The Scum of the Earth Read online

  And there were sudden partings, such as press

  The life from out young hearts, and choking sighs

  Which ne’er might be repeated; who could guess

  If ever more should meet those mutual eyes,

  Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise!

  The ‘sudden partings’ included one of Wellington’s ADCs, the Honourable Henry Percy, who pocketed a ladie’s velvet handkerchief purse given him as a keepsake by an admirer. The purse was to play a part in the history of the battle and its aftermath. Like his fellow officers, Percy dashed off to war, still wearing the dress uniform he wore at the ball.

  The Duke whispered to his old friend, Charles Lennox, the Duke of Richmond, that he needed to see a good map. Richmond took Wellington into his dressing-room and unfolded a map for him on a table. Wellington shut the door and said, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God; he has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me … I have ordered the army to concentrate at Quatre Bras; but we shall not stop him there, and if so I must fight him there.’ According to Richmond, he made a mark on the map with his thumb-nail. It was over a crossroads on the main road into Brussels. It was about 9 miles to the south of the city on the Charleroi road at a hamlet called Mont Saint Jean.* Soon the world would know it as Waterloo.

  Notes

  * His brother William chose Wellington because the family could trace their roots to the nearby Wellesley in Somerset in 1104. The Duke approved but Lady Wellington did not, saying, ‘it recalls nothing’. (Wellington Despatches viii 148, Raglan Papers, 13 September 1809)

  * General Andrew Jackson defeated the English under Packenham (brother-in-law of Wellington) at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 before news of the peace deal at Ghent had arrived.

  * On hearing about the death of Talleyrand, Metternich said: ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ** La Route Napoleon, a 350km section of national road N85 through the Alpes-Maritimes to Grenoble, is celebrated by the French with gilded imperial eagles by the roadside.

  * He blamed the Duke of Castiglione for surrendering Lyons without a fight, and the Duke of Ragusa for surrendering Paris to save the city.

  * It has long since been replaced by a multistorey car park and boring blocks of grey offices and flats.

  * The map with Wellington’s thumbnail mark was lost. Richmond took it with him to British North America (Canada) when he was made its Governor General, but his map was mislaid after his sudden death there in 1819. While touring the province, he was bitten by a pet fox and died in agony of rabies.

  1. Hansard Report, 28 April 1915.

  2. ‘The Master of the Ordnance Exercising his Hobby’, etching by Robert Cruikshank, British Museum, 1935,0522.11.159.

  3. WP 1/453/7, Wellington Archive, Southampton University.

  4. WP 1/453/8, Wellington Archive, Southampton University.

  1

  THE SCUM OF THE EARTH

  Thomas Creevey was strolling through the Parc de Bruxelles with his step-daughters, the Ord sisters, shortly before the Battle of Waterloo, when they were joined by Creevey’s newfound friend, the Duke of Wellington. Creevey had just received the newspapers from London containing reports of the debate in the Commons raising doubts about war, and the MP wanted to ask the Duke himself whether he thought he could win. Creevey noted in his journal:

  He stopt, and said in the most natural manner:—‘By God! I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.’—‘Do you calculate,’ I asked, ‘upon any desertion in Bonaparte’s army?’—‘Not upon a man,’ he said, ‘from the colonel to the private in a regiment—both inclusive. We may pick up a marshal or two, perhaps; but not worth a damn.’—‘Do you reckon,’ I asked, ‘upon any support from the French King’s troops at Alost?’—‘Oh!’ said he, ‘don’t mention such fellows! No: I think Blücher and I can do the business.’—Then, seeing a private soldier of one of our infantry regiments enter the park, gaping about at the statues and images:—‘There,’ he said, pointing at the soldier, ‘it all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’

  ‘That article’ was the ordinary British soldier, the anonymous figure in a redcoat that Wellington later christened ‘Tommy Atkins’. These were the men on whom the outcome of the battle – and the future of Europe – would rest.

