Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (11 page)

For the Light Division men and Pack’s Portuguese, weeks of retreating across muddy, execrable roads were being paid back: their blood lust was up. Ney’s corps suffered almost 2,500 casualties that day, with Simon’s brigade losing the most. Elsewhere, the initial attack by Reynier’s corps had met the greatest success: its columns had reached the plateau at the highest point of the ridge and begun to deploy, and only a countercharge by Picton’s division had managed to turn the tide.

On the slope in front of Sula it was impossible to say exactly who had lost his life to the 95th, and who to the 52nd or indeed the Portuguese. But it is clear that the six battalions taken forward by Simon suffered terrible casualties among their officers. The
Légion
Hanovrienne
had nine of them killed or wounded, including eight of its twelve company commanders. The 26
ème Régiment
had twenty-one officer casualties (a little under half of those present with its two battalions). Ferey’s brigade, which had tried to follow Simon up the hill, also suffered badly: Colonel Bechaud of the 66
ème
, for example, having recovered from his chest wound in July at the Coa, received the same compliment at Busaco. These losses among leaders were the telltale symptom of well-aimed fire.

Busaco, despite this, was a fight in which traditional notions might have seemed, to a British general of conservative cast, to have given Wellington his triumph: devastating volleys at point-blank range and bayonet charges delivered with perfect timing. Even the laurels for successful skirmishing had to be shared between the 95th, Portuguese
Cacadores
and the light companies of various line battalions. The French, though, deduced a general lesson from their officer casualties: that, in the words of one staff officer, ‘the English were the only troops who were perfectly practised in the use of small arms, whence their firing was much more accurate than that of any other infantry.’ They had become ‘the best marksmen in Europe’. That this had come about could be attributed in large part to the training pioneered by the 95th’s founders and the growing influence of the system developed before the Peninsular War by General Sir John Moore at Shorncliffe – even the
Cacadores
had fallen under it, for they had been retrained by British officers, including several of the 95th.

If Beckwith and the other officers of the 95th had only a general idea of how well they had picked off the French commanders, they certainly knew that their own losses had been slight: just nine men killed and thirty-two wounded in the battalion. None of the casualties had been officers. Simon’s skirmishers had made a great deal of noise and smoke as they came up the mountain, but their effect on the crouching riflemen had been minimal. Concealment was an important factor in this, for the riflemen had become expert in this, whereas other regiments, such as the Portuguese light troops, were less experienced and so suffered more heavily. But there was something else at work here too. Just as the British Army might have its
idées fixes
about the bayonet or flog
ging, so the French had been blunted in their effectiveness by their generals’ received wisdoms about rifles and target shooting.

The French did not want to issue rifles to their men. A small-scale experiment had ended in 1807, the weapons being hard to load and their barrels fouling too easily (since they were of inferior design to the British Baker). The French also considered the rifle a very suspect thing if it just caused the soldier to sit, trying to pick off his enemy at long range, rather than close with him and decide the matter by bayonet. Napoleon’s generals understood why such a weapon might be of use in the hands of an American frontiersman, a German forester or even an Englishman, but it would not do for their own people, ruled in war as in so many other matters by Gallic passion. One leading French theorist summed up the aversion to the rifle: ‘It was an unsuitable weapon for the French soldier, and would only have suited phlegmatic, patient, assassins.’

Napoleon’s light infantry carried instead the
fusil de dragons
, a smoothbore musket slightly shorter than that of the rest of the infantry, and originally designed for mounted troops. As for the whole business of aiming, the French were in something of a muddle. The
fusil
had a fore-sight, a metal blade close to its muzzle, but no back-sight with which to align it. What’s more, conscripts like Sub-Lieutenant Marcel’s received no training in marksmanship. They pointed at their targets all right, but were self-taught in the business of aiming, that is, adjusting their fire to take account of the distance and movement of their prey. By Busaco some French officers were beginning to appreciate the cost of this neglect.

At the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo just a few months before, one of the more professional French generals present had been staggered by the poor shooting of Ney’s infantry. Writing to Paris in order to request an urgent shipment of musket cartridges, he wrote:

This enormous expenditure of ammunition occurred in one month by light companies whose combined strength did not amount to more than a couple of thousand of Ney’s corps. It might be supposed that
Marcel’s men and the other
voltigeurs
firing off so many rounds might have become first-rate marksmen, but actually the effect was more haphazard. While some did indeed become good shots, others never grasped the basic principles of adjusting their fire.

