Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (12 page)

Jonathan Leach, always one of Craufurd’s harshest critics, commented sarcastically that it was ‘a speech well calculated no doubt to make men and officers adore their leader and follow him enthusiastically up the French heights’. As Craufurd deployed his brigades ready to attack the superior French force to their front, Wellington appeared on horseback, ‘in time enough to save us from total annihilation’. Seeing that Craufurd had drawn his battalions up in line, with just a single squadron of cavalry in support, Wellington asked him, ‘Are you aware, General, that the whole of Junot’s corps is close to the advanced body you now see, amounting to, at least, 23,000 men, a large portion of which is cavalry?’ The attack was instantly called off, with many men reflecting bitterly on how close their brigadier had again come to destroying them.

The following day, the Light Division stopped just outside Santarem. There was a causeway leading to a bridge across the River Maior ahead of them, and it became clear that the French were prepared to defend it, having wheeled guns up to a position where they could bring a withering flank fire on anyone attempting the crossing. The river thus became the new demarcation line between the forces, for the Light Division was to stop in this area for several weeks, through the worst of the winter weather, while Masséna made up his mind whether to go forward or back.

Craufurd had been making representations to Horse Guards for some time about the need for more troops, and while in Arruda, a further two companies of the 95th (one each from the 2nd and 3rd Battalions) had been made over to him. They had found themselves unable to march to the division’s standards, one officer noting, ‘The company with which I had just arrived were much distressed to keep pace with the old campaigners – they made a tolerable scramble for a day or two, but by the time they arrived at the lines the greater part had been obliged to be mounted.’

The men of the 1st Battalion had already assumed the air of veterans. Their clothes were rain-washed and ingrained with dirt to the point where they had gone black or brown. Their bodies were lean and sinewy, faces tanned like leather. The spare shirts, brushes and the like which had been hauled up to Talavera had since been jettisoned from
their packs as dead weight. This difference between what they had left behind and what they had become loomed increasingly large in the minds of those men who had sailed out in May 1809.

Simmons, who had delighted in the veteran’s reputation he had earned in the battalion, found himself reluctantly recognising that his ardour to return to service had oustripped his body’s powers to heal itself. He had come down with dysentery – that and his leg wound meant he could not keep up on the marches. He wrote to his parents, ‘Only a little while back I could run miles, always the first to go through or over anything; judge how my feelings must be hurt at so serious a difference.’

On surgeons’ advice, Simmons returned to Lisbon, a check which he knew would damage his finances. Lieutenant Harry Smith too discovered that his return to action had been premature. Although his ample means bought him a mount, he was in acute pain from the ball lodged in his heel, and resolved to go back to hospital to have it removed.

Those who stayed took over farm buildings and made themselves as comfortable as they could. In one case, only a sheet draped across a barn divided the company officers from their men. This provided the subalterns with a golden opportunity to eavesdrop, since they generally steered clear of their men during the hours of darkness, for all sorts of unfortunate incidents might befall an officer who charted too close a course to them when they were drinking. ‘The early part of their evenings was generally spent in witticisms and tales,’ one lieutenant recalled. ‘In conclusion, by way of a lullaby, some long-winded fellow commenced one of those everlasting ditties in which soldiers and sailors delight so much. They are all to the same tune, and the subject (if one may judge by the tenor of the first ninety-eight verses!) was battle, murder, or sudden death.’

Captain O’Hare knew well enough that the peace of his company was best ensured by keeping close tabs on its consumption of alcohol. His suspicions being aroused one morning by the number of soldiers who still seemed inebriated, he discovered and smashed a still they had set up in one of the outhouses. On another occasion, he was woken at night by the drunken ramblings of Private Tom Crawley, one of Costello’s friends, and decided the man was boozing too much, even by his own rather liberal standards. Crawley’s gin ration was stopped – under normal circumstances each soldier had his blackjack filled with the early-evening meal, no mean ration since these cups held half a
pint. ‘Had sentence of death been pronounced, it could not have sounded more harsh,’ Costello recalled of the moment the quartermaster refused Crawley his grog, explaining it was ‘by order of Captain O’Hare’.

