Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (14 page)

Reynier was now engaged in a general withdrawal. A charge by two squadrons of French cavalry onto Drummond’s flank helped hold the British up for a while, as did another downpour. The dense sheet of rain dampened down the firing and also allowed the 17
ème Léger
and 70
ème
to break contact with the British, running back into the gloom.

By the end of the day, Reynier’s men had paid a heavy price – suffering casualties of 61 officers and 689 men, as well as having 186 soldiers taken prisoner. Wellington reacted with the unbridled gratitude of a man who had feared he might be presiding over a fiasco, but discovered that everything had turned out better than he could have hoped. He wrote exultingly to a colleague: ‘our loss is much less than one would have supposed possible, scarcely two hundred men … really these attacks in columns against our lines are very contemptible.’ The disparity between the losses was even more dramatic than he imagined, for the British casualties did not exceed 162, and the 95th, for example, had just two men killed. In short, Beckwith’s men stood against five times their number and inflicted five times as many casualties.

Something much more subtle than the bludgeon fire of the British line had been demonstrated at Sabugal. Of the five French colonels who led their regiments against the Light Division, two were killed and two were seriously wounded, only one remaining unscathed. There had been heavy casualties among company officers too – all evidence of carefully aimed fire. The British battalions had been handled with the utmost tactical flexibility: at times much of the 43rd had been skirmishing, at others the 95th had formed a firing line on their flank. Beckwith had deployed his shooters in a variety of combinations with the 43rd fighting and manoeuvring in small sub-divisions. His leadership, considered inspirational by everyone who had witnessed it, had shown that soldiers led by an officer who was both expert and humane would follow him to triumph, even in an apparently hopeless situation requiring the greatest steadiness.

On the day of Sabugal, Brigadier Craufurd had been walking the streets of Lisbon. He had just returned from England and had heard rumours of his division’s battles in March. He wrote to his wife, insisting he was unrepentant about having taken leave: ‘If anything brilliant has been done, it will be to a certain degree mortifying, but I am pre
pared for it … the happiness of having seen you and our dear little ones, after so long a separation, continues, and will continue giving me renewed energy and strength of mind.’

Craufurd’s ability to put a brave face on the events of his absence began to crumble when reports started flying about after Sabugal, having taken some days to reach the Portuguese capital. It became obvious that the action had caused considerable éclat, the Light Division and Beckwith having gained a fame from it which March’s skirmishing did not provide.

A few days later, when Wellington came to write his official dispatch, a document that would be published in the newspapers, he reflected further on the events at Sabugal. He was certainly not a man given to hyperbole, but it was to be one of the most effusive dispatches he ever composed: ‘I consider the action that was fought by the Light Division, by Col. Beckwith’s brigade principally, with the whole of the 2d Corps, to be one of the most glorious that British troops were ever engaged in.’ As for the leader of the division’s Right Brigade, who still technically only held the post of commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 95th, Wellington wrote, ‘It was impossible for any officer to conduct himself with more ability and gallantry than Col. Beckwith.’

This was a bitter pill indeed for Craufurd, for neither he personally, nor the division whilst under his command was ever to receive such words from Wellington. Craufurd could not contain his feelings when he finally admitted to his beloved wife and most intimate confidante that ‘it would be stupid to pretend to persuade you that I did not feel any regret that the events, which have taken place in my absence, had not taken place until after my return.’

The Light Division’s fame combined with its losses to enhance the prospects for the advancement of its officers. Beckwith was raised from lieutenant colonel to colonel, a step that would eventually remove him from the command of his battalion. On 11 April, Peter O’Hare was also given an in-field promotion, or brevet, to the rank of major. This meant higher pay, and priority in promotion to a major’s post once one was vacant. Indeed, the death of Major Stewart in March had created such a gap: the only way that O’Hare could have been thwarted would have been if some officer already in possession of a major’s commission (for example, in the 2nd or 3rd Battalion of the 95th) had outmanoeuvred him. But Beckwith appears to have observed a rule that the promotions, wherever possible, should be made within the battalion and
on the basis of gallantry or seniority (both in O’Hare’s case), rather than allowing an outsider to come in, by purchase or otherwise. This took account of the proud and prickly nature of his battalion’s officers and the difficulty that any non-veteran might experience in commanding their loyalty.

