Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (20 page)

Smith and Vandeleur did what they believed Headquarters expected of them:

‘The fate of this man excited much commiseration,’ according to Costello. ‘Because of his previous good character, and the fact that he had marched as a prisoner for many days, it was commonly thought he would be pardoned.’ Everybody had learnt the lesson that they were intended to learn from February’s firing squad. Surely someone would step forward and say a few good words for Almond, saving him as Hodgson had been saved – but who? At the time of his desertion, his company had been under the command of George Simmons, a junior lieutenant. As for O’Hare or Cameron, they were hard men all right, but they lacked the connections to feel confident about putting their heads above the parapet in such a situation. Only someone with the stature of a Beckwith could have saved Almond, and he was confined to a sickbed.

On 9 March, the division halted in Castello de Vide, a little hillside spa town in the northern part of Alemtejo Province. Almond’s execution had been fixed by the court martial for the next day. Costello found himself, with several comrades, guarding the prisoner. They were playing cards and chatting among themselves when the provost arrived. There was to be no pardon: the sentence would be carried out the following morning at ten.

Almond sent for the 5th Company pay sergeant and asked for his arrears. Indeed, the prisoner was insistent on the point that the execution could not be carried out until these several pounds had been received. These were made over, one of the guards being sent out to
buy some good wine with it. What remained was signed over to Almond’s mother. The prisoner then noticed that one of his keepers had worn-out shoes, so he swapped his own with him, saying, ‘They will last me as long as I shall require them.’

The following morning, 10 March, the Light Division was drawn up as ordered, to witness another execution. A muffled drum was beaten and the band played the Dead March as the prisoner was led out. It was raining a typical, damnable Portuguese winter’s rain, and the grave that had been dug for Almond was soon waterlogged. The prisoner marched up, looked into it and said, ‘Although a watery one, I shall sleep sound enough in it.’ He seemed completely composed, showing no signs of fear either in his step or in the timbre of his voice.

Almond knelt and declined the blindfold with the words, ‘There is no occasion, I shall not flinch.’ The provost, embarrassed, explained that these were the rules. As the firing party made ready, he called out to his guards of the previous night, giving each of them a word and a farewell. ‘As I nodded to him in return,’ wrote Costello, ‘I fancied it was to a dead man. And in two minutes, he was no more. The intrepid and cool manner in which he met his fate drew forth a general feeling of admiration.’ The blindfold went on at last, rifles were presented at their mark, and the damp stillness was shattered by a volley. Almond tipped back into his grave and sploshed into the muddy water like a sack of butcher’s scraps.

The French gun captain peering down the barrel of his great beast of a cannon could see enemy soldiers running across a trench, on the ridge five hundred yards or so from his position. Several nights before, the enemy had thrown up this earthen defence on the gentle rise overlooking Badajoz’s eastern wall. It was the first parallel of their siege works. Every day the gun captain and his company had been hurling heavy shot at it, trying from their platform on the city’s massive walls to flatten the insolent work of men with shovels. He watched the running figures, three of them. You could not lead running soldiers with a massive great gun in the way you did with a rifle. Instead you aimed for your target – the trench – and if you caught some member of the working parties in the process, then
ça ira
! But an experienced gun captain using the mental mechanism honed by years of practice and thousands of shots could judge very precisely the time required for the flight of his ball to a known range, add to it the moment’s delay of the powder burning from the touch hole through to the main charge and subtract from this the instant it would take running men to cover a given distance. The gun went off with an almighty thump.

Private Costello was aware of the whoosh of air just behind him and the splash of something on his jacket. He jumped down into the trench and turned around, ‘and beheld the body of Brooks, headless, but quivering with life for a few seconds before it fell … the shot had smashed and carried away the whole of his head. My jacket was bespattered with the brains.’ Costello and Tom Treacy had made it, James Brooks had not. Another man who had sailed in May 1809 with the 3rd Company was dead. Brooks was one of the many captured on the Coa in July 1810, but he had managed to escape the French. In the days
before his death, he had told Costello several times that he had dreamt of a headless corpse.

The siege of Badajoz was already proving something harder fought and more desperate for the Rifles than their action at Rodrigo three months earlier. There were three times the number of French in Badajoz for one thing – and it was thrice the fortress for another, having thicker walls, deeper ditches, the works.

On 22 March, the day after Brooks was killed, another party of riflemen was sent forward on a hazardous duty. Some French guns across the Guadiana River to their north had been playing havoc on Wellington’s first parallel. That trench ran atop the San Miguel ridge from north to south and the French on the other side of the river were able to send flanking shots right along it. The riflemen got themselves settled and waited in cover for daybreak.

As it became lighter, they chose their targets. The sentry walking along the walls, appearing now and then in the gun embrasures. The gunner preparing one of the twenty-four-pounders for the day’s work ahead. Once the word was given, the 95th began picking off anyone who showed himself near the guns. It was long-range shooting – two hundred or more yards – much further than Gairdner and his party had been firing at Rodrigo. But with careful adjustment for distance, they soon began claiming victims, one officer noting, ‘This had the desired effect; and the field pieces were withdrawn into the fort, after some of the gunners had bitten the dust.’