Despite these apparently basic limitations, Napoleon’s light troops had gained a considerable reputation in the wars of the previous decade. Audacious command and high morale had generally more than compensated for their poor shooting. However, from Busaco onwards, quite a few French officers realised that they were condemmed to fight the British skirmishers at a considerable disadvantage, one that arose from their lack of systematic marksmanship training.

Masséna’s defeat came as a profound shock to his people. One eyewitness lamented the army’s ‘enormous loss of officers’. For the marshal, any hope of hurling the British out of Portugal began to falter. On 28 September, Wellington returned to his old tricks, falling back towards his prepared lines of defence at Torres Vedras. The French could not understand his lack of aggression. Why wasn’t he following up his success of the day before? But the British general only liked to give battle on terms of his own choosing. He had succeeded in causing Masséna almost 4,500 casualties and was now inviting an army that had failed to carry the heights of Busaco to come and try its luck against the trenchworks and batteries of Torres Vedras. There Masséna would have to deal with the psychological impact of the Busaco defeat, one staff officer commenting, ‘Our heavy losses at Busaco had chilled the ardour of Masséna’s lieutenants, and bred ill-will between them and him; so that now all were trying to paralyse his operations, and representing every little hillock to be a new height of Busaco the capture of which would cost copious bloodshed.’

The battle was an enormous relief for Craufurd. He had been despondent after the Combat of the Coa but even he probably did not understand that he had been a whisker away from being sent home. In his official Busaco dispatch, Wellington praised Craufurd for conducting a fighting withdrawal to the Busaco position, ‘with great regularity’, and for the bayonet charge which had caused the enemy ‘immense loss’.

Wellington’s Army had performed very well in a general action, the first of its kind since Talavera more than a year before. But whereas the losses at Talavera had been great, this was a more emphatic victory. British officers took pride in throwing back regiments that were veter
ans of France’s fabled triumphs in Italy or central Europe: the fields of Lodi, Marengo and Austerlitz where Napoleon had made his reputation. A company commander of the 95th walked about in the dusk of that September day gathering buttons from the coats of the French dead strewn across the hillside so that he might ascertain their regiments and therefore their pedigree. He was perfectly satisfied with what he found, writing home, ‘The 26th, 66th and 82nd are Bridge of Lodi boys, but of the heights of Busaco I daresay they will be less proud.’

It took from 28 September to 10 October for the Rifles to march down through the hilly Portuguese countryside to a little town called Arruda. It was a tortuous journey, attended by the usual hardships and more. Men with sore feet and empty bellies were drenched by daily downpours, one officer noting on the 8th, ‘This day’s march was about as miserable as I wish to see. Incessant rain all day. We got into a rascally hovel which we contrived to set fire to but soon put it out again.’

During the two-month withdrawal from the frontier, Wellington’s soldiers had become used to treating Portuguese property recklessly. It was their commander’s intention to fight in the style of Fabius, laying waste to the Portuguese hinterland so that the French would be unable to find food, or indeed people. Orders had been issued by the Portuguese authorities for the evacuation of all inhabitants, if necessary by force, from the path of Masséna’s army. Wellington’s rearguard daily raided abandoned houses for any food they could find, or indeed for firewood.

When they got to Arruda, the 95th took up a bivouac on a ridge overlooking the town. There they discovered one of the great secrets of the Napoleonic wars: that Wellington had ordered the construction of lines of fortifications stretching twenty-nine miles from the Atlantic coast in the west, in an arc through the hill country of the Peninsula behind Lisbon, to the River Tagus in the east. Arruda was close to the eastern end of this defence, being in a sector where there were twenty-three redoubts armed with ninety-six cannon. The whole programme, involving construction of scores of strongpoints, diversion of streams, emplacement of cannon and drilling of militia, had taken more than one year to accomplish, with a bill of
£
100,000
for the labour alone, and yet somehow it had remained unknown to the French.

The 95th’s task in this scheme was not to man some fort, a task that had been assigned to third-rate troops of the Portuguese militia. The Rifles would remain part of the reserve that would rush to any threatened point and also patrol no man’s land in this eastern part of the lines, so as to prevent French penetrations – be they for foraging or surprise attacks.

After such a miserable march, Captain O’Hare’s pleasure at finding Second Lieutenant George Simmons in charge of a roaring fire and a laid table can easily be imagined. Simmons had come up from Lisbon with a party of convalescents and quickly commandeered a suitable little house for the officers of his 3rd Company.

