MORTAL HARRY’S language outraged my sensibilities but broke no bones. Some of us recruits, namely Harlowe, Brooks, and myself, suffered far worse at the hands of Corporal Buchanan who had marched us down from Dublin and who was now in charge of the mess to which we were assigned. He drew our pay for us every Saturday, and on the specious pretence of guarding it safely for us, so that we should not run into temptations of women and drink, squandered the greater part of it himself. It paid the expenses of his weekly score at the public-house. According as it was thirsty weather or, not so thirsty, we received a greater or lesser proportion of our due; but, though provisions were very cheap in Waterford at the time, the allowance he made us was always below our needs. We complained continually in private among ourselves, but such was our inexperience that we did not dare state our grievance to the Captain commanding our company. Had the complaint been properly made, with the interference of a sergeant, we should most certainly have been redressed: but none of us came forward to bell the cat. Our apprehensions were increased by the fact of the Corporal’s being a favourite with Lieutenant Sweetenham, our platoon officer. This Lieutenant was a well-intentioned but negligent gentleman, having been over-long in the service and without interest to secure his promotion: he suffered many abuses in his command to pass with impunity.
The first of us to contemplate desertion was Brooks the Dipper, but he did not confide in us, knowing of our objections to him. He was a dirty soldier and a liar, and would not relinquish his old trade when embracing that of arms; we were therefore not sorry one Sunday, when we were awakened by the morning gun, to find him gone. It added to our satisfaction to hear that, before absconding, he had stolen the whole of our pay from the pockets of our cruel Corporal: for we hoped now to reclaim it for ourselves. But the Corporal boldly told Lieutenant Sweetenham that the money was his own, all but a few shillings, since he had advanced us money earlier in the week for the purchase of pipe-clay, hair-powder, soap, and missing necessaries to lay out for the general inspection of our belongings that had been held. We were a pack of spendthrifts, so he had the impudence to tell the Lieutenant, in our presence too – and he eyed us malignantly as who would say: ‘Dare to tell on me, my beauties, and you’ll be confined in darky for ten days, every man Pat of you,’ which was his common expression. Such was Corporal Buchanan’s ascendancy over us that none of us durst nail his lie to the bench.
That evening Harlowe said to me: ‘Lamb, a bargain is a bargain. I swore to serve the King as a soldier, for a certain payment. That payment is withheld from me and I am half-starved for want of it. The exercises are severe and I am punished for every trifling fault which my bodily weakness makes me fall into. I am resolved to desert the Service. If the Dipper can get off free, why not I? What I have suffered is enough to turn a man rank Jacobite. Aye, Waterford is a harbour of good omen: it was from here that King James II escaped from his enemies and sailed to freedom in France.’
I remonstrated with Harlowe, pointing out the manifest dangers of such a course; but he persisted in it. He said that the vessels in the Newfoundland trade that sailed from Waterford with cargoes of pork, butter, and potatoes were frequently short-handed, and he could no doubt stow himself aboard one of them and work his passage to America, which was his object. The harbour of Waterford extended about eight miles in length in nearly a straight line, all the way deep and clear, and having no rocks or sands that could obstruct the navigation; and that many small vessels were tied up in lonely parts would facilitate his escape. The name of America struck sympathetically in my ears, and, near desperate as I was myself, I began to think that his project was not so rash as I had judged. That evening, after a particularly warm day under Mortal Harry, I became fully determined to ally myself with Harlowe.
There was a manner of breaking out of barracks, known to two or three of us, which presented no difficulties to a pair of active men. The route began with the necessary-house. One man would there mount on the other’s shoulders in order to climb a ten-foot wall, and pull up his comrade after him; a short stretch of this wall brought the venturers to a holly-tree, into the prickly branches of which they must leap, and so descend. A sentry had his walk along the outer wall of the barracks; but he could be eluded even on moonlit nights by making the passage in three stages. The first stage was to choose, for the leap into the tree, the moment when the sentry had turned the corner of the barrack wall, and to wait concealed in the foliage until he had reappeared and passed on again. The second stage was then to shin down the tree and lie concealed behind an elder-bush. The third was to wait for his second reappearance and subsequent disappearance, and thereupon to dash across a paddock and out of sight behind a hedge.
