Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (2 page)

Among the rank and file, few things were prized more than courage and the facility for capers or laughter. Private William Brotherwood was another wag. He was the veteran of a couple of campaigns, a wry Leicester boy with a wicked way with words. At the Battle of Vimiero he’d run out of balls for his rifle. So with a torrent of abuse, he’d loaded his razor and fired that at the French. It was the kind of jape that the men told the Johnny Newcomers about and which ensured he was notorious in the best sense of the word.

What were they looking for, those men like Fairfoot, Almond, Costello and Underwood? Their bounty had seemed like a lot when they joined: ten guineas was more than a year’s pay for the ordinary soldier. But many boozed that away quickly enough and then they had to live by their sixpence a day. When you’d been in more than seven years, like Almond and Brotherwood, you got the princely sum of another penny a day.

On campaign, as those two veterans knew well, there were also chances for plunder. A prisoner would soon be stripped of his valuables, and in all probability, his clothes too: most would yield a few coins but an officer might be unburdened of a watch or silver snuffbox. Such were the fortunes of war: the French hadn’t hesitated to do it to the 95th’s men who fell behind in January so why should the riflemen hold back if they clapped hands on some Frenchie, alive or dead?

They did not see themselves as mercenaries, though. Many had joined through a craving for adventure. Costello had been seduced by the yarns his uncle spun, as they sat back in Ireland making shoes together. The old soldier’s tales of campaigning in Egypt made him ‘red hot for a soldier’s life’. Fairfoot too had been suckled on tales of derring-do, for his father had been a soldier for more than twenty-eight years and he had grown up to the echoes of the drill square. His initiation into military life, in the 2nd Royal Surreys, had gone badly wrong, for it was a deeply unhappy battalion run on the lash and fear. Now Fairfoot was given a new opportunity to advance his soldier’s career. As for Brotherwood, he had originally been driven into the Leicestershire Militia through need. He had been a stocking-weaver but the fickle dictates of fashion led to hundreds like him being cast out of work. Having tasted a soldier’s life and liked it, he had been determined to transfer into the Rifle Corps, with its hard-fighting reputation.

For officers things were a little different. They had dreams of glory
too, of course, but for the most part those were inextricably linked with their craving for advancement. They were a rough lot, the 95th’s officers, mostly, in the words of one of them, ‘soldiers of fortune’. Out of nearly fifty sailing with the 1st Battalion, the great majority had never purchased a commission and for many, their patent of rank, signed by the sovereign, was their only real mark of gentility.

Captain O’Hare was one of the original riflemen, going back to the regiment’s formation in 1800, and he had got his two promotions by seniority alone. Nobody had done him any favours or bestowed any patronage, which may have been one of the reasons why brother officers and men alike knew him as a foul-tempered old Turk. It had taken fifteen years of hard soldiering to creep his way up the lists of regimental officers until he arrived at the front of the promotion queue. Now he was the regiment’s senior captain, and thirsting for the step to major, but that was not an easy thing, especially when some better-connected or richer officer might jump over his head and secure the prize.

As for Simmons, he had not purchased either, being granted his second lieutenancy for encouraging dozens of men from his militia regiment, the South Lincolns, to volunteer with him for the 95th. His commission was a prize for helping fill the ranks. This was just as well, for there was no question of purchase. It was a shortage of money that had caused Simmons to join the Army in the first place, giving up his medical studies and ending the dream of being a surgeon.

Having joined the 95th, George, the eldest of nine brothers and three sisters, saw his duty as helping to pay for the education of his siblings. In the letter he had posted from Dover, Simmons explained his motivation thus: ‘As a soldier, with perseverance, I must in time have promotion, which will soon enable me to be of use to my family; and at all times it will be my greatest pleasure and pride to take care that the boys go regularly to a good school, and I have no doubt of seeing them one day men of some experience through my interposition.’

For some sprig of the gentry, a second lieutenant’s pay, of just under
£
160 per annum, was not considered enough to live on. An allowance of
£
70 or
£
80 was considered quite normal, and some truly rich young men drew on their families for vastly more than that. Simmons, by contrast, not only intended to live within his means, but to remit
£
20 or
£
30 home to his parents each year, and his was not the most extreme case by any means. One young lieutenant of the 95th sailing with him
was the main provider for his widowed mother and eight siblings back in County Cork.

