Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (15 page)

Among the Rifle officers gazing at the fallen Camerons and talking to witnesses of the fight, there were some theories about why they had suffered so heavily: 256 casualties. Of course the close-quarters battle had been a desperate affair, but the 71st engaged alongside the Camerons throughout had suffered half the casualties. The 79th had been serving under Wellington for less than one year and still fought by the book: the old book. Most of the Peninsular veteran regiments – as well as the 71st – had adopted the movement and firing tactics of the Light Brigade – ‘Sir John Moore’s System’, so called. But the 79th had been ill equipped for the village fight: instead of dissolving their companies into skirmishers fighting from every window, they had, apparently, tried to keep their men formed up in small groups, firing volleys in sections according to the old drill.

The riflemen posted as pickets found themselves negotiating their way through the dead and dying. The 95th were not indifferent to their suffering, but having marched or doubled many miles that day and fought their own battle, they were dog tired. One of the subalterns, the Scottish lieutenant John Kincaid, chanced upon a Highlander: ‘a ball had passed through the back part of the head, from which the brain was oozing, and his only sign of life was a compulsive hiccough every two or three seconds.’ Kincaid asked a medic to examine his countryman, and the doctor affirmed the case was hopeless. The lieutenant then ‘got a mattress from the nearest house, placed the poor fellow on it, and made use of one corner as a pillow for myself, on which, after the fatigues of the day … I slept most soundly. The Highlander died in the course of the night.’

Kincaid’s businesslike attitude to passing the night next to this dying man reflected how used the 95th had become to being surrounded by death. It was the currency of much of their daily conversation, be they rankers or officers. Among the latter the topic of sudden death was so common that endless euphemisms were coined to provide a little conversational variety: ‘biting the dust’, ‘entered in today’s
Gazette
’, ‘acquainted with the Grand Secret’, ‘going across the Styx’.

Those who were unable to deal with the odds in the 95th sought a post elsewhere if they were an officer, or skulked in the hospitals if they belonged to the rank and file. For the most part, though, the veterans who had sailed to Portugal two years earlier embraced their destiny, resigning themselves with a grim fatalism. Reviewing the results of his two months on the march, George Simmons wrote home to Yorkshire just after Fuentes d’Onoro:

The adventurers among the 95th’s officers constantly related the risks they ran to their chances of advancement. A little later that summer, doubtless after some maudlin reflection on the events of that year, Simmons told his father, ‘It of course makes one gloomy to see so many fine fellows fall round one, but one day or other we must all go. The difference is very immaterial in the long run whether a bullet or the hand of time does your business. This is my way of moralising when I go into a fight.’

Simmons’s bargain with danger in the 95th was not quite as he portrayed it to his parents; for while he kept his end of it, the Army was unable to advance him at the speed he expected. George’s brother Maud, serving with the 34th Foot, was promoted to lieutenant on 13 March 1811, one year and eleven months after he had joined. Two years on from joining the 95th, George was still a second lieutenant.

Some riflemen had realised that their risks in any single battle were relatively small, skirmishing among the rocks and trees, when compared to those of a line battalion sent shoulder to shoulder into a hail of metal in some hell like Fuentes d’Onoro. The 79th had nine officers wounded in a day there. When a southern detachment of the British Army fought at Albuera later that May, some regiments were completely crushed: the 57th suffering 428 casualties, including two-thirds of its officers killed or wounded in a few hours. Maud Simmons’s 34th were at Albuera too, suffering 128 casualties, including three officers killed.

For the average line regiment, though, the odds of being sent into the burning heart of some terrible battle like this were very low. Some
served years in the Peninsula without being heavily engaged with the enemy. Since marching towards one’s enemy required a moral strength and a resignation to destiny, the Army at large became all the more aware that men in the Light Division were unusual, in that they had to summon up these qualities repeatedly. And within this division, the 95th were called upon most often. Not long after Fuentes d’Onoro, one officer of the 43rd wrote home that his division’s ‘conduct is spoken of by all the Army in the highest terms, and to be in the Light Division is sufficient to stamp a man as a good soldier’.

The reputation gained by Craufurd’s division was not the result of effusive reports in the newspapers – excepting the language used by Wellington himself to describe the battles in his dispatches – but something rather more subtle. Letters home from men like Simmons were read by brothers sitting bored by the fireside and related to cousins or friends. The knowledge of the 95th’s deeds and the atmosphere within the regiment rippled outwards by correspondence and word of mouth, through Army families into wider society.

George’s brother Maud expressed interest in transferring from the 34th into the 95th. George tried to dissuade him, writing to their parents, ‘He is very comfortable in his present [corps], and not half so liable to be exposed to hardships. I have advised him to continue in his regiment.’ Maud already knew enough from his Army service to accept the advice. But among the ingénues in Britain or Ireland who thirsted for adventure, attempts to dissuade them by frank accounts of the dangers or of the months spent sleeping in the open only increased their desire to wear the green jacket. George and Maud’s teenage sibling Joseph, back home in Yorkshire for the moment, would prove just such a case.

