Sgt Major Orland Delmar is a Scottish national, born in Edinborough. Joining the Army at age 16 in 1849, he became part of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, a Lowland Scots Regiment. In 1854 he was sent with his regiment to Greece and the Balkans, in support of British interests. There, the regiment became embroiled in the Crimean War between Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire versus the Russian Empire.
Delmar survived the battles of the Crimean peninsula, and was promoted to the position of Sergeant of his Company. It was a hellish period of warfare, known for its notoriously incompetent international butchery, an iconic symbol of logistical, medical, and tactical failures and mismanagement. Orland Delmar himself was a fine soldier, but survival was hard in the Crimean Peninsula. He had begun to find the inklings of misgivings and mistrust in how the military and governments worked, influenced in a great part by incompetent nobles who purchased their commissions in the regiment.
From Crimea, the Regiment ended up in Arabia, and then India, putting down a series of minor revolts and bandit lords. He continued to rise through the non commissioned ranks, becoming Sergeant Major for the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
He mustered out in 1869 after 20 years of service, thoroughly disillusioned with large governments in general, and nobility in particular. He was a hard man, who had made a fair amount of money in the course of his Army career. He wasn’t ashamed to shy away from plunder, or black market profit. He also tried to steer the Regiment in the ways of honor with regards to treatment of the locals as well as their own enlisted ranks. He achieved various levels of success in this goal, which in general only lowered his opinion of his noble officers.
Disappointed (or perhaps disgusted) with his Army service, and India, he took ship east, eventually ending up in a American city known as San Francisco. It was a wide open land, fresh and unpopulated.