Many of the 95th’s officers, then, could be described as desperate men. Their hunger for promotion arose from the harshness of their personal and family circumstances. The little flotilla of transports and warships was therefore bursting with anticipation for the new campaign. There was a ceaseless hubbub about what the coming months might bring, and nobody, right up to the brigadier in command, could really have described himself as immune to this febrile atmosphere. But the officers’ search for advancement, and that of many ordinary riflemen for fame among their peers, would soon expose them to horrible dangers.

Each man may have wanted to prove himself in battle, but there was also a collective will at work, a desire to show that a regiment of British riflemen could perform wonders on the battlefield, when all manner of
savants
believed no such thing was possible. Just a few months before the 95th’s departure, a veteran light infantry officer had declared in print that people such as the Germans and Swiss made the best sharpshooters, whereas the British rifleman, through upbringing and temperament, ‘can never be taught to be a perfect judge of distance’. Disproving this thinking would cost the regiment dear.

Only a minority of those who had sailed on 25 May 1809 would still be in the battalion’s ranks when it returned five years later. Many would be dead, others sent home as invalids to beg on the street, and some would have disappeared without trace, presumed deserted.

What of Captain O’Hare, Second Lieutenant Simmons, and Privates Almond, Brotherwood, Costello and Fairfoot? Of those six, half would never come home: one dying a hero’s death, another paying the price for a commander’s mistake and the third suffering the ultimate disgrace of execution at the hands of his own comrades. And the survivors? They would gorge themselves on fighting, experience some of the most intense hardships imaginable and, between the three of them, be wounded ten times. In the process of those campaigns, the 95th would become a legend and its soldiers a pattern for what a modern warrior should be.

It was hard to say which disturbed their first night ashore more: the din of bullfrogs, the churning of empty stomachs or the aching of limbs confined too long on the passage. The battalion landed at dusk on 3 July. After weeks on the transports they had been disgorged in Lisbon – for Portugal was indeed their destination – the previous day. Their relief at escaping the smelly old tubs on which they had been shut up throughout June was short-lived, because it was followed immediately by a passage up the River Tagus in shallow-draught river boats. They were packed together on narrow benches, rifles between their legs, as the boats scraped and wobbled across sand bars, the soldiers expecting at any moment to be capsized into the river and consigned to a watery grave.

Once they had got off for the night at Vallada, the new men began to realise what life on service involved. Their short passage on the river boats had deposited them a little up the Tagus, saving them a couple of marches on their way to the Spanish frontier. The baggage was not yet organised, so no camp kettles appeared for cooking. There were no tents, for the 95th had not been issued with them.

As the sun slipped down, a hot day gave way to cool, damp night, the dew impregnating their woollen clothing. Second Lieutenant Simmons jotted in his journal, ‘Hungry, wet, and cold and without any covering, we lay down by the side of the river. I put one hand in my pocket and the other in my bosom, and lay shivering and thinking of the glorious life of a soldier until I fell fast asleep.’

To the man not used to channelling his body between tree roots or stones, the night offered little refreshment. A mere three hours after they had sought refuge in sleep, the bugles sounded reveille. The men
fell in by companies, began their march, and as they went, the sun, climbing into the Portuguese sky, heated the dew out of their clothing. They reached the town of Santarem, where matters began to look up a little.

The new campaigners soon discovered that it only takes a day without food to re-educate a soldier’s stomach. So upon reaching the town, the officers piled into little restaurants and coffee houses and paid with their own money for the meal with which the military commissariat had not provided them. The realisation, barely a day into their campaign, that the individual rifleman would often have to dip into his own pocket to provide for the essentials of life, would be reinforced many times in the coming years.

The quartermaster and a party of helpers soon appeared with dozens of mules they had bought in Lisbon and the rudiments of a regimental baggage train began to form. There was an official allowance of pack animals for each regiment, and some in addition for the more senior officers. Captains commanding companies were entitled to a horse to ride and a mule or donkey to carry their valises and canteens. The subaltern officers – thirty-three of them in the battalion – were allocated just a single beast of burden between two from the public purse.

There was nothing to stop those lieutenants with an extensive equipage and ample funds buying their own mules or indeed their own riding horses. For Simmons, this was out of the question. A pack animal might cost ten or twelve pounds, a good horse considerably more. He would be walking.