  They were men like the self-confessed Irish rogue, Private Charles O’Neil of the ‘Slashers’, the 28th Regiment. O’Neil, 22, was a serial deserter with no pretentions to heroism. O’Neil was typical of many Irish farm boys who took the ‘King’s Shilling’ – though his bounty was considerably more than 12 pence – because of youthful naïvety and poverty in rural Ireland. He was the youngest of eleven children, including six brothers, born in Dundalk in County Louth, halfway between Belfast and Dublin, in what is now the Republic of Ireland.

  Ireland was a prime recruiting area for the British Army. More than 30 per cent of the English county regiments were actually made up with Irish recruits. Not even the threat of being killed put off raw recruits like O’Neil. O’Neil’s eldest brother enlisted in the Navy, joined HMS Terrible and was killed by a cannon ball a few months later. A second brother joined Wellington’s army in the Peninsular campaign, and was killed at Talavera.

  O’Neil defied his parents’ entreaties and fell for the slick talk of the recruiting officer and the paradiddles of a drummer boy putting on a show from a covered cart in the bustling centre of Belfast:

  We eagerly pushed our way through the crowd, which we had some difficulty in doing; but the eagle eye of the officer soon rested on us, and, perceiving our eagerness, he called out, ‘Make way, make way there, my lads! That’s right, that’s right – fine soldiers you’ll be, my hearties, I warrant!’

  O’Neil was a simple farm boy when he signed up to the 8th Regiment of Foot in Belfast for the government ‘bounty’ of 18 guineas, but the money soon ran out – there were deductions for the recruiting sergeant, and the drummer, and O’Neil’s uniform, and ribbons for the officer’s wife. He did not like army discipline and deserted after just twelve days, disguised as a tramp. Fearing capture and a flogging, he then joined the 64th Regiment of Foot at Navan and was paid a second bounty of 18 guineas but deserted again. He became a wanted man, so to escape arrest joined a militia unit bound for Dublin, and was paid bounty for a third time. In Dublin he was horrified to hear that his new militia unit was to be joined by one of the regiments from which he had deserted, so, to escape again, he offered himself for service abroad, and transferred into the 28th Regiment of Foot, for which he was paid the bounty a fourth time. That is how he ended up in Spain, fighting under Sir Arthur Wellesley, in the Peninsular campaign, and at Waterloo.

  O’Neil wrote a lively account of his exploits long after the battle, and reading between the lines of O’Neil’s colourful memoir you get the impression that, like a character from a Flashman novel by George MacDonald Fraser, O’Neil shrewdly kept his head down and left the heroics to others. O’Neil survived the horror of Badajoz by spending most of his time skirmishing in the mountains against the guerrillas, killing pigs and stealing wine. In Vitoria, O’Neil and his friends found a couple of wine barrels in a cellar and, intending to get drunk, borrowed an axe from a soldier in the pioneer corps to smash them open. The first barrel contained nothing more intoxicating than butter; they were so furious that they smashed open a second and it spewed out a stream of gold coins, which had been hidden in the butter. O’Neil promptly stuffed a plug of the coins in his knapsack. The French abandoned everything, including the women of Jérôme’s travelling brothel and the army’s pay in gold coins that had just arrived before the battle. Jérôme left behind his own carriage, and boxes containing the priceless treasures he had looted from Spain and Portugal on the battlefield, worth an estimated £100 million today. Much of the bullion in coins went into men’s pockets. A fortnight after O’Neil and his comrades enjoyed their night of bacchanalia in Vitoria, Wellington gave vent
to his fury in his letter to Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.

  I am in a small room in the Hartley Library at Southampton University with a sheaf of Wellington’s original letters on a desk. He wrote his letters with a quill pen in black ink on sturdy cloth or linen-based hand-made paper of varying sizes from folio to smaller sheets, and folded them with a seal, without envelopes. The address was written on the back. Wellington’s letter is datelined Huarte, 2 July 1813 – now a suburb of Pamplona in the Basque region of Spain, near the French border. You can clearly see where he broke off to refill his quill, because the handwriting fades and suddenly darkens where he dipped his quill into the ink. It reads as though he dipped it in venom:

  It is quite impossible for me or any other man to command a British army under the existing system. We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers; and of late years we have been doing everything in our power, both by the law and by publications, to relax the discipline by which alone such men can be kept in order.

