3 - Life Abroad

Summary

Much Of Life In The nineteenth-century army was spent overseas; in 1846, for example, there were 100,600 men in the army of whom only 44,980 were serving in the British Isles. This trend was even more exaggerated with respect to the infantry: roughly three-quarters of infantry regiments were serving outside the British Isles at any given time before the 1870s. As Peter Burroughs has noted, for infantrymen – and their families – army service meant ‘almost perpetual exile’. Life in colonial outposts around the world also meant many of the predilections and tendencies identified in the last chapter were thrown into stark relief in strange and sometimes hostile overseas environments. Wives were simply expected to cope in unfamiliar and sometimes inhospitable situations. Preoccupied as they were with getting the regiment established and meeting its assigned duties, officers often made minimal arrangements for soldiers’ families – if there was no barrack space available, a sergeant might be told to find the women and children whatever lodgings he could discover in whichever far-flung place the regiment had arrived. However difficult the living arrangements might prove, the wives were expected not only to cope, but also to perform the work the regiment required of them. In such circumstances soldiers’ wives, perforce, had to be canny and independent, and to work together.

It should be noted that the experiences of soldiers and their families in the various outposts of the empire were also somewhat unevenly recorded. Life in India and Canada was well documented and has been widely explored; that in Australia much less so. Living conditions also varied widely. In tropical garrisons, sickness and death ran rampant: the West Indies stations were especially notorious for their high mortality rates. The healthiest overseas garrisons, on the other hand, were in British North America and South Africa. In an attempt to deal with the high tropical casualties, the army developed an acclimatisation policy:

a ten-year rotating tour of duty was introduced in 1837, initially for the western hemisphere, by which battalions proceeded first to the Mediterranean for three or four years, where they might become accustomed to a hot, dry climate before being transferred for a similar period to the deadly combination of heat and dampness in the Caribbean.