Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters Read online

  Rifles

  Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters

  MARK URBAN

  for my beloved Sol

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List Of Illustrations

  Preface

  Chapter One: Departures

  Chapter Two: Talavera

  Chapter Three: Guadiana

  Chapter Four: Barba Del Puerco

  Chapter Five: The Coa

  Chapter Six: Wounded

  Chapter Seven: Busaco

  Chapter Eight: The Corporal’s Stripes

  Chapter Nine: Pombal

  Chapter Ten: Sabugal

  Chapter Eleven: Fuentes d’Onoro

  Chapter Twelve: The Gentleman Volunteer

  Chapter Thirteen: Deserters

  Chapter Fourteen: The Storm Of Ciudad Rodrigo

  Chapter Fifteen: The Reckoning

  Chapter Sixteen: Badajoz

  Chapter Seventeen: The Disgrace

  Chapter Eighteen: The Salamanca Campaign

  Chapter Nineteen: The Regimental Mess

  Chapter Twenty: Vitoria

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Nivelle

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Nive

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Tarbes

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Castel Sarrazin

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Quatre Bras

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Waterloo

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Legend Is Born

  Inserts

  Notes On Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Praise

  By the Same Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  The different firing positions used by riflemen; the Baker rifle. The reproduction Baker rifle clearly demonstrates the later rounded plate patch box and a swan neck cock. The Baker lock illustrated represents the later-style Tower assembled lock with a flat plate and ring neck cock.

  Illustration from Ezekiel Baker’s 33 Years Practice and Observation with Rifle Guns.

  A target used in the trials that selected the Baker rifle.

  Detail of a map of the northern Portuguese-Spanish frontier, scene of the Light Division’s exploits from 1809 to 1812.

  Sidney Beckwith the 1st Battalion’s Commanding Officer during the campaigns of 1809–11; Andrew Barnard, commander of the 3rd Battalion of Rifles in Spain and later of the 1st; Robert Craufurd in the uniform of the 5th Battalion, 60th Foot; Alexander Cameron, commander of the 1st/95th between Beckwith and Barnard.

  Ned Costello after leaving the 95th and his service in the Spanish Carlist (civil) War; Jonathan Leach, commander of the 2nd Company for almost all of the Peninsular Wars; Harry Smith, a 95th officer who rose to become a successful general.

  The Combat of the Coa.

  Busaco; Foz d’Arouce, the most successful of the Light Division’s combats against Ney’s rearguard.

  Sabugal.

  Watercolour of Ciudad Rodrigo by Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell of the 95th; the Great Breach at Badajoz, painted by Atkinson.

  Mitchell’s view of Fuentes d’Onoro

  Vitoria.

  Wellington breaches the French Pyrenean defensive line at Nivelle.

  The 95th fighting in the Pyrenees; the Battle of the Nive.

  Morning at Waterloo by Aylward; fighting in La Haye Sainte.

  The illustrations are reproduced by kind permission of: The National Army Museum (1a, 10b, 14a); the Trustees of the Royal Green Jackets Museum (2, 3, 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d, 6c, 15a); AKG London (15b); Mike Fitzgerald and Sue Law (1b, 1c – originally displayed at http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~slaw/SuesPage/baker.htm).

  Preface

  The 95th Rifles became the British Army’s best-known regiment at a time of some very potent national myths. Wellington’s riflemen have found a niche in the military historical pantheon alongside Cromwell’s Ironsides or the Desert Rats.

  In modern times they have been lionised by popular culture in novels as well as television drama. C. S. Forester featured riflemen in his books, and Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series has brought tales of the Green Jackets’ derring-do to millions.

  It is apparent then that their exploits have been recounted in more or less embroidered forms quite a few times before. Surprisingly, though, nobody has ever written a proper history of the regiment, and in particular of its 1st Battalion through the period of maximum drama – 1809–15. A colonel in the Rifle Brigade, Willoughby Verner, attempted to tell the full story of all three battalions of his regiment, but never completed his narrative, which ends abruptly two years before the campaigns do.

  What’s more, although Verner’s efforts were deeply impressive for their time, he began publishing his history in 1912. It was a very different age and he wrote for the glory of his regiment. Although he was prepared to confront a few difficult issues, Verner self-censored in a way that would be unacceptable to most readers today.

  I knew that if I was to push this narrative well beyond Verner or any other previous account, I would have to exploit many new sources of information, as well as looking again at the old ones. My starting point was the existing published memoirs of several soldiers of the 95th, as well as Verner’s account.

  Then I was able to get to most of Verner’s working papers, which allowed me to revisit his research, including some vital primary sources that had for many years been unavailable to other writers. After that I dug out some other primary material such as letters or journals that he did not have access to and which has never been used in published form before. Then the various claims of authors or diarists had to be checked against official records, such as the Muster Lists or Casualty Returns at the Public Record Office in Kew. Having performed all of these tasks, I had to search for the French Army version of various key engagements, in order to try to gauge the real effectiveness of the Rifles.

