Rifles - Mark Urban [187]
– ‘Cameron was born and grew up in Lochaber’: an article on Cameron’s background and career appeared in the Rifle Brigade Chronicle, 1931.
– ‘His relatives had kept too tight a grip on the family funds’: this detail about Cameron emerges from Charles Napier’s journal in Napier’s History.
185 ‘perhaps from being less spoiled and more hardy than British soldiers’: Cumloden Papers.
– ‘As a friend, his heart was in the right place’: Kincaid, Adventures.
186 ‘Now Smith dined alone as acting commander of 3rd Company’: good detail of the reorganisation emerges from Gairdner’s MS Journal.
– ‘was in his choice of his profession’: Kincaid, Random Shots. Sarsfield’s departure is noted in the monthly return.
– ‘not suited to our specie of troop’: Beckwith’s letter to Cameron, 10 October 1813, referring to Sarsfield’s later transfer out of the 95th. The letter resides in the Cameron Head Papers.
187 ‘The march was commenced with precisely the same regularity’: Leach, Recollections and Reflections.
189 ‘A trooper of the 14th Light Dragoons captured a French cavalier’: Costello.
190 ‘Our division, very much to our annoyance’: Kincaid, Adventures.
– ‘The public buildings are really splendid’: Simmons.
– ‘It is here the stranger may examine, with advantage, the costume, style and gait’: Cooke.
– ‘A fine meal could be had in Madrid, but it would cost you six shillings’: Hennell.
191 ‘I have been very unwell, add to that I never had money’: Gairdner MS Journal, entry for 20 October 1812.
– ‘I sold some silver spoons and a watch’: Leach, Rough Sketches.
– ‘Lieutenant Samuel Hobkirk of the 43rd … was rumoured to spend £1,000 a year on his uniforms’: Cooke and Hennell are among those who were transfixed by Hobkirk’s wealth.
192 ‘In Madrid, they were able to find a proper theatre’: Cooke.
– ‘I was truly glad to get away from this unfortunate place’: Simmons.
– ‘The conversation among the men is interspersed with the most horrid oaths’: Hennell.
194 ‘The road was covered with carcasses of all descriptions’: Simmons.
– ‘It is impossible to conceive of anything more regular’: Leach MS Journal.
– ‘which was fun for them but death to us’: Simmons.
– ‘Cameron sent the Highland and 1st Companies out to the water’s edge as skirmishers’: Gairdner and Leach provide good accounts of this fight in their MS journals. Gairdner notes the four supporting companies of the 95th were ‘formed in line’.
196 ‘Charles Spencer, distraught at the prospect, burst into tears’: Costello.
– ‘sentries with fixed bayonets placed around the piles’: Leach MS Journal.
NINETEEN The Regimental Mess
197 ‘Fire places of no small dimensions were made by our soldiers’: Leach MS Journal.
– ‘Having ransacked the canteens of each company for knives, forks, spoons, &c.’: Leach, Rough Sketches.
198 ‘after a great deal of needless and ungentlemanly blustering’: Gairdner MS Journal, as is the quotation of Cameron.
199 ‘Between field sports by day and harmony and conviviality at night’: Leach MS Journal.
– ‘Up to this period Lord Wellington had been adored by the army’, Kincaid, Adventures.
200 ‘the most ultra of all ultra-Tories’: Kincaid’s (anonymous) sketch of Johnston in the United Services Journal, 1837, Part I.
– ‘he was the type who might easily have called out some Scot’: FitzMaurice, in the work about his father, also the source of the above quotation, describes him as a man who could never be shaken from his conviction that duelling was an honourable way to settle matters of honour, saying he was raised in the tradition of the ‘duello’.
201 ‘take advantage of his superior rank, not only to decline giving me that satisfaction’: this passage is by William Surtees about an officer in another Rifles battalion who tormented him. I have included it because
it is an unusually candid consideration of some of the factors weighed up before calling someone out.
201 ‘the conduct of our Commandant and a few of