ‘discovered’, edited and printed in 1899. Harry Smith’s memoir was finally published too, having hitherto only existed as a manuscript for circulation within the family. Sir Charles Oman meanwhile fed the interest by publishing the massive and authoritative A History of the Peninsular War, starting in 1902. The growing secondary literature emphasised glory and self-sacrifice, holding Wellington’s Army up as mythic warriors, examples to a nationalistic Britain at the peak of its powers.
The 95th’s specific role in this publishing phenomenon grew out of the popular appeal of their saga. These were not the memoirs of cannon fodder, packed into their red-coated ranks awaiting death, but of spirited individuals who, by slaying a senior French officer or storming a post, somehow made a difference to the tide of history.
Inevitably, as the essence of these first-hand accounts was boiled down by writers or historians who were not present, certain episodes were glossed over or mythologised. Costello, for example, bore an early share of the responsibility for promulgating a widely held view that the men of the 95th were rarely flogged and had somehow escaped the system of brutality that typified the eighteenth-century Army. The early twentieth-century authors often took this rosy picture at face value. As we have seen, though, the desire of the officers who founded the 95th that their men should be spared the lash was to prove no more than a noble aspiration, particularly under Craufurd. But it is also only fair to the general to point out that even regimental officers of the 95th such as Beckwith, Barnard, Cameron and O’Hare, as well as lowly fellows like Lieutenant James Gairdner, all ordered riflemen flogged. In short, riflemen got no special treatment in this regard.
While the 95th were not spared the stick, they were offered various carrots by way of incentive. Some of these, such as the pillage of French convoys, were regarded as the reward due to enterprising fellows in the advance guard. In other respects, though, the acknowledgement of the Rifles officers – particularly Colonel Beckwith – that bathing, football, coursing and races could all make a soldier’s life enjoyable, marked a radical new departure for the Army. Beckwith’s approach in this regard was complemented by a reduction to the minimum of the drills repeated endlessly in other regiments. Many redcoats, for example, practised the ‘manual exercise’ of loading their musket ad nauseam on the drill square but almost never actually fired a cartridge. The 95th, on the other hand, maintained its high standards of marksmanship by constant target practice, even when they were just a few miles from enemy outposts. The fun and games helped build regimental and company spirit and, as Leach and others explicitly pointed out, meant the soldiers were ready to follow Beckwith into hell when the time came. They also helped maintain physical fitness, an Army preoccupation that can also be said to have begun with the Light Division. As for the marksmanship, it laid the ground for a far more professional attitude to soldiering.
The 95th’s founders also wanted to provide motivation in the shape of promotion and distinction for deserving soldiers. Here too they achieved remarkable results. Robert Fairfoot can be seen as a prototype. His father served almost twenty-nine years in the Army without escaping the rank of private. But young Fairfoot ended his days as a commissioned officer and a perfect model for young riflemen to emulate. William Brotherwood might well also have ended up as a sergeant major or even an officer had he not been killed in 1813. The Rifles did not invent this type of promotion, but in trying to extend it widely, by educating privates and non-commissioned officers, the 95th was quite directly subverting the class system. Conservatives did not like it one bit: Wellington himself commented that this ‘new fangled school mastering