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Updated: June 20, 2025
His friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his day, pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-poured, undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope.
When the legions were enrolled, the men were ill armed, undrilled, and unprovided a mere mob, gathered hastily together and ignorant of the first elements of their duty. With the officers it was still worse. The subordinate commands fell to young patricians, carpet knights who went on campaigns with their families of slaves.
"If by fighting them," said Babberly, "you mean asking the unarmed citizens of Belfast to stand up against rifles " "Unarmed?" The word came from Conroy in his corner. Every one was startled. We had not expected Conroy to take any part in the discussion. "Undrilled, undisciplined," said Babberly. "What can be the result of such a conflict as you suggest?
My idea was that comparatively undrilled boys and older men, not sound enough for campaigning, armed with rifles, able to shoot straight with them, and using local means of transport, bicycles, cars, and so forth, would be a quite effective check upon an enemy's scouting, a danger to his supplies, and even a force capable of holding up a raiding advance more particularly if that advance was poor in horses and artillery, as an overseas raid was likely to be.
Many still had reason to remember the ghastly blunders and the muddling which had cost so many gallant lives and so many millions of treasure during the Boer War, when it took three hundred thousand British troops to reduce eighty thousand undrilled farmers to submission. What if the same blundering and muddling happened now? And it was just as likely now as then.
There were a number of new and undrilled regiments in the command, and in hastening to the front in columns of battalions in mass, proper intervals for deployment had not been preserved, and time was necessarily lost before the troops could be put in line. Indeed, some of them were not regularly deployed at all.
In the first days of the Revolution our troops, undrilled and not strictly disciplined, could not fight in line. To advance on the enemy, a part of the battalion was detached as skirmishers. The remainder marched into battle and was engaged without keeping ranks. The combat was sustained by groups fighting without formal order. The art was to support by reserves the troops advanced as skirmishers.
It consisted chiefly of raw, undrilled troops, quite unused to discipline, but, perhaps, as effective as veterans in the service in which they were employed, the adroitness of the enemy, accustomed to the interminable swamps, hammocks, and cane-brakes which abound in this country, quite paralyzing the energies of the men, and destroying that esprit du corps without which no success can be expected in an army.
We have heard of soldiers escaping from a besieged fortress by night; but such was the inspiring power of this commander that there was a steady leaking in of men from the hills, undrilled and raw, but of superb physique and dead shots with the ride.
The guns were loaded, but rammers, matches, wadding, cannon-balls, were all out of place, and not immediately accessible. The crew were merchant sailors and landsmen, all undrilled in the duties peculiar to an armed ship. There had been lying for some time at the same anchorage the British frigate Leopard, fifty guns; and this ship also put to sea at noon of the same day.
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