There were several more missions like this in the following days. Moving close to the city’s walls under cover of darkness, riflemen would dig pits for themselves and wait for dawn when any Frenchman on the ramparts was fair game. They tried to concentrate on the gun crews and this led the enemy to close up the embrasures in front of the cannon with planks or gabbions until just before the moment of firing. One French officer tried to counter the sniping by waving his hat on a stick to draw British fire and then having a party of picked shots try to kill the marksmen. This contest went on for a whole day before the French officer himself dropped, believed to be killed by a ball from the 95th. Lieutenant Simmons, who commanded such a party, wrote in his journal, ‘I was so delighted with the good practice I was making against Johnny that I kept it up from daylight till dark with forty as prime fellows who ever pulled a trigger.’

There was another obstacle to the British plans: a strong redoubt on
the San Miguel ridge called La Picurina. The task of storming it was set for the evening of 25 March and given to a brigade of the 3rd Division, but all manner of volunteers went along.

Robert Fairfoot was one of them. He’d developed a thirst for action that, on that very day, got him promoted to sergeant. Evidently there was no need for him to go. If Fairfoot kept volunteering, he’d soon be a dead sergeant. But why should a man who’d just been made up hold back and let others take the risk? That was the way they saw it. William Brotherwood, Kincaid’s old confederate in the bating of Tommy Sarsfield, went too. Four months before, he’d been promoted to corporal and, like Fairfoot, he was not a man to rest on his laurels.

The storm of the Picurina was a desperate business – much less easy than the San Francisco redoubt on 8 January – for the defenders had been able to pour fire on the British as they struggled to break in to the fort, killing or wounding half of the five hundred attackers. The surviving stormers returned to their camps in the early hours to regale their expectant messmates with the horrific tale of that night’s storm.

Sergeant Fairfoot and Corporal Brotherwood both survived. The latter, already well known to his fellow riflemen as a wag, furnished those who had not been there with a good yarn about how the Green Jacket put the redcoat in his place. Some of the 3rd Division stormers, knowing the Picurina business to be theirs, were evidently furious at the arrival of the Rifles ‘volunteers’. One of them had shouted at the riflemen to place their ladders and get out of the way. ‘Damn your eyes!’ Brotherwood had bellowed back above the din. ‘Do you think we Light Division fetch ladders for such chaps as you to climb up? Follow us.’ That was putting the lobsters down, and it was repeated among many of the 95th.

The desperate business of grinding down the city’s defences continued from one day to the next, the incessant banging of cannon filling the waking hours, giving way at night to mortars with their distinctive double bangs. There was an almost febrile air of anticipation among the British troops. Some regretted holding back at Rodrigo; the losses had not been so great and the stormers got drunk for a month on the proceeds. Others wanted to get Badajoz over with. Some officers may have thought a coming war with Russia might shorten the Iberian conflict. Alexander Cameron read in a letter from a friend in England that ‘the Russian army is 400 thousand strong on the frontiers … war commences, Boney will have too much to do to think of the Peninsula.’

It was in this atmosphere that a party of hospital convalescents marched up to the 95th’s bivouac one morning. Major O’Hare, back in good health, was in acting command of the battalion and greeted the returnees, including Sergeant Esau Jackson, who’d spent almost two years as an orderly at Belem. ‘We anticipated a scene,’ said Costello, ‘we were not deceived.’

O’Hare spotted his man: ‘Is that you, Mr Sergeant Jackson? And pray where, in God’s name, have you been for the past two years? The company have seen a little fighting during that period.’

Jackson, aware no doubt that the eyes of all were now trained on him, replied, ‘The doctors wouldn’t allow me to leave the hospital, sir.’

O’Hare looked hard at him, ‘I’m sorry for that, because all I can do is give you the choice of a court martial for absenting yourself from duty without leave, or I can have your stripes taken off.’

Jackson knew he had no choice but to surrender the sash around his waist and the stripes on his shoulder, the symbols of his rank. O’Hare turned and said loud enough for all his soldiers to hear, ‘By God, I will not have these brave fellows commanded by skulkers.’ Corporal George Ballard, another 3rd Company man, was promoted in his stead.

Had Jackson’s desire for redemption exceeded his zeal for selfpreservation, he could have volunteered for the storming party. Many of those who went were soldiers who chanced their lives because they were desperate to gain resurrection in the eyes of their comrades. Private Thomas Mayberry was one of those readying himself for the moment when men were called to assault Badajoz. Mayberry, too, had been a sergeant once, but he had been broken and flogged back in England for defrauding his company’s paybooks in order to pay off gambling debts. ‘Mayberry was held in contempt by his fellow soldiers, and ill thought of by the officers,’ according to one private. He was fed up with the taunts and abuse of messmates and superiors alike – it was not a life he wanted to carry on living.

