A regiment to reckon with

In the spring of 1990, at the age of 21, I found myself sitting on an English hillside in the sun as one member of a brand-new training platoon of British squaddies. Having been marched up hill and down dale for a couple of hours that afternoon, we were handed large cans of beer by the corporals and told to stand up one by one — in front of the platoon, its NCOs, and its lieutenant — to explain what motivated us to join the Light Division. As a university-educated Canadian, my own reasons were odd-sounding and faintly naive, while the other soldiers’ reasons had an enviable clarity: ‘I got a job as a builder, but my supervisor was a twat. So I hit him in the head with my shovel.’ ‘I worked in mines, and during last strike, union paid me hundred pounds to lock management in pit. I did, but I got fired.’ ‘I bet my mate fifty quid that I would join the Army — and I won, didn’t I? I hate it already.’

In the Duke of Wellington’s day, the 95th Rifle Regiment at least paid new recruits a bounty of ten guineas, even if most drank that bounty away as quickly as they could gulp. But there were other enticements: ‘NO WHITE BELTS! NO PIPE CLAY! … your Quarters are the best in the Army … you have the first of every thing,’ promised a regimental recruiting poster which is reproduced on the frontispiece of Mark Urban’s remarkable new history, Rifles: Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters. His book tells the story of the Light Division’s 95th Rifle Regiment through its service in the Peninsular War from 1809 to 1814, and in the renewed fighting that led to Waterloo.