  After going through all of these different sources, I needed to find a coherent way of telling the 95th’s story. I chose to write it as the saga of the men who embarked at Dover on 25 May 1809. This really gets to the core of Rifles mythology and to all of the legendary regimental characters. There were various compromises inherent in this decision – not least that some epic moments in the year prior to this, as well as the stories of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, could not be told in great detail. Be that as it may, the 1st Battalion in May 1809 was a substantially different unit to the one that had fought a few months earlier and it is the interaction between veterans and newcomers that forms a vital subtext to the early part of the book. Also, I have mentioned the 2nd and 3rd Battalions’ most celebrated exploits in the campaign.

  Many soldiers’ stories are told in this book, but six individuals are flagged up at the start. This book is not the story of these six men per se, but their fate provides a useful reference point as the narrative unfolds.

  In recounting the six-year journey to Waterloo with them it is also my aim to give the lay reader a great deal of information about the realities of life in Wellington’s Army and to establish the 95th’s pivotal role in creating what we might now recognise as a modern British soldier. It is not a general history of the Iron Duke’s campaigns nor of soldiering in the Napoleonic era, so the wider themes are always tackled through the experience of soldiers of the 95th Rifles. I make no apology for dispatching the Battle of Salamanca, perhaps Wellington’s greatest battle, in a few short sentences, since the 1st/95th played almost no part in it.

  The result is, I hope, an account of these campaigns that shears away the distortions or recyc
ling of other authors, providing a vivid, truthful account of how these extraordinarily tough men lived, fought and died. It is inevitable, I think, when going back to so many primary sources, that much of the new material that comes to light concerns issues that later authors wanted to screen out such as cowardice, theft or bungling. Because of this, some who rush to judgement may see my book as a debunking or knocking job on the 95th. It is certainly not intended as such, and I hope that my admiration for the courage, stoicism and thoughtfulness of many of its officers and men is clear throughout.

  I owe many people a debt of gratitude. My editor at Newsnight, George Entwistle, has to be thanked for allowing me to embark on the journey in the first place, and my agent Jonathan Lloyd for making sure it was worth my while to do so! Phyllis Mendoza started me off with a very kind gift of several Rifles memoirs that her late husband had collected.

  Lieutenant General Sir Christopher Wallace was the key that opened the door of the Royal Green Jackets Archive in Winchester for me. Once there, I relied time and again on the extraordinary recall and patience of Major Ron Cassidy who, in retirement, administers this vital resource as a labour of love for his regiment. It was here that Verner’s notes and many other vital accounts were found.

  For some new material, I have a debt to Caroline Craufurd, a descendant of Major General Robert Craufurd, who helped me to much information about that tormented figure. In working on the official records, I sometimes deployed the skills of professional researchers in the shape of Eileen Hathaway and Roger Nixon. George Caldwell and Robert Cooper gave freely of their particular expertise on the 95th. On the French accounts, Cyril Canet assisted in the Vincennes archives. John Montgomery, librarian of the Royal United Services Institute in London, rallied to the cause this time just as energetically as he did with my last book.

  Throughout the research, I benefited enormously from the kindness of John Sandler, the leading collector of Napoleonic literature in Britain, whose library, amassed over more than sixty years, contains fifteen thousand volumes. I was able to consult this vast resource at will and draw on his great expertise. The Sandler Collection was particularly useful for digging up early French published accounts.

  The task of licking my tract into shape fell to Julian Loose and Angus Cargill at Faber and I am delighted to complete this fourth collaboration with that house. Dr Rory Muir once again did me the enormous favour of vetting my text for more egregious errors – but of course I alone take responsibility for any that remain. Many others – too numerous to mention – have shared their knowledge or books, often through virtual communities such as the Napoleon Series internet forum.

  Finally I must also thank those who have had to put up with me while I got this obsession out of my system: my wife Hilary, as well as daughters who showed an understanding far in advance of their years, Isabelle and Madeleine.

  Mark Urban

  London, October 2003

  ONE

  Departures

  May 1809

  Just before 6 a.m. the head of the battalion entered Dover. There were many people watching from upstairs windows as the green phalanx wound its way down to the port. Of course they drew onlookers; the battalion’s buglers had seen to that by shattering the twilight stillness as they arrived. A good blast on the horns was usually used to announce them and to tell ignorant civilians that, having heard a strange cacophony, their eyes were about to register something quite unusual too: the first regiment of British riflemen.

  At the head of the column rode several officers resplendent in their dark-green uniforms, with a pelisse, that fashionable braided jacket beloved of hussars and other cavalry dandies, thrown over one shoulder. On their crowns, tall caps with a bugle badge and a tuft of green. Behind them about 1,100 troops tramped along, the thumping cadence of their marching echoing through narrow streets.

  They had already been going for four hours when they filed into Dover, having quit their barracks a little further down the coast after the briefest of nights. Many of them were bursting with anticipation, for they were embarking on foreign service. In a letter that he posted that morning, 25 May 1809, Second Lieutenant George Simmons wrote home to Yorkshire, ‘This, my dear parents, is the happiest moment of my life; and I hope, if I come where there is an opportunity of showing courage, your son will not disgrace the name of a British soldier.’