Sabugal was O’Hare’s last battle at the head of the 3rd Company. He would now serve as a major, commanding one of the two wings into which the battalion had been divided. Had the position been sold, it would have cost someone almost
£
3,000. But O’Hare had achieved the step through serving his time, hard fighting and being lucky enough to stay alive. In making this promotion, he had managed something so difficult – for the average battalion carried five captains for each major – that even many of the better-connected officers in the Peninsular Army had trouble achieving it.

As for the more privileged class, they had come to look beyond the regiment for their advancement. Duncan Arbuthnott, killed at Sabugal, had been almost the only aristocrat to defy this pattern – for he had continued to serve with his company and had lost his life in doing so, whereas others among the handful of landed types who had sailed with the battalion soon concluded that a staff appointment was a more certain route to promotion. Such a post would locate them closer to men of influence and a little further from the bullets. Lieutenant Harry Smith (from a landed but not titled family) became ‘brigade major’ or principal staff officer to the commander of the Light Division’s Left Brigade at about this time. Captain, the Honourable James Stewart, while technically remaining in command of the 1st Company, actually served in a series of staff appointments after arriving in Portugal. Dudley St Leger Hill had left the 95th in August 1810, gaining two steps in rapid succession by going via the West Indian Rangers to the Portuguese
Cacadores
.

Captain Hercules Pakenham, of the influential Anglo-Irish Longford clan, adopted all of the black arts used by moneyed families to advance an Army career. During his first seven years in the Army, he had changed commission six times in order to boost his rank as quickly as possible. His brother was Colonel Edward Pakenham, the Deputy Adjutant General at Headquarters and, as such, had Wellington’s ear. Young Hercules was appointed Assistant Adjutant General, serving in the 3rd Division not long after the 1809 campaign started.

In August 1810 he made the jump to major by buying a commision
in the 7th West Indian Regiment. Of course, he never intended to present himself in that poxy, pestilential, Caribbean hellhole where they served. The usual form among richer officers was to buy a step in the West Indian, African or some other garrison regiment, and progress to a more salubrious corps during the one to two years after purchase, before a failure to appear in front of one’s commanding officer was deemed bad form. Although Hercules had served several years in the 95th, and was well liked by many of its soldiers, his loyalties were only to himself: he wrote home to his father that April that ‘supposing I got into the most desirable Regt. in the service, I should be happy to leave it the moment I could get a step.’

It was possible to buy commissions in the 95th, but the regiment had long harboured a prejudice against such advancement, preferring the principle of seniority. This had led one ambitious officer to abandon it several years earlier with the words: ‘As to remaining an English full pay lieutenant for ten or twelve years! not for the universe! … rather let me command Esquimauxs [
sic
] than be a subaltern of Rifles forty years old.’ Battle losses since the arrival in Portugal two years earlier created more vacancies and therefore promised more rapid advancement, as George Simmons constantly reassured his parents. At the same time, they hardened regimental officers against accepting newcomers and convinced aristocrats that a safer route to advancement could be found elsewhere.

As for the possible consequences of buying rank in the 95th and throwing one’s weight around, one need not have looked further than the case of Lieutenant Jonathan Layton. He had sailed with the others in 1809 and served in Leach’s company. In Leach’s absence, Harry Smith had commanded the company at Pombal and Redinha. On Smith’s appointment to the staff, Layton took over, even commanding 2nd Company at Sabugal. Beckwith trusted him to handle the company because Layton was a very tough man, a real ‘soldier of fortune’. Layton had no difficulty killing: in fact, he had killed a captain in his own regiment.

When the battalion was about to depart on foreign service in 1808, Layton had argued violently with Captain Brodie Grant, a wealthy officer just twenty-one years old. Layton’s company had marched to Harwich the next day to embark, but Grant caught them up. Layton and Grant argued until, pistols being produced, they determined to fight a duel in a nearby field. Grant was killed and Layton went on trial
at Chelmsford Assizes, charged with manslaughter. He was eventually acquitted through lack of evidence.

It cannot be said that society knew its own mind on the subject of duelling. The Duke of York tried to use his influence, while at the head of the Army, to stamp it out. A contest of this kind had caused one officer of the 95th to leave the regiment. In Layton’s case, however, Colonel Beckwith had turned a blind eye, considering Grant the more blameworthy of the two parties. But Layton’s fate was to serve on without the possibility of promotion.

