William Cobbett . Edward E. Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ learning of which I am master. This study was, too, attended with another advantage: it kept me out of mischief. I was always sober and regular in my attendance; and not being a clumsy fellow, I met with none of those reproofs which disgust so many young men with the service.”

      These efforts at self-education would be wonderful enough, in a person surrounded with the comforts of life, but when we recollect what the life of a private soldier was, until very recently, with the temptations presented by poverty, and by dissolute associates, and by the almost utter want of sympathy between the soldier and his aristocratic superiors, the extreme difficulty of the case is evident.

      “Of my sixpence nothing like fivepence was left to purchase food for the day. Indeed not fourpence. For there was washing, mending, soap, flour for hair-powder, shoes, stockings, shirts, stocks and gaiters, pipe-clay and several other things, all to come out of the miserable sixpence! … The whole week’s food was not a bit too much for one day. It is not disaffection, it is not a want of fidelity to oaths, that makes soldiers desert, one time out of ten thousand; it is hunger, which will break through stone walls; and which will, therefore, break through oaths and the danger of punishment. We had several recruits from Norfolk (our regiment was the West Norfolk); and many of them deserted from sheer hunger. They were lads from the plough-tail. All of them tall; for no short men were then taken. I remember two that went into a decline and died during the year; though when they joined us they were fine hearty young men. I have seen them lay in their berths, many and many a time, actually crying on account of hunger.

      “The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my book-case; a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing-table. … I had no money to purchase candle or oil; in winter-time it was rarely that I could get any evening light but that of the fire; and only my turn even of that. … To buy a pen or a sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of food, though in a state of half-starvation: I had no moment of time that I could call my own; and I had to read and to write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling, and brawling of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that, too, in the hours of their freedom from all control. Think not lightly of the farthing that I had to give, now and then, for ink, pen, or paper. That farthing was, alas! a great sum to me. I was as tall as I am now; I had great health and great exercise. The whole of the money, not expended for us at market, was twopence a week for each man. I remember (and well I may!) that upon one occasion I, after all absolutely necessary expenses, had, on a Friday, made shift to have a halfpenny in reserve, which I had destined for the purchase of a red-herring in the morning; but, when I pulled off my clothes at night, so hungry then as to be hardly able to endure life, I found that I had lost my halfpenny! I buried my head under the miserable sheet and rug, and cried like a child.”

      And yet the life had its amenities. Tender recollections come up, when he visits Chatham again, nearly forty years after, of the pretty girls of his “cap-and-feather days.” How they evinced a sincere desire to smooth the inequalities of life; and particularly to serve out the beer more fairly than their masters or husbands. His superior officers, too, inspired him with a certain amount of respect and affection; whilst the Colonel’s discovery of the willing horse was, undoubtedly, a fount of pleasure and gratification to the young recruit.

      Cobbett tells, somewhere, of a poor little drummer-boy who gambled. He gambled away all his pay, his shirts, his stockings, and all his necessaries, even to his loaf, which was served out to him twice a week. At last, to prevent him from begging through the streets of Rochester and Chatham, the men were compelled to take his loaf from him, to serve it out a slice at a time, and to see that he ate it. Here is about the lowest depth of degradation to which a private soldier could descend; but the moralist will see, in this anecdote, only one other instance in which the weight or the deficiency of moral stamina is dependent, whether in private soldier or in prince, upon the habit of mind acquired in childhood. Beneath the parental roof must the parental duty be done; no “prayer,” and no idle talk of reliance on providence (so very, very often put forth, when only a plea for laziness and indifference) will avail, unless the dictates of common prudence are heeded, and a straightforward principle, in example, daily shown. The riff-raff of society, in all grades, is composed of those whose childhood was neglected.

      Early in 1785, a detachment from the depôt at Chatham was forwarded to head-quarters, and the event is thus described in the autobiography:—

      “There is no situation where merit is so sure to meet with reward as in a well-disciplined army. Those who command are obliged to reward it for their own ease and credit. I was soon raised to the rank of corporal; a rank which, however contemptible it may appear in some people’s eyes, brought me in a clear twopence per diem, and put a very clever worsted knot upon my shoulder too. … As promotion began to dawn, I grew impatient to get to my regiment, where I expected soon to bask under the rays of Royal favour. The happy day of departure at last came: we set sail from Gravesend, and, after a short and pleasant passage, arrived at Halifax in Nova Scotia. When I first beheld the barren, not to say hideous, rocks at the entrance of the harbour, I began to fear that the master of the vessel had mistaken his way; for I could perceive nothing of that fertility that my good recruiting captain had dwelt on with so much delight.

      “Nova Scotia had no other charm for me than that of novelty. Everything I saw was new: bogs, rocks, and stumps, mosquitoes and bull-frogs. Thousands of captains and colonels without soldiers, and of squires without stockings or shoes. … We stayed but a few weeks in Nova Scotia, being ordered to St. John’s, in the province of New Brunswick. Here, and at other places in the same province, we remained till the month of September, 1791, when the regiment was relieved, and sent home.”

      Cobbett repeatedly declared, in after-life, that during these eight years he was never accused of the slightest fault. As his numerous opponents, in all their violence and unscrupulousness, never succeeded in raking up anything, in the smallest degree, derogatory to his high character as a soldier, the statement is, probably, as perfectly true as need be. But he also boasts that he never wilfully disobeyed his father or his mother. These two things are so interdependent (in the mind of the biographer), that the reader must once more be recalled to the idea presented in the early part of this chapter, of the prominence due to the illustrious results of self-discipline. An idea, which is only an idea with the great majority of mankind, to their latest hour. An idea, which gains prominence in some minds only just in time to enable them to warn their younger fellows, of the certain consequences of its neglect. An idea, which is eagerly embraced by some few, who, by a happy inspiration, note that the world has been led and guided, and governed, by the men who first put the bit and the bridle upon their own unruly selves.

      So William Cobbett goes to his regiment. And while others are swilling, or gambling, or idling, he is continually training. Rapid promotion is the result. At the end of little more than a year, he is Sergeant-Major, having been placed in that proud position over the heads of fifty other sergeants.

      While, however, he was only corporal, he was made clerk of the regiment, a post which brought him in an immensity of labour, a great deal of which was due to the ignorance or unworthiness of his superior officers. The studies, too, were not neglected:—

      “I was studying at one and the same time, Dr. Lowth’s Grammar, Dr. Watts’s Logic, the Rhetoric of some fellow whom I have forgotten, a book on Geometry, … Vauban’s Fortifications, and (ex-officio) the famous Duke of York’s Military Exercise and Evolutions, explaining these latter by ground-plans. … Never did these cause me to neglect my duty in one single particular; a duty of almost every hour in the day, from daylight till nine o’clock at night.” … “When I was sergeant-major … I found time to study French and Fortification. My chef-d’œuvre in the latter was the plan of a regular sexagon with every description of outwork. When I had finished my plan, on a small scale, and in the middle of a very large piece of drawing-paper, I set to work to lay down the plan of a siege, made my line СКАЧАТЬ