Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (23 page)

‘All these misfortunes coming at once played the devil with me,’ Simmons wrote home; but with the calm of a man who had come unscathed through Badajoz, ‘I took up my pipe and thought to myself that things might have been worse … the life of a soldier is well calculated to make a man bear up against misfortunes.’

As the same engagement came to an end, the British cavalry charged some Frenchmen, driving them off. A trooper of the 14th Light Dragoons captured a French cavalier on his mount in this fight and, seeing the 95th, rode over, wishing to cash in his prize forthwith. He chanced upon Private Costello, his countryman from Queen’s County, and greeted him cordially. Lieutenant Gairdner was standing nearby and was soon drawn into the conversation, as he was able to translate the Frenchman’s plaintive cries. The French dragoon insisted that he would never have been captured if he’d been as well mounted as his Hibernian captor. The trooper turned to Gairdner and said, ‘Than by Jasus Sir, tell him if he had the best horse in France, I would bring him prisoner if he stood to fight me.’ The riflemen all had a good laugh at this Irish bravado. Then it was down to business. What would your Honour give me for his horse? Gairdner, knowing the trooper’s time was short and the Army was going through one of its periods of short pay, struck an excellent bargain, buying the beast for five dollars, or little more than one pound. Pocketing his cash, the trooper started rooting through the Frenchman’s valise, eventually drawing out a pair of cavalryman’s strong trousers, which he threw to Costello, gratis. It was only fair to share one’s good fortune. Gairdner had picked up a cheap packhorse and the Irish trooper galloped off with enough for several bottles of wine.

Simmons’s loss, or indeed that of the French dragoon, happened in the same affair as Gairdner’s or Costello’s gain. It was all as arbitrary as the flight of bullets, or so it often seemed to them – this sense was summed up in the much-used phrase, ‘the fortunes of war’. It was the way that soldiers rationalised the inexplicable workings of fate and their own powerlessness in the face of them.

The fortunes of war also decreed that the 1st/95th played almost no part in the events of 22 July 1812. Posted on Wellington’s left flank, they observed a little light skirmishing around the middle of the day and were formed up to pursue the flying French as light faltered towards the end of it. In the intervening hours, the fate of Spain had been decided by Wellington’s crushing defeat of Marmont on the bat
tlefield of Salamanca. It was later celebrated as the defeat of forty thousand men in forty minutes, and while not exactly conforming to this propagandistic hyperbole, Wellington’s battle marked his emergence as an offensive commander and one of the great captains of the age. ‘Our division, very much to our annoyance, came in for a very slender portion of this day’s glory,’ wrote a grumpy Kincaid.

With this French defeat, the wrecks of Marmont’s army streamed away from the frontier, pursued by the British, uncovering Madrid. After a march of a couple of hundred miles, Wellington’s Army entered the Spanish capital on 12 August to scenes of hysterical rejoicing. When the British commander left at the end of the month to continue his pursuit of the French Army, the Light Division was among those that remained behind to guard Madrid.

Once in Madrid, the men of the 95th felt they had reached civilisation again. ‘The public buildings are really splendid,’ one Rifles officer wrote in his journal, ‘no abominable dunghills in every direction, like Lisbon.’ More importantly for most of them, there were the women: this interlude was first and foremost a chance to gaze upon well-dressed, cultured, beautiful women. At dances in Gallegos and Ituera a man made do with what was available. For those long starved of female company, the frumpy maidens, occasionally mustachioed, of the Spanish peasantry had sufficed and even proven the stuff of many a romantic fantasy, for a soldier quickly learns to make do under such circumstances. In Madrid, it was a different story entirely.

The
guapas
were best observed at about 7 p.m. strolling on the Calle Mayor or in the pleasure gardens near the Retiro:

At public dances twice a week in the assembly rooms of the Calle de Baños and El Principe, they could actually hold hands with these beauties and quadrille or waltz with them. The officers’ pleasure at taking in these sights and sounds was soon tempered by a sense of their own poverty. A fine meal could be had in Madrid, but it would cost you six shillings. The Army was desperately short of coin again and pay was six months in arrears.

The mortification of one well trained in dancing, like James Gairdner, can easily be imagined. He wrote in his journal, ‘I have been very unwell, add to that I never had money for the army has never been worse paid than since we have been here, so that I have not had much pleasure to boast of having enjoyed the capital of Spain.’ He sent to his family for some cash to rectify matters. Those who could not fall back on family help were reduced to all kinds of expedients. One captain of the 95th recorded, ‘I sold some silver spoons and a watch to raise the wind.’

George Simmons, serious-minded and dedicated to his family as ever, managed in the few months after his losses of July to scrape together
£
22 6s 7d to send home. The money was first sent to a banking house in Lisbon who produced a bill which came back to Simmons. He then posted it home, his family cashing it with an English money dealer who, along with the issuing house in Lisbon, skimmed off his cut. Simmons, always ready to stand
in loco
parentis, had decided that his brother Joseph was at risk. Having come to the Peninsula as a volunteer in Maud’s regiment, the 34th, Joseph had been commissioned into the 23rd Fusiliers, a fashionable corps in which a young boy from Beverley could fall in with all sorts of moneyed blades with extravagant habits. To add to George’s concerns, Joseph had fallen ill and been placed in hospital in Salamanca.

Knowing that this would be the best way for Joseph to avoid mounting debts or the kind of disaster that had befallen Tommy Sarsfield, George Simmons arranged to have his younger brother transferred to the 95th. There he could instruct him, protect him from muttering his youthful opinions aloud, and indeed from that type of older officer who delighted in torturing young subalterns with their tricks. The mentor principle had worked very well for all brothers in the regiment: the Smiths, Coxes, Coanes and Travers among them.

Many officers also found themselves enjoying the largesse of those who could afford to give generous hospitality, like Lieutenant Samuel Hobkirk of the 43rd. He had an allowance of
£
700 a year but was rumoured to spend
£
1,000 on his uniforms and campaign comforts. Hobkirk threw a party in Madrid which provided many a comrade with a night’s lavish entertainment. The 95th did not have a figure to compare with Hobkirk, in terms of spreading money about, but its most recently joined subaltern, Lord Charles Spencer, a callow youth of eighteen, was at least able to subsidise his mess.

The officers in Madrid also took to organising their own entertainments so that they might extend some hospitality to the youth and beauty of the city. Light Division theatricals had begun in the Torres Vedras winter of 1810. There had been further performances during the winter quarters of 1811–12. In Madrid, they were able to find a proper theatre to put on two plays:
The Revenge and The Mayor of Garrett
. These performances were acted by young, high-spirited officers such as Freer, Havelock, Hennell and Hobkirk of the 43rd (the last bankrolling the production, as might be expected) and the newly arrived Spencer and Gairdner of the 95th. Their Madrid efforts were a great success, netting such a large profit from the curious, paying Spanish public that the officers were able to donate $250 to the city’s poor.

This happy interlude was destined to be short-lived. Wellington’s push to the north-east had been checked at the fortress of Burgos. He had known that the Light and 4th Divisions could not be asked to storm again, after the recent horrors of Badajoz, and had therefore left them near Madrid. However, his attempts to take the citadel with other troops resulted in a number of costly rebuffs and he realised he would have to march all the way back to the Portuguese frontier in order to avoid defeat at the hands of the French armies now massing against him.

The British Army quit Madrid on 31 October, their departure arousing the ire and contempt of the
Madrileños
. Being left to their fate among the French dashed the hopes of many Spanish. Men shouted insults at the marching redcoats and the young women, so delightful at weekly dances, hissed accusations of cowardice and effeminacy. ‘I was truly glad to get away from this unfortunate place,’ one officer wrote in his journal. ‘We could not do the people any good and pity is at best (under the circumstances) a sorry way of showing good wishes.’

Marching down towards the border, they went in long stages in order to stay ahead of the French; they were frequently drenched by chilly autumn downpours and generally grumbled at their reversal of fortunes. The talk after the order ‘March at Ease’ often took a darker tone on this journey, as one Light Division officer vividly described in a letter:

As the marches continued into November, the supply of booze – that essential lubricant for Wellington’s Army – began to break down, along with that of all other rations. The commissaries simply could not cope with the sudden reappearance of the main Army in the impoverished borderlands, for they had been buying much locally in more prosperous parts of Spain during the late campaigns. The hard marching had taken its toll in every sense. Lieutenant George Simmons, for example, had been obliged to put his sick brother Joseph on his pack mule and, having bought no new horse to replace the one lost in July, was himself walking. He had worn through the bottoms of his shoes, and as for many of his riflemen, each squelch into the mire brought his bare sole into contact with muddy road. By 16 November, matters were assuming a desperate aspect, Simmons noting in his journal: ‘Most of us walking barefooted, my shoes having no bottoms, as well as my friends’; my legs and feet much frost-bitten; could hardly crawl.’

It was under these trying conditions that the Craufurd system proved itself once again: its Standing Orders provided a means of regulating the marches and determining what to do with men who couldn’t keep up. For Wellington’s Army had begun to disintegrate: the failure to issue rations had combined with the weather and long marches, meaning that around five thousand British and Portuguese soldiers, straggling behind the divisions, were listed as missing. The Light Division remained one of the least affected by this phenomenon, which in others saw one in six or one in seven soldiers going absent without leave. The French picked up about two thousand of these men, while others eventually returned to their colours.

The French were still there, nipping at their bloody heels. Even a British Army in what the soldiers of the previous generation would have called a ‘flight forward’ could not outstrip the advanced guard of a French Army, so practised were Napoleon’s men in the business of marching, living off the land and pursuing an advantage.

On 17 November, the French caught up, falling upon the British rearguard (formed of course by the Light Division), as the Army made its way across the foaming waters of the Huebra at a place called San Munoz. Crossing a difficult obstacle like this river inevitably caused a blockage. ‘The road was covered with carcasses of all descriptions, and at every deep slough we found horses, mules, donkeys and bullocks mingled together, some dead, others dying, all mingled with baggage,’ wrote Simmons. Taking advantage of the exhaustion and congestion that morning, advanced French patrols of dragoons attacked the British waiting in the oak forests to cross the river.

The 95th’s baggage train fell into French hands at one point, a company of Rifles attacking through the trees to drive off the plundering dragoons. General Sir Edward Paget, the Army’s second in command, was captured during these chaotic events. The French forces arriving on the heights overlooking the Huebra and held by the Light Division began to build up to the critical point where a determined attack would be launched. Fortunately for the British, the crossing was continuing apace.

When the Rifles finally quit the heights and began marching down the slope leading to the ford, the French were able to give them a heavy fire of musketry and cannon. ‘It is impossible to conceive of anything more regular than the march of the Light Division from the heights to the river and across it although the whole time under a heavy cannonade,’ wrote Leach in his journal. ‘No troops at a field day ever preserved their formation in better order.’

Their order might have been good, but they were suffering. Knowing that the enemy cavalry infested the woods, Cameron had no choice but to form the battalion in column for the crossing. This allowed the French gunners an unusual opportunity to make good practice on the 95th, in tight ranks instead of its usual skirmish order, ‘which was fun for them but death to us’. Several soldiers were struck down by the shot as the column finally plunged, chest-high, into the icy waters. Once across, the Light Division deployed with its usual alacrity. A French column was seen heading down to the left of the fords, clearly with the idea of trying to force a passage. Cameron sent the Highland and 1st Companies out to the water’s edge as skirmishers to kill some of them, while the other four companies remained formed in line some way back from the bank, ready to charge with fixed swords any French
who attempted an assault. Some companies of the 52nd joined in the skirmishing.