Corporal Fairfoot showed himself a reliable helper for O’Hare. He managed that difficult trick of retaining the good opinion of his former messmates, while discharging his new responsibilities fairly. Although an Englishman by parentage and outlook, having lived most of his life in Hampshire, Fairfoot well understood the Irish rankers who made up the company’s toughest fighters and hardest drinkers. He had been born in Dublin and spent his childhood there, while his father’s regiment was stationed in Ireland, and appreciated all of the complexities of that place.

During these cold, wet, winter days many of the soldiers considered tobacco to be an even more vital comfort than alcohol. The rank and file used clay pipes, which helped them keep their wits about them while on long hours of sentry duty. Officers preferred cigars, consuming them voraciously. Most considered them an essential tool, whether starting one of those hard marching days at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., or spending time on some rain-swept hillside observing the enemy. ‘If a man in England … fancies that he really knows the comfort of tobacco in that shape he is very much mistaken,’ Jonathan Leach later wrote. ‘He must rise, wet to the skin and numb with cold, from the lee side of a tree or hedge where he has been shivering all night under a flood of rain, then let him light his cigar and the warmth which it imparts is incredible.’

These few comforts saw the 95th through the dying days of 1810. On Christmas Day, the officers raced their horses on the flats beside the River Maior. They were tolerably well supplied, because of their proximity to Lisbon, but nobody would have claimed that theirs was a particularly interesting duty.

During the weeks in Arruda and months outside Santarem, the officers tried to relieve the tedious routine of rounds, pickets and commands. Books were in short supply since it was most difficult for a subaltern of Rifles, slogging along on his two feet, often soaked through, to carry some little library with him. A small supply of reading matter was however available, precious volumes carried on captains’ baggage mules and passed around freely. There were some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and romantic stuff like Rousseau’s
Nouvelle Héloïse
.

Since only a few of the 95th’s officers had the education to read nov
els in French, they sought translations, particularly of plots that were set in Iberia. Lesage’s
Gil Blas of Santillane
, both as a novel translated by Tobias Smollett and as a subsequent play written in English, was a great favourite. Its setting in Salamanca and romantic twists and turns amused them greatly. They also liked to identify with the young hero’s picaresque adventures as he made his way in the world, starting penniless but eventually arriving at a position of great power and influence.
Don Quixote
was another favourite, neatly satirising the notions of chivalry by which many officers tried to live. References to this novel were so widespread that it was quite common, even among the illiterate rank and file, to refer to broken-down old horses as Rosinante (the Don’s steed) and to the objects of their romantic fantasies as Dulcinea.

Some even conceived the idea of acting out the texts they had available: having heard from some French deserters in Arruda that their officers were putting on little skits and plays, the Light Division men decided to do the same. Shakespeare became the basis for the early dramatic fumblings of several subalterns.

Craufurd soon became bored with all this. He also missed his wife and children deeply, frequently succumbing to what he called the ‘blue devils’. He wrote to them of his ‘miserable position’, and his inability to serve their interests while living in this state. He resolved to ask Wellington’s leave for a trip home.

The rules of seniority – under which commands were doled out on the basis of time served in rank – had already been violated by Craufurd’s appointment. His substantive rank was only colonel: a brigade was properly a major general’s post and a division one for a lieutenant general. Wellington had rebuffed Craufurd’s legion critics, particularly after the Coa, and worked the military secretarial system judiciously to keep him in position. After receiving several requests for permission to visit home, the general at last wrote to Craufurd, ‘I would beg you to reflect whether, considering the situation in which you stand in the Army, it is desirable that you should go home upon leave. Adverting to the number of General Officers senior to you in the Army, it has not been easy to keep you in your command.’

Such language from the aloof and conservative Wellington was highly unusual. Craufurd’s response to Wellington’s ‘begging’ was typical: he wrote back expressing the hope that other officers might be satisfied, ‘without reducing me to the painful alternative which I have at present to contemplate.’ In short, he was ready to resign. Many in the
Army, including senior figures at Horse Guards as well as harassed company commanders, would have been only too pleased if the offer had been accepted – but the secret of Craufurd’s hold over Wellington was precisely that the Commander of Forces was a little in awe of this man of such prickly independence and powerful personality.

