Indeed, within three days, it seemed to Sharpe that perhaps money was the reason for the camp’s secrecy. It was not just the way that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s men had stolen the bounty from each recruit, but the way that, day after day, the debts piled up. At every inspection Sergeant Lynch would find a fault with a man’s Necessaries; a torn knapsack strap, a holed sock, and each fault would be noted and the cost of the item deducted against future pay, Sharpe guessed that no man at the camp received pay, that all of it was channelled into the hands of Girdwood. Such raids on men’s pay were quite normal in the army; half of every man’s wages was deducted for food alone; yet Sharpe had never seen it done on such a scale or with such enthusiastic rapacity.
Only the training was pursued with more enthusiasm, and Sharpe had not seen any camp in which recruits were worked so hard. They drilled from morning till sundown. The grammar of soldiering was hammered into them until the clumsiest recruit, after one week, could perform all the manoeuvres of Company drill. Only Tom, the half-wit, was considered untrainable and he was given to the Sergeants’ Mess as a cleaner.
The object of their life, from the cold mornings when they were roused before dawn until the sun was set and the bugle called the lights-out, was to avoid punishment. Even after the bugle there was still danger, for it was a maxim with Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood that mutinies were plotted at night. He made the Sergeants and officers patrol the tent lines, listening for voices, and it was rumoured that Girdwood himself had been seen, on hands and knees, threading his body between the tent guy ropes to put an ear close to the canvas.
The punishments were as varied as the crimes that occasioned them. A whole squad or tent could fetch a normal fatigue duty; digging latrines, clearing one of the many drainage channels that ran to the mudflats, or mending, with stiff twine and a leatherworker’s needle, the stiff canvas of the tents. Sergeant Lynch favoured a swift beating, and sometimes used a knapsack filled with bricks as his instrument of punishment, either worn for extra drill, or else held at arm’s length while he stood behind ready to cut with his cane at the first quiver of fatigue in the outstretched arms.
There were beatings and floggings and, savage though they were, they could all be avoided by the simple expedient of obedience and anonymity. Most of the recruits learned fast. Even when it rained, and it seemed impossible to keep the mud from their uniforms, or from the tarpaulins that formed the groundsheets of their tents, they learned to scrape and wash the mud entirely away, and even though the cleaning water, that was blessedly abundant in the low, marshy land, soaked their thin straw palliasses, it was better to sleep shivering and damp than to incur the wrath of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s inspection.
Yet Giles Marriott, who had joined the army in a mood of self-destruction because his girl had jilted him for a richer man, earned punishment after punishment. Morning after morning, at the dawn inspection, Sergeant Lynch would find a speck of mud on Marriott’s pipeclay and the Sergeant’s voice would snap at the terrified man. ‘Strip!’
Marriott would strip. He would stand shivering.
‘Run!’
He would run the tent lines, stumbling in the mud, jeered on his way by sergeants and corporals who would slash at his bare buttocks with their canes or steel-tipped pacing sticks. ‘Faster! Faster!’ He would come back to Sergeant Lynch with tears in his eyes and his pale flesh scarred by the welts of the blows.
‘Just keep your bloody mouth shut,’ Harper told him.
‘We’re not animals. We’re men.’
‘No you’re not. You’re a bloody soldier now. Never look the bugger in the eyes, never argue, and never complain.’
Marriott listened, but did not hear. The other recruits did both, for in only a few hours Sharpe had become their unofficial leader and guide within the army. On their very first day Sharpe had calmed Charlie Weller down, gripping the boy’s shoulders till it hurt. ‘You do nothing, Charlie!’