Corporal Buchanan was dead-drunk as usual on the night for which we planned our evasion, which was pay-day night of the ensuing week; and we therefore had no fear that our long absence at the necessary-house would be noticed by him. We stole out, about an hour after the evening gun, Harlowe carrying two wretched suits of slops which he had bartered at a marine-store against the fine silk handkerchief and decent hat in which he had enlisted. We undressed in the necessary-house and put on these patched and ragged duds, rolling up our regimental clothes and burying them in a sand-heap outside. It was a cloudy night and a little rain was falling.
We mounted the wall cautiously and silently and observed that the sentry was at that moment disappearing round the corner. We crawled along the top of the wall, which was irregular and difficult, and each in turn catching hold of a projecting bough of the holly swung ourselves into a crotch of the tree: where we crouched panting. Soon we heard the sentry’s steps approaching and presently saw him ground his firelock in a very unsoldierlike fashion and begin to whistle and dance a jig to the tune of ‘The Top of Cork Road’. We recognized him as ‘Mad Johnny Maguire’, a very humane and merry Northerner who had been among our comforters in these troubles. He had urged us repeatedly to bring our complaint to the company officer and brave the consequences, and undertook that all would be well if we did so. My heart pricked me that, should we succeed in deserting, poor Maguire must bear the blame and be confined for our fault: for our regimental clothes would be discovered and it would be known that we had passed through his walk. He might well be suspected as a confederate. However, it was too late now to turn back.
Hardly had Maguire shouldered his arm again and resumed his march, when we heard whispered curses and a rattle of stones, and two men came along the wall after us. For a moment we thought we were lost, and that this was a party sent to apprehend us. We lay perfectly still, not daring to move, and suddenly some one took a great leap off the wall into the tree, kicking Harlowe on the head as he went, and landing on my thighs. My assailant gave a muttered cry and seized me by the throat, but Harlowe instantly interposed, recognizing him. ‘Hist, Moon-Curser,’ he said. ‘Leave off now, for God’s sake. We are all friends. This is Gerry Lamb and I am Gentleman Harlowe. We are deserting too.’
Terry Reeves (nicknamed ‘Moon-Curser’ from his having been a link-boy before he enlisted) and his comrade Smutchy Steel were recruits of the same company as ourselves but of another mess; they had by a coincidence chosen the same moment for desertion. Terry was drunk and Smutchy a very oafish fellow; both were in their regimental clothes. It was a great embarrassment to both parties that we were simultaneously engaged on the same venture, for the risk of capture was thus more than doubled. But neither would ‘give the wall’ to the other, and Mad Johnny Maguire had come whistling back before the whispered argument in the crotch had finished. We were piled one upon the other, like fish in a creel, or like corpses along the covered way during a hot assault.
Then came a diversion: from the next sentry post on the right, a sudden hoarse challenge of ‘Halt, who goes there?’
‘Rounds,’ was the reply. This surprised us, for the visiting sergeant of the watch was not due until midnight.
‘What rounds?’ the sentry called again.
‘Surprise Grand Rounds.’
‘Advance four paces, Grand Rounds, your Honours!’ So quiet was the night that we could hear the smart slap of the sentry’s hand at the swell of the stock, and the click of his heels as he presented his arm. For it was Major Bolton, the Commanding Officer of the Regiment, who accompanied by his adjutant officer, a drummer with a lantern, a sergeant, and a file of men, was making an unannounced inspection of the posts. Maguire’s strolling step briskened up into a parade-ground stride, he ceased whistling, and retired around the corner again to await the officers’ approach. While the Major was questioning the sentry in his duties and finding fault with him for being short of two buttons on his coat, we decided on a bold move. I slid to the ground and helped down Harlowe, who ran across to the elder-bush. Then I stayed to assist the two others for I reckoned that, since we must all sink or swim together it was to my interest to do so. How we managed to push heavy-footed Smutchy Steel under cover of the bush without Maguire hearing and challenging us, I do not know; but I imagine that his attention was so fixed upon the approach of the Grand Rounds that he discounted the nearer noises as unworthy of his attention. There were, as it happened, an ass and her foal pasturing near by, for the steps of which perhaps he mistook ours.
From behind the bush we heard Maguire challenge, in his turn, very fiercely, and after the same exchange as before, Major Bolton, the adjutant, and the drummer with his lantern came into view. Major Bolton warned Maguire to be on his guard that night, for there was a report that two soldiers contemplated desertion. ‘And if you fail in your duty, my man, it will not be for lack of warning.’ They passed on, and soon we were able to make the next stage to the hedge.
