Barracks, Bivouacs and Battles

THE OLD SERGEANT

The scene of my little story is a sequestered hill-parish away up among the brown moors and sullen pinewoods of northern Scotland, and the date of it is full forty years ago, when I was a boy living in the grey old manse down in the sheltered glen which was the only picturesque “bit” of all the parish whose minister my father was. It was a curiously primitive region. Its crofters and farmers lived out their lives and were laid in the old graveyard up on the hillock – hardly a soul of them having ever been twenty miles outside the parish bounds. There was a vague lingering tradition concerning a scapegrace son, long since dead and gone, of old Sandy McCulloch of the Calternach – how the daring young ne’er-do-well had actually left his native land, made his way to India – we boys used to look up the map of India in the manse atlas – had married a “begum” there, and had finally been poisoned off by that mysterious female. This tradition had engendered a fine wholesome terror of begums, and all kinds of adventures that haply might involve matrimonial connections therewith, with disastrous results to follow. So our young men stayed at home and tilled the sour cold land laboriously but contentedly. There were a few exceptions, it is true. Now and then a young fellow would take the Queen’s shilling, and go out from among us on a career of soldiering. They seldom came back, for Cardwell’s name had not yet been heard in the land, and short service in the army was a reform undreamed of. When a man ’listed then, it was nominally for life; actually, until his bodily vigour was so impaired that he was held no longer fit for service, and then he got a pension for the remainder of his days. But what with hard service abroad, what with cholera in Hindustan and Yellow Jack in the West Indies, what with poor fare in barracks and on noxious crowded transports, no great proportion of the soldiers of those days managed to keep alive long enough to attain the pensioned period. There was but one army-pensioner in our parish, and he is “the old sergeant” of my story.

They were grand old specimens, those veterans of a bypast era. To them the credit of their old regiment and the honour of the service were dearer than anything else in all the world. They had a great self-respect that had been instilled by the discipline they had undergone, and by the dangers they had passed through. They had a single-hearted loyalty to the Crown they had served, and a manly belief in the country which their strong arms and ready weapons had helped to save. It is no doubt all right in a military sense that there are no old soldiers among us now; but of this I am sure, that in a good many respects the country is the worse for the want of them.

There was a Sunday morning of my boyhood which I remember as if it were yesterday. The Sunday school, held in the grey old schoolroom on the edge of the wood in the centre of which stood the parish kirk, had just been dismissed. The bell had not yet begun to ring, but it was the custom of the great straggling parish to hold its grand weekly palaver, summer and winter alike, on the little wood-encircled open space around the kirk, during the half-hour before the simple Presbyterian service began. To this end, the folk who were to constitute the congregation were gathering, coming in by twos and threes along the various paths centring on the kirk. Good old Willie Duffus, the elder from the far-distant Forgie district, had climbed and descended the bleak shoulder of Muldearie, had picked his devious way across the moss, had forded the burn, and was now so close at hand that I could discern the weather-beaten fluffiness of his ancestral beaver, and the resplendent brass buttons on the mediæval blue coat which had not been new when it had been his grandfather’s wedding-garment. Johnny Mills, the cripple tailor, who was wont to carry his goose and ironing-board from farmhouse to farmhouse, and to accept his food as part of his poor pay, came shambling up the dykeside from his hovel in the kailyard under the old willow-tree. With an air of rustic patronage which he could well afford, since most of the poor folk were in his books, Sandy Riach, the “merchant” of the Kirktoun, came strutting up the path from the little wooded hamlet. The farm lads, with their straw-coloured or red hair cut square in the nape of the neck, brilliant as to chest in their scarlet or blue plush vests studded with big white bone buttons, clumped kirkward in their heavy hobnailed boots, exchanging now and then a word of clumsy badinage with the lasses in their tartan shawls, and the rig-and-fur stockings and stout shoes they had put on after wading the burn down in the hollow. Old Maggie Dey, as she wended her slow way leaning on her stick, would stop now and again for a confidential whisper with a good-wife; for Maggie was the parish “howdie” —Anglice, midwife – and had officiated at the introduction into this vale of tears of more than half of the population of the parish. Just on the rise of the “manse-brae” I could discern my mother’s bonnet as she climbed the steep knoll, with a little cohort of my younger brothers and sisters by her side, walking orderly, as beseemed the day and the occasion.

Ha! there was old Robbie Strachan nailing up a notice on the half-open church door, and now he was unfastening the bell-rope from its hook high up on the porch wall, preparatory to the statutory twenty minutes’ tolling of the clangorous old bell up there on the stumpy belfry. We boys, keenly alert, were watching Robbie’s every motion, rejoicing in the prospect of one of our chiefest weekly joys; for Robbie when he was in a good humour would let us have the rope and do the ringing, all save the peremptory final peals known as the “ringing in,” while he conversed sedately with a knot of his cronies.

