Rifles - Mark Urban [4]
As embarkation started, so did the wailing and oaths of women who saw that the dread moment of leave-taking had arrived. ‘It was such a parting scene that I never wish to witness it again,’ one of the soldiers later wrote. ‘The women clung round the necks of their husbands, so that the officers had much ado to part them. There was such a ringing of hands, tearing of hair and crying that I was glad to jump on the boat, thankful that I had no wife to bewail my loss.’
The men, loaded down with anything up to eighty pounds of fighting kit, clambered gingerly into the rowing boats that awaited them at the base of the quay. The tars then heaved away on the oars, pulling their human cargo one mile out into the middle of the harbour where a squadron of transports lay at anchor.
Among the married soldiers, there were some last lingering looks at the waving figures on the quay. Then, putting a brave face on their misery, the wives sent up three cheers for the 95th, and many bystanders joined in. The women’s cries were all the more poignant, one officer wrote, for ‘knowing well that numbers must never return to their native land’. Not to be outdone, the soldiers returned their own huzzas before the stiff breeze carried away their shouts.
O’Hare’s 3rd Company, including Simmons and Fairfoot, went aboard the Fortune, one of three transports needed to carry the battalion. The masters of Fortune, Malabar and Laurel wasted little time. The tide and wind were with them. They slipped their cables and stood out to sea.
The confidence with which the squadron had set off soon ebbed away. The wind had rounded on them, frustrating any progress down the Channel, and the entire group of ships found itself, by 5 June, close in to Cowes with heavy squalls pushing the transports about their anchorage. There they were to remain for six days.
For some of the men, like Private Joseph Almond, these unforeseen checks hardly excited surprise. Three years before, he’d been one of a small number in the present party who’d set sail from Portsmouth. Their journey had taken six months: six months of confinement on a ship, eating hard tack and suffering the company of poxy tars. They had disembarked in South America emaciated and short of puff, having to fight a hard and ultimately futile battle against the Spaniards.
While they remained confined afloat, four hundred riflemen and any number of matelots on board each little transport, the chances of rows and altercations multiplied. Almond, a big Cheshire man in his mid-thirties, was one of those unfortunates who had twice had corporal’s stripes but lost them again through misdemeanours. Perhaps he might get them back in this new campaign.
Those who officered the 95th knew that even the brighter soldiers like Almond – and you needed some reading and writing to make corporal – had to be kept away from drink as far as possible. For the chances of fighting, mutinous language or even general insolence multiplied with each slug of liquor. So while some of the young officers took the opportunity to go ashore and strut like peacocks in front of the fair Isle of Wight girls, the same indulgence could not be granted to the rank and file.
Allowing the men off would also have carried some risk of desertion. Generally, fighting corps like the 95th did not suffer from it much. But you never knew when some militia hero might repent his decision to sign on to the regulars and steal away with his ten guineas’ bounty. Private Fairfoot knew a fair bit about desertion: he had decamped three times from the Royal Surreys. He’d always been caught: twice they had busted him back from drummer to private and locked him up. Desertion was rarely a capital offence in England – it was too common for one thing, they