RED RAW HISTORY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20875, 15 November 1929, Page 12

RED RAW HISTORY.

GIBRALTAR UNDER SIEGE.. ~ . .Sir. John. For fescue in ■ The ‘ Times (London) has given extracts • from the r £T-, officer' w’lio served in the siege of Gibraltar of 1727-28. The principal points are •’ reviewed in the following article:— . . Lovers of the eighteenth century—and they; are a goodly fellowship in England ;md in America—will presently be celebrating this second centenary of the death of Sir Richard Steele, the only, begetter of the school of essayists to whom we owe so many charming pictures of Ji.ngUsh life and manners in the reign ot Queen Anne. In articles in The Times bit John - Forteseue has been drawing another side of that life as it existed a few years later—a side little heard of in contemporary accounts of that brilliant and cultivated age. In extracts from the diary■ of an officer R | r " d ’the sie S a of Gibraltar of J(2i-2S Sir John Forteseue tells us something of the Jot of our Mediterranean garrisons in the year when Horace W«l----po!e went to Eton. Walpole paints the time of the children and the grandchildren of Popes Belinda, of the noble gentlemen and gracious ladies whom Sir Joshua immortalised on canvas, but in Walpole, too, there, is not much to be read of what t. 0 * 1511 - 11 Rervice meant, or might mean, when it was raining victories and gold boxes, when we were founding an Empire beyond the seas in India and losing another in America.

The diary Je signed “S. H..” and all Sir John s efforts have failed to identify him or to discover anything of him except that he went out on the staff of General Clayton, the Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar, and that he landed at the Rook on-February 2, 1727. just nine davs before Clayton fired. the first ahet. While the fighting lasted (“ S. H/s " entries record an exceeding hot fire,” a " fire with inexpressible fury,” “the same hot work* on different occasions, and bears witness to the accuracy of the Spanish artillery) the men had not much to complain of, except insufficient supplies, the standing hardships of the service, and the frequent bursting of their guns, which they seem, to have taken as a matter of course. ’The Governor, Lord Portmore, was nearly 80. but he was a splendid old veteran - of King William s wars, and met the messages. of -the enemy in the way in which soldiers like to see them met. .’Clayton and others of the superior officers-’lad served in the same stern school, and showed themselves able and resolute leaders.

•With the armistice of June C the reaction among all ranks began. There was an epidemic of quarrels, duels, desertions, and suicides, and lovers, of Tristram Shandy will sympathise with Sir John's disappointment that hi* researches failed to find any record of the quarrel "about a goose between , Roger Sterne, the father of Laurence fwhom Sir John identifies with u hele_Toby himself) and Captain Phillips. Non-commissioned officers and men fought, fiercely among themselves as soon as they had no enemy to fight, and/a still worse sign of the temper of the garrison was the stream of deser.tions. ■ The: men, it must be remembered, ■were . nearly . all illiterate. They had nothing, to break-the desperate monotony of their exile, but drunkenness, debauchery. gambling, and quarrelling. Sir Johns surmise that some of the desertions —they ; were ' commoner among the Gameronians than in other regiments—may have been due to sympathy with th* Stuarts may well be_ correct—-for Georg* f ,died_ during; the siege, and during the armistice the garrison took the oath to George 11. Deserters were shot down if eaught in the act, and in most cases hanged without mercy. if they returned—as several did after they had tried service ’with the enemy. Most people will be surprised to-learn • that; the higher officers had strong pecuniary reasons for the recapture of _deserters, or ever of their corpses. Nearly all • colonels. Sir John tells us, were general officers in those days, without, however, any increase of pay. But they supplied.the men’s clothing, and they wete allowed to stop twopence, a day out-of J the' men’s pay for tha clothes. . If a deserter got* on with his clothes, he was fining his general l in • their value and fining the officers in the cost-of getting a new. recruit—for the Government'bounty for .recruits was always too low. If his." corpse;” as “S. H.” writes it.' was brought in, the clotbos were cavern On Christmas Eve a deserter was caught with a, full description of -tha strong and weak •points', of the defence. He was not.hanged or shot, presumably because by reason of the armistice .the fortress .was not -being actually baaieged at the time. But he was given a. sentence which most men would think more terrible than death. Flogging was the punishment for military offences, and this man got 500 lashes .inflicted in an exceptionally painful way, and was shipped‘to"the'Wets Indies as a slave for. life. Other horrible eentences are chronicled in these brief notes as ordinary incidents of. garrison life. One man, by his own account, received 30,000 lashes in the 14 years of his service at Gibr raltar,. and yet "he. is hearty' arid well and no ways concerned.”

No. complaint of the' injustice or the severity of these punishments is recorded* They seem .to ' have been -ao. cepted as the recognised penalty for military transgressions. A ship came in “ laden with women ” from Ireland on “February 7 (1728), “froig ivheiieo come great numbers of these necessary evils.” • There were other evils which “ S. H.” describes with. a..bluntness too crude for modern proprieties. Ironically or not, he excepts all A the great, officers " from any share, in “.these irregularities.’’Some of the “gentlewomen" were set in “ a pretty whim or whirligig in form of a bird ‘cage,” which was round and made them “ a liti .c giddy and landsick,” a sight that “gave great pleasure to 1 the spectators,” and others were put in a. kind of pillory which-made 'them "sit in - great prim.' “A private. gentleman ” who presumed to ask leave to marry one of these ladies got 100 lashes for hia impertinence, but a* ha repeated his - request next- day, “ though his back was like raw head and bloody - bones,” the court, " in consideration of bis sufferings, noble merit, and undaunted gallantry, ’ mercifully granted his request. ■ ’ •

The flippancy with which "SJI.” jot* , down -these horrors suggests indifference to them, but his seeming cynicism may perhaps„have been, no- more than- a veil, as seeming cynicism often is, to hide his real feelings. The first part of the century which ended' with a passionate devotion to humanity in multitudes of all classes, which, gave the word "sentimental” European currency in its modern sense, and which flooded much of* our literature with mawkish emotionalism, was in its early years a refined, but hard, age inheriting the harsh traditions of the age before, and nowhere perhaps were these traditions so deeply rooted as in the services by sea and land. Some abuses of the same kind survived through Wellington’s campaign* in the Napoleonic wars, and lingered in the Crimea. We may hope that even in King William’s times the sufferings of remote garrisons beyond the seas were exceptional. Corporal Trim tells of barbarous flogging in the Low Countries, but the warm love of the service which fires him at the memory of the great events of his campaigns and the deep affection which he and Toby hear each other aeem to show that in all the desperate battles and fmfT."l the Netherlands the heroes who fought them were not so utt*-:3v wretchedre e / 036 *®ck. Sterne could not have made Trim and Toby love each other as he did had not the immoral if™ tU f G r heir £rien dship been after nature, if not from nature. mn£ Fort *f<lue -declares thatV* m ut not blame the officers at Gibraltar At fc^at tinie > as at many ’ the , rc B l mental officers were Inlrf Tt ‘ho considered in the least the comfort of the soldier.” “It f ot j tbeJ V- he , MJrs ’ “ '"'bo drove the men to desertion, but the mean, stingy callous politicians who filled the House „ C-oTOuons The charge against the politicians of the last year of George I may be , too severe. They were ignorant a “*? ln<Jlff ? r *r?jh. and then, as often, ignoranco and indifference had crueltv as their consequence. * r