  Even after 200 years, the anger is palpable. Wellington had good reason to be angry with his men after Vitoria. While O’Neil and his comrades had gone on a drunken looting spree after their victory, they had allowed 55,000 French troops under Joseph-Napoleon, Bonaparte’s elder brother, to escape over the Pyrenees into France. Wellington went on to complain in the same letter about the desertions from his ranks – in less than a month, he had lost 2,733 men to ‘irregularities’ including ‘straggling and plunder’. The ‘existing system’ to which he referred was the British preference for a ‘voluntary’ army. This was in truth, a lie. While men of the officer classes bought their commissions in the army for the honour and excitement it might bring, the ordinary men in the ranks usually had to be coerced into joining the army. The army was a hard and brutal life in the ranks and boys had to be desperate to volunteer to serve in it; as a result, Wellington believed they recruited the ‘scum of the earth’ like O’Neil.1

  Napoleon by contrast had a conscript army, which brought in the sons of what was left of the noblemen after the attentions of the guillotine, as well as the common man. In Britain conscription had been tried and abandoned. The 1803 Additional Forces Act created a new army of reserve, conscripted by a local county ballot. It meant that if your name came out in the ballot, you had to go into a county militia. Those dragged away from their farms included a young shepherd from Dorset called Benjamin Harris who had to leave his old, white-haired father to tend the sheep. Benjamin was too ill after the disastrous Walcheren campaign to serve at Waterloo, but eked out a living in old age as a shoemaker – a trade he picked up in the army – and dictating his memoirs: the ‘Recollections of Rifleman Harris’ to Lieutenant Henry Curlew (Harris may have been illiterate). As a result, he left us a vivid insight of what life was like in the ranks. Harris was ‘a fair sample of the unconquerable British private’, said W.H. Fitchett, who republished Harris’s memoirs in 1900 – ‘stocky, stubborn, untaught and primitive in nature …His endurance is wonderful. Laden like a donkey, with ill-fitting boots and half-filled stomach, he can splash along muddy Spanish roads, under the falling rain, or sweat beneath the Spanish mid-summer heats, from grey dawn to gathering dusk …’ Harris’s vision was narrow … ‘it is almost filled up by his right and left-hand files, it never goes beyond the battalion.’ But Harris was speaking for the ‘common soldiers’, the men Wellington called ‘the scum of the earth’.

  The draft was unpopular and ineffective (large numbers sent substitutes to do service for them) and was quietly dropped after 1805, leaving Wellington to rely on so-called ‘volunteers’. Some naïve farm boys joined for adventure, far horizons, and the prospect of drink, plunder and women. Many were running away from something – poverty, prison, or paternity and sometimes all three. Some were the dregs of humanity; they had to be, to join the army. They could be turned into a professional killing machine, but in Wellington’s view, this class of soldier needed discipline or he would rebel. O’Neil’s fears about being caught as a deserter were well founded. Rifleman Harris was part of a firing squad that executed a young rogue like O’Neil who deserted and enlisted sixteen times for the ‘King’s Shilling’. He was handcuffed and shot by Harris’s firing squad in front of 15,000 men at Portadown Hill, near Hilsea Barracks in Portsmouth, as an example of what could happen to men who deserted. ‘His hands waved for a few moments like the fins of a fish … four of our party immediately stepped up to the prostrate body and placing their muzzles to the head, fired and put him out of his misery.’2

  A shilling a day was the usual pay for an English soldier and the acceptance of a shilling was taken as a symbolic contract between the government and an enlisted soldier. Recruiting sergeants got their unwary targets drunk before slipping them the shilling while they were in their cups. The legend was said to be the reason why pewter mugs were made with glass bottoms, so the unwary could see the shilling in their drink.

  Volunteers also joined to escape punishment by the courts – sentences could be commuted to a life in the army by the magistrates; others from Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland were driven by starvation and poverty to seek adventure and a soldier’s daily ration of 1½lbs of bread; 1lb of beef or mutton; and half a pint of wine or a third of a pint of rum.