From Santarem they headed off towards the Spanish frontier, in pursuit of the main British army. Their brigade commander may have had highly trained men under his command, but he appreciated they had been weeks at sea. Things began in measured stages: from Santarem to Golegao, four Spanish leagues (getting on for sixteen or seventeen miles); then more gently from Golegao to Punhete, three leagues; Punhete to Abrantes, two leagues.

As they marched along the dusty Portuguese roads, all became aware of their brigadier, Robert Craufurd. He rode back and forth along the column, watching them, measuring them. Every straggler claiming he couldn’t keep up aroused Craufurd’s notice. Every officer who fussed about leading his column across bridges or fords excited stronger emotions.

Craufurd was a small man, the product of a well-connected Scottish family. Sitting behind a large cloak rolled on the front of his saddle, his ‘black muzzle’ peered over. However freshly shaven, his chin always carried a blue-black tinge of stubble. His actions were quick, his eye missed little. There was something terrier-like about him. When he was angered by what he saw, which was often on this march, he would let fly with imprecations and abuse. The greater his rage, the reedier or squeakier his voice became.

Craufurd’s character was sufficiently well known even in 1806 for him to have been described by one newspaper as ‘an opinionated, an ungracious and even ill tempered man’. And that was before the disgrace.

During the 1806–7 expedition to the River Plate in South America, one in which both Captain O’Hare and Private Almond had served, Craufurd had been obliged to surrender his brigade. Surrounded by enemy troops in the streets of Buenos Aires, Craufurd’s force had made its stand in a convent before, under a heavy fire of sharpshooters, its commander was forced to capitulate.

A court martial had exonerated Craufurd for the failure, blaming the expedition’s overall commander instead. But the distinction of having surrendered a British brigade in action was an odious one, and he knew it would always cling to him. Even as this new campaign continued, he would find himself again and again coming back to the memory of Buenos Aires, writing home to his wife, ‘In that very town, the capture of which would have raised me to the height of military glory if I had been left to myself, I, two days afterwards, found myself in the humiliating situation of a prisoner.’

Whatever his temperament, those who ran the Army, at Horse Guards in London, knew Craufurd as an officer of unusual education and vision. He had attended reviews of the Prussian Army and served as a British representative in the field with Archduke Charles of Austria. His German and French were fluent and he had the self-confidence necessary to discuss military theory with any of the great captains of the day. After Buenos Aires, Craufurd was saved from obscurity by the court-martial verdict, political connections, and a reputation for being a scientific soldier.

Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley, who would shortly become known as Lord Wellington, commanding the British forces in the Iberian Peninsula, knew that these qualifications made Craufurd a very
rare creature indeed among a pedestrian corps of generals. What better man to entrust with the outposts at the front of his army?

For those marching in Craufurd’s brigade, this grasp of military theory counted for little, of course. Old soldiers chatting around the campfire could piece together certain chapters in the brigadier’s turbulent career. Captain O’Hare and a few of the others had been in Buenos Aires, where they too had been subjected to the ignominy of surrender and a few months’ captivity before returning home. William Brotherwood had been with the 2nd Battalion of Rifles in Craufurd’s brigade during the campaign of that previous winter. The wholesale reorganisation of the 95th had brought Brotherwood, his captain Jonathan Leach and many others into the 1st Battalion for this new campaign. Brotherwood could tell the others some stories: he was among the riflemen who’d seen Craufurd beat his men and order floggings for the most frivolous of disciplinary offences. During that long retreat to Corunna seven months before, the lads called him Black Bob.

Craufurd’s strictness arose from a conviction that he must rule the brigade entrusted to him with the greatest zeal. He did so because it was the vehicle for the resurrection of his reputation. Its every movement and evolution must be calculated to excite the admiration of Sir Arthur Wellesley and the envy of his peers. Its marches must be regulated with the precision and predictability of a fine timepiece.

To this end, Craufurd issued a series of Standing Orders on the morning of 10 July, as the brigade had a day of rest in Abrantes. Less than a week into the campaign proper, this set of instructions confirmed his reputation for strictness in the eyes of the 95th’s officers and established the commander as their enemy. Captain Jonathan Leach, commander of 2nd Company, wrote in his diary: ‘Brigadier General Robert Craufurd (damn him) issued this day to the Light Division an immensity of the most
tyrannical
and
oppressive standing orders
that were ever compiled by a British officer [emphasis in original].’