On the previous day we had marked out the vessel in which we proposed to stow ourselves away, moored at about a mile’s distance from the barracks. She was a large, half-decked, cutter-rigged vessel, of the sort named ‘droghers’, and was evidently sailing soon, and for some distance, to judge from the water and live stock being carried aboard her as we watched. The cargo was birch-brooms and potatoes. Our two comrades had broken out in a blind despair rather than with any preconcerted plan, and they therefore attached themselves to us as guides to salvation; nor could anything that we might object make them quit our company. We passed along the road down which we were marched every morning to our drill, but took to the ditch every time that footsteps approached. After a few hundred paces we heard a regular tramp of feet in the distance and the sharp cry of a non-commissioned officer giving his men the step. We leaped into the ditch in no time, and soon a party of six men went by with fixed bayonets. Mortal Harry was in command and in their midst we descried the stumbling and miserable figure of Brooks the Dipper, his hands gyved behind him.
‘Yes, my heathen jewel,’ Mortal Harry was exulting, ‘the drummers of The Ninth are Goliaths and Behemoths; they lay on like the red fiends of Hell itself. Won’t they lift the skin off your eel’s body, hey? Old Pontius Pilate’s crew of Romans couldn’t do better, by the Almighty God, no, they couldn’t! By the time they have entirely done with you, you’ll be howling for the raw hide of a cow to lap yourself within, my poor damned monkey, lest you bleed to death.’
An indescribable horror seized me at these words, spoken in such cold malevolent tones that they felt like the hand of death on my heart. To go forward, or return – either course now seemed equally perilous. Harlowe was for going forward at all events; therefore I went with him. We arrived without further hazard at the water-front, but I remember that it was rather with relief than anguish that I observed our potato-ship in the act of casting off and slipping down the tide.
‘Now,’ says I to Harlowe, ‘you can do as you please. But I, for one, am returning. Be sure that it was the man at the shop from whom you bought these rags who betrayed us to Major Bolton; for we communicated our design to no one, and these two drunkards here acted on a sudden motion. We have no chance of escape; but we have a chance at least of making good our return, if we start at once.’
They all felt too miserable for disputation, and without a word turned homeward with me. After the passage of half an hour we were back again at the hedge and then ran across in pairs to the elder-bush. But Smutchy Steel, the awkward creature, put his foot in a rabbit-hole and turned his ankle, letting out a great screech. Mad Johnny Maguire was still on his watch, for it wanted a few minutes of midnight. He was standing at ease under the holly-tree. I had the presence of mind to anticipate his challenge, by crying out: ‘Hist, Maguire, for the love of God raise no alarm! It’s I, Gerry Lamb! Let me come forward and explain our case to you.’
He proved a good comrade to me once more; for, though risking a severe punishment for such a breach of discipline, he consented to let me approach unchallenged. I detailed what had occurred in a few words and pleaded earnestly with him to let us return to our duty, explaining that we had felt at the water-front the reviving energy of loyal motives, which had induced us to turn back in time. He revolved the matter for awhile in his head and then remarked quizzically, ‘So it’s deserting backwards you are, my fine cocks? By Heaven, it’s a big thing you’re asking me, Gerry boy. For if I were now to arrest the whole four of you, wouldn’t it mean great glory to me, and perhaps a guinea from the company officer in recompense, beside?’
‘Yes, John Maguire, we are indeed at your mercy. But pray hasten your decision, or the Visiting Rounds will be upon us.
He winked at me, shouldered his piece, and retired beyond the corner, as much as to say: ‘Well, then, my name is Billy Hare, I know nothing.’ So we returned safely, though it was a great business, hoisting Steel into the crotch and hauling him across to the wall; we could not prevail on him to stifle his groans. We were safely back at the sand-heap, and hurried changing back into our soldiers’ clothes, before midnight tolled from the chapel bell, and the distant cries marked the progress of the Visiting sergeant.
As Harlowe and I re-entered the barrack-room, Corporal Buchanan awakened suddenly at the noise and turned up the lantern burning small beside him.
‘From whence, in the Devil’s name, do you soldiers come?’ he inquired in the hoarse whisper of sleep.