Early in February, having got his way, Craufurd left Portugal. His timing was as bad in his leave arrangements at it had been on the Coa the previous July, for the Light Division was about to enter a period of frenetic marching and fighting. The Light Brigade and then Division had lived in his dark shadow for the best part of two years and their initial reaction to his departure was relief. Captain Leach noted gleefully in his journal: ‘Brigadier General Craufurd has sailed for England. God be praised we have got rid of the Vagabond.’

On 5 March 1811, a typical sluggy Portuguese dawn brought an end to the outlying picket’s night. They were cold and wet during this apparently everlasting Portuguese winter, and through the murk they could just make out the French pickets standing at their usual stations. But as the riflemen of 2nd Company studied those sentries it slowly became clear that they were not moving. One or two intrepid fellows crawled forward and discovered that the French had left behind scarecrows – straw men in greatcoats and shakoes, armed only with broomsticks.

Masséna’s withdrawal did not come as a surprise to Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith. For some days, French deserters had been coming across. Since a couple of weeks before there had been ‘constant reports brought in that they cannot remain much longer in their present positions as the soldiery are suffering sad privations’. The day before, on 4 March, two deserters were received by the 95th, who said ‘the enemy are burning everything they cannot remove, such as gun carriages, carts etc’.

The earlier accounts had been sufficient to bring Beckwith back from Lisbon. He had gone there to try to recuperate from another bout of the intermittent fever that so many had acquired in the Guadiana. But the colonel rallied himself from his sickbed and travelled back with George Simmons, who hoped he was strong enough at last to keep up with his company. It afforded the young subaltern a chance to foster ‘the greatest friendship’ with his commanding officer and now patron.

Craufurd’s absence meant the Light Division was without a commander. Beckwith was in charge of the Right Brigade, comprising the Right Wing of his own battalion and the 43rd Light Infantry. The two
wings served in different brigades, each under one of two majors serving with the 1st/95th.

The riflemen wasted little time in rushing forward into Santarem and were shocked by what they found. Any guilt about their own foraging activities in Arruda the previous autumn was quickly forgotten, for Santarem had been well and truly ransacked. Simmons gave his impressions: ‘the few miserable inhabitants, moving skeletons … many streets quite impassable with filth and rubbish, with an occasional man, mule or donkey rotting and corrupting and filling the air with pestilential vapours’. Another officer felt it ‘looked like a city of the plague, represented by empty dogs and empty houses’.

Masséna had seen his army dwindle from sixty-five thousand when it entered Portugal to just over forty thousand as it left. The difference was accounted for by battle, sickness, desertion, capture and the wrath of the Portuguese militia. He had lost almost six thousand of his fourteen thousand horses, too. The remaining beasts had almost all been necessary to haul back his artillery, scores of surplus wagons being consigned to the flames. His army was ready enough to retreat to Spain, and could still defend itself, but the weeks of starvation had left the French soldiery undisciplined and resentful. As they moved back towards the frontier, many stragglers took the opportunity to visit revenge on the locals. One French officer remarked, ‘The labours that beset our soldiers, the obstacles they encountered, the hunger that devoured them, excited the worst feelings in them; their hearts hardened as their bodies weakened; they had no more pity for those they pursued, they accused them of their own faults; they killed them if they put up resistance.’

The 95th, following close behind, may not have suffered quite the same privations, but they were hungry too. The Peninsular Army had become chronically short of cash during the winter. When the Army could not afford the weekly pay parade, it was deferred for one week. As they set off in pursuit of the French, Wellington’s soldiers were three months in arrears. The riflemen moved through Santarem with alacrity: they were keen to catch up with some lame Frenchie or a dead one – it didn’t matter so long as he was fresh and hadn’t been stripped by the locals. They knew that every soldier would be carrying some coin about him, hoarded for the last extreme, hidden in a little belt worn under his shirt or secreted somewhere else about his person.