Many young gentlemen set fathers, uncles or military friends of the family investigating whether they might join. At Headquarters, they were sensitive enough to the dangers of this service to try to dissuade one aristocrat from seeking a commission in a Light Division regiment; a staff officer wrote that ‘Lord Wellington conceives there he might be treated to more shots than his friends would wish.’ Instead, the general recommended that the young peer in question might consider the Fusiliers or Guards. Of course, many of the more humble applicants did not have the benefit of this private advice, nor were there great fortunes at stake if they bit the dust.

Now that the Light Division had won the admiration of the
Peninsular Army and its commander, many of the officers already serving there, having no private funds or connections to fall back upon, became all the more determined to reap some reward for their service and to see off others whom they regarded as having inferior claims to advancement. This, as we shall see, made it increasingly difficult for newly arrived officers to fit in with the old veterans.

It also produced determination in men like Sidney Beckwith to see their best people receive just rewards. For Peter O’Hare, given a brevet in April, Wellington’s Fuentes dispatch contained more glorious news. His deeds in fighting off the French in the Turon valley drew a mention from his commander. That, in the formal system observed by Horse Guards, was an endorsement for promotion to the next suitable vacancy. Having gained an acting major’s rank in April, O’Hare got Wellington’s backing for a substantive post in May. This was a considerable coup, for an officer could soldier on for years with a brevet promotion without any actual change in his situation apart from the pay.

As for Simmons, Beckwith was determined to do something for him too. The commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 95th, had a duty to make up a quarterly list of officers suitable for promotion, noting as well the number of vacancies open to them. This was relayed to Wellington’s military secretary, who in turn would usually gain the general’s endorsement on the nod, and the papers made their way to London. Writing several weeks after Fuentes, Beckwith departed from the usual formality of these reports in order to plead the case of Simmons: ‘The last named officer, I beg leave in a particular manner to recommend to Lord Wellington’s notice. He has been constantly with his company, has been very severely wounded, and his zeal and gallantry have been conspicuous on all occasions.’ This was sufficient to win him promotion to lieutenant, at last, in July 1811.

The hot months of June and July were therefore a time of some satisfaction for the officers and men of the 95th. There were marches and the ennui of endless pickets under Craufurd’s eagle eye, to be sure. But supplies remained regular, the regiment was operating in familiar territory and many of its members had seen that they could benefit from its reputation as the hardest fighting corps of the Peninsular Army. Nevertheless, those who had spent two years fighting for survival and promotion would not make the easiest bedfellows, as several young men who sought to share in the 95th’s glory were about to discover.

A few weeks after Fuentes d’Onoro, Thomas Sarsfield appeared at the quarters of the 95th. He was an Irishman in his late twenties who had already seen something of the world and encountered various disappointments. Sarsfield was thickset, big across the shoulders, and not particularly tall – all qualities that gave him a rather ungentlemanly appearance.

The spring campaign’s losses had caused the 95th to look for more men. Whereas the rank and file could only come out as drafts or in whole additional companies posted from the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, there were few obstacles in the way of a determined young gentleman who travelled out on the Lisbon packet, presenting himself in Portugal. The 95th had actually sought such applications, one officer writing home that May: ‘I hope to see a great number of volunteers come out soon … I hope many will fancy a green jacket, as our ranks are very thin, having lost a number of brave soldiers.’

Sarsfield was one of several young hopefuls who answered the Rifles’ call in the summer of 1811. Before taking the decision to travel to Iberia, another of those volunteers, Thomas Mitchell, considered the simplest expedient and the cheapest, which was to write to the Commander in Chief at Horse Guards in London and ask for a commission. He had drafted the following appeal:

Any person who sent such a letter, bereft of interest, was entering a lottery in which his own life could be sold very cheap. For the recipients of the Commander in Chief’s patronage could end up in any regiment, but would most likely be posted to one where the officers were all selling out or dead, due to a posting in some disease-ridden Caribbean graveyard. Mitchell wisely decided not to send the letter. Instead he made his way out to Portugal so that he – not the Commander in Chief – might choose his regiment. Like Sarsfield, Mitchell had heard about the daring 95th and was keen to join it. The only disadvantage to making one’s way out like this lay in the lowly status that such recruits were granted, that of ‘gentleman volunteer’.

This, then, was what the Scot and the Irishman became, early in the summer of 1811. One officer of the 95th summed up their situation pithily:

Mitchell had the very good fortune to discover a distant family connection in the form of Sir Archibald Campbell, an officer commanding a Portuguese brigade in Wellington’s Army. Campbell wrote the necessary letter of introduction, which got him admitted to the general’s presence, where a short interview usually took place before the young man was dispatched to his regiment. Occasionally, when the candidate failed to impress, he would be told there was no vacancy and packed off home.