‘From the necessary-house,’ we replied. ‘We have, both of us, a touch of the colic.’
‘How came that sand on your coats?’
‘We tripped over a mound of sand in the darkness.’
‘You drunken strollers, get you to bed at once,’ he roared at us, and an instant later fell asleep.
Harlowe turned down the lantern wick, lest finding it still burning high in the morning he should be reminded of the incident; and then we crept back into bed. Never before in my life had I been so glad to be between blankets, as then. We had taken the precaution to thrust our ragged clothes, with a stick, deep into the night soil at the necessary-house, and there was now nothing more to fear.
A court martial sat upon Brooks the Dipper the next morning and he was found guilty of desertion, aggravated by the theft of his comrades’ pay, and the additional crime of resisting arrest by the party sent to take him at the peasant’s hut where he was found hiding. The sentence was three hundred lashes at the halberts. Major Bolton had accelerated these proceedings instead of letting Brooks lie a prisoner for a week or so, which would have been the more usual course. For he desired to make him an example to the two unknown men who, from the evidence of the slop-shop man, seemed also to be contemplating desertion. The sentence was promulgated at noon, and at three o’clock the regiment was formed up in a hollow square to witness its execution under the superintendence of the Drum-Major, who was answerable that the cat did not have more than nine tails, and with the surgeon standing by to decide at each stroke whether the continuance of the punishment endangered the man’s life or his further usefulness as a soldier. I will say this for Major Bolton, and so will any man who ever had the honour of serving under his command, that he was an officer who combined strictness with magnanimity to a most remarkable degree. He avoided flogging as much as possible, and only resorted to it for such great crimes as required extraordinary coercion. For the common breaches of military laws and duties, he used to send the offenders to the drill field for a few hours, sometimes (to show his keener displeasure) making them wear their regimental coats turned inside out as examples of ill behaviour and disgrace. They were, moreover, prevented from going on any command or mounting the principal guards.
On this occasion, he did not shirk the horrid spectacle of Private Brooks’s castigation, though it was well known that he had told the surgeon that his stomach churned within him on such occasions, and that he had great difficulty in restraining his vomit. I shall spare the reader the details of the proceedings, informing him merely that during the infliction of the punishment on my comrade’s bare back, by the regimental drummers, the warm, youthful emotions operated in me to such an extent that I cried like a child. Harlowe, who stood next to me, fainted clean away, his firelock falling with a clatter at my feet.
The third drummer had just completed his tale of twenty-five lashes – each one of which was like a stroke against my own heart – and the victim’s shrill screams had already turned to great sobs when Major Bolton, evidently much affected, strode forward to the halberts where he was bound, and in very moving, compassionate tones expostulated with Brooks on the greatness of his offences, and asked him, had he suffered enough?
When Brooks signified his repentance in grimacings, being unable to kind a voice, Major Bolton ordered him to be taken down and remitted the remainder of the punishment, on Brooks’s promise of future good conduct. The parade was then dismissed.
As we came off parade, my feelings still very warm, I remarked to Terry Reeves, in the hearing of Corporal Buchanan: ‘Twenty-five was for resisting arrest, Moon-Curser, twenty-five for desertion, but the remaining twenty-five, as the Major said, was for that meanest of all crimes, stealing his comrades’ pay.’
The Corporal turned round sharply, but I was too wild to mind his glaring eye, and I believe that had he spoken a word of reproof, I should have called him thief to his face. However, he made no remark; and, fearing, I suppose, that his peculation might be made known to the Captain, he gave us that very night nearly two shillings apiece of our pay, holding back only the odd shilling of our due. However, the next week and the week following he still kept us on very unfair allowance, and I should yet have gone hungry had not Sergeant Fitzpatrick and his wife employed me to teach their young son writing and arithmetic. These people were very kind to me, frequently inviting me to their table, where they both plied me with the Rev. Charles Wesley’s opinions and merits as well as with excellent porter. They paid me, besides, at the rate of one shilling and sixpence a week. I also managed to pick up an odd sixpence or so by making out reports for other sergeants and corporals; and was thus able to relieve my unfortunate messmates who still, however incredible this may seem, preferred starvation to complaint.
Harlowe, though a man of better education than myself, was unable to undertake such writing tasks as these, because he had never learned a clerkly hand, and had such a crabbed gentleman’s fist that his writing was quite illegible.