For two weeks after the French quit Santarem, there were actions of
some sort almost every day between the enemy rearguard and the Rifles. Once Marshal Ney and his 6th Corps, the Light Bobs’ old enemies from the frontier, took charge of the rearguard, its operations were conducted with great skill. Each day, the lumbering beast of the French Army would turn around and face its pursuers. Sometimes they would engage, sometimes not. Each time the British passed through a Portuguese village, a new outrage would greet them: hundreds of mules deliberately lamed by having their hamstrings cut by the French; Portuguese peasants beside the road, their bellies slit open; a man left to die slowly under a huge boulder placed upon him by several sadistic soldiers. With every sight of this kind, the riflemen felt entitled to deal a little more roughly with any Frenchman they chanced upon.

During the first proper action, at Pombal, on 11 March, two men of O’Hare’s company had got into a heated argument over the warm body of a Frenchman one of them had shot. ‘Go kill a Frenchman for yourself!’ one private had shouted at the other.

Costello and some of the other men had the good fortune to take a French officer’s baggage horse. Among the more solvent officers, there was always a ready purchaser for a beast of this kind, and the contents of its bags were soon sold off too. A swift sale of the prize allowed O’Hare to give each man six dollars – a sum in Spanish coin equivalent to a little over a shilling, enough to keep them in wine for several days.

The following day, they had come up with Ney’s boys again at Redinha. For many in the 95th, there was an exhilaration about leaving behind the sodden mire of winter quarters and being in action again: ‘It was a sunshiny morning, and the red coats and pipeclayed belts and glittering of men’s arms in the sun looked beautiful. I felt a pleasure which none but a soldier so placed can feel.’ O’Hare, being the senior captain, claimed the post of honour at the head of the column, leading off the attack towards a wooded ridge.

On these occasions the Rifle companies deployed in set-piece fashion. They would come up a road, marching three abreast. When the enemy were sighted they would either be told off in companies, each given their task by the major commanding Right Wing, or would form into column of companies, moving a little closer to their objective in this formation.

Coming closer to the enemy’s
voltigeurs
, normally a few hundred yards away, the company commander would give the order to extend,
and the bugler relay it with a distinctive call. The files (a pair of men in each case) would then move apart – anything from two to six paces between each file, depending on the nature of the terrain and how numerous their foe. As soon as this advance came close enough to the enemy to fire with effect, the front man in each file would be ordered to stop, the rear man run past him about six paces, drop down, aim at his target and fire. The subaltern or sergeant commanding the section would then call out or blow a whistle and the first rank would get up and rush past those who had just fired, while they reloaded. Within each company, the two halves or platoons might also be stopping and starting in the same way, the whole moving forward with pounding feet, whistle blows and a steady, crackling fire of rifles. Advancing up to the French rearguard, most of the Light Division adopted skirmishing tactics too, for the red-coated battalions – the 43rd and 52nd – had learned to dissolve the rigid lines used by normal battalions when the terrain and tactical situation allowed it. Their men, and the
Cacadores
, were also using the protection of ground and aiming their shots.

It was tough, physical work, particularly if, as at Rehinha, the skirmish followed a march of many miles. Every man also needed to feel complete confidence in his mate – the rear rank man with the front one of each file – since a carelessly aimed shot might easily claim a friend. The same went for the subalterns commanding Left and Right platoons and for the company commanders, one with the other.

At Redinha, Lieutenant Harry Smith was commanding 2nd Company, Captain Leach being ill. His men deployed beside O’Hare’s as they worked up towards the French-held ridge line. Smith was eager to prove his worth in this post – few officers in the battalion radiated ambition more intensely. When he moved his company ahead of O’Hare’s and suffered a local counter-attack from the French, the old Irish captain did nothing to ease his distress. Smith recorded angrily, ‘I sent to my support, O’Hare, to move up to me. The obstinate old Turk would not, and so I was obliged to come back, and had most unnecessarily five or six men wounded.’ Perhaps O’Hare had been waiting for an order from his major. Perhaps he just didn’t like young subalterns in a hurry.

When, eventually, the two companies pushed through the little town and saw off the French, riflemen soon fell upon their wounded. Costello was disgusted to spy two buglers fighting one another for the right to rob a wounded French officer. One tried to settle the matter by
pulling a knife and tearing at the stricken man’s shirt so as to find his money belt, but he stabbed the officer in the process. ‘It was with difficulty that I restrained myself from shooting the owner of the knife,’ wrote Costello, ‘but then he told me it was an accident.’