John FitzMaurice was yet another of the same species. He had come out a few months before his countryman, Sarsfield, having obtained the necessary letter of introduction from a judge of the Irish circuit. In this way the web of low-level patronage was extended both by the writer of the letter, who earned the gratitude of the young man’s family, and by Wellington himself, to whom the author became indebted. In the case of FitzMaurice, his appearance at Headquarters resulted in an invitation to Wellington’s dining table.

‘Well, what regiment would you like to be attached to?’ asked the general.

‘The Green Jackets,’ was FitzMaurice’s reply.

‘Why, the uniform isn’t very smart!’

FitzMaurice would not be deterred. ‘I believe, my Lord, they see a good deal of the enemy.’

Wellington looked across and answered, ‘By God they do, and you shall join them.’

Whereas FitzMaurice’s induction into the 95th went smoothly, Sarsfield’s, alas, would turn into a disaster. Upon their arrival in the regiment, volunteers entered a curious world in which they were neither fish nor fowl. ‘While they are treated as gentlemen out of the field, they receive the pay, and do the duty of private soldiers in it,’ one officer explained. So FitzMaurice and Sarsfield would have to take their place in the skirmish line in battle, or on sentry when in camp, but would have to retain the manners necessary to get along in the officers’ company mess to which they had been attached.

Although FitzMaurice was bereft of good Army connections and therefore ended up as a volunteer, he was from a family of gentry and thus benefited from a sound education and the occasional remittance of cash from home. This made him a convivial enough member of the 3rd Company mess which he joined. More importantly, FitzMaurice had the very good fortune to arrive at the 95th just before its serial fights of that March. The eyes of officers were always upon a volunteer in action, for no question was more important than whether he had pluck or would sneak off at the first whiff of powder. During a skirmish at Freixadas, near the end of March, FitzMaurice had been in such a frenzy of firing that he broke his ramrod while reloading and gashed his hand on it. He continued to fight on, for the wound was a superficial one, but in the process his blood was liberally spread about. Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith, coming away from the engagement, was heard to say, ‘That young devil FitzMaurice is covered with blood from head to foot but is fighting like blazes.’ The volunteer wisely kept the lightness of his wound to himself and was commissioned shortly afterwards as a second lieutenant. Thomas Mitchell was also fortunate enough to arrive in time for some of that spring’s combats.

By the time Sarsfield presented himself, FitzMaurice was already the veteran of half a dozen engagements and an established member of the regiment. It was Sarsfield’s bad luck that, following Fuentes d’Onoro, the regiment was taxed by some very long stages (down to Badajoz and back, following an aborted siege of the place), which meant its old
hands were vexed by the petty routines of marching, the ill health of the Guadiana plain and the constant presence of Craufurd, but had gone months without a good fight in which to let off steam. Under these conditions, a certain type of 95th man was bound to make mischief.

It became the norm for the veterans to test out the newcomers with some nonsense. When John Kincaid had appeared in the battalion, he had been sent off to catch a pack mule that one of his brother officers swore had broken loose. After careering about the fields for some time in pursuit of the animal, Kincaid brought it back, only to discover that it belonged to someone else entirely, who then reported it as a theft. The new man’s reaction to this prank could ensure either his acceptance or a repetition of the teasing.

‘Our first and most uncharitable aim was to discover the weak points of every fresh arrival, and to attack him through them,’ Kincaid wrote later. ‘If he had redeeming qualities, he, of course, came out scathless, but, if not, he was dealt with unmercifully. Poor Tommy [Sarsfield] had none such – he was weak on all sides, and therefore went to the wall.’ Kincaid was a leading figure in these proceedings, but others, including Jonathan Leach, when bored, also grew enthusiastic for this form of sport.

Sarsfield, like George Simmons, had a brother in the 34th, but unlike Maud Simmons, Tommy Sarsfield’s brother had been killed at Albuera. This might well have ensured a sympathetic reception in the 95th, particularly when added to the fact that Sarsfield had served some time at sea.

The riflemen discovered, though, that any report of the enemy was likely to get this new volunteer overexcited, running about and bellowing the alarm in naval terminology. Since they were actually several miles from their foe, this fun was too good to miss.

Kincaid devised an elaborate charade to show Sarsfield up while amusing one and all. His confederate in all this was William Brotherwood, the Leicestershire soldier in Leach’s company known for his wicked sense of humour. Brotherwood was by this time an acting corporal. Sarsfield would be taken out from Atalaya, the Spanish village where they were bivouacked, to a small hill nearby, where pickets were posted to keep a lookout over the rolling groves of oak that cover this part of the country. Brotherwood’s job in this, with several riflemen in tow, was to act the part of the French. The corporal and his
men took their fun very seriously, firing their rifles towards Sarsfield and whoever was there with him, so that the Irishman panicked, running back to Atalaya, hallooing and generally sounding the alarm.

