Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (7 page)

From the officers’ side of the divide – for O’Hare’s predicament in this regard was far from unique in the Rifles – it was difficult to overcome the familiarity which many soldiers showed to someone of low birth. The riflemen could detect a natural gentleman easily enough by his manners. Whereas, for example, Lieutenant Harry Smith, a dashing young English subaltern who had bought his commission in the 95th, was addressed as ‘Mr Smith’, ‘Your Honour’ or ‘Lieutenant Smith, Sir’, O’Hare’s men often called him by his first name.

‘We had but a slender sprinkling of the aristocracy among us,’ one officer of the 95th wrote later, perceptively summing up the difficult question of social status. ‘They were not braver officers, nor were they better or braver men than the soldiers of fortune, with which they were mingled; but there was a degree of refinement in all their actions, even in mischief, which commanded the respect of the soldiers, while those who had been framed in rougher moulds, and left unpolished, were sometimes obliged to have recourse to harsh measures.’ Such was the medicine that O’Hare had been obliged to give to the man who stole his boots.

Once serving on the frontier between the Coa and the Agueda, the captain and several other officers had come to enjoy what modest social opportunities the little Spanish villages could give them. They soon took over the small
cantinas
, inviting local girls to join them in nightly drinking, dancing and song.

The rankers also benefited from a relaxation of discipline in Barba and the other villages they had occupied since 1810 began. This was in part the result of the distance of their billets from the main Army and its officious staff men. One captain of the 95th noted in his journal, ‘Various amusements were exhibited this morning in our village. Jack ass racing, pig hunting, fighting all the cocks in the village was also introduced. I afterwards shot one of the cocks with a single ball at one hundred and seven yards. Several matches at football were also played.’

Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith, who took personal command of the four companies in Barba, was quite content for these amusements to take place. His calculation, one officer surmised, was ‘that to divert
and to amuse his men and to allow them every possible indulgence compatible with the discipline of the battalion … was the surest way to make the soldiers follow him cheerfully through fire and water, when the day of trial came.’

As a Christmas treat, Beckwith bought a hog and had it greased and set loose through the narrow alleys of one village. The men went bounding after, hallooing and tumbling, generally disturbing the peace. One by one they would leap or lunge at the careering animal, until a dextrous fellow eventually caught the swine, earning himself the right to butcher and eat it, making him the hero of his messmates.

Some of the soldiers thieved, of course, as did some of the officers. Just a few weeks after Wellington had caused his entire 4th Division to parade before dawn for days as punishment for stealing honeycombs, the 95th’s officers, led by Captain Leach, cheerfully plundered the hives around Mata de Lobos or Barba and took delight from shooting and consuming the locals’ pigeons. While Leach was aware enough of his and others’ infractions to describe the 95th as ‘a nefarious corps of poachers’, it was during this period on the frontier that the soldiers honed their sense of how much larceny was fair game and how much might bring unhappy consequences for themselves and the battalion. Pinching the odd bird was acceptable, holding up a Spaniard at gunpoint and robbing him was not and would soon enough have brought the provost marshal and his hanging noose in to shatter their mountain idyll. When a party of convalescents, including Robert Fairfoot and Ned Costello, marched up from the south to join the regiment early that year, they were able to tell the others of the draconian punishments being meted out to those caught robbing the Portuguese in the Army’s rear.

While some of the riflemen tested the limits of Colonel Beckwith’s tolerance for petty crime, there was a serious military purpose to their presence. The French had soon detected the outposts in Barba del Puerco. Across the gorge, and behind the ridge facing the 95th’s station, was San Felices, a small village where a French infantry brigade had made its headquarters.

The French commander, General Claude-François Ferey, was one of those hard-fighting warriors who personified all that was best about the imperial officer corps. Ferey had been campaigning for most of his thirty-nine years: he had gone through the revolutionary ferment, rising from the ranks, and his service record as a brigade commander
included Marengo and Austerlitz, two of Napoleon’s most brilliant battles. Ferey’s pickets occupied forward positions very close to the bridge at Barba. Their reports suggested the British force was very small. He also knew that the riflemen picketed at the bridge had evolved the same cheerful modus vivendi with their French partners as had existed down at Almaraz a few months earlier.

