opened my trenches, made my approaches, covered by my gabions and fascines—at last effected a mine, and had all prepared for blowing up the citadel.” … “When I was in the army, I made, for the teaching of young corporals and sergeants, a little book on arithmetic; and it is truly surprising in how short a time they learned all that was necessary for them to know of that necessary department of learning. I used to make each of them copy the book.”
Those were days when a man might rise above the rank-and-file.[4] Cobbett himself had the promise of an ensigncy, when he came to make application for his discharge. As a matter of course, such officers, through their skill, prudence, and general knowledge, became the crack men of their regiments; the best practically-instructed men, perhaps, in the army. For the rest, the average officer must have been a curious make-up; sent into the army, often as early as fourteen years of age—without any special training—he was there for his social position; and, except when on active service, passed a frivolous sort of existence; often so ignorant of his professional duties (i.e. everything beyond daily routine) that they were habitually shirked, excepting when the colonel was a Tartar, or when a clever factotum could be found among his subordinates.
Such a factotum was the new clerk to the 54th regiment:—
“In a very short time, the whole of the business, in that way, fell into my hands; and at the end of about a year, neither adjutant, paymaster, or quarter-master, could move an inch without my assistance. The military part of the regiment’s affairs fell under my care in like manner. About this time, the new discipline, as it was called: (that is to say, the mode of handling the musket, and of marching, &c., called Dundas’s System) was sent out to us, in little books, which were to be studied by the officers of each regiment, and the rules of which were to be immediately conformed to. Though any old woman might have written such a book, though it was excessively foolish from beginning to end, still it was to be complied with; it ordered and commanded a total change, and this change was to be completed before the next annual review took place. To make this change was left to me, who was not then twenty [24] years of age, while not a single officer in the regiment paid the least attention to the matter; so, that when the time came for the annual review, I, then a corporal, had to give lectures of instruction to the officers themselves, the colonel not excepted; and, for several of them, if not for all of them, I had to make out, upon large cards which they bought for the purpose, little plans of the position of the regiment, together with lists of the words of command, which they had to give in the field. … There was I, at the review, upon the flank of the grenadier company, with my worsted shoulder-knots, and my great, high, coarse, hairy cap, confounded in the ranks amongst other men, while those who were commanding me to move my hands or my feet, thus or thus, were, in fact uttering words which I had taught them; and were, in everything excepting mere authority, my inferiors, and ought to have been commanded by me.”
Several references to this period are made in the “Advice to Young Men;” and need not be reproduced here. But the following racy story (from the “Political Register” of Dec. 1817) must be laid under contribution to illustrate this period of Cobbett’s life.
“The accounts and letters of the Paymaster went through my hands, or, rather, I was the maker of them. All the returns, reports, and other official papers were of my drawing up. Then I became the sergeant-major to the regiment, which brought me in close contact at every hour, with the whole of the epaulet gentry, whose profound and surprising ignorance I discovered in a twinkling. But I had a very delicate part to act with these gentry; for, while I despised them for their gross ignorance and vanity, and hated them for their drunkenness and rapacity, I was fully sensible of their power; and I knew also the envy which my sudden rise over the heads of so many old sergeants had created. My path was full of rocks and pit-falls; and, as I never disguised my dislikes or restrained my tongue, I should have been broken and flogged for fifty different offences, given to my supreme jackasses, had they not been kept in awe by my inflexible sobriety, impartiality, and integrity, by the consciousness of their inferiority to me, and by the real and almost indispensable necessity of the use of my talents. First, I had, by my skill and by my everlasting vigilance, eased them all of the trouble of even thinking about their duty; and this made me their master—a situation in which, however, I acted with so much prudence, that it was impossible for them, with any show of justice, to find fault. They, in fact, resigned all the discipline of the regiment to me, and I very freely left them to swagger about, and to get roaring drunk out of the profits of their pillage, though I was, at the same time, making preparations for bringing them to justice for that pillage, in which I was finally defeated by the protection which they received at home.
“To describe the various instances of their ignorance, and the various tricks they played to disguise it from me, would fill a volume. It is the custom in regiments to give out orders every day from the officer commanding. These are written by the adjutant, to whom the sergeant-major is a sort of deputy. The man whom I had to do with was a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate. The orders, which he wrote, most cruelly murdered our mother tongue. But, in his absence, or during a severe drunken fit, it fell to my lot to write orders. As we both wrote in the same book, he used to look at these. He saw commas, semi-colons, colons, full-points, and paragraphs. The questions he used to put to me, in an obscure sort of way, in order to know why I made these divisions, and yet, at the same time, his attempts to disguise his object, have made me laugh a thousand times. As I often had to draw up statements of considerable length, and as these were so much in the style and manner of a book, and so much unlike anything he had ever seen before in man’s handwriting, he, at last, fell upon this device: he made me write, while he pretended to dictate! Imagine to yourself me sitting, pen in hand, to put upon paper the precious offspring of the mind of this stupid curmudgeon! But here a greater difficulty than any former arose. He that could not write good grammar, could not, of course, dictate good grammar. Out would come some gross error, such as I was ashamed to see in my handwriting. I would stop; suggest another arrangement; but this I was, at first, obliged to do in a very indirect and delicate manner. I dared not let him perceive that I saw, or suspected his ignorance; and, though we made sad work of it, we got along without any very sanguinary assaults upon mere grammar. But this course could not continue long, and he put an end to it in this way: he used to tell me his story, and leave me to put it upon paper; and thus we continued to the end of our connexion.
“He played me a trick upon one occasion, which was more ridiculous than anything else, but which will serve to show how his ignorance placed him at my mercy. It will also serve to show a little about Commissioners sent out by the Government. There were three or four Commissioners sent out to examine into the state of the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Their business was of a very extensive nature. They were to inquire into the number of the people, the extent of their settlements, the provisions expended upon them, and a great variety of other matters. Upon all these several heads they were to make a Report, and to subjoin to it a detail in figures. It required great ingenuity to frame these tables of figures, to bring the rude and undigested materials under general heads, dividing themselves into more particular sections, and then again subdividing themselves, and so on, and showing, at last, a sort of total, or result of the whole. To frame this appendix to the Report, and to execute in any moderate space of paper required a head, an eye, and a hand; and to draw up the Report itself was a task of a still superior order. The Commissioners, the name of one of whom was Dundas … who or what he was besides, I know not; and I have forgotten the names of the rest. But they closed their work at Fredericton in New Brunswick, where I was with my regiment. As the arrival of every stranger was an excuse for a roaring drunk with our heroes, so this ceremony now took place. But the Commissioners had their Report to make. And what did my ass of an adjutant do, but offer to do it for them! They, who in all likelihood, did not know how to do it themselves, took him at his word; and there was he, in the sweetest mess that ever vain pretender was placed in. He wanted to get some favour from these Commissioners, and relied upon me, not only to perform the task, but to keep the secret.
