II One of Craufurd’s Veterans
“Rifleman” Harris, an innocent-looking sheep-boy, his face brown with the winds and rains of the Dorsetshire Downs, drifted, so to speak, into a soldier’s life pretty much as a floating leaf, blown from some rustic valley and fallen into a rustic stream, might drift into a great historic river, furrowed by a thousand keels, and be swept away to unknown seas. His autobiography is curious alike in what it omits and in what it tells. It is so barren of one class of personal details that we are left in ignorance of when the writer was born. He leaves himself in his own volume without a Christian name. We are not told why he enlisted, nor where. Unlike most people undertaking an autobiography, Rifleman Harris appears to have had no interest whatever in himself, and he was incapable of imagining that anybody else would be interested. But he was keenly concerned in all the personal incidents of a soldier’s life, and he describes them with a simplicity and a directness, an economy of adjectives, and a felicity of substantives, which makes his “Recollections” one of the freshest and most interesting soldier autobiographies ever written.
He had some good luck as a soldier. He belonged to a famous regiment; he served under some famous commanders; he heard the first shots fired by British muskets in the Peninsula. But he had also much ill-luck. He tramped, perspired, and probably swore, under South American suns in that most ignominious of all expeditions, under the most contemptible leader that ever wore a cocked hat—Whitelocke’s fiasco at Buenos Ayres. He next served in Portugal, and took part in the fighting at Roliça and Vimiero. Under Sir John Moore he shared in the heroism and the horrors of the dreadful retreat to Corunna, or rather to Vigo. That Harris survived snow and rain and hunger, the inexpressible toils of the long marches, the biting cold of the black unsheltered nights, as well as the sabres of the pursuing French horsemen and the bullets of the French skirmishers, is little less than marvellous. But he did, and landed at Spithead, ragged, bare-footed, unshaven, with rusty musket, hollow cheeks, and eyes that had almost gone sightless with mere fatigue—about as stiff and hardy and unconquerable a bit of soldierly flesh and blood as the world of that day could produce.
A British private who had known the shame of Whitelocke’s South American expedition and the distress of Moore’s immortal retreat might well think he had exhausted all the evil possibilities of a soldier’s life. But the unfortunate Harris had one more evil experience. He found a place in the unhappy Walcheren expedition, and crept out of it with wrecked constitution and ague-poisoned blood. He served after this in a veteran battalion; tried hard for service in the Peninsula, but, to his unspeakable disgust, was disqualified by a doctor with an unsympathetic temper and an inelastic conscience, and while still only thirty-two was discharged on a pension of sixpence a day. “For the first time,” he says, “since I had been a shepherd-lad on the Blandford downs I found myself in plain clothes and with liberty to go and come where I liked.”
But Harris never received a sixpence of his hard-earned pension, bought with blood and sweat. Before the first payment became due Napoleon had escaped from Elba; the veterans were called back to the ranks. Harris, wasted with fever and shaken with ague—legacies from Walcheren swamps—was unable to join, and forfeited his pension. He had to spend the rest of his days making shoes and writing his “Recollections of a Rifleman.” In view of this record, perhaps, the most striking thing in Harris’ “Recollections” is their unconquerable good humour. The writer never grumbles. No faintest accent of discontent ever steals into his voice. His cheerfulness is invincible. He is proud of his officers; in the best of temper with his comrades; takes mud, rain, toil, empty stomach, and too heavy knapsack, a couch on the wet grass and under weeping skies, the pain of wounds, and the peril of death, all as part of the day’s work, about which nobody has any right to grumble. A soldier’s life, he plainly holds, is the pleasantest in the world. No one is better qualified than Rifleman Harris to tell to a modern and ease-loving generation how the men of the Peninsula marched, suffered, fought, and conquered.