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

  Although Beckwith and the other founders of the 95th considered flogging both degrading and pointless, they did not rule it out under all circumstances. His predecessor as commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, for example, had campaigned publicly for the abolition of corporal punishment, ‘except in cases of infamy’. Such was Plunket’s case, for the battalion could not be allowed to see such an example of riot go unpunished.

  Plunket’s company commander and Beckwith evidently resolved to settle the matter within the battalion. Officers of the 95th were sensitive to cases which might damage the regiment’s good name going before a general court martial, because such proceedings would inevitably come to the notice of Lord Wellington and, since they were published, of newspapers back in England. Plunket’s punishment – the loss of his sergeant’s stripes and three hundred lashes – was instead decided instanter by a rapid regimental court martial.

  ‘When the sentence became known, sorrow was felt for him throughout the regiment, by the officers almost as much as the men,’ according to Private Costello, who had worshipped Plunket since joining O’Hare’s company. The battalion was paraded to witness the punishment. Plunket was stripped to the waist, tied to a tree and two buglers stepped forward with their cats. After Beckwith refused a last appeal, the first bugler swung his whip onto the prisoner’s back.

  After a few strokes, the colonel suspected that Plunket’s popularity was making the bugler lay it on a little light. ‘Do your duty fairly, sir!’ he shouted at the bugler, who completed the first ration of twenty-five lashes. But Beckwith could not stand the whole procedure, and after thirty-five had been administered, he ordered that Plunket be taken down. Beckwith spoke to the bloodied prisoner in a clear, loud voice, for the benefit of the whole battalion: ‘You see now, sir, how very easy it is to commit a blackguard’s crime, but how difficult to take his punishment.’

  The training at Campo Maior reached a peak on 23 September. A little after dawn, the 95th was joined by the other two battalions under Craufurd’s command (the 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry) for a brigade field day. This was an opportunity for the brigadier to watch how quickly his men responded to his commands to change formation while moving across country. The more swiftly and precisely these evolutions were carried out, the greater the brigade’s chance of prevailing on the battlefield.

  The tactics taught to the 43rd and 52nd by Moore back in England, and drilled by Craufurd under that blazing Iberian sun, were a hybrid of orthodox and Rifle ones. They helped the battalions to change formation more quickly, to extend many companies in skirmish order (not just one, as was more usual in normal infantry battalions), and they encouraged a new type of shooting which gave the redcoats the added destructive power that the 95th had achieved through aimed fire, while retaining the devastating short-range potential of the volley. The Light Brigade system pioneered by the 52nd instructed men: ‘On the word “Present!”… each man slowly and independently levelling at the particular object his eye has fixed upon, and as soon as he has covered it, fires of his own accord.’

  For new soldiers like Simmons, Fairfoot and Costello, running about the dusty scrub was hard, thirsty work, particularly as the day became ferociously hot. At least, though, they were learning the tactics of their chosen corps, something that was new to them. For the old hands such as O’Hare, Almond and Brotherwood, these field days could be tiresome in the extreme: they had done it a hundred times before and were only likely to catch Craufurd’s notice if they fouled up. They knew the difference, too, between the textbook evolutions of the training ground and the real business of staying alive once the balls were flying.

  As week after week of intense training went on, the Light Brigade found its preparations for war being sapped by a sinister disease. The plain where they had bivouacked belonged to the Guadiana River, and the Caya, where they bathed, was one of its tributaries. The Guadiana marked Portugal’s frontier and Wellington had chosen to keep his army there because it would allow him to re-enter Spain on another raid in support of the Spanish armies. However, the flatlands around this great river were known to be ‘proverbially unhealthy’.

  Privates Robert Fairfoot and Ned Costello and Second Lieutenant George Simmons all came down with Guadiana fever. Simmons, who had once been destined for a medical career himself, believed he had been stricken with ‘the typhus’, but the army’s surgeons had their own diagnosis of intermittent fever. Once a man was stricken with this malady, he could be laid out for weeks, each apparent improvement of his condition giving way to some recurrent bout of sweats and delirium.