  Simmons, with all the patriotic fervour of the military virgin, marched behind his captain, Peter O’Hare, a grizzled veteran who had fought in a dozen battles around the world. Putting the newest officer under one of the oldest; that, of course, was the commanding officer’s intent.

  The whole battalion had been formed on the same principle. It had returned from campaigning against the French in Spain just three months earlier, but it had been remade. Such were the exigencies of the service. Of the ten captains at the head of their companies that 25 May, only O’Hare and one other had filled the same positions in January.

  Dead men’s shoes had been filled and many experienced officers and soldiers marched out of the 1st Battalion in order to give a backbone of experience to the newly formed 3rd, who were staying behind while they were trained to some sort of acceptable standard. In the pell-mell of regimental reorganisation, the 1st Battalion had not been able to refuse its quota of new men.

  Private Robert Fairfoot marched in the ranks of O’Hare’s company down to Dover docks. He was tall, a well-made man of twenty-six years, but he was Johnny Raw in the eyes of the old riflemen. Granted, Fairfoot had done his time in the militia – there was no way they’d have let him into the 1st Battalion at all without some knowledge of the soldier’s way of life – but he’d never heard a shot fired in anger. Fairfoot had been in the 95th for less than four weeks. One of the old hands commented contemptuously that when the orders to embark that morning had been received, ‘the men who had joined us from the militia had scarcely learned the rifle drill’.

  Each of the ten companies in that battalion contained its sprinkling of Johnny Raws and its quota of veterans. They had not been blended yet. Months would be required to get those men messing happily together. The extra recruits had been drafted from the militia because Britain’s generals had been roused from their usual indifference in professional matters by the regiment’s performance in several foreign expeditions. Just a few weeks before its 1st or senior battalion embarked at Dover, the 95th had been rewarded by being allowed to form a 3rd Battalion. There was a buzz of excitement about this new form of warfare – of green-jacketed men using the rifle – but its apostles knew that there was much still to be proved. The Rifles had generally been employed in brief little campaigns against second-rate troops. They had only faced Napoleon’s legions fleetingly the previous summer and in the early part of 1809. So just as the likes of Simmons and Fairfoot were setting out to prove themselves, the entire battalion and its tactics would now be on trial. By the end of the campaign, the 1st Battalion of the 95th would be held up by some as one of the finest war bands in all history.

  There was fighting in store for Simmons and the others all right: there would be five years of it before the survivors would see the white cliffs of Old England again. Of course, they had no way of knowing that as they caught sight of the ships at anchor. In fact, they did not even know where they were going. One rifleman would say with great conviction that the battalion was headed back to Spain or Portugal, but another, with equal fervour and a ‘damn yer eyes’, would assert they were going to help the Austrians, whose legions were locked in a new battle with Napoleon. The British government had been locked in a sporadic global competition with the French since their revolution, and as the Emperor Napoleon’s armies triumphed on the Continent, ministers in London wanted to use the small expeditionary army they could scrape together to make mischief for their Gallic enemies. They had selected the 95th’s destination as the most profitable place to do that.

  As the tail of the column arrived on the dockside, a gaggle of dozens of women and small c
hildren brought up the rear. There was no set drill about the embarkation of wives for a foreign expedition. Sometimes there would be a quota of five or six per company. Sometimes, with a quartermaster’s nod and wink, it would be more than that. But the commanding officer had issued strict orders this time: no women.

  There had been wives on the last expedition, and not a few of them had ended up being left in Spain. Some had dropped dead from exhaustion trying to keep up on long marches through winter snows. Others had fallen behind to be violated by half a dozen French dragoons before having their throats cut. And there were a few who fell behind and might be alive or dead, nobody knew. So the colonel had been most adamant on this point: there would be no women with the regiment, and, as for those services like sewing repairs or fetching provisions, the men would fend for themselves.

  As embarkation started, so did the wailing and oaths of women who saw that the dread moment of leave-taking had arrived. ‘It was such a parting scene that I never wish to witness it again,’ one of the soldiers later wrote. ‘The women clung round the necks of their husbands, so that the officers had much ado to part them. There was such a ringing of hands, tearing of hair and crying that I was glad to jump on the boat, thankful that I had no wife to bewail my loss.’

  The men, loaded down with anything up to eighty pounds of fighting kit, clambered gingerly into the rowing boats that awaited them at the base of the quay. The tars then heaved away on the oars, pulling their human cargo one mile out into the middle of the harbour where a squadron of transports lay at anchor.

  Among the married soldiers, there were some last lingering looks at the waving figures on the quay. Then, putting a brave face on their misery, the wives sent up three cheers for the 95th, and many bystanders joined in. The women’s cries were all the more poignant, one officer wrote, for ‘knowing well that numbers must never return to their native land’. Not to be outdone, the soldiers returned their own huzzas before the stiff breeze carried away their shouts.