Not long after Sabugal, Captain Jonathan Leach, restored to health, came back to his company and Layton once again resumed his subaltern’s duties. The command of 3rd Company, however, had been left vacant by O’Hare’s promotion.

By early May, the French were back at the frontier, with the Light Division assuming its old positions on the Beira uplands. An enemy garrison had been left behind the new British lines in Almeida, the Portuguese fortress captured by Masséna the previous year, and Wellington placed himself ready to block any attempt by the marshal to relieve it. The armies were ready to do battle again, and the 95th were once more destined to be centre stage.

The journey from Lisbon to the Beira frontier was an arduous one, taking even the most determined traveller more than one week. Being a cross and anxious fellow, it must have seemed to last for ever for Brigadier Robert Craufurd. Those coming the other way brought reports of an imminent general action. Having missed Sabugal and the events of March, he certainly did not intend to be absent. Among the soldiers of the Army, the Light Division was making its name in small battles – affairs of the outposts, advanced guard actions – but home in Old England such fights hardly registered with the public. A distinguished role at a battle like Busaco was another matter. While at home on leave, Craufurd had been satisfied to learn that his family and friends all knew of his part in it, since Lord Wellington’s dispatch had featured in the newspapers. Just as blood money was far less likely to be voted for the soldiers in some skirmish like Redinha, so the real baubles or plums served up to senior officers came from the public acclamation gained after victory in a large set-piece battle.

Wellington’s Army had taken up a line in front of the Coa, on the upland plateau that marked the frontier. The terrain there was strewn with boulders, ferns and thorns, cultivated only in scattered patches and bounded by deeply carved valleys. There were considerable dangers in fighting with a steep gorge and rushing river to your back, as Craufurd had learned the previous July. In order to allow two possible routes of withdrawal, then, Wellington had extended his divisions across a broad frontage of several miles. A smaller river, the Duas Casas, ran in front of the British position, carving a little valley in which the town of Fuentes d’Onoro sat. To the left of Fuentes, the ground gave its defenders a formidable advantage, a natural rampart
which any attacker would have to assail. The village itself was barricaded and ready for defence. To its right, there were woods around the river bed and a couple of villages (Pozo Bello and Nava de Haver) on rising ground behind them which the British also prepared to defend. The Light Division was being held behind the centre of this position and slightly to the right as a reserve.

Craufurd appeared near Fuentes early in the morning of 4 May. As he approached his battalions there was a cry of ‘Three cheers for General Craufurd’, and it was answered. ‘I found my Division under arms, and was received with the most hearty appearance of satisfaction on the countenances of the men and officers, and three cheers from each Regiment as I passed along its front,’ the proud Black Bob told his wife. Why had these men whom he had so often flogged and insulted cheered? There was an element of good military form in greeting a returning commander, no doubt. But the rank and file had tasted life under General Erskine and it had not been good. They blamed Ass-skin for their hunger on the various occasions when they had gone without food or money. They remembered that under similar circumstances in 1809, at least Craufurd had relaxed his own strict rules in allowing them to kill livestock. More important than that, though, they had the sense that Craufurd attended keenly to his duty, keeping an ever-vigilant eye on his outposts, often being near the action, whereas Erskine had either been present and useless, or lost, as he was in the fog at Sabugal.

Despite the shouted acclamations, the underlying attitude of many did not change. Among the company officers in particular, Craufurd was still detested. This did not affect either the brigadier’s desire to grind down those who resisted his orders, or his way of doing things. So the likes of the 95th’s Leach were set to resume their battle of wills with him soon enough.

On 5 May, Marshal Masséna launched a general attack against Wellington’s long line. Early in the morning, French skirmishers appeared in the woods to the (British) right of Fuentes, where Right Wing of the 95th was manning a line of pickets. The riflemen began their usual work, taking aim from behind trees, firing and reloading. Their enemy tried to press forward, losing a man here and there, but the attack was not pushed with real vigour. The riflemen soon discovered why, as a blaring of bugles and a shouting of orders drew them back towards their supports.