There was great uncertainty in the French command about whether Craufurd’s line of outposts was at all supported. For an aggressive general like Ferey, the fact that there was a small number of defenders, apparently unsupported, offered the tempting prospect of a
coup de
main
attack to take the bridge, seize some prisoners and test the general effectiveness of the British outpost line. The friendly relations that existed between sentries would simply allow him to get his storming party close enough to pounce with virtually no warning.

Early in the evening of 19 March, O’Hare’s company took over the task of manning the outlying picket. Two men would stand sentry just by the British-held end of the bridge. Fifty yards to their rear, sheltering among the rocks on the steep hillside, were Sergeant Tuttle Betts and a further dozen troops. The remainder of the 3rd Company, about forty men, for it was at little over half strength due to sickness, would take turns standing guard and sleeping in a little chapel a couple of hundred yards further back. If there was a real emergency, the other three companies, under Beckwith’s command, were billeted in Barba itself, about twenty or thirty minutes away to the rear. It was a system that kept most men dry and warm, but one that could only work if the company on duty at the bridge maintained its vigilance – even those who slept were fully clothed, rifles by their sides, ready to respond to any alarm.

As O’Hare did his rounds, shortly after dusk, he was accompanied by Simmons, since it was O’Hare’s job to teach the boy something about pickets, supports and all the other arcane business of manning outposts. Such was Simmons’s desire to please his captain that he crawled across the bridge so that he could make some brief observations on the French side. With this, the young subaltern retired to a tent near the chapel at about 9 p.m. O’Hare, who had ‘been taken unwell’, retired to a bed in Barba del Puerco itself. The company’s two lieutenants, Mercer and Coane, took turns visiting the pickets.

It was raining heavily, with gusts of icy wind causing those on duty to shiver in their greatcoats or crouch under heavy cloaks, counting the
minutes until their relief by fresh sentries. But while most of O’Hare’s company slept, Ferey was leading storming parties of his men up the steep mountain paths out of San Felices and towards the bridge of Barba del Puerco.

Ferey had picked his soldiers carefully. A storming party of about two hundred from the elite companies of several battalions would be responsible for seizing the bridge. A larger group would form up beside the bridge once the attack began, so that they could fire at any British supports that came to the assistance of the outlying picket. The general knew that his men were undertaking a difficult mission, at night, over narrow mountain paths. He promised them a double ration of food and wine if they succeeded.

At about 11.30 p.m., the French stormers crept up to the eastern end of the bridge. As the supporting party made its way over the rocks to form a firing line to the left side, there was a kerfuffle of men stumbling in the darkness. Ferey felt sure the British had heard.

The leading French
tirailleurs
and
carabiniers,
the picked soldiers of the 32
ème Léger
or light infantry, hastened across the bridge. Two riflemen posted at the British end, Moore and McCann, heard footsteps and shouted a challenge.

In seconds the stormers were past Moore and McCann. The alarm was shouted at last, and shots rang out. Moments later Sergeant Betts’s party, including Fairfoot, was desperately trying to defend itself. Lieutenant Mercer, the officer on duty, quickly began shouting an alarm, sending Lieutenant Coane to fetch those slumbering in the chapel to spring to their arms and follow him to the bridge. Costello was among the men who stumbled out into the darkness.

‘Be quick, men, and load as you go to the brow of the hill!’ one of the officers shouted, as the riflemen rushed towards the firing.

Down at the bridge, dozens of French were across; Moore, McCann, Fairfoot and others had been disarmed and collared. The remainder of the sergeant’s picket had fled higher up the British side of the hill and were crouched behind rocks, trying to pick off the French with rifle fire. Shooting in the darkness, the men were little more than twenty or thirty yards apart in places. As Sergeant Betts shouted orders to his men, a musket ball smashed into his jaw, leaving a bloody mess as he crumpled to the ground. Mercer and a first party of reinforcements joined them.