  The number of cases built up quickly and the regimental hospital, manned by the 95th’s surgeon and his two mates, soon proved inadequate for the care of more than a few dozen patients, so the feverish riflemen were transported to a general hospital established in a convent in the nearby garrison of Elvas. One patient noted, ‘My case was really pitiable, my appetite and hearing gone; feet and legs like ice; three blisters on my back and feet untreated and undressed; my shirt sticking in the wounds caused by the blisters … a little sympathy would have soothed, but sympathy there was none.’ Private Costello, finding himself in the convent, recorded, ‘I fortunately recovered after an illness of nearly six weeks, thanks to my good constitution, but none to the brute of an orderly, who, during a delirium of the fever beat me once most furiously with a broom stick.’

  The surgeons were at a loss for a specific cause of the outbreak. Since the fever had evidently arisen because of the sickly miasmas that pervaded the Guadiana plain, they kept fires burning in the wards, so the smoke might keep out these noxious vapours. One of O’Hare’s riflemen, dragooned into acting as an orderly, recorded another treatment for the raging fever: ‘We were ordered to sit up with the sick in our turns, and about midnight to take each one out of bed (they all lay without shirts), lead them to a flight of steps, and pour two buckets of cold water on each. They were so deranged they knew nothing about it.’

  Private Brotherwood, a fellow of iron constitution in his mid-twenties, was one of the minority not to succumb to Guadiana fever at all. Simmons, of similar age, managed to beat off the fever after three bouts of it. By mid-October he was on the mend. But by the time orders came through for an imminent march to northern Portugal, Guadiana fever had carried off thousands of Wellington’s soldiers. Dozens died in the 95th, with O’Hare’s company, for example, losing twelve soldiers.

  Three of the eight Royal Surrey Militia men who had joined O’Hare’s company with Fairfoot were among that dozen carried off by the fever. Fairfoot himself remained dangerously ill when the battalion joined the rest of the Light Brigade heading towards northern Portugal on 16 December. Costello was also too sick to march, languishing in the convent that the army had turned into a general hospital.

  Before it had even crossed swords in earnest with the French, the 95th had lost a company’s worth of men. Many of those who had sought the glories of a military career found themselves interred in unmarked graves in the dusty soil of Alemtejo. In Guildford or Dublin, mothers received an official notification of death, often with a promissory note for a few shillings of back pay, a last reminder of a rifleman son they would never see again.

  The 95th would have many days on the road before it reached its destination on the northern Portuguese frontier of the Baixa Beira. The weather was turning, with increasingly heavy rains. Snows dusted the peaks of the sierras. At least the cooler temperatures made the marching easier, as did the knowledge that they were quitting that damnable Guadiana plain – and heading, perhaps, for the trial with the French for which so many of them yearned.

  FOUR

  Barba del Puerco

  January–July 1810

  On 6 January, the Rifles crossed the River Coa, on Portugal’s northern border. It was their first glimpse of the deeply incised gorge, its fast-flowing torrent, and the ancient arched bridge that crossed it, leading to the fortress of Almeida guarding the gateway to the north of the country. The b
arrier of the Coa, with its few crossing points, and the poor peasant villages of the mountain country around it were destined to be the setting for many of the 95th’s exploits in the coming years.

  The journey north from Campo Maior had taken the Rifles three hundred miles through the dramatic peaks of the Sierra d’Estrella and up onto the barren plateau of the frontier. There, great lumps of rock littered the ground like giants’ playthings and the few, poverty-stricken inhabitants lived in hovels with earthen floors and smoking chimneys. The driving rain and the covering of heather and ferns, as well as the frosts, reminded many riflemen of western Ireland or the Yorkshire moors.

  As the battalion tramped away from the infernal Guadiana, many of the soldiers had come to appreciate the pleasures of life in the field. Each day as they marched up through the mountains, some ravishing new prospect greeted them – they experienced a host of sensations that the boyhood playmates they had left behind in Yorkshire or Chester would never know. One novice marching with the battalion wrote of the scenery, ‘It was beyond anything I could have conceived, and it has highly compensated me for my labour.’