Unseen by them, Masséna had launched his attack by ordering his
cavalry to make its way, concealed, through the woods in front of Pozo Bello and Nava de Haver. They succeeded in their aim, mounting up as they emerged from the treeline and surprising the stretched British regiments in that area. Some 3,500 French cavalry drove about a quarter of that number of British horsemen before them and began falling on the infantry.

Faced with this crisis, Wellington sent the Light Division about a mile towards his right flank, supporting his beleaguered division by drawing the enemy off them. He soon made the decision to withdraw his men from Nava de Haver and Pozo Bello, where they had been covering his southern withdrawal route out of the highlands. The British commander was shortening or redeploying his line, at the same time refusing a flank – making it into an ‘L’ or elbow shape with the village of Fuentes at the bend and with his right drawn back on the higher ground behind.

Early that morning, there were thousands of French horsemen careering about the open scrub as the Light Division formed up. The French dragoons and
chasseurs
were flushed with triumph, but they were also unsupported for the moment by their own infantry. When they charged the redcoats, they were met with volleys of musketry. At moments of extreme danger the British battalions were forming square, presenting a wall of bayonets that horses were too afraid to charge. The 43rd and 52nd moved into this maelstrom and anchored themselves on the plain, giving the threatened regiments a chance to withdraw past them, towards Wellington’s main defensive position.

A good cavalry commander – of which the French had plenty – knew he could pretty much make a meal of skirmishers, scattering them into clumps and riding them down at his leisure. In order to avoid this fate with thousands of enemy horses around them, Right Wing of the 95th needed to demonstrate skills of drill and movement that might not shame the Guards, for a few men executing their turn too late or falling behind would soon create an opening for the French cavaliers. As the riflemen emerged from the woods they assembled in column of companies. Moving forward, onto the open plain, they ‘formed column at quarter distance, ready to form square at any moment if charged by cavalry’. This ‘quarter column’ meant having about fifteen feet between the heels of one company and the toes of the one that followed it, transforming them into a mass, easily able to stop and face outwards, presenting a wall of bayonets if charged.

As it happened, Right Wing did not have to form square as it crossed the open ground. It was not moving out to the right like the red-coated Light Division regiments, but making its way to the main British defensive line, where the 1st Division had been formed up to create Wellington’s new left flank. The 95th marched close to the British artillery that garnished that ridge. The guns must have deterred the French horsemen, but the Rifles also showed great steadiness and purpose when the enemy’s green-clad dragoons did come cantering around them. ‘While we were retiring with the order and precision of a common field day, they kept dancing around us, and every instant threatening a charge without daring to execute it,’ one officer recalled.

Reaching the main line, the Green Jackets filed between the Guards who formed the mainstay of the 1st Division and lined up behind them. At one point, a couple of riflemen calmly walked forward, past their officers, to try to pick a good concealed sniping position where they might hit one of the officers leading the French forward. When one British commander asked where the riflemen were going, an NCO replied that it was ‘for amusement’. One of these riflemen, named Flynn, was a good specimen of the hard-fighting Irish who inspired endless comment among the 95th’s officers. Flynn was a good shot and seemed pretty much indifferent whether he was killing a man or something for the pot. At Sabugal, he had been leading a running Frenchman with his rifle and suddenly switched his aim to something scampering in the grass. When one of the subalterns asked him what he was doing, Flynn replied: ‘Ah your Honour, we can kill a Frenchman any day but it’s not always we can bag a hare for your Honour’s supper.’

An hour or two passed and French cannon, having moved up, began to play on the 1st Division, as their infantry tried to turn the British position. The French knew that if they could get around the extreme right of the new British line, they would be able to cut Wellington’s regiments off from their only remaining withdrawal route, via the same bridge over the Coa that they had attacked in July 1810. The problem for the French commanders was that they would have to press their attack through a rocky gully, where the Turon, a little stream running parallel with the Coa, ran. Any attack through the Turon would have to be made using skirmishing tactics.

Seeing the danger, Wellington ordered British light infantry to contest the gully. Five companies of the 95th were sent out under Major Peter O’Hare and a couple of light companies of the Guards under
Lieutenant Colonel Hill. They marched about half a mile until they were by the Turon stream, in a boulder-strewn valley, taking up positions in some clumps of trees. But while the Rifles that day had shown a steadiness in close-order marching that would not have disgraced the Guards, the results would be very different when the Guards were required to show their skill as light troops alongside the 95th.