Robbie Strachan, the bellman and “kirk officer” of our parish, was a tall, gaunt old fellow, lean-faced and high-featured, straight still as a pine, although in his time he had put in forty years of hard soldiering. His regulation mutton-chop whiskers, white as snow, just reached the corners of his grim old mouth, the rest of his lined visage closely shaven. You would have known him at a glance for an old soldier, by his balanced step, his square shoulders, and his disciplined attitudes; he stood proclaimed yet more plainly by the well-brushed threadbare trews of Gordon tartan that encased his lean and wiry nether limbs. Robbie had been a sergeant in the local regiment, the gallant Ninety-Second, and in its ranks had borne the brunt of many a stubborn fray. He had worn the brogues from off his feet in Moore’s disastrous retreat on Corunna, and had helped to bury that noble chief “by the struggling moonbeam’s misty ray and the lantern dimly burning.” He had been in the thick of the fierce bayonet struggle in the steep street of Fuentes de Oñoro, had climbed the ridge to the desperate fight of Albuera, and had taken a hand in carrying the bridge of Almarez. A wound had kept him from Salamanca, but he was in Graham’s front line on the day of Vittoria, and had many a tale of the rich plunder that fell to the conquerors in that short, sharp, and decisive combat. He had heard the bullets patter on the rocks of Roncesvalles, had waded the “bloody Bidassoa” under the shadow of the lofty Rhune, and was only hindered from being in at the death in the final desperate struggle on the glacis of Toulouse, by having got a bullet in the chest as he waded up to the knees behind Picton through the marsh which Soult vainly imagined protected his front at Orthez.

Robbie was but a corporal when he went down at Orthez, but he was full sergeant on that wet June morning of the following year when “Cameron’s pibroch woke the slumbering host” to range itself in “battle’s magnificently stern array!” Bullets had an unpleasant habit of finding their billets in him, and he was knocked over again on the forenoon of Waterloo when hanging on to the stirrup-leather of a Scots Grey in the memorable charge of the “Union Brigade” and shouting “Scotland for ever!” in unison with the comrades of horse and foot hailing from the land of cakes. The army surgeons in their cheery manner pronounced him as full of holes as a cullender, and were for invaliding him then and there as unfit for further service; but Robbie stoutly pleaded that he would be as good a man as ever when his wounds were healed, and triumphantly made good his words. So he had put in fifteen years’ subsequent soldiering, and had heard the British drum-beat all round the world, ere, some ten years before the date of my story, he had been retired with a sergeant’s pension for life and something additional for wounds. He was an old man now, but he carried his years well, and was still a good man in the harvest field, or with the spade. Most of his work with that implement was done in the manse garden, and we manse boys used to spend hours in listening to his stories of his old fighting days, while he made the drills for the garden peas, or dibbled in the kail plants in the plot behind the gooseberry bushes.

An exemplary man in a general way, Sergeant Robbie had his little failings; but for which he would have been an elder of the parish instead of being but the bellman and kirk officer. He was rather quick-tempered, and when moved to wrath, he swore in a manner which conclusively proved he had been with the army in Flanders. Then again, occasionally, on pension days mostly, he would take more whisky than was good for him. When he got “fou,” it was always in the light of day, and so he exposed himself. As he marched home from the little public-house down at Blackhillock, with “the malt abune the meal,” his effort to appear preternaturally sober was quite a spectacle. Always stiff of attitude, he was then positively rigid: he would sway, but it was the swaying of a ramrod; when haply he fell into the ditch, there was no collapsing in a limp heap – he went down all of a length, as if there was not a joint in all his long body. But these exhibitions were comparatively infrequent, and were excused in the eyes of the parish censors because of the hole in the sergeant’s head made by the Waterloo bullet.

He and his old wife, who had seen a great deal of the world from the top of a baggage-waggon, but who was a most worthy domestic soul, lived together in a cottage at the back of the wood. The couple had an only son. When the youth grew into a strapping lad, Robbie had marched him down to Gordon Castle, to take counsel concerning his boy’s future, with his patron the Duke. It was in Robbie’s strong arms that the Duke – then Lord March – had lain, when the surgeons probed unsuccessfully for the bullet that pierced his chest on the day of Orthez, and which His Grace carried in him to the grave. As the result of this conference, Robbie had taken his son into Aberdeen, and enlisted him in his own old corps, the Gordon Highlanders. I remember the young fellow coming home on furlough, and the sensation among the simple folk as he swaggered up to the kirk in his flowing tartans and with the ostrich-feather bonnet on his handsome head. Old Robbie was a proud man that day, for his son had the corporal’s stripe already on his arm, although he had been barely three years a soldier.

