As the new ensign was waiting to be gazetted, having his uniform made, and choosing his sword, the 16th left the barracks at Fermoy, and set sail from nearby Monkstown for Canada. The war with the United States was not two years old and the 16th was being posted to guard the Canadian border against the threat of attack from the south. Wainewright’s first chance of military glory had vanished.
While the regiment was still at sea, he arrived at the huge barracks in Fermoy, the final part of which had been completed a few years previously.
It was the largest military base in the west of Ireland, with accommodation for more than 180 officers, 2,800 other ranks and 152 horses. But
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when Wainewright arrived there was only a vestige of his regiment left.
The monthly Regimental Return, dated May 25th 1814, four days before the regiment landed in Quebec, shows that the garrison in Fermoy was down to six officers and 60 men.
In command was Captain John Galloway, under him Lieutenants W.G. Hasleham, John O’Brien, Darby Mahoney and another ensign, John O’Donnell, who joined three weeks after Wainewright. They were all Irish, and the first three all regulars. The young dilettante must soon have tired of their provincialism, and of Fermoy itself, whose streets, according to a local account of the time, were “partially-paved”.
Dreams of action were evaporating in the empty barracks in the wet south of Ireland. As the rest of the 16th was garrisoning Quebec and Montreal and setting up post at Chambly and Coteau du Lac, Ensign Wainewright was writing orderly and guard reports.
He was to accustom himself “to give his words of command not only with energy and precision but with that firm, confident manly voice…” according to the Regimental Companion, somewhat of a challenge for one who lisped and lacked the discipline to be either energetic or precise. He should also have been having a “frequent intercourse, not only with geographical charts and books upon mathematics, but likewise the application of their different principles to practical experiments.” An arid prospect for one of Wainewright’s artistic disposition.
Apart from entering into practical experiments with a notable lack of enthusiasm there was
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little for the officers to do except talk and drink. Wainewright wrote eight years later of his time at Fermoy: “the noisy audacity of military conversation, united to the fragrant fumes of whisky-punch (ten tumblers every evening without acid!)* obscured my recollection of Michel Angelo (sic) as in a dun fog”. (It’s not clear what he meant by acid; whisky punch is usually made by adding lemons and sugar).
But if the drink and the talk failed, Fermoy itself had a few distractions to offer. There was a circulating library, a newsroom and billiard room at the biggest hotel. “The necessities and luxuries of life are found here in as great profusion as in any of the larger towns in Ireland” declared Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland.
The highlight of the year came in September; a week’s racing on a course north of the town which was also used for military exercises. Even with all these small distractions, life in an empty regimental depot was very dull, as the Monthly Returns show. Most months there were no orders from London or Dublin. When letters did arrive they usually dealt with minor matters, such as ammunition or provisioning.
Or perhaps Captain Galloway was so bemused by whisky punch that he forgot to enter in the Returns all that he should have done; a tart note from the Adjutant-General in Dublin that September directed him to “be particular in examining them.”
The boredom of Ireland was soon to end. By January 1815 this rump of the regiment had moved to Hilsea barracks at Portsmouth and by the following month to nearby Tipnor, the magazine and gunpowder works. Wainewright was granted
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leave by the Commandant from February 11th, and should have returned by the 13th, but there was no sign of him.
By the 15th he was posted absent without leave, and ten days later Captain Galloway noted in his Return:2 “It is presumed some accident must have happened to him, as there has been no account whatsoever from him.” Captain Galloway was obviously taking a charitable view of the disappearance of his ensign.
But a month later Wainewright was still missing. The March Return pointed out that every effort had been made to trace him: “Ensign Wainewright was written to agreeable (sic) to the address he left, but no answer has been received; his friends were there written to, who stated they understood he was lying ill at Bath, but that as soon as certain information could be obtained I should be informed thereof.”
By the time Captain Galloway wrote this Wainewright had been missing for six weeks, and without a word of explanation. However grievous his illness, it seems that he had been able to let his friends know, but not his regiment. Was the illness a precursor of the “acute disease” as he called it, which was to attack him within a few months? It seems more likely, and more in character, that he had become so bored and restless that the idea of returning after leave to a soulless military life miles from his London haunts had become intolerable.
Oscar Wilde was to write much later that the “reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to
2. WO 17/291
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satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other things”.
But return he did eventually, for by the end of April he was back on the strength. In the British army in the 19th century, absence without leave automatically became desertion after 21 days, for which the penalties were very severe. No record of Wainewright being disciplined has been discovered. Perhaps the rules were elastic in the languid world of the officer class.
For example, Lord Cardigan, he of the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade, had bought himself a colonelcy for £40,000 and in the first two years of his service in the 11th Hussars was with his regiment for only four weeks.3
During Wainewright’s long absence, Napoleon had escaped from Elba and marched on Paris; another European conflict was imminent. Orders went out to the 16th in Canada to return home at once.
The regiment landed at Portsmouth in August, two months too late for Waterloo, though it eventually went on to join the army of occupation. But Wainewright took no part in all this; in May he resigned his commission. He may have been asked to do so after his long absence; more probably the thought of further service was unbearable. He had lasted barely a year, and that with a long absence in between.
His last few days in the Army he spent at Fort Cumberland, the bastioned stronghold at
3. Woodham-Smith, C. The Reason Why. Penguin, 1953
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Portsmouth which commanded the approach to the marshes and Langstone Harbour.
As he looked across Spithead to the Isle of Wight he could not have imagined that the next time he would see it, 22 years’ later, would be as a convict bound for the other side of the world. But there was no thought of ignominy now; on May 15th he sold his commission and his name appears for the last time in the Army List for June 1815. “Augustus Losack to be ensign by purchase vice Wainewright retd.”
Another career had failed, and he later dismissed this failure characteristically in one of his essays: “Several apparently trifling chances determined me against this mode of killing Time and humans.”