Rifles - Mark Urban [22]
Many of the riflemen who had served in other regiments marvelled at the superiority of the 95th’s techniques and instruction, one such commenting: ‘Eight out of ten soldiers in our regular regiments will aim in the same manner at an object at the distance of three hundred yards, as at one only fifty. It must hence be evident that the greater part of those shots are lost or expended in vain; indeed the calculation has been made, that only one shot out of two hundred fired from muskets in the field takes effect, while one out of twenty from rifles is the average.’ In this way, the Green Jackets hoped to more than compensate for the rifle’s rate of fire, which with perhaps one shot per minute was two or three times slower than a smooth-bore musket.
Men like Beckwith believed that new qualities of initiative were required from the soldiers who wielded the rifle, and these were not best fostered by corporal punishment or drilling him until he became an automaton. One of the 95th’s founders had written in 1806, ‘Ambition and the love of distinction are the ruling passions of soldiers, prompting them to encounter every hardship.’ In fostering that ambition, the regiment believed in teaching its soldiers to read and write – an essential qualification for promotion, but a step considered highly suspect by many of the Army’s more reactionary generals, including Wellington himself.
The 95th’s raw material, though, was not much different from that of any other regiment, despite the wish of some officers to develop a more selective recruitment system. Its founders had tried, in the early days, to recruit among the tougher men on the country’s Celtic fringes. As a result the regiment had, for a while, been almost equally divided between English, Scots and Irish. The admission of hundreds of militia volunteers (mainly from Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Surrey) early in 1809 had changed the 95th’s character, bringing in more English, many of them former tradesmen. When setting out from Dover earlier that year, its composition had been roughly six Englishmen to two Scots and two Irish.
In the ranks of the 95th, there were soldiers with all the vices Lord Wellington associated with British or Irish recruits. Many officers felt the Irish were particularly prone to thieving. They almost all plundered, of course, especially when the failures of supply drove them mad with hunger. They also loved to drink, and it was liquor that gave Beckwith a particularly difficult problem of command while his battalion was in Campo Maior.
Tom Plunket, the Irish crack shot so admired on the passage out by Ned Costello, had by this stage been promoted from corporal to sergeant, and got blind drunk one day after training had finished. When his messmates tried to restrain his increasingly outrageous behaviour, Plunket became violent, grabbed his rifle and barricaded himself into a small hut. There was no choice but to send for an officer. Plunket, however, swore blind he would shoot the first person sent to arrest him. The stand-off continued until his passions cooled and some officers were able to persuade him to come out.
Under a draconian disciplinary regime, it is quite clear that Plunket could have ended up charged with mutiny, being marched in front of a general court martial. Such bodies tried the most serious offences, including capital ones, and had Plunket been convicted he might well have ended up on a rope. Beckwith’s dilemma was all the more disturbing, given that just a few months before he had singled out Plunket for shooting the French general and called him a ‘pattern for the whole battalion’.
Many of the older soldiers knew that back in 1805 Beckwith had proved his aversion to flogging in the most remarkable way. When a party of drunken Irish recruits to the battalion had chanced upon two women near the camp, abusing them verbally and physically, Beckwith