Sergeant Lamb's America Page 5

  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.

  Chapter IV

  DURING OUR stay at Waterford I fell into many irregularities. The common girls of the town were lavish of their favours to the military, whose handsome facings and well-set-up appearance exercised a sort of fascination upon them; and since the Roman Church regarded such errors as venial, so long as the men they chose were not known to them to be married, I had much gratification at little expense. I also acquired a taste for the raw spirit distilled by the peasants from potatoes, which was as potent as it was easy to come by. However, my strongest prepossession was for gambling, and ‘the Devil’s picture book’, as the Methodists term a pack of cards, was now my favourite study. Being inexperienced in barrack-room life, I was a regular loser in whatever games of chance I attempted. In Dublin I had acquired a sharp eye for those forms of cheating in which cards are secretly removed from the pack to the dealer’s advantage, or the pack is arranged beforehand and only a pretence of cutting and shuffling made. But I had yet to learn the maxim, which it cost me a large sum of money to frame for myself: never to use an opponent’s pack more often than my own. For though in The Ninth no one, I dare affirm, marked his cards with the faint thumb-nail scratches and notches used in the fashionable clubs of London, there was not a pack in use among us of which each card had not acquired a distinct character of its own by constant handling. A shepherd knows every ewe in his flock by some slight difference of appearance, which would certainly escape the eye of the stranger unless one happened to be blind, lame, or tailless: in this same way every owner of a pack knew his own cards at a glance, soon as dealt, even though there might be no broken corner or torn edge among them. This knowledge put him in the ascendancy over players who knew only half a dozen of them at most, even after playing several times with the pack.

  Sergeant Fitzpatrick and his good wife used to counsel me strongly against my passion for gambling. He used to say: ‘Private Lamb, the practice will involve you in severe difficulties. Even where money is not risked, the playing of cards administers to idleness and dissipation; and where money is risked, the winner proceeds with ideas of avarice, and the loser to recover his losses, until the precipice yawns equally for both.’ And she would quote from a poem of which I do not recollect the title:

  Cards are superfluous, with all the tricks

  That idleness has ever yet contrived,

  To fill the void of an unfurnished brain

  To palliate dullness and give time a shove.

  To supply the expenses of gaming, the privates sold their necessaries, besides squandering their pay: on such occasions they dreaded an officer’s inspection of the barrack-room when they had to lay out their belongings for his scrutiny. But they almost invariably managed to elude punishment, by borrowing shirts, gaiters, stockings, and other articles of regimental appointment from comrades who happened to be sick or absent on guard duty. It was, among us, held a matter of honour to pay gambling debts within twenty-four hours of incurring them, and a man would rather commit crimes which even common and statute law punishes as capital offences than fail to meet such obligations.

  In July 1774, our regiment received the route for the North of Ireland, and on our arrival there, by way of Dublin – where, to my satisfaction, I found my father more friendly disposed towards me – the companies were distributed among the various towns of Ulster. I happened to be ordered on command, in a detachment of twelve men under Lieutenant Sweetenham, to Saintfield, ten miles distant from Belfast. It was a small but neat town once extensively engaged in the linen manufacture; but then in decay. The neighbourhood of Belfast was very ill disposed to the British Government, because of the way in which its ministers had played fast and loose with Irish trade and industry.
The greater cheapness of living and labour in Ireland has always rendered her a dangerous commercial rival to England. First of all we were forbidden to export cattle, so our landowners turned their land into sheep-walks, and a flourishing woollen industry was presently begun. This industry, which employed thirty thousand families in Dublin alone, was crushed in my grandfather’s day by laws prohibiting the export of Irish wool or cloth, not only to England and the colonies, but to any country whatsoever. In compensation, a promise was made that our linen and hemp manufacture should be encouraged; but no sooner was the linen trade well established than innumerable restrictions were put upon it so that Irish should not compete with English and Scottish linen (which were subsidized by the Government) in any country in the world – nor even with Dutch linen, for fear the Dutch, in retaliation, ceased to buy English woollens.

  As a result of this jealousy of the English manufacturers ten thousand or more weavers had since five years been obliged to emigrate to America, whence they wrote home letters full of rancour. The spirit of these weavers, who were all Presbyterians, was the Dissidence of Dissent, and was more obnoxious to our Protestant ruling classes even than Popery. Many thousands of Presbyterians had previously emigrated to America, being driven from their homes at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the inquisitorial Test Act, though they had been among King William’s staunchest supporters at the Protestant revolution. These had become backwoodsmen of the Western Border, and were to be among the fiercest and most redoubtable foes with whom we had to contend in the American War. From a great many inhabitants of Saintfield we therefore received black and sullen looks; none the less, the women here, as in the South, appeared very needy to court with our men, especially where there seemed a prospect of matrimony.

  There was a very beautiful girl living at Newton Breda, two and a half miles distant from the inn where we were quartered, the daughter of a retired English merchant captain and a former lady’s maid in the household of Lord Dungannon, whose seat of Belvoir lay adjacent. Father and daughter resided together in humble circumstances, the mother being lately deceased. I conceived a great passion for Miss Kate and would have made her my wife had she consented, since she was a Protestant like myself, and there was no obstacle to our union but my poverty. But she put me off with a tender firmness, and would not so much as allow me the smallest familiarity with her. I did not suspect that I had a rival, at least among the soldiery. The Saintfield horse-barrack lay empty at this time and I flattered myself that of all my comrades there was none to whom she could give the preference over me.

  She continued to treat me with friendship and did not discourage my visits. Nor was her father at all averse to my visits at the house, though he made it clear enough that I must not deceive myself with any hopes in regard to his daughter until I held at least a corporal’s rank. With my education, he said, and my natural talents, I might within a few years rise high in the Service.

