Orders, Decorations and Medals

INDIA GENERAL SERVICE 1854-95, 1 clasp, North West Frontier (2295 Pte. Robt. Waterfield, 32nd Foot) dark toned, nearly extremely fine

Private Robert Waterfield kept a personal journal of his career from enlistment in 1842 through to his discharge in February 1857. His original manuscript was discovered in 1965 and, edited by Arthur Swinson and Donald Scott, it was published as ' The Memoirs of Private Waterfield, Soldier in Her Majesty’s 32nd Regiment of Foot (Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry) 1842-57'. Warerfield, a Leicester man, enlisted in the 32nd at Portsmouth and in 1846 was trooped to India, where he spent eleven years. He saw action at the Siege of Multan and at the Battle of Gujerat and took part in dozens of minor actions and skirmishes. He received his discharge just before the Indian Mutiny, and his diary thus forms a continuous narrative with the record of the Mutiny diarist of the 32nd, Private Henry Metcalfe. Waterfield's diary was frank and outspoken, even by the standards of modern soldiers. He writes of the harsh discipline of the Army, the drab soldier's minutiae of billets, guard duty, of executions ('military murders'), church parades and hospitals. He carefully notes the states of roads, bridges and river journeys, the effects of artillery and controlled fire-power, and the deteriorating efficiency of units of an ill-equipped, largely ill-cared for Army in extreme conditions of climate. His diary is a sidelight on the growth of Empire, but an important contribution to our knowledge of the 'British in India' in the years before the watershed of the Mutiny brought sweeping changes in the British administration and in the Army which maintained peace in the great sub-continent. And it is interesting to read that Waterfield could observe, a generation before Kipling, that 'The Pte. Soldier is not half cared for. In time of War they are thought much of, in time of peace...a pariah Dog.'