Rifles - Mark Urban [182]
TWELVE The Gentleman Volunteer
125 ‘I hope to see a great number of volunteers come out soon’: Simmons.
– ‘your memorialist, a native of Scotland, aged 19, is a son of respectable parentage’: Mitchell’s notes survives in the Mitchell Papers, cited by William C. Foster in his Sir Thomas Mitchell and His World 1792–1855, published by the New South Wales Institution of Surveyors.
126 ‘A volunteer – be it known to all who know it not’: Kincaid, Random Shots. Kincaid calls Sarsfield ‘Dangerfield’ in his book, presumably to safeguard against the threat of litigation or a challenge to a duel.
– ‘John FitzMaurice … had come out a few months before his countryman Sarsfield’: his recommendation was from Judge Day. The story of FitzMaurice’s arrival in his regiment was told by his son, cited above.
127 ‘While they are treated as gentlemen out of the field’: Kincaid, Random Shots.
– ‘That young devil FitzMaurice is covered with blood from head to foot’: FitzMaurice fils.
128 ‘Sarsfield’s brother had been killed at Albuera’: this detail emerges from Beckwith’s letter to Somerset of 4 July 1811 in WO31/327.
129 ‘the usual sinister cast of the eye worn by common Irish country countenances’: Kincaid, Random Shots.
– ‘His original good natured simplicity gave way to experience’: Costello, who calls Sarsfield ‘Searchfied’ in his book.
130 ‘General Murray who commands the garrison … is very fond of shew and parade’: Gairdner’s letter to his father 26 May 1811. The other quotation comes from a letter of 10 September 1810. Both are contained, along with Gairdner’s journal, in the archives of the National Army Museum MSS 7011-21. Gairdner’s impressions form a vital and hardly ever used primary source on the 95th.
130 ‘the laughing stock of the whole army, and particularly of the Light Division’: Charles Napier, in William Napier’s book of his life.
– ‘Ensign William Hay joined the 52nd only to witness the following’: Captain William Hay, Reminiscences, 1809–1815, Under Wellington, London, 1901.
131 ‘Order upon orders of the most damnable nature were issued’: Leach MS Journal.
– ‘I am glad to see you safe, Craufurd’: this is one of the better-known Craufurd anecdotes, first described by F. Larpent, Private Journal of F. Seymour Larpent, Judge Advocate General, London, 1853.
THIRTEEN Deserters
134 ‘A Spanish peasant girl has an address about her’: Kincaid, Adventures.
135 ‘characters like Leach or Johnston strolling down the lanes with a pet wolf’: Leach, Rough Sketches and ‘Anecdotes in the Life of the Late Major Johnstone, of the Rifle Brigade’, by a Brother Officer [in fact Kincaid], United Service Journal, 1837, Part 1.
– ‘21 August, when half of the 3rd Battalion – four companies comprising its Right Wing’: Leach MS Journal.
136 ‘One evening, returning from an inspection of the outposts, General Craufurd rode straight into a scene of near riot’: Costello is the source of this entire anecdote.
– ‘The corporal was broken to the ranks and awarded 150 lashes’: Costello says the man was called Corporal Miles, a name that does not appear in the 1st Battalion lists. It is possible he was in another battalion of the 95th. He is also unclear about when exactly the incident happened, but Leach in his MS Journal makes reference to the flogging of two men on 11 October 1811.
137 ‘I am labouring under a fit of the blue devils’: Craufurd to his wife, 3 December 1811, cited by Spurrier.
– ‘Headquarters was putting the squeeze on skulkers in the hospitals again’: with a General Order of 15 November 1811, in Dispatches.
138 ‘Three men had absconded from the 1st/95th within a year of its landing’: they were Neil MacLean and Ronald MacDonald, 7th Company, and Allan Cumming, 3rd Company, according to returns. Cumming returned later, as we shall see. Kincaid, in Adventures, reports the death in battle of another 95th deserter, which circumstantial evidence suggests may have been MacDonald.