  Craufurd pushed his troops beyond the Coa, closer to Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortified town on the Spanish side of the uplands. There they would take up a line of observation posts along another river, the Agueda, which ran parallel to the Coa and like it flowed down into the Douro, the great river of northern Portugal. For the most part, this upland landscape consisted of open plains or rolling groves of black oaks and other trees. In places, though, the underlying rock burst through this covering, providing vantage points, and where the Agueda cut its way down to meet the Douro, a deep gorge many miles long presented itself.

  The Light Brigade had been posted to this remote corner of Portugal to guard Wellington’s army against the possibility of surprise. It was well known that tens of thousands of French troops lurked not far away in Spain, and everybody predicted it would not be long before these corps d’armée marched into Portugal to throw out the British. Brigadier Craufurd convinced his leader that posting a chain of lookouts on the peaks of this highland would provide warning of any hostile movement, allowing the rest of the army to train and rest in comfort many miles to the rear. One of Craufurd’s staff noted, ‘This extraordinary undertaking was in a great measure one of his own bringing about. He almost led the Commander in Chief into it by the enthusiastic zeal with which he carried it through.’

  There were great dangers to occupying scattered posts so far ahead of friendly lines. The principal one was that enemy cavalry might pass the Agueda by some ford and cut off Craufurd’s parties: then they would not only fail to give warning, but fall into the French bag to boot. For this reason, the forward line of outposts was to be occupied by Allied cavalry, two squadrons of the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion, who might make good their escape just as quickly as any enemy tried to move on them. In one place, though, Craufurd posted infantry: he sent four companies of the 95th to the Agueda gorge and a small Spanish village called Barba del Puerco. Here the terrain was so rocky that enemy cavalry could not approach the little bridge across the river and Craufurd considered that if the Rifles were sufficiently hard-pressed, they could defend the pass for long enough for him to bring reserves up to cover their withdrawal.

  In late January 1810, Craufurd started posting his observation parties. Most of them consisted of a few hussars. In key places, a British officer was attached. These groups could alert the reserves some miles behind them by lighting beacons or firing off their guns. Craufurd instructed these mustachioed veterans of the German Legion in great detail and in their own language. He told them how to conduct themselves and how to take daily measurements of the Agueda, so that he could reassure himself that the river remained high enough to protect his posts against surprise. ‘General Craufurd in fact worked out the most difficult part of the oupost duty with them,’ wrote James Shaw Kennedy, a staff officer who was one of the brigadier’s few real admirers in the Army at the time. ‘They knew his plan for each space they covered, but not his general plan; and each worked out his part most admirably. The General communicated with them direct. He had the advantage of possessing, with great abilities and activity and energy, uncommon bodily strength, so that he could be on horseback almost any length of time.’

  Craufurd was skilled at working out complex problems of time and distance. When he applied this to his brigade’s marching, and how small deviations might hold up the whole, he drove many of his officers to distraction. But in his appraisal of the time it would take the French to move on his people, and then how long his reserves of the 43rd and 52nd would need to extricate the forward parties, his ideas were perfectly sound. They would allow the Light Brigade to fulfil its warning role for the army as a whole without endangering itself unduly. Shaw Kennedy summed up the scheme and the 95th’s role within it: ‘He kept his infantry back entirely with the exception of the infantry post of four companies of the Rifles at Barba del Puerco, upon the calculation of the time that would be required to retire the infantry to the Coa … the calculation, as above stated, must never be lost sight of; for it was upon that calculation that he acted all along [emphasis in original].’

  Lord Wellington wanted his outposts to frustrate French reconnaissance of his deployments, as well as warning of any large-scale attack. The scheme worked out by him and Craufurd thus threw a chain of light or Rifle companies across the front of his army – in much the same way as he screened the battalions of his army in battle, by using lines of individual skirmishers and undulations of the ground. Wellington was evidently very impressed with the way Craufurd supervised his observing parties, although in time he would become anxious for the safety of his forward scouts.