  In England, the army had relied on recruits from the rural areas. Around 25 per cent of the Royal Artillery recruits (who needed skill with horses) gave their trade as farm labourer in the twenty years to 1779, but when Wellington led his army to Waterloo, the textile workers outnumbered the farm hands in the ranks of the Royal Artillery. The change was brought about by the dramatic shift in Britain from farms to factories as the populations of the textile towns suddenly expanded. One of the paradoxes of the Regency period is that as the textile industry boomed, more spinners and weavers were put out of work in the old rural cottage looms by the new machines in the mills. One of the recruits was a young lad from Oldham, a rapidly expanding cotton mill town near Manchester, called John Lees. As a Royal Artillery driver, his job was to look after the horses drive the wagons, and haul the supplies for Bull’s battery of heavy 5½-in howitzers. The foot regiments had their own batteries, and the army’s wagon drivers had to carry everything for an army on the move – animal fodder, camp kettles and kitchens, ammunition, stores of beef, beer and bread, women camp followers who hitched a lift on the carts on top of the baggage, and when times were good, looted goods and plunder from defeated armies. Lees also had to carry ammunition to the gunners in his wagon, which at Waterloo was a perilous job.

  Recruits from the industrial towns like John Lees were smaller than men from the country because they were less well fed than farmers’ boys, and some regiments established a rule that they would take no men shorter than 5ft 7ins.

  John Graham, an Irishman from County Monaghan, was discharged ‘for being undersize’ in 1817 (after Waterloo), although his size had not mattered before; he may have been one of the few who survived the carnage inside the 27th Inniskilling Regiment’s hollow square at Waterloo, when they were cut to pieces by French artillery.

  O’Neil was among the few who could read and write in the ranks. Illiteracy is the reason most of the early histories were written by officers, not the men, and it limited a man’s chances of promotion to NCO rank; it almost certainly would have barred men from the ranks rising to become officers. In a detailed study of the 27th Inniskilling regiment, Mark Bois3 estimated 30 per cent of its 700 men were illiterate, although men did learn to read and write in the army, and some units had regimental schools.

  The Duke did not only refer to his men as the ‘scum of the earth’ in anger. He returned to the subject twenty years after the Battle of Waterloo, when he was reminiscing about his wars over dinner at Walmer Castle on the Kent Coast, when he was Lord Warden of the Cinq ports. His loyal friend Earl Stanhope faithfully noted down the Duke’s words in his journal. Wellington and his hosts were discussing flogging in the army when his view about
the ‘scum of the earth’ came up. The Duke made it clear to his dinner hosts that he regarded flogging as a necessary evil to try to stop his soldiers and the camp followers, including their wives, from plundering their way across cities like Vitoria in Spain, which would have alienated the local people from his army.

  Napoleon’s army may have survived on plunder in the countries it occupied, but Wellington paid for his provisions to win the support of the local people (see Chapter Eight). Stopping looting was vital to his strategy but it was an annoying inconvenience for his men. Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer, who tried to match ‘the beau ideal’ required for horses in the Peninsular War4, complained Wellington wanted it both ways – he harshly criticised Mercer for failing to keep his horses in prime condition, but put him on a charge for ‘borrowing’ forage from the French farmers without paying for it. Wellington took an unusually strict view of looting because he knew he could not liberate Spain and Portugal if he had to fight a guerrilla war with its hostile inhabitants as an occupying army at the same time as fighting the French. Thirty lashes for his miscreants were a small price to pay for keeping the local population content.

  However, the brutality of flogging had been criticised at home by Radical writers such as William Cobbett, who had spent time in Newgate prison for writing an attack on flogging in the army in his popular Weekly Political Register, and there was a growing campaign in Parliament to have flogging banned, at least for women. The Duke did not agree with such a relaxation of army custom and practice.

  The Duke said the only way of tackling plundering by his own army ‘is to have plenty of provosts to hang and flog them without mercy, the devils incarnate’. He told Lady Salisbury: ‘It is well known that in all armies the Women are at least as bad, if not worse than men as Plunderers! And the exemption of the Ladies would have encouraged Plunder!’ Women could expect thirty vigorous and painful lashes on the bare backside when they were caught. The Duke said the army needed to retain flogging, if only as a reserve so that officers could impose milder punishments on their men such as ‘billing up’ – confining to barracks which he had suffered as a young officer – without the risk of the officers being defied.