True Soldier Gentlemen (Napoleonic War 1) by Adrian Goldsworthy Read Free Book Online Page A

buttons on his tunic and gaiters without dirtying the material around them.
    Now, after five months, his uniform felt comfortable – or at least as comfortable as the rough wool and the stiff leather neck stock allowed. His first parade, when nothing seemed to fit and it all felt so awkward and ungainly, had left him wondering how the sergeants could be so impossibly smart. Even now these men seemed to possess some magic he lacked, but Williams felt that he was a master of the chief mysteries of soldiering. He could pick out his musket from all the other India Pattern firelocks by the tiny notch on the butt plate and the stain on the wood just behind the trigger, which no amount of oiling and scrubbing could remove. It was ‘his’ musket, unique among all the hundreds of thousands owned by the army. Williams felt himself to be fully a soldier, but he remained an outsider wherever he was.
    MacAndrews gave the company five minutes’ rest after marching for an hour, and then a longer break after the second hour. By then they had gone a good six miles, and the weather had improved, so the order was given to remove their greatcoats and tie them back on top of their wooden-framed packs. That done, Williams was unsure what to do as the grenadiers took their ease. Should he go and join the officers as they leaned against a nearby wall, or stay and converse affably with the grenadiers, showing that he was not too proud to acknowledge them? Would either welcome him or would he be seen as sycophantic to theofficers and patronising to the men? Pringle was always friendly, and when the lieutenant was present the supercilious Redman was at least formally polite. As Williams glanced towards the officer, he noticed Hanley looking back at him. After a moment, the new ensign nodded and smiled, but it was hard to know whether that was meant as an invitation, and Pringle had his back to him so was no guide. Williams nodded in reply, but did not move.
    ‘Mr Williams, sir, did you bring your tinder box?’ asked Dobson from behind him. The ‘sir’ was a courtesy. Tout and another private named Murphy also came up holding their clay pipes. After that Dobson stopped any of the other soldiers from asking for the same service. Murphy was one of a dozen or so Irishmen in the grenadiers, and there were similar numbers in the other companies. In spite of its name, the 106th had few soldiers from Wales, and fewer still from the county itself. Like other regiments they took recruits wherever they could find them. ‘We don’t want to wear out Mr Williams’ flint,’ added the veteran.
    ‘No, he’s not married yet,’ quipped Murphy. Williams allowed himself a smile in spite of the coarseness.
    ‘That’s why he’s still happy,’ put in Dobson automatically, although he had buried one wife and been with his Sally now for sixteen years. They rowed sometimes, especially when he drank, but even then he had never laid a hand to her and was proud of that. Their eldest girl was now nearly sixteen – there had been some urgency about their wedding – and was a constant source of worry to him. ‘Would turn me to drink, if I had not long since spun that way,’ he often said. Jenny Dobson was too full of herself, and he feared that she was making eyes at the officers. That way lay ruin, for ‘gentlemen’ all too easily used and discarded maids like her. She had a brother, aged fourteen and now on the strength as a drummer, and a sister just ten.
    Dobson had been raised to sergeant several times over the years, but then been broken for drunkenness. Like so many soldiers, Dobson all too easily threw off all restraint, drowning himself in alcohol, which tended to make the big man violent. Williams did not think the officers much better – had been astounded bythe sheer quantities they could drink in an evening. Personally he drank little, mainly because the taste nauseated him, and had never been drunk in his life, although that was on