Rifles - Mark Urban [42]
The river passage went smoothly enough, the men then being transferred to a naval transport, which sailed them around to Lisbon, where they arrived on 7 August, after a hellish journey of thirteen days. Here, the officers and men went their separate ways. Smith, Simmons and some of the other subalterns limped into the Golden Lion Hotel, an establishment that catered for the British officers going to or from their regiments.
The following day, appalled by the size of the bill at the Golden Lion, Simmons hired himself a room in the Rua de Buenos Ayres. Harry and Tom Smith also decamped, but to another address, the rent a little higher, of course, as befitted young gentlemen of their standing. All of them just wanted to recuperate as fast as possible. None required immediate surgery, although Harry Smith still had a ball lodged in the heel of one foot. It was simply a matter of taking rest, sending your servant out for food, and trying to maintain one’s composure as an Englishman, amid the stench of garlic or frying sardines and the incessant shouting of the inhabitants. Simmons wrote home to his father, ‘The people are not worthy of notice. I met with great barbarity all the way. They would let you die in the streets before they would assist you.’
Those whose wounds allowed a rapid recovery, and whose spirit remained ardent, did not like to linger at Lisbon, for the outgoings were inevitably greater than those they incurred sleeping under the stars and messing with the other officers of their company. A wound could be turned to your financial advantage, of course, with a visit to the Medical Board resulting in a pension. A lieutenant who had lost an eye or one of his arms could augment his income to the tune of £70 per annum. A great many who were in receipt of such a payment fully intended to return to their regiments.
Those who were seriously wounded but who escaped a lasting disability were entitled to a one-off gratuity of a year’s pay. The more gentlemanly sort used this benefit for the purpose for which it was intended and, with their colonel’s leave, sailed home for a year’s convalescence. However, some of the hardier types with no great expectations, of whom there were many in the 95th, calculated that a man who had been sick in Lisbon for a few months but then rejoined his regiment with a year’s pay in his pocket was a man who had made himself a devil of a good bargain.
Soldiers too found themselves parading before the Medical Board, where they might also receive ‘blood money’ for a wound. For those who’d had limbs amputated or other serious injuries, the board often took the decision to invalid them back to England. They would be put on a ship for Haslar on the Solent; there it would be decided whether they could be sent to an invalids’ or veterans’ battalion, or were so seriously crippled that they needed to be pensioned off. A man sent out in this way could receive a decent stipend – some got as much as ninepence a day, rather more than they were paid in their regiments, although there, at least, many of the essentials of daily life were found for them. Others, though, were cast out with a few pence a day and considered themselves hard done by.
Among those who had been evacuated, feverish, from the Guadiana, or shot up from the Coa, there was another category of soldier. By the late summer of 1810, it was clear that quite a few – hundreds, certainly – had realised the benefits of lingering about Lisbon. The alternative, after all, was a return to the floggings and grapeshot of regimental service. The wine was cheap in the Portuguese capital and there was always plenty of company around the barracks at Belem, just outside Lisbon, where hundreds of men discharged from general hospital but not yet deemed fit to return to their corps would gather. ‘It was a place noted for every species of skulk,’ one of the hardier riflemen recorded, ‘better known to my fellow soldiers as the “Belem Rangers”.’
These skulkers earned the contempt of stout-hearted soldiers, whose