Private James Burke was another determined to volunteer. He had been on the Forlorn Hope at Rodrigo with Fairfoot, but had neither that man’s intellect nor Mayberry’s contrition. Burke, an illiterate labourer from Kilkenny, personified the hard-fighting, fatalistic Irish in the 95th’s ranks. He was, in the damning words of one of his officers, ‘one of those wild untamable animals that, the moment the place was carried, would run to every species of excess’. In short, Burke was
bound to volunteer because he had learned it was the best way to get the fight of his life, with a fuck and the devil of a good drink at the end of it.

Among the officers, too, there were many who wanted to put themselves forward. The chances of promotion were one factor, but like the men, many of them had become convinced of the doctrine, ‘The more the danger, the more the honour.’

All of this meant that when the volunteers were finally called for, ‘so great was the rage for passports to eternity in our battalion, on that occasion, that even the officers’ servants insisted on taking their place in the ranks; and I was obliged to leave my baggage in charge of a man who had been wounded some days before.’

On 5 April, Wellington’s engineers told him that their battering of the two bastions at the south-east corner of the defences, Santa Maria and La Trinidad, had shattered them to the point where they were vulnerable to assault. Fearing the approach of a relieving French column, he gave orders for the attack, but at the last minute, concerned about the height of the rampart in front of those broken works, he postponed it for twenty-four hours. The extra time would allow the gunners to pound away, to see if they could do anything to blow away this rampart in order to make the job a little easier.

The postponement of the assault meant that the picked men waited throughout 6 April, knowing their trial would come that night. Sergeant Fairfoot, having volunteered for his fourth storm in as many months, would be part of the Forlorn Hope – so would Private Burke and Ned Costello. Major O’Hare had been given the command of the storming party, to be made up of three hundred men. Esau Jackson was not among the volunteers.

Such was the zeal to take part that some curious deals had been done between Colonel Barnard and the officers of his division. Lieutenant Willie Johnston would not be put off, so a task had been invented for him, in command of a ‘rope party’ to advance with the Forlorn Hope and pull down some defences the French had erected on top of the breach. The command of that Forlorn Hope was ultimately given to Lieutenant Horatio Harvest of the 43rd on the basis of seniority alone – precisely the nonsensical solution rejected by Craufurd in January. ‘He insisted on his right as going as senior lieutenant; so over-scrupulous was he that his permitting a junior officer to occupy this post might be construed to the detriment of his honour,’ one officer of the
95th wrote years later, evidently still angry. ‘He went, and … by his too refined sense of honour deprived another officer, probably, of that promotion which would have been the consequence of going on this duty had he survived.’

The volunteers were excused normal duties on the 6th. ‘I went to the river and had a good bathe,’ wrote Bugler Green, who joined Fairfoot in the Forlorn Hope. ‘I thought I would have a clean skin whether killed or wounded.’ It was a sunny day, one in which the soldiers were able to lie about and reflect on the trials ahead. One subaltern of the 43rd chanced upon Horatio Harvest, sitting on a bank, sucking an orange. ‘My mind is made up. I am sure to be killed,’ said Harvest, without apparent emotion.

This lull before the storm played very badly with Lieutenant Thomas Bell. He had joined the 1st/95th in February, just after Rodrigo, with two other subalterns sent out from England to replace casualties. Bell was an old acquaintance of George Simmons, having served with him in the Lincolnshire Militia – they volunteered into the 95th on the same day back in April 1809. Bell had sat the war out in Shorncliffe so far. Although he had no experience of fighting whatsoever, he arrived in the regiment with a more senior rank than a hardened warrior like John Kincaid.

Sympathetic voices would have told Bell that he would have every chance to prove himself soon, just as Gairdner had quickly shown his mettle at Rodrigo. But the gallows humour and fatalistic resignation of the 95th’s soldiers only made Bell more anxious. As the siege of Badajoz wore on, Bell’s feelings of turmoil grew unbearable.

The day also gave way to some uncomfortable meditations for O’Hare. He had been wounded before, in south America, but had somehow gone through the current Peninsular campaign with only one slight wound (at Fuentes). Did that give him the mysterious aura of a survivor, or had he already pushed his luck too far?

At around 8 p.m. the stormers fell in, prior to being given a last-minute pep talk by their officers. Lieutenant Bell chose this moment to complain of feeling sick, and to abandon his men, heading back towards his tent. A double allowance of grog was doled out to each soldier, to numb them for the business ahead. O’Hare was ill at ease. Captain Jones, of the 52nd, asked him, ‘Well O’Hare what do you think of tonight’s work?’

‘I don’t know, tonight, I think, will be my last,’ said O’Hare.

‘Tut tut man! I have the same sort of feeling, but I keep it down with a drop of this.’ Jones handed O’Hare his calabash and the old Irish major took a good draught of brandy. The Light Division stormers had formed up in some quarries about a third of a mile from the Santa Maria breach. They waited a while longer, for they were not due to move forward until 10 p.m. One more chance to peer into the gloom and talk over the objective.