It took no time for natural scavengers such as the men of the 95th to start investigating the place in front of their position. ‘Never was a town more completely deserted than Arruda,’ one officer remarked. ‘The inhabitants, dreading the approach of the French, had taken flight to Lisbon, leaving their houses, many of which were magnificently furnished, without a human being in them. The chairs and tables were subsequently carried up to the camp.’

Few riflemen were housed; instead some tents were issued (for the first time since they had arrived in Portugal) to allow them to escape the cold and rain. The soldiers, though, wasted no time in beginning expeditions in Arruda, breaking into houses, where ‘many of them had some food in the larder, and a plentiful supply of good wines in the cellar’.

The 95th were guilty of a good deal of vandalism on these missions, since they assumed that Arruda would eventually fall into French hands. Houses were stripped, and ornate furniture was broken up for firewood. ‘This was the only instance during the war in which the light division had reason to blush for their conduct,’ one veteran later wrote.

Reunited with his messmates, Simmons heard for himself about Busaco and the skirmishes of the retreat from the frontier. He reacquainted himself with old friends and recounted his experiences in Lisbon.

Simmons was pleased to see Private Robert Fairfoot, for the rifleman, who celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday in Arruda, had become something of a friend and a personal project. During his brief campaigns, Simmons had come to learn the value of a steady soldier.
He had seen the Belem Rangers, and when he and Harry Smith had been placed at the head of a party of eight hundred convalescents for the three-day march from Lisbon to the lines of Torres Vedras, a quarter of these ‘heroes’ disappeared before they reached their destination.

Fairfoot had gone absent without leave three times while in the Royal Surrey Militia, but on joining the 95th he had at last been able to show his true colours. The 2nd Royal Surreys were ruled by one Major Hudson, ‘as great a tyrant as ever disgraced the Army’. The men called him ‘Bloody Bob’ or ‘Wheel ’em again Bob’ because of his penchant for the lash and drill respectively. Fairfoot found himself buffeted between the ranks, where he had to drill all day under Hudson’s beady eye, and the post of drummer, where his duties included whipping his comrades. Fairfoot’s desertions arose from the unhappiness that follows when a man must pick morsels of his comrades’ flesh from the knots of his cat, having been forced to flog them all day for no good reason.

Early in the spring of 1809, when the 2nd Royal Surreys found themselves in the south of England as volunteers for the regulars were called for, hundreds had escaped the militia. One of their privates wrote home, ‘I have taken the first opportunity and volunteered … into what regiment I cared not a straw.’ Some 127 of the Royal Surreys went into the 51st (a smart light-infantry regiment) and around 90 joined Fairfoot in the Rifles.

In the 95th, Fairfoot had learnt the difference between parade-ground drill and the life of danger and comradeship in the Rifles. He had shown himself so good a soldier at Barba del Puerco, the Coa and Busaco that he had been marked down for promotion.

The 95th prided itself on giving advancement to deserving, bright men. One of its sergeants, William Weddeburne, had argued in print that the regiment’s form of warfare meant that ‘frequent opportunities are afforded for the display of personal courage, activity, and intelligence, and, to persons possessed of such qualities, it is a certain road to distinction’. The publication of Weddeburne’s text on training light troops was in itself a mark of the unusual position an NCO could achieve in the Rifles. It was evident to any soldier, once in the 95th, that serving in small groups in outposts or patrols rather than in line regiments offered many more opportunities for the deserving soldier to show his mettle, or for a corporal to demonstrate he was fit for further promotion.

As it was, the rank of corporal was a recent introduction to the Army. The printed Monthly Returns forms sent out for the 95th’s adjutant to complete had columns marked for ‘sergeants’, ‘buglers’ and ‘rank and file’, but none for corporals. The practice of marking this rank and that of sergeant with stripes on the sleeve was only just beginning. The founders of the 95th had been so pleased with the beneficial effects of giving men these distinctions that they had established a further category – albeit unofficial – between private and corporal, that of ‘chosen man’. This was a private being prepared for promotion, who was given extra responsibilities; the officers hoped that these steps would give men something to aspire to, and redress some of the advantages the French had reaped by offering so many rewards to their troops.

The theory of promotions was one thing, but there was a more practical and urgent need for O’Hare to rebuild his company: half of it had been captured at the Coa. Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith had obliged with some transfers of riflemen from other companies, but O’Hare also had to alleviate a shortage of non-commissioned officers. His company had set sail in May 1809 with six sergeants and six corporals. He had since lost two sergeants and three corporals – dead, captured or promoted. One sergeant, Esau Jackson, who’d been given to O’Hare to alleviate matters, soon decided he had seen more than enough of the enemy, and got himself appointed to a comfy sinecure in charge of stores at Belem.