With a chain of French light troops coming towards them, an exchange of fire was soon under way. When the British 1st Dragoons cantered up on the riflemen’s left, ready to charge some French horse, there was one of those curious outbreaks of civilised consensus that was peculiar to the Anglo-French Peninsular fight: ‘This was the first charge of cavalry most of us had seen and we were all much interested in it. The French skirmishers extended against us seemed to feel the same, and by general consent both parties suspended fire while the affair of the dragoons was going on.’

The crackle of rifles and musketoons then resumed, with both sides standing their ground, using cover while they reloaded. O’Hare’s men – something under three hundred of them – were soon given an order to withdraw, since it was becoming apparent that the French frontal attack on the 1st Division would not be pressed home and that the enemy light troops in the Turon had effectively been checked. The Rifles began falling back from tree to tree, firing and loading, front-rank man eyeing his rear-rank man, a rhythmic dance in which every Green Jacket knew his place.

Breaking off the engagement in skirmish order was a difficult undertaking when there were so many French cavalry loitering about. To compound the danger, folds of the ground or trees might conceal the approach of horse until there was no time to react. One officer of the 95th turned around to see that ‘a company of the Guards, who did not get out of the wood at the time we retired (from mistake I suppose) were sharply attacked.’

Some squadrons of the 13
ème Chasseurs
à
Cheval
, French light cavalry, came cantering into view, and seeing the Guards were running about in all directions, set spurs to their horses, trumpeters sounding the charge. Lieutenant Colonel Hill’s men were unable to form square. Many tried running for it, but the horsemen were soon among them, bringing their sabres down onto the heads and arms of the desperate infantry. The Guards tried to rally into ‘hives’, small defensive clumps in which the men faced outwards with their bayonets, but it was too
late for many. Seventy were killed or wounded, Hill and nineteen others captured and led back to the French lines. Meanwhile, the companies of the 95th engaged that day suffered no fatalities and fewer than a dozen wounded between them.

If the Rifles had been able to skirmish with great success as well as little loss, the last great drama of 5 May was to be a much more sanguinary affair. Since early that morning, the 71st and 79th had been under attack from thousands of Frenchmen in the village of Fuentes d’Onoro itself. The 71st was a Scottish regiment that had been retrained one year before in light-infantry duties; the 79th were Highlanders, the Cameronians, still proudly kilted.

By early afternoon, when the action on the Light Division’s flank was petering out, the French were throwing yet another wave of infantry into the village, its defenders having fought doggedly for six or seven hours. ‘The town presented a shocking sight,’ one observer wrote, ‘our Highlanders lay dead in heaps … the French grenadiers lay in piles of ten and twenty together.’

The Scots, short of ammunition, were driven from house to house until a few score of the 79th were holding out in a churchyard near the British end of the town, supported by the 71st in nearby houses. Wellington could not afford to lose this critical point, at the elbow of his two defensive lines, and he ordered a counter-attack, sending a brigade of Picton’s 3rd Division into action.

They charged into the narrow streets and the French troops, momentarily caught with walls or piles of bodies to their backs, fought desperately with the bayonet. The remnants of the 79th, emerging from their churchyard, set about them with the passion of men bent on revenge, and when their colonel was hit and fell, this anger turned into an unstoppable blood lust. ‘Such was the fury of the 79th’, wrote a member of Wellington’s staff who later went to investigate, ‘that they literally destroyed every man they could catch.’ In this mayhem, no quarter was given: cornered Frenchmen pleading for their lives were swiftly bayoneted by the Highlanders.

By late afternoon, with the guns falling silent in the village too, some companies of the 95th were sent down to pick their way through the narrow lanes choked with corpses, and post themselves as lookouts on the far side of Fuentes. A few French officers, coming forward with a flag of truce to evacuate the wounded, struck up conversation with the riflemen. Some of the officers recognised one another, for their old foe
General Ferey had been one of those leading his regiments in the desperate fight of that afternoon. Flasks of brandy were passed around and they reflected on that day’s terrible cost; how many of their friends and comrades had drunk deep of the ‘fountain of honour’ at Fuentes d’Onoro. The British had suffered 1,452 casualties and the French 2,192 during the day’s slaughter.