If I have been over-minute in the attempt to depict Sergeant Robbie, I advance the double excuse, that he was among the prominent figures of my youth time, and that the type is now as extinct as the dodo. The old man stepped out from under the kirk wall with the bell-rope in his hand, and we boys darted forward to make our request that he would hand it over to us and let us do the ringing for him. But there was a strange stern expression in his face that gave us pause. “No the day, laddies,” was all he said, as he took post at the corner of the stone dyke, and began to sway the chafed old rope. We stood silently by, in wonder at his mood. We had known him cross; but he was not cross now: in the gloomy set face and the unwonted silence there was something quite new and strange to us. And yet another strange thing, his wonted cronies held away from him this morning. There was something mysterious in the air. The people, as they gathered in the open space outside the kirk, formed little muttering knots. From these, every now and then, a person would drop out, and strolling up to the kirk door in a seemingly purposeless way, would stand there a while looking up at the notices displayed on it, and then saunter back to the group he had left, or drift into another. It was curious that, no matter wherever you looked, every one seemed to be stealing furtive glances at Sergeant Robbie, standing out there by himself swaying the bell-rope with his long lean arms. And furtive as they were, the old man was clearly conscious of those glances. His face grew harder, grimmer, and more set; yet once or twice gazing up at him in my bewilderment with a boy’s curiosity, I thought I noticed a quivering of the muscles about the close-gripped lips.

The “ringing in” was finished, and the congregation had passed into the kirk. As Sergeant Robbie, carrying the big pulpit Bible, strode up the aisle in front of the minister, it seemed to me that I had never seen him carrying so high that old white head of his, with the cicatrix of the Waterloo bullet in the gnarled forehead. Every eye was on the old fellow, and he knew it, and bore himself with a quiet courage in which somehow there came to be felt an element of pathos. It was curious again how all eyes centred upon him when in his extempore prayer the minister besought “consolation for those who were in sore trouble and mourning over the falling away of one near and dear to them.” Robbie stood straight and square, his face fixed – only his lean brown throat swelled for a moment as if he were resolutely forcing down a spasm of emotion. Tibbie his wife stood by his side, and when the old soldier laid his hand on her shoulder she quelled with a strong effort her rising sobs.

The simple service ended, the people streamed out through the door that Robbie had thrown open; we of the manse party were the last to emerge. It was part of Robbie’s duty, as kirk officer, to “cry” to the dispersing congregation all notices placed in his hands for purposes of publicity, the duplicates of which he had previously nailed on the kirk door. The kirk officer in those primitive regions was the chief medium for giving good advertisement. As we came out Robbie was standing in the centre of a large circle, calling out in his high falsetto the particulars of a “displenish sale.” “Fower good stots, three milk kye, a pair of workhorses, farm implements, household furniture,” and so on.

This finished, there was a pause. Sergeant Robbie folded up the sale advertisement; as he did this his hand was trembling so that it fell to the ground. He stooped, picked the paper up and put it in the rear pocket of his coat; then from out his breast-pocket he pulled a folded blue document. He braced himself firmly, came to rigid “attention” as if he were in the presence of his commanding officer, and slowly opened out the blue paper.

“Dinna read it, Robbie!” “Dinna read it, sergeant!” came from a dozen voices in the sympathising circle around him. “It’s no necessar’ – ye needna, ye maunna read it,” cried the senior elder, James Cameron, of the Gauldwell, with a sob in his thin old voice.

It was as if the sergeant heard no word of dissuasion. He had opened out the paper and was holding it between his hands, standing there braced at “attention” and fighting down the working in his throat that momentarily was staying his voice.

Behind him, as he thus struggled, broke out the piteous wail “Oh, my laddie, my laddie!” from the very depths of poor Tibbie’s heart, followed by a burst of loud sobs.

The sergeant did not turn to his wife – boy as I was, I remember it struck me that he dared not.

“Belnabreich,” he said to an old farmer standing directly in front of him, “Belnabreich, tak’ her hame, tak’ her awa’ frae this, in the name of God!”

Old Belnabreich moved towards Tibbie, but before he reached her she got the mastery of herself again.

“Thank ye, Belnabreich,” she said, “ye’ve a kind heart; but I’m gaun tae bide here, whaur my man is. We’ve come through muckle thegither, and we’ll thole this disgrace thegither, and syne him an’ me, bairnless noo, will tak’ our sorrow hame thegither.”