Simmons was up just in time to see Mercer take a shot through the
forehead and drop dead at his feet. One rifleman leapt out of his cover: shouting ‘Revenge the death of Mr Mercer!’ he ran down the slope until he reached a French officer, and in one deft movement swung his rifle to the Frenchman’s head and blew it off. As the officer dropped, there was a cacophony of firing, and the rifleman fell dead too. With Mercer’s death, Simmons was in command of the men trying to hold their ground. Lieutenant Coane had rushed off to get their captain.

In the terror of this close-quarter fighting, men loaded and fired like demons. Private Green, in combat for the first time, forgot his ramrod and fired it and the ball it had pushed home through the body of a French grenadier who was charging him. Costello wrote, ‘I felt an indescribable thrill, for never before had I been under the fire of a French musket.’

For a moment the moonlight shone through the scudding clouds and several riflemen were able to find the most excellent mark: the white crossbelts that the French soldiers wore across their greatcoats. ‘X’ marked the spot for their firing. The 95th’s shots began opening holes in the ranks of Ferey’s storming party and their commander faced the choice of trying to fight further up the slope, to clear the riflemen from their firing positions, or to give up the game and retreat across the bridge. He chose to fight. The French officers tried to urge their men onwards, into the ‘well nourished fire’ of the British skirmishers. Ferey’s drummers started beating the
pas de charge
, the repetitive signal heard above the din of battle that communicated one idea: forward.

O’Hare appeared and joined in the general turmoil, bellowing out for all his men to hear it: ‘We will never retire. Here we will stand. They shall not pass but over my body.’

The firing, drumming and shouting had been going on for half an hour when the first of Beckwith’s reinforcements appeared. One company had been sent to cover a flank – two others came to the top of the feature that overlooked the bridge. Riflemen loaded their weapons and joined in the general mêlée. With each flash of a Frenchman’s firing musket briefly illuminating their targets, Beckwith could see enough through the murk to detect signs that the French attack had faltered, with the officers capering about, beating the backs of their soldiers with the flats of their swords, trying to get them to quit their cover and move up the slope. It was time to use the close-quarters weapon issued to each of his riflemen: a bayonet that was so large and fearsome-looking that they called it a sword.

Orders were given swiftly; there was the sound of metal on metal as the blades were slotted onto the muzzles of each Baker rifle, and then a great cheer. One of the subalterns who was part of the reinforcements Beckwith brought up recorded: ‘Our swords were soon fixed and giving the war cheer we closed on the foe sending them helter skelter into the gorge and down the pass as far as their legs could carry them.’

Many of the French turned and began fleeing across the bridge. Moore and McCann were bundled over too, as prisoners – but Fairfoot and one or two others seized their moment to break free and throw themselves into cover.

As Beckwith led his chargers down the difficult slope towards the bridge, they became mixed with the more steadfast remnants of the French, who were still trying to defend themselves. The adjutant fought hand to hand with a couple of enemy soldiers, before being delivered by a rifleman’s timely bayonet thrust into one of them.

Little more than an hour after the first shots were fired, the last parties of French ran back across the bridge and the riflemen began collecting their prisoners. The colonel and several men collared one young conscript, who, terrified, remained clutching his musket. As Beckwith started to cross-examine him, the Frenchman pulled the trigger and, with an almighty flash and bang, sent a ball through Beckwith’s shako.

A rifle was levelled instantly at the Frenchman’s temple, but Beckwith, whose head was singed but intact, checked the rifleman who was about to pull the trigger: ‘Let him alone; I daresay the boy has a mother.’ The colonel ordered the French conscript to be disarmed and sent to the rear.

The fighting at Barba del Puerco was over by 1.30 a.m. on 20 March. It had cost the Rifles one officer and eight men killed, as well as fifteen wounded, and two prisoners – Moore and McCann had been spirited back to the French lines. Seeing few bodies on the ground the next morning, the riflemen convinced themselves that the French had suffered heavily and carried back many of their casualties. Ferey’s dispatch reported the losses: twelve dead and thirteen wounded. Three Frenchmen were also taken prisoner.