Flushed with battle, three months in arrears of pay, and with little hope of seeing their own supply train as they advanced so rapidly, the riflemen wanted to pillage food and drink as well as coin. They were not inclined to be too generous with their spoils either: any man who held back in action, or went to the rear with a wounded comrade for rather too long, was in danger of being labelled a skulker by his messmates.

That evening Costello and several others cooked up their spoils after the Combat of Redinha. Private Humphrey Allen reappeared and tried to join them, ‘but was refused because he had gone out of action with the wounded’. Having sent Allen packing with some choice language, the 3rd Company men chomped away and thought nothing further of the matter until they heard a shot in the distance, followed by a heavy exhange between the two sides’ pickets.

Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith raced down to investigate the firing, only to discover Private Allen was the cause of it. On being rebuffed by his mess, he had walked down to the outlying picket, chosen a French sentry and killed him. When Beckwith asked why, Allen replied, ‘Why sir, I arnt had nought to eat these two days and thought as how I might find summit in the Frencher’s knapsack.’

Two days later, they were in action again, at Cazal Noval. Once again, Ney had made his dispositions wisely. Wearing his dark-blue coat, red hair visible beneath his cocked hat, Ney could be relied upon to appear at the key moment. The troops around him drew new inspiration from this leadership. ‘The slightest position offering any advantage was occupied,’ Sub-Lieutenant Marcel wrote. ‘If there was a gun shot at five in the morning, the Marshal would appear at the post of the sentry who’d fired it; if a man was wounded in the rearguard company of
voltigeurs
, he’d make sure that he wasn’t abandoned. “With the redhead we can be calm,” said the soldiers.’

It was rather different in the Light Division. Just before Redinha, Wellington had appointed Major General Sir William Erskine as acting commander
vice
Craufurd. Erskine was so short-sighted that some said he could see no further than the head of his horse. Wellington even doubted Erskine’s sanity, but felt unable to sack him because of his
political connections. Erskine, in theory at least, was a commander of horse, but as Wellington pithily observed, ‘He is very blind, which is against him at the head of the cavalry, but very cautious.’ The last characteristic seemed to be a faint sort of recommendation. In action at Cazal Noval, he proved not just cautious but quite incapable. The Light Division was checked with ninety-four casualties, including two officers and three soldiers of the 95th killed.

The 95th’s dead included the commander of the battalion’s Left Wing. He had fallen with a shot through the lungs, and when George Simmons ran to his help, frothing blood was coming from his mouth, a sign the one-time apprentice surgeon knew all too well. ‘Major Stewart, as many others have done, asked me if he was mortally wounded,’ Simmons jotted in his journal. ‘I told him he was. He thanked me, and died the day following.’

It was perfectly obvious to the rank and file that Erskine was a bungler, and they soon began referring to him as ‘Ass-skin’. The French, knowing how well Ney brought them away from some difficult situations, considered the British pursuit ‘timid’ and poorly conducted. Wellington too had drawn conclusions from these affairs and soon began exercising a closer personal supervision of the Light Division, appearing more often at the head of the Army.

With these skirmishes between French rear and British advance guards, many of the riflemen were confronted with the effects of their handiwork for the first time. At the Coa or Busaco, the British had been falling back. But in March 1811 they were advancing and often a rifleman who potted his Frenchman soon stood over him. Rushing forward at Cazal Noval, Ned Costello picked his target: ‘My blood was up because he once aimed at me, his ball whizzing close by as I approached, so when I got within fifty yards of him, I fired. I was beside him in an instant. He had fallen in the act of loading, the shot having entered his head … A few quick turns of his eyes as they rolled their dying glances on mine turned my whole blood within me. An indescribable uneasiness came over me, and I reproached myself as his destroyer.’ The rifleman gave his victim a swig of wine from his canteen, easing his dying moments as he hoped someone might one day do for him.

Costello’s feelings were all the more perturbed when he realised that the soldier he had killed was hanging back to try to protect his wounded brother, who lay nearby. When the battle was over, he went back to
find them but discovered both Frenchmen, ‘naked as they were born, perforated with innumerable wounds, no doubt administered by the Portuguese. I turned back to camp in a very poor humour with myself.’