Flogging in the army had not yet been abolished, but I only remember one case during my service in which this punishment was inflicted for stealing from a comrade. The man was a notorious blackguard who ought to have been discharged by the Colonel before he was drummed out as part of his sentence. He did not seem to care a rap for the flogging, or at least pretended not to care. The discipline was very good as many of our men, though probably ne’er-do-wells at home, came from the Borders of Scotland and a few from the Highlands.
I remember once when sitting in the orderly room, my own colour- sergeant, a fine old soldier from Skye, brought up two or three recruits from the Hebrides, who had been put under his tuition because they could not speak or understand English. The Colonel asked him what the men were brought up for. He replied: "I canna make soldiers of them, Colonel, and the best thing ye can do with them is to discharge them.”
“How is this, Sergeant Macdonald?” said the Colonel. "I thought the men from your islands were always considered the best of soldiers.”
"That was true enough in old times, Colonel, but it is no true now,” said he.
“And how do you account for it, Sergeant ?”
“It is like this, Colonel. The good men in Skye are nearly all gone to America now. In the old days when they had not enough to eat they just had to take it from those that had or starve, but now they are crying to the Government for food in bad times, and they're no wanting to fight.”
I was told by the same man that he went out to the Crimea in December, 1854, with a draft of three officers and one hundred men to the regiment, and though they arrived too late to take part in. any of the battles, there were only one officer, one sergeant and one man of that detachment present with the battalion when they returned from the Crimea in 1856. Those who have read the accounts of the misery and starvation of our army in the trenches in the spring of 1855 will understand what became of these raw recruits, and contrast it with the losses from similar causes in the last war.