The water was standing in the sergeant’s eyes, but the spasm was out of his throat now, and in a steady strong voice that carried far, he read out the print on the face of the blue paper. And this was what it befell him to have to read:

Whereas No. 1420, Corporal Peter Strachan of the 92nd Regiment, age twenty-four years, height five feet eleven inches, complexion ruddy, hair red, eyes blue, distinguishing marks none, enlisted at Aberdeen on the – day of – 1844, born in the Parish of Auchterturff, in the County of Banff, and resident in said parish before enlistment: Deserted from the said regiment at Montreal, Canada, on the – day of – 1848: The lieges are hereby warned under pain of law against harbouring the said deserter, and are strictly enjoined to give immediate information to the nearest police officer should they become cognisant of his whereabouts, to the end that he may be apprehended and duly punished.

The sergeant uttered the final invocation in a loud firm tone, and a graceless callant in the background, unwitting of the tragedy of the situation, cried “Hurrah.” Otherwise there reigned a dead silence, as the old man, turning to his wife, gave her his arm with a certain courtliness rare among north country husbands of the humbler classes, and conducted her out of the little throng. The pair were allowed to get out of hearing ere the little stir of comment and condolence set in – it did not last long, for most of the folk had to trudge some distance to their homes. I remember watching the lonely couple as they wended their way along the path by the side of the wood, the dumpy huddled figure in the duffle shawl leaning against the tall spare form in the quaint old blue coat that had once belonged to the Duke, and the threadbare tartan trews that were a relic of the old regimentals.

From that Sunday old Sergeant Robbie was an altered man. Never more did he cross the hill for the once cherished “crack” with his Peninsular friend the Duke. Never more could the lads entice him to a dram in the Blackhillock public-house. He duly came to his work in the manse garden, but we boys hung about him in vain for stories of his old fighting days; a great silence had fallen upon the old man. His lean figure began to lose its erectness, and soon you scarcely would have known him for a veteran soldier. There remained one link only between him and my father, the interchange of the snuff-mull. But there were no more of the genial little chats that had been wont to accompany the give-and-take. From that Sunday Robbie was a man of monosyllables, and even my mother could not penetrate his grim reserve. He became yet more laconic after he lost Tibbie, who never held her head up from the day she knew of her son’s disgrace. The poor old woman faded out within a couple of years, and Robbie had no longer the consolation that comes from having sorrow shared. After her death he gave up his duties as bellman and kirk officer, and scarcely left his cottage except to attend church. When I went to say farewell to him before leaving home to go to school, I found him sitting in front of the fire, staring blankly at the smouldering peats. That was the last time I saw the old man.

A year or two later a letter from home told me that old Robbie had heard from his son. The deserter, it appeared, had made his way to Chicago, had gone into some business in that stirring place, and was making money fast. He had written home begging his parents – he had not heard of his mother’s death – to come out to him in America, and had enclosed a draft for an ample sum of money to pay the charges of the voyage and journey. The stern old man would hold no terms with the son who had disgraced his parents and dishonoured his uniform. He told my father curtly that he had folded the draft in a blank sheet of paper, and sent it back by return of post.

The tough old soldier, weary of life as he was, lasted a few years longer. At length one day the parish was stirred by the news that he had been found lying dead in a ditch some three miles away from his cottage, about half-way between it and the village of Keith. And before that day was done, the parish throughout its length and breadth knew also that Robbie’s son, the deserter, had been apprehended and carried off to jail by Neil Robertson, the head of the county police.

The strange details were gathered piecemeal. A niece, a girl, who had come to live with the old man in his later feebleness, told that one night late a knock had come to the cottage door. The old man had opened it himself and was confronted by his son. She had overheard their brief colloquy. The son had begged the father to forgive him, and to leave home at once with him for America; he had a conveyance close by, and they might start immediately. The stern father had bidden the son begone out of his sight. He would not let the young man pass the threshold of the cottage, and told him plainly that if he did not quit the neighbourhood without an hour’s delay, he would inform against him. With that he had shut the door in his son’s face, prayed with tears and groans for two hours, and then lain down in his clothes. Before daylight the son had returned to the cottage, having, he told her, spent the night in the adjacent wood, and from outside the window had adjured his father to see him, if but for a moment. The old man would speak no word, lying silent in the press-bed opposite the fire; and as the day dawned the son had gone away, calling out to his father that he would come back again at night. The old man had lain late, groaning and praying in bed; about noon he had got up, read a chapter of the Bible aloud, and taking his stick had gone forth. She had hoped he was gone to look for his son; but he never came back, and the next thing she heard was that he had been found dead. The son had returned at night, but she had “steekit” the door, and made no answer when he called.