Went the Day Well? by David Crane

Author:David Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

7 p.m.

Noblesse Oblige

Colonel Thomas Nicholl was old-fashioned enough to have long since finished his dinner. Down in town smarter men might be edging the time of the meal back, but a retired colonel and a JP with slaves in the West Indies and a fine old, seven-bay pile, topped with shaped gables, near Hendon called Copt Hall, probably felt secure enough of his place in the world to hold on to his own ways.

He would not have been a soldier, though, if his thoughts had not been elsewhere this Sunday because on the other side of the Channel he might have seen the story of a great part of his life mapped out along the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean. Nicholl had been commissioned into the 33rd of Foot – Wellington’s own regiment – in 1772, and had sailed as an ensign to America on the outbreak of the War of Independence, serving with the 33rd from the First Siege of Charleston in 1776 right through to Guilford Court House in 1781, before transferring as lieutenant and captain into the 70th in the May of that year.

The 33rd had already had a bad time of it at Quatre Bras but it was for the soldiers of the 44th that he would have been most anxious. Nicholl had been unfortunate in his time with the 70th if it was fighting he wanted, and after serving in that historic graveyard of the British Army, the West Indies, had done nothing more exciting than garrison duties in Gibraltar and Jersey, steadily rising by purchase during one of the most dismal periods in the history of the army, before transferring to the command of the newly formed 2nd Battalion of the 44th in 1803.

The 2nd Battalion of the regiment – the East Essex – had been raised in Ireland after the collapse of the Treaty of Amiens and if regimental form was anything to go by, colonel and men might well have been relieved to find themselves on garrison duties. During the course of the previous sixty years the 44th had established its claim to be the most disaster-prone unit in the army, but under Nicholl’s brief command the regiment that had been decimated at Prestonpans by Highlanders, slaughtered at Monongamela by Indians, and turkey-shot by backwoodsmen at New Orleans two weeks after the peace treaty with the United States had been signed, had, perhaps mercifully, got no farther than routine duties on English soil.

The worst was still to come – the regiment would be wiped out to a man on the disastrous retreat from Kabul – but if ever a regimental tradition offered a testimony to the enduring spirit of the British soldier in the face of his generals it is that of the 44th. In the hundred-and-thirty-odd years of its history it found itself under the command of some of the most unfortunate leaders ever to send troops into battle, and yet time and again the men and junior officers who had been mauled

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