On one occasion, Brotherwood picked up Sarsfield’s hat, which had fallen off during his escape, made a hole in it with his penknife and presented it to him on his return to the bivouac. Sarsfield seized hold of the trophy and rewarded Brotherwood with a silver dollar. That evening, the old soldier and his messmates were able to laugh at the volunteer’s stupidity while drinking away the proceeds.

There was no let-up for Sarsfield when messing with his fellow officers in the evening. One recorded that he had ‘the usual sinister cast of the eye worn by common Irish country countenances’. Sarsfield’s naval reminiscences, which he presumably calculated might have bought him some credit in the eyes of these grizzled veterans, simply excited their contempt.

This torture could not go on indefinitely without even Sarsfield realising that he was being made a fool of. ‘His original good natured simplicity gave way to experience,’ wrote one rifleman, ‘and he gently informed his tormentors that he kept a clean brace of pistols about him, at any time at their service.’ Since neither Kincaid nor the others wished to fight a duel, the bullying at last ended, and Sarsfield, due to the shortage of officers, prevailed, gaining his commission in the regiment. Although the elaborate charades at his expense stopped, the young Irish second lieutenant was never really accepted by officers or men – the old lags like Brotherwood and Kincaid agreeing that he was the type of excitable knave who should be banished from the Rifles.

George Simmons drew his own lessons from the affair, for he was concerned at what might happen to his brother Joseph, who was talking freely about coming out to the 34th or 95th, and had also, briefly, run away to sea. Lieutenant Simmons wrote home: ‘Some forward young fellows give themselves great airs and get themselves offended, which will never happen if a young man conducts himself as a gentleman and does not give way to chattering and nonsense.’ The desire to impress could be the undoing of a man: Simmons instructed his parents that when Joseph did eventually sail out, he should, ‘not be showing his agility in climbing about the ship or using sea phrases, as such proceedings would make the officers have a bad opinion of him.’ In short, the saga of the 95th’s volunteers demonstrated that the only way to proceed was to measure language and behaviour carefully, be alive to
teasing, and wait for some opportunity to prove your mettle in battle, for nothing else would gain the veterans’ respect.

Passing muster with those who had been fighting for two years was a challenge that would also afflict those already serving in the regiment who had gained rank but never been near gunfire. There were many such officers in the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, some of whom had merrily spent the last two years’ campaigning in Shorncliffe, the clifftop camp relinquished by the 1st Battalion on 25 May 1809. ‘General Murray who commands the garrison … is very fond of shew and parade,’ Second Lieutenant James Gairdner wrote to his father, after experiencing numerous field days that summer near the garrison. Gairdner had been born in America and his family had considerable property in Atlanta. It had been intimated to him that he would be sent on service as soon as possible, and he took his preparation seriously, if at times misguidedly, writing home at one point, ‘I am learning dancing every day for it would never do for an officer not to be able to dance. I have been learning drawing, in which I think I have greatly improved.’ It was not until early 1812 that he made his debut in the field, and the battalion’s hardened officers would get the measure of the callow Gairdner.

The regiment’s life during the late summer of 1811 consisted of much marching and countermarching along the frontier. Shortly after Fuentes d’Onoro, the French garrison left behind Allied lines in Almeida had broken out at the dead of night, its commander succeeding in getting most of his men through the British lines and back to French ones. This gave one and all another chance to excoriate General Erskine, widely held responsible for the fiasco, one officer commenting bitterly that Erskine was, ‘the laughing stock of the whole army, and particularly of the Light Division’.

Craufurd, back in the saddle as the division’s commander, was a man who needed activity and the scent of battle if he was to keep the blue devils at bay and stop himself becoming a bully to his subordinates. His promotion to major general, early in June, did nothing to mollify him. During the marches of June, July and August, he reverted to type, punishing his men for any deviation from Standing Orders, issuing more of them to cover various contingencies, and generally keeping an iron grip on his command.

Some of the newcomers were utterly shocked by what they saw. Ensign William Hay joined the 52nd that summer only to witness the
following ‘act of diabolical tyranny’ during one march. The division was moving through a ford, with Craufurd watching from his horse not far away. ‘The general, from his position on the bridge, observed two or three of the 95th take some water in their hands to cool their parched mouths,’ wrote Hay. ‘Instantly the halt was sounded, the brigade ordered to retrace their steps, the whole division formed into hollow square, and these unfortunate men paraded, stripped, and flogged. Such scenes, alas! were of almost daily occurrence, and disgusted me beyond measure.’ Hay took the earliest opportunity to transfer to another regiment.