At the time I wrote, "It must be admitted that the training of our barrack-rooms is not favourable to the acquirement of decent manners and gentlemanlike demeanour, and that until we elevate the profession of arms in England, and remove the stigma popularly impressed from the rank of a private soldier, we cannot expect to induce the needy members of the more respectable classes in society to enter as volunteers; and the high rate of rewards for skill in all mechanical and industrial arts will ever offer an obstacle to the efforts of the recruiting sergeant to enlist a better sort of recruits so long as the present scale of pay and ration stoppages is maintained. The advocates for the abolition of purchase are impressed by the force of such objections as are presented by the general constitution of our army; but, after all, what the country keeps up its army for is, not that it may consult the wishes or the tastes of any class whatever, however numerous, powerful, and wealthy, but that the army may fight its battles, and maintain its liberties and its glory against all comers. Pompey's dandies were, no doubt, greatly displeased at being slashed in the face by Caesar's rough legionaries, and thought them very low fellows; nor had Rupert's cavaliers any great opinion of the good breeding or politesse of Old Noll's Ironsides; but the camp has never been regarded as any special school for demeanour or the inculcation of etiquette, however favourable it may be to the development of some of the nobler{466} qualities of humanity; and if we really can procure brave, intelligent, zealous, and deserving officers by some enlargement of the limits which have hitherto circumscribed our choice, we must submit to the inconvenience, though they may have a smack of the barrack-room about them. It must be recollected that our boasted mess system utterly breaks down in active campaigning, and that, in the field, the officers live separately or in very small groups, so it is only in times of peace that those whom Providence finxit meliore luto will be obliged to come in contact with the commissioned grossier, who will, after all, always represent a very small minority. It is forgotten by the friends of the system of "rank for money," that there has as yet been no officer from the ranks whose conduct before the enemy has been the subject of unfavourable notice, and that not one of them has been obliged to leave the service for refusal to perform his duty in the trenches; nor has it always been officers from the ranks who have been subjected to courts-martial, by the sentences of which they were forced from the army. In fact, many of those who take this side of the question are arguing, not for aristocracy, but for aurocracy; they are sacrificing to Plutus when they think they are worshipping Mars, and they confound the two questions — in themselves entirely distinct, but so mingled in camp dialogue as to be inseparable — of the purchase system with that of promotion from the ranks. There are such difficulties in the way of an abolition of the former system, that its most intrepid advocate may well pause before he suddenly demolishes it, and the devotion, the courage, and the endurance of the British officer of the army, and the respect of the men for him, are very weighty considerations in the way of the theoretical reformer.
"But if it have its advantages, the system has also its great, its crying evils, of which every mouth is full, and which are only met by the remark that there are evils in every system. Look at the case of Lieutenant-Colonel Cuddy, of the 55th. At the battle of Inkerman, he, as senior Captain, took the command of his regiment, when his senior officers were either killed or wounded. Throughout the whole of that terrible winter he served in the trenches, kept his handful of men together, and in all respects proved himself as careful as he was brave, and as prudent as he was zealous. Although lieutenant-colonel in the army, he was only captain in his regiment, and after having gone through the winter of 1854 and the spring of 1855, with all their hardships and conflicts, when the regimental majority was for purchase, owing to the retirement of the gallant Major Coats (whom I saw so badly hit at the Alma, that I thought he could scarce recover), Colonel Cuddy had the mortification of seeing Captain Cure, who was seven years his junior in the list of captains, and who had served at home with the depôt during the beginning of the campaign, pass over his head by purchase, and take the command of the regiment out of his hands. And can the country now heal the wound in that proud spirit? No; poor Cuddy fell at the Redan, and his cares and his sorrows are over for ever.{467}
"Cases somewhat similar are not wanting in other regiments. Right or wrong, had this war gone on, the purchase system was doomed. General Orders were crowded with notices that Captain So-and-So, having done the duty of field officer, that Lieutenant Such-a-One, having acted as Captain, and that Sergeant-Major Nobody, having acted as quartermaster of his regiment from such a date, would draw pay and allowances accordingly. War pushed our system horribly out of shape, and gave its delicate frame such squeezes, and deranged it so terribly, that its dearest friends scarcely knew it when we carried it home. Some of the young and intelligent officers on the Staff did not hesitate to express a hearty wish for the abolition of the system. To the French it was utterly incomprehensible, and it is a fixed idea in the mind of Private Jean François Marie that General Codrington paid enormous sums for the honour of commanding the army — otherwise he cannot understand it."