This eighteenth-century satirical engraving depicts a recruiting party which has convinced a very dishevelled trio that their future lies with the British army. It will obviously take a good deal of drilling to whip these three into shape. In the mid- nineteenth century it was estimated that two-thirds of the men who joined up were labourers out of work, one-tenth thought that life in the army would be a lark and another tenth were either in trouble with the law or had been a failure at everything else. The rest had a variety of reasons which ranged from ambition to running away from home. The ambitious ones were soon disappointed; it was virtually impossible for a soldier to rise through the ranks to become an officer and the rare few who succeeded found themselves social outcasts, wanted by neither their former cohorts nor their new colleagues in the mess.