Two weeks after the battalion arrived in Arruda, Fairfoot was promoted to corporal. His pay more than doubled, to one shilling, two and a quarter pence per day. He had been in the Army long enough to know that with that money came added duties and responsibilities. Fairfoot had been an Army child, following his father about, hearing his views about what made a good corporal or a bad one.

In the 95th, a corporal’s duties were set out in some texts, like the ‘Green Book’ written by Colonel Coote Manningham, one of the regiment’s founders, and in other pamphlets such as the printed pages of Craufurd’s Standing Orders for the Light Division. Reading and writing were essential to the discharge of these duties. Evidently Robert Fairfoot conquered this challenge of literacy, whereas it may well be that his father, with more than twenty-eight years’ service as a private soldier, did not. But the 95th’s senior officers certainly believed in offering their brighter soldiers the chance to learn.

In each company, there was an orderly sergeant of the day who would be assisted by a corporal, both answering to a duty officer. On the march, their duties ranged from arresting stragglers who had not been issued with tickets by their officers entitling them to fall out, to securing the bivoauc. The posting of sentries was equally important on the march or in a place like Arruda.

Colonel Manningham had decreed:

The Light Division Standing Orders, as one might expect from Craufurd, took the business of posting sentries to extremes. There were to be outlying and inlying pickets – to prevent the brigade being surprised by the enemy – then there was to be a regimental camp guard (mainly to hinder the riflemen’s mischief) and a company guard of one corporal and four privates. If Fairfoot was part of the outlying or inlying picket, camp guard or company guard then the night promised to be one of close attention to duty and little sleep. Given the numbers of different tasks, these could be assigned to NCOs every other day, at a time when their company was light of corporals, and it is clear that a man who was unable to abandon the hard-drinking ways of the private soldier would soon come unstuck – if discovered drunk on duty he would usually be relieved of his stripes. This is what had happened to Sergeant Plunket at Campo Maior a year before, and to many others in the 95th since they had landed. Fairfoot, though, applied himself conscientiously, for he had turned some kind of corner in his life, leaving behind the misery of his militia days. His stripes were never taken from him.

For those who had been broken to the ranks, however, resurrection was possible. If there was ever a moment when Joseph Almond, the Cheshire man who had been busted from corporal in 1808, could have redeemed himself, then Arruda was a propitious one, because of the shortage of NCOs. But while bright enough, and no skulker on the battlefield, Almond’s company commander had taken against him, and it proved impossible to regain his former station. He may well have fall
en foul of the notion many officers had, that a man in his late thirties who had not learnt to moderate his drinking was, in the words used on discharge papers, ‘worn out’, ‘a bad soldier’ or ‘dissolute’.

For the illiterate private, there was almost no advancement possible. If, however, he had a good ear, such a man could be appointed as one of the company’s two buglers. While at Arruda, William Green was made up to this post by O’Hare, enjoying the better pay. The bugler’s bargain, however, was not always a happy one for he, playing that part carried out by the drummers in a line regiment, was responsible for laying the lash onto unfortunate members of his company.

The 95th’s stay in Arruda proved pleasant enough, for they drank plenty of plundered wine, lived under canvas and ate well. Four weeks after their arrival, they awoke to discover that the French pickets posted in front of them had disappeared.

Masséna had realised that his men would starve in front of Torres Vedras and that to assault the fortifications was to invite a bloodbath. Every day French troops had to wander further and further away in their foraging expeditions, and with these ever-widening patrols, the number being lost to Portuguese partisans or desertion increased. The Army of Portugal, as Masséna’s three corps had been designated, was melting away. Its horses were dying too, or becoming so emaciated that French generals began doubting their ability to draw all the cannon and supply caissons they had brought with them back to Spain, should the order come to quit Portugal. The marshal resolved to pull back to Santarem, a city in a fertile region several marches away from Lisbon and nearer to his sources of supply across the Spanish frontier. There he intended to winter, while awaiting further instructions from Paris.

Craufurd’s division was set rapidly on the Army of Portugal’s tail, its commander scenting the chance for further distinction. On the second day after they left Arruda, Craufurd spotted a French brigade moving across a plain towards some high ground at a place called Cartaxo. He drew up his division, but before giving any orders for an assault, he berated them for their behaviour on the march there. The text of this harangue has survived, and a quotation will give a flavour of the man in action: