Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (25 page)

That winter, the riflemen saw quite a bit of their Commander of Forces, since his headquarters was just a few miles away in Frenada. Every couple of days, Wellington hunted across the moorland. A blaring of horns and barking of hounds signalled the arrival of his party, consisting usually of the finely mounted sons of the aristocracy on his staff.

A sportsman like Leach would have liked nothing more than to join in such fun, but he did not have the money. ‘Lord Wellington’s fox hounds often met within reach of our cantonments, but such was the miserable state of our horses that the staff-men only could avail themselves of it,’ he wrote. The Rifle officers would look at their bony nags and call them Rosinantes. A fellow on the staff was expected to keep two or three horses to ride on, because he was about delivering orders day and night, and he therefore received extra allowances for forage. In truth, though, it was not simply a matter of a few shillings’ stipend here or there, since the young bloods would think nothing of spending a lieutenant’s annual pay on a horse and its upkeep.

Even the slowest-witted Rifles officers, seeing their well-bred comrades disappear to the staff, had concluded that such a post offered a far better opportunity for advancement than fighting with the 95th. George Simmons was wise enough to have grasped this early on, and his parents, learning these facts of military life from his letters, had begun their own efforts to help. Being straightforward Yorkshire folk, and bereft of any great interest, they had begun their campaign with the local Member of Parliament. George wrote back to them, touched by their efforts but clearly considering the case hopeless: ‘I am too well hackneyed in the ways of the world to for a moment imagine that a Member of Parliament would give me anything, or, in other words, ask for a company for a perfect stranger who had not given him the least assistance.’ Simmons’s father had evidently seen Harry Smith’s rise as a
pattern for his own son, but George had to disabuse him that he could even aspire to such a thing: ‘You make me laugh with the idea of an aide-de-camp being the high road to a Brigade-major’s situation. Aides-de-camp are generally chosen by general officers through relationship or family connections or friends. My ideas of the world since I became a soldier are quite changed.’

Simmons was perfectly right, for he predicted Lord Charles Spencer’s departure from the regiment several months in advance. That officer exploited a family connection to get onto Major General Sir William Stewart’s staff, after serving around a year with the 95th.

The technique of using the dashing and dangerous 95th as a stepping stone into a somewhat safer and better-remunerated staff job was sufficiently well known to those officers without connections to generate some resentment. It was generally felt that one year’s regimental service was the bare minimum, Leach noting:

Cameron, always comfortable in the role of curmudgeon, felt strongly that young subalterns needed whipping into shape – indeed, this may have been the sole basis of his antipathy to Gairdner. During the final weeks of 1812, Cameron tried to obtain the recall of Second Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell, whose regimental career had lasted a bare three months in 1811 before secondment to the Quarter Master General’s staff. Mitchell, ironically, was a young man who had come into the Army almost bereft of interest, volunteering like Cameron himself had done long before. This, though, brought no sympathy whatsoever and Cameron had written angrily to Headquarters: ‘2nd Lieut Mitchell being a young officer and entirely unacquainted with his duty as a Regimental Officer, I have to beg that his Excellency the Commander of the Forces will be pleased to order him to join his Regt forthwith, being deficient in subaltern officers.’ In order to ram home his point, Cameron recalled Mitchell’s servant, a private rifleman, to the regiment.

Mitchell, however, had proven himself an exquisite map-maker and the staff needed his services. Cameron soon found he had bitten off
more than he could chew. The Quarter Master General himself wrote to Wellington that Cameron’s actions in castigating Mitchell and recalling his servant ‘appeared to me such a measure of harshness and irregularity that I wrote to M General Alten intending to lay the whole matter before the Commander of the Forces’. Little could the commanding officer of the 1st/95th have imagined that in trying to exercise his rights over a penniless pipsqueak barely in his twenties, he would end up having to explain himself to General Alten and Lord Wellington. Cameron stood his ground, though, falling back, as military pedants were apt to do, on regulations, insisting that Second Lieutenants were too junior to be attached to the staff. Mitchell sheepishly returned, doubtless further improving the brittle dinner-table atmosphere in Alemada. The matter did not rest there: a new QMG arrived, someone in whom Wellington had complete trust, and a few weeks after he had appeared in his regiment, Mitchell packed his bags once more and rode back to Frenada.

In a number of small ways, then, Cameron’s character and the limitations of his command became known to those in charge of the Army. All of this must have been extremely vexing for him, since he was a man who believed in solving problems, as far as he was able, inside the regimental family. For example, when Private George Stratton was caught by Don Julian’s guerrillas trying to make his way to the French lines, having robbed some of his comrades, Cameron resolved to deal with the matter himself. The battalion was marched out to witness the punishment of four hundred lashes, and Cameron told him: ‘I ought to have had you tried by General Court Martial – in which case you should have been shot – but the high character the regiment has borne in the army prevents me from having it mentioned in General Orders that a man of the Rifles could be guilty of the heinous crime of desertion.’ The case of Almond and the others one year before appears to have taught the officers that execution would not operate in the deterrent manner that Wellington had hoped and that it was best to resolve these matters in ways that would not make it into the newspapers at home.

Cameron, for all his clumsiness in dealing with brother officers, understood the soldier’s mentality well, and told the assembled regiment, ‘If his own company shall be answerable for his good behaviour, I shall forgive him.’ Nobody spoke up for Stratton. The soldiers were happy enough as the buglers started laying on the lash. After all, some
one who stole from his messmates ranked second only to a skulker in their book of villains. After sixty or seventy strokes, though, one of the men did call out, a private called Robinson whom Cameron said was as bad as Stratton. Reluctantly, the colonel halted the punishment.

Stratton’s desertion was almost a singular event that winter. The Spanish drafted in to the 95th earlier that year, on the other hand, proved rather more prone to it. The Spanish experiment was tried in several of Wellington’s regiments, the 1st/95th’s quota being forty-six men. Most of these deserted during the last few months of 1812, the battalion’s monthly return for 25th November containing a rather tart annotation next to the figure of nine for soldiers who deserted: ‘Only one is a native of Great Britain.’

For the most part, it was not a winter to rival the previous one for privations. The men had been given arrears of pay shortly after going into winter quarters, enabling them to buy drink, tobacco and some other comforts. There was a better supply system in place too, bringing up each man’s daily pound of beef with biscuit and rum to boot.

Wellington was keen for his Army to be re-equipped during this winter, for its clothes had fallen apart during 1812’s tough fights and marches. The 95th’s quartermaster was able to buy some dark-green cloth in Lisbon, which tailors ran up into new trousers and jackets for those needing them. ‘Green having become the least conspicuous colour in the regiment,’ wrote Costello, ‘it was amusing to see our fellows strutting about as proud as peacocks among the Spanish peasant girls.’

The soldiers also had their dances and assemblies. This was their fourth winter away from home, and during the long stay in Alemada some became smitten with local girls. Many might have thought it wiser not to have a woman trailing around with the regimental baggage, but they had been through such horrors in their campaigns that they wanted to live for the moment. A few dozen men in the 95th took Spanish or Portuguese wives, although these unions were rarely consecrated in church, for the men were mostly heretics in local eyes. But enough impoverished families were sufficiently content to see their daughters fall in with a British soldier, who would take some sort of financial care of them, that these arrangements did not cause scandal. Some of these women would march with the regiment, playing the sort of roles – washing, mending and peddling drink or smoking fodder – that regimental wives embarked on service might have done, before Beckwith banned them in May 1809.

In all the boozing, smoking and easy living of those months, the Light Division lost some of its fighting edge. One officer of the 95th wrote to a friend in London, ‘We have acted some plays … with various success, we have got drunk with constant success.’

Early in 1813, with the prospect of a further campaign against the French in the offing, General Alten began a programme of marches, firing practice and field days designed to bring his division back up to scratch. Matters were made more difficult for him by the replacement of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Barnard in command of the 1st Brigade by Major General James Kempt. The 2nd Brigade remained for the time being under General John Vandeleur, who had proven a tough and effective officer, earning the affectionate nickname Old Vans from his men.

Barnard had enjoyed nearly a year in acting command of the 1st Brigade (and indeed of the whole Light Division at Badajoz), a mark of the faith Lord Wellington placed in him. Eventually, though, those who ran the Army at Horse Guards insisted on a general holding substantive rank taking over the command. Barnard took the setback philosophically, and began plotting how he might make his promotion to full colonel permanent. He devoured political news and pleaded in his letters home for more papers and caricatures to help pass the hours in his billets. In the meantime, he knew he was about to return to regimental soldiering, taking over command of the 1st Battalion of Rifles just before the start of the new campaign. Cameron would be pushed aside as acting commanding officer, just as Barnard himself had been displaced from the next rung up the military ladder by Kempt’s arrival.

Barnard had not yet taken over when the long winter lay-off and changes in command made themselves felt on 8 April, as the 1st Brigade was put through its paces. ‘We had a brigade field day this day on the plain between this and Espeja, the movements were done very badly indeed,’ one officer of the 95th wrote.

With its mixture of men hardened almost to the point of villainy with others who had campaigned too much, the battalion would not be easy to command in the forthcoming campaign. In his last weeks as commanding officer, Cameron took an opportunity to pack off several older men in the battalion who were simply too broken down to keep up with another season’s tough marching. Ten were sent away early in 1813, most to the 13th Royal Veteran Battalion, where they could at least still live with some dignity, wearing a red coat and having all the
essentials of life found for them. Had the supply of fresh recruits been better, there can be little doubt that the expedient of invaliding men home in this way would have been used much more widely, for those unable to keep up with a regiment were frequently the source of all sorts of difficulties.

Some tough weeks of training lay ahead for everyone. George Simmons broke off a message to his parents on 30 April with the words: ‘I must end my letter, as the company are already mustering at my door for target practice. I shall pass the remainder of the day in proving the abilities of my men in hitting a mark in order to do justice to our enemies when we meet with them.’ When the brigade held another field day on 8 May, its performance was much improved. There was still time for some further preparation before Lord Wellington reviewed the Light Division on 17 May.

Around the 95th’s dinner table, a lively conversation about the next campaign followed the end of each day’s training. They knew from the English newspapers that Napoleon, having suffered a complete disaster in Russia, which of course delighted them, was preparing to fight in Germany. The wiser ones anticipated some weakening of the French Army in Spain in order to succour the Emperor in the north. However, each report of a movement by some French division across the frontier was considered highly unreliable. Officers would offer up the latest theory with an ‘
on dit
’ or ‘it is said’ in order to distance themselves somewhat from it: ‘
on dit
a corps of fifty thousand Russian auxiliaries is daily expected to disembark at Lisbon’. Percolating absurd reports and obvious ones down to their essence, one captain wrote to England, ‘Rumour says that we are about to retrace our steps and that we shall not stop until we have driven the French out of Spain … however I am totally in the dark upon the points which enable us beings of an inferior description to form any opinion at all.’

They did know one thing, though, and that was that the long winter’s repose would soon be over. Every soldier or officer, appreciating the comforts he would require on the marches ahead, set about finding them. ‘We now only require that the canteens of each Company’s mess should be well supplied before we begin the campaign with tea and sugar, a pigskin full of wine – a keg of spirits – lots of segars – and some spare horse shoes and nails to be carried with us in case of losing a shoe on the march,’ wrote Leach.