Rifles - Mark Urban [55]
Corporal Fairfoot showed himself a reliable helper for O’Hare. He managed that difficult trick of retaining the good opinion of his former messmates, while discharging his new responsibilities fairly. Although an Englishman by parentage and outlook, having lived most of his life in Hampshire, Fairfoot well understood the Irish rankers who made up the company’s toughest fighters and hardest drinkers. He had been born in Dublin and spent his childhood there, while his father’s regiment was stationed in Ireland, and appreciated all of the complexities of that place.
During these cold, wet, winter days many of the soldiers considered tobacco to be an even more vital comfort than alcohol. The rank and file used clay pipes, which helped them keep their wits about them while on long hours of sentry duty. Officers preferred cigars, consuming them voraciously. Most considered them an essential tool, whether starting one of those hard marching days at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., or spending time on some rain-swept hillside observing the enemy. ‘If a man in England … fancies that he really knows the comfort of tobacco in that shape he is very much mistaken,’ Jonathan Leach later wrote. ‘He must rise, wet to the skin and numb with cold, from the lee side of a tree or hedge where he has been shivering all night under a flood of rain, then let him light his cigar and the warmth which it imparts is incredible.’
These few comforts saw the 95th through the dying days of 1810. On Christmas Day, the officers raced their horses on the flats beside the River Maior. They were tolerably well supplied, because of their proximity to Lisbon, but nobody would have claimed that theirs was a particularly interesting duty.
During the weeks in Arruda and months outside Santarem, the officers tried to relieve the tedious routine of rounds, pickets and commands. Books were in short supply since it was most difficult for a subaltern of Rifles, slogging along on his two feet, often soaked through, to carry some little library with him. A small supply of reading matter was however available, precious volumes carried on captains’ baggage mules and passed around freely. There were some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and romantic stuff like Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse.
Since only a few of the 95th’s officers had the education to read novels in French, they sought translations, particularly of plots that were set in Iberia. Lesage’s Gil Blas of Santillane, both as a novel translated by Tobias Smollett and as a subsequent play written in English, was a great favourite. Its setting in Salamanca and romantic twists and turns amused them greatly. They also liked to identify with the young hero’s picaresque adventures as he made his way in the world, starting penniless but eventually arriving at a position of great power and influence. Don Quixote was another favourite, neatly satirising the notions of chivalry by which many officers tried to live. References to this novel were so widespread that it was quite common, even among the illiterate rank and file, to refer to broken-down old horses as Rosinante (the Don’s steed) and to the objects of their romantic fantasies as Dulcinea.
Some even conceived the idea of acting out the texts they had available: having heard from some French deserters in Arruda that their officers were putting on little skits and plays, the Light Division men decided to do the same. Shakespeare became the basis for the early dramatic fumblings of several subalterns.
Craufurd soon became bored with