Rifles - Mark Urban [43]
For the man determined not to leave hospital, there were various tricks. ‘Some of the younger soldiers, benefiting by the instruction given to them by old malingerers, caused sores or slight wounds, which under ordinary circumstances, would have healed quickly, to become inflamed and daily worse,’ one experienced army surgeon wrote. ‘Tongues rubbed against whitewashed walls certainly puzzled us doctors. Fits were common and constantly acted in the barrack yard, lameness was a general complaint, and not a few declared themselves hopelessly paralysed.’
However, the accomplished skulker did not consider it very proper to lie about in hospital, for there they made deductions from your pay, and that was money better spent on gin or Madeira. A man ‘awaiting instructions’ at Belem Barracks could claim his full six or seven pence day’s pay, and spend it with alacrity. Poring over his regimental returns, Wellington eventually noticed that something was amiss. On 23 October, Headquarters issued a General Order:
1. The Commander of the Forces has observed with the greatest concern, the large number of men returned sick in general hospital, compared with the returns received from the medical officers of the number of men actually on their books in the hospitals. 2. The former, at present, is more than double the latter, and it must be owing to some existing abuse.
In short, Wellington had realised that a great many men whose regiments assumed they were in hospital had actually been discharged but were not coming back. It might seem surprising that Headquarters did not tumble to the tricks of the Belem Rangers earlier, but by autumn 1810 it was trying to rein them in. The more artful skulkers had already tried to save themselves from such measures by adopting a shrewder line. Private Billy McNabb of the 95th was one such.
McNabb, a native of Falkirk, was thirty-eight and had been in the Army long enough to lose any dreams of glory. He was also a clever fellow who knew how to work the system. He had sailed from Dover with the 1st Company but had soon discovered that a man of his age could not manage the marches as well as a Costello fifteen years his junior, or indeed risk his life with the same nonchalance. When the Army first set up hospitals in Portugal, there had been no staff, apart from a handful of surgeons or assistant surgeons. These few experts were soon given hundreds of patients to look after. A soldier who could read and write, like McNabb, might ingratiate himself with those in charge and gain a position assisting them. Then he would receive the handsome sum of an additional sixpence a day as a ward orderly. As long as he remained in the good books of his medical masters, they would resist the regiment’s attempts to get their man back.
Wellington, however, had got wind of the tricks of men like McNabb. His Army was simply too short of trained soldiers to allow them to hang about the rear, currying favour with the surgeons by day and drinking themselves insensible at night. His General Order directed the hospitals to employ Portuguese civilians in place of the McNabbs, who, it added sternly, ‘are to be sent by the first opportunity to their regiments’.
The paths of Privates Costello and McNabb thus crossed bright and early one morning that October. Captain Samuel Mitchell, a tough Scot who had been shot in the arm at the Coa while at the head of his 6th Company, had heard reports of his countryman. Having recovered his health in Lisbon, Mitchell was quite determined that McNabb should join the party returning for service with