  To be brief: this Kate Weldone, who was dark-haired, well-featured, and of a gracefully rounded figure, and had, besides, remarkable wit and spirit, told me one day during her father’s absence from the house that she was in great grief. She said that she would do almost anything in the world to recompense me if I would risk a crime for her sake.

  I resented this question, and asked her whether she mistook me for a rapparee or bully.

  But her misery was so remarkable that I softened towards her. Indeed, I presently assured her that I would commit almost any crime in the world, just for the satisfaction of pleasing her, so long as it were no vulgar crime, of theft or murder, and did not injure any of my comrades.

  At this, she ran into my embrace and kissed me wildly. She swore that what she asked was in the interests of her own greatest happiness and would not hurt any one at all, least of all any comrade of mine.

  ‘A strange sort of crime that hurts nobody, yet benefits you, my dearest Kate,’ said I. ‘Very well. On condition that it is indeed exactly as you say, I hereby swear by my honour to do for you whatever lies in my power: and I shall leave the assessment of my reward to your generosity.’

  Her father happened to approach the room at the moment, but we broke our embrace in time, warned by his difficult breathing. On his entry he did not observe the emotion under which both of us were labouring, and called for a dish of tea.

  ‘I hear from the innkeeper, Private Lamb,’ he said, after we had exchanged our usual civilities and his daughter had busied herself in blowing up the fire, ‘that even were I willing to give you my daughter, which I am not, the marriage could not now be solemnized. Your Commanding Officer has today issued a general order to prevent private soldiers from marrying without written licence signed by the officer of their company or detachment. He has desired the ministers of the places concerned not to solemnize the marriages of soldiers without calling for such a paper from them.’

  Miss Kate affected indifference to the news, and Captain Weldone then went on to repeat a rumour that orders were soon expected for us to be sent to Boston in New England, where the colonists were at this time in almost open rebellion. Major Bolton’s action was read as a precaution against more soldiers’ wives being taken upon the strength than could be received aboard the transports when we embarked for America. ‘It’s an ill wind, etc.,’ he said. ‘If you are sent, and a campaign develops, your promotion is likely to be accelerated, and on your return I shall, I trust, find no reason for refusing you my Kate, if she be still willing.’

  This made me suppose that there was an understanding between the Captain and his daughter on the subject, that she had confessed to her liking for me, and that only my lowness of station and my poverty prevented the consummation of my hopes. I returned to our quarters in an elated frame of mind, and after buying drinks for the whole company called on my comrades for a game of cards. We played a while for very trifling stakes, since they were so far seduced in wealth that most of them had been forced to keg themselves: that is to say, they had taken a common form of oath not to borrow, lend, touch spirituous liquors or lose more than a penny a game at cards or dice, until they had saved enough of their pay to repurchase the necessaries which they had sold. The restriction seemed to irk my friend Harlowe, for he asked in a tone of challenge whether there was not a soul present who would dare to bet with him in visible coin. ‘I have just bought a new pack of cards,’ he said, ‘and I’ll break the seal for any one who will match me through the pack, card against card, the ace to take precedence over the king.’

  He fetched the cards, broke the seal and shuffled them while I fetched drink for the two of us. He was my messmate and much obliged to me for a variety of services, and I therefore did not do him the discourtesy of watching him at the shuffle. He dealt out the cards alternately, so that we had half the pack each. They were smuggled Spanish cards, a sort which we favoured because they were both stout and cheap. They ran forty-eight to the pack, and Primero was our favourite game with them.

  We matched card against card at threepence a sight, and when at the eighth card he was a shilling and threepence ahead of me, I called on him to double the stake: which he did.

  At the twenty-fourth card I owed him eight shillings and ninepence and, desperate at the greatness of this sum, called on him to double the stakes again. He refused, saying that he would not run me into such a thicket as would tear the clothes off my back, thread and thrum; but I insisted, and my comrades called him a coward and told him in the language of the cock-pit to ‘beak up and fight it out to the throttle’. So he consented, though with an appearance of comradely reluctance and concern; and when only eight cards were left to play I owed him sixteen shillings. I doubled the stakes again, and he consented ‘to give me a chance to win the whole sum back’. But I continued to lose, at two shillings a card, twice out of every three times; and when the last card had been turned up, and I lost even that, my debt to Harlowe stood at the prodigious sum – for us – of twenty-nine shillings and ninepence.

  There was dead si
lence for a while, and I sat stupidly fingering the cards with my left hand and drumming the Devil’s tattoo on the table with the fingers of my right.

  Nobody laughed, for it was well understood that I could not afford to quit my debt within the statutory time. I was well enough liked by the men, many of whom would have been willing to accommodate me with a loan, had they been able; but they were kegging themselves and could do nothing. For Harlowe they had no liking and avoided his company as much as they decently could, he being a bird of another feather than their own. Mad Johnny Maguire offered me one shilling and sixpence, which was all he had, and Terry Reeves two, which was more than he had in coin; but this sum, added to what I had in my pockets, still fell short of the debt by a guinea. All those present behaved like mourners at a decent funeral.

  I burst out laughing and shouted: ‘Oh, by the Holy, it’s come to this, has it? Well, down goes the whisky, and that’s the last drink I’ll swallow for a long while, for now I’ll be kegging myself to Harlowe.’ As an alternative to paying a debt, if the sum exceeded one month’s pay, a soldier might keg himself to the victor: that is, abstain from all drink and gaming and make over all his pay, except one shilling a week, to his creditor. Nevertheless, the creditor had the right to refuse to compound in this manner if he distrusted the debtor; and the debtor was then bound to obtain the money by some other means.

  Harlowe looked narrowly into my eyes. ‘And what if I refuse to let you keg yourself to me?’ he inquired. ‘Have you always treated me in so comradely a way that you should expect generosity or mercy now?’