  This use of Craufurd’s troops in this way was novel in its scale, and Wellington was quite open to new ideas on how a Rifle regiment might act on the battlefield. There had been Rifles under his direct command in Denmark three years earlier, and his first battle against the French in Portugal during the brief 1808 campaign had been touched off ‘by the over-eagerness of the riflemen’. Wellington did not resent them for this wild spirit – on the contrary, he had already come to value the 95th as soldiers. They in turn thought highly of him. Although Wellington’s manners were of the eighteenth-century school, and his politics distinctly conservative, he was all for developing the use of light troops. He rejected, for example, the old system of forming ad hoc battalions from the light companies of several line regiments, favouring instead the deployment of specially trained corps of these men like those under Craufurd’s command. Wellington soon realised that these regiments – the 43rd, 52nd and 95th – were among the very best troops he had. He also rejected the doctrine of many conservative generals that riflemen, owing to their slower rate of fire and skirmishers’ vulnerability to cavalry, could only ever be deployed in penny packets, supporting regular infantry. Craufurd, although a conservative in many matters, accepted that the 95th could be used as a regiment rather than being broadcast about like the riflemen of the 60th were. Wellington and the commander of the Light Division between them came to the conclusion that the way to nullify clouds of French light infantry on the battlefield was to use their own Green Jackets or red-coated light infantry in large numbers too.

  In the early part of 1810, though, they were not contemplating a general action; rather, they needed to frustrate the various French probing movements on the upland frontier. The Rifles were posted in villages about the uplands with savage-sounding names like Mata de Lobos (Death of Wolves), eventually taking up their position in Barba del Puerco (Pig’s Beard) towards the end of February. This followed two months in which they had been marching hither and thither almost constantly, time which had afforded Second Lieutenant Simmons a chance to see the less likeable side of Captain Peter O’Hare, his company commander.

  O’Hare was a rough diamond typical of the Irish adventurers who made up much of the 95th’s officer cadre. If he was harsh with the young offi
cers, that was because this was the Rifles system and because he had never gained anything easily in his military career. O’Hare had joined the Rifles when they formed and served under Beckwith’s predecessor, a man who believed in tough superintendence of his officers, one of them commenting, ‘With him the field officers must first be steady, and then he goes downwards: hence the privates say, we had better look sharp if he is so strict with the officers.’

  For someone who had experienced O’Hare’s slow rise through the ranks, beasting some young puppy of a subaltern came all too easily. Simmons noticed that each time they were quartered in a Portuguese household during their march up from Campo Maior, O’Hare would take the best sleeping quarters and give the next best to his company’s two lieutenants. ‘Being the junior officer,’ Simmons noted, ‘I consequently got the last choice of quarters, which too frequently was a dirty floor with my blanket only. Captain O’Hare did not show me much kindness.’

  The captain’s rough speech and slow advancement marked him out to officers and men alike as someone bereft of even the smallest quantum of patronage. O’Hare’s soldiers believed him to be such a rough one that he must have started his career in the ranks. This was not quite true, for he had begun his military career as a surgeon’s mate in the 69th Foot. This post was a sort of halfway house between the rank and file and an officer’s commission. However, O’Hare’s men were right in one essential: a surgeon’s mate could be flogged for his misdemeanours, something quite out of the question for an officer.

  He was not long in that lowly station: having been commissioned in the 69th, O’Hare had taken the opportunity offered by the creation of the Rifle Corps to transfer out of his original regiment and reinvent himself. His officers in this new corps appreciated his diligence and bravery, providing him at last with patrons to fight for his advancement. O’Hare had served as adjutant, a sign of his commanding officer’s favour but a post also requiring him to police the regiment’s young subalterns, acting as his colonel’s truncheon. He had been promoted to captain in 1803 after that same commanding officer wrote of his ‘anxious wish that the eldest lieutenant of the Rifle Regt, Adjt O’Hare, should be recommended to the succession to the 3rd … company … Lieut. O’Hare is a subaltern of very long standing and a very good officer.’