Craufurd’s system was designed to govern the troops’ behaviour from their first waking moment to their last. Reveille, the blowing of a bugle horn, would sound an hour and a half before any intended march got under way. The Standing Orders set out what had to happen before a second horn blast an hour after the first, noting, for example, ‘the baggage must be loaded at least ten minutes before the second horn sounds’. A quarter of an hour later, at the third horn, companies were to form, ready to set up. On the fourth blast, the head of the column would begin its march.

At the other end of the day, everything was prescribed, from the posting of a guard to catch stragglers who’d fallen behind without leave, to the choice of correct sites for cooking and measures to stop ‘the men easing themselves in improper places’. In order to prevent the excrement piling up, ditches would have to be dug, ‘covered over daily and fresh ones made as often as expedient’. Craufurd, it could truly be said, intended to regulate his brigade’s every motion.

Standing Orders reached their most pedantic extreme when describing arrangements for what was usually the day’s main business: marching. Article 3 No. 4 stipulated that ‘any man who, for the sake of avoiding water or other bad places, or for any other reason, presumes to step on one side, or quit his proper place in the Ranks, must be confined.’

The reasoning for this last injunction was contained in Article 3 No. 7: ‘the defiling of one Regiment on the march … will cause a delay of ten minutes; one such obstacle, if not passed without defiling, would, therefore, delay a Brigade consisting of three Regiments, half an hour, and in the winter, when obstacles of this kind are frequent, and the days short, a column, which is constantly defiling without cause will arrive at its quarters in the dark.’

Craufurd’s orders ran to many pages, which officers were expected to learn by rote. While they were the product of much careful reflection on military science by their author, they were tainted by obsessions such as his conviction that small deviations on the line of march ruined all calculations. Furthermore, his ideas would be enforced with such harshness that they excited the unbridled hatred of almost every officer in the 95th, who had been infused in the newest and most liberal notions of disciplining and motivating soldiers.

If the Rifle officers found Craufurd especially insufferable, then he seems to have regarded them and their ideas with similar disdain. There was something so different about the 95th – its appearance, its weaponry, its conduct – that offended Craufurd’s sense of order. He tried to use fear to change their ways. During the Corunna campaign, the whole brigade had often been paraded to witness floggings. He’d struck his soldiers with his own hand, too, for what he saw as insolence. The veterans of that campaign knew well that at one point, after beating a man of the 95th to the ground, Craufurd had shouted at the
soldiers around him: ‘You think, because you are riflemen, you may do whatever you think proper, but I’ll teach you the difference before I have done with you!’

In July, many riflemen regarded the prospect of serving under Craufurd for the foreseeable future with dread. One captain in the 95th, who knew him from the previous campaign, wrote home, ‘You have heard how universally General Craufurd was detested in the retreat to Corunna. If possible he is still more abhorred now and has been so ever since we landed in Portugal.’

For the next fortnight they fell into a daily routine of marching. Reveille was usually sounded in the early hours of the morning and the troops would trudge along until about 11 a.m. As the July heat reached its peak, they would be resting and cooking up their main meal of the day.

Craufurd had to reconcile his desire gradually to build up the marching powers of his Light Brigade (so that he did not leave too many stragglers behind or kill off soldiers with heatstroke) with his determination to catch up with the main army he’d been sent to reinforce. General Wellesley had moved his small force of sixteen thousand through the mountainous country of the Hispano-Portuguese frontier, in the direction of Madrid, linking up on the way with a Spanish force of thirty-five thousand under General Cuesta, together with which they now threatened their common enemy, the French. The aim of all this was to stop the French from pushing into the south of the country by threatening Madrid, the centre of their operations.

On most days the Light Brigade marched between twelve and sixteen miles. This was tough enough, and it killed a couple of the weaker men through heatstroke. Craufurd took to inspecting the soldiers’ water bottles to make sure they were full. He did not want the rogues to fall out fetching water, or a whole column to halt at some stream while they filled up. The soldiers saw things differently: a full bottle added several pounds to your marching kit and they already felt crushed by the burden of full regulation equipment: