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

  With the elements of the Light Division that remained on the eastern bank of the Coa having contracted their line from one a couple of miles long at the start of the business to one of a few hundred yards, the French companies that pursued them began firing to much greater effect. Leach explains it in a letter home: ‘Now the fire began (as you may naturally fancy) to be cursedly hot from the French because the nearer we drew to the bridge, the more we concentrated and from behind every wall and rock they directed their fire at the bridge and its vicinity.’

  The French forced back the troops on top of the knolls overlooking the bridge, and once their shooters were lining that vital ground, the predicament of the defenders became truly desperate. Balls were whistling about the ears of the riflemen, ricocheting dementedly off rocks, whining into the air. Every now and then there’d be the slap of a bullet hitting flesh and the cry of another man going down. Two of Leach’s subalterns, brothers called Harry and Tom Smith, sank moments apart, both with leg wounds. Lieutenant Pratt fell, a ball having gone straight through his neck, splashing blood all over the rocks. Many of the riflemen had been firing for hours and could not reply: they had run out of ammunition. If the French wheeled a couple of guns up to the ridge, the British would be massacred.

  Sensing the danger, Major Charles MacLeod of the 43rd rode his horse up the steep slope, its hooves somehow planting themselves between the big stones, and called on the men to follow him. About two hundred Green Jackets and redcoats fell in behind, bayonets fixed, determined to drive the French skirmishers off the knolls from which they were doing such slaughter. Second Lieutenant George Simmons was among them, rallying some of the few remaining 3rd Company men with him.

  As he was nearing the top of the slope, the men all around him cheering, Simmons felt a hammer blow that sent him crashing into the rocks. ‘I could not collect my ideas, and was feeling about my arms and body for a wound until my eye caught the stream of blood rushing through the hole in my trousers, and my leg and thigh appeared so heavy that I could not move it,’ he would write. A sergeant of the 43rd stooped over him, tightening a tourniquet around the leg, but as he straightened up, a bullet blew off the top of his head. MacLeod’s attack reached its objective, the French driven back for the moment, allowing precious minutes to complete the evacuation. Companies of the 52nd, responding to Major Napier’s urgent message, came pelting back through this position, saving themselves from death or capture.

  Many of those crossing the bridge were now the walking wounded, or were carried by mates, as Costello had been. A defensive line had been prepared on the western side, anticipating the withdrawal of the last couple of hundred men. Captain Alexander Cameron’s men of the 7th or Highland Company of the 95th were crouching behind rocks, ready for anything. Behind them were several rallied companies of the 43rd and some cannon.

  As the soldiers carrying the wounded Simmons rushed up the British-held side of the gorge, trying to find a surgeon, they ran into Craufurd instead. He ordered them to put the officer down on the hillside and go back. Simmons believed that Craufurd’s prejudice against him, stemming from the loss of his personal wagon on the march to Campo Maior, had come into play, and that his brigadier cared not a jot if he bled to death on this godforsaken spot. But the Green Jackets ignored the order, one shouting at Black Bob, ‘This is an officer of ours, and we must see him in safety before we leave him.’

  With almost everyone across, remnants of the last few companies began scrambling down the rocks, trying to make it down to the bridge in the moments it would take for the French to seize their opportunity, retake the knolls, and start shooting down on them again. ‘The French in a second occupied the hill which we left, blazed away at us in crossing and as we ascended the opposite heights made damnable work amongst us,’ one of the last across wrote in a letter home.

  To his consternation, Captain Leach found a lone artillery officer on the bridge with a tumbril full of ammunition, pleading for help. The riflemen helped push the wagon across to the western side and with that, the Light Division was finally over.

  Ferey’s men, however, did not intend to leave the matter there, for they had driven their enemy from the field, and success in war demanded that they exploit such an advantage to the full. The voltigeurs had worked away throughout the first part of the day in skirmishing; it was now time to employ men of the other elite company in each battalion, the grenadiers. Colonel Jean-Pierre Bechaud called out to the grenadiers of his 66ème Régiment to rally around him, gathering others from the grenadier company of the 82ème. Just as the light companies had their role in the scheme of war – to skirmish up ahead of the regiment – so the grenadiers were those you sent for when some desperate feat, a storming, was required.

  A cheer and a fusillade went up from the French covering party, as the grenadiers pelted down the rutted road to the Coa bridge. The 95th watched them coming, many of them choosing a target and leading him slowly with their rifle. It was vital, though, not to let fly too soon. As the first Frenchmen made it onto the bridge, muskets held out in front, bayonets fixed, their red grenadiers’ epaulettes bouncing up and down on their shoulders, the crackling of rifle fire at last began.

  Captain Leach fixed on Captain Ninon, commander of the 82ème’s grenadier company, tracked him with his rifle as he came onto the bridge, and squeezed the trigger. ‘I fired at him myself with my little rifle (which still stands my friend) and cursed my stupidity for missing him, but a running person is not easily hit.’

  Each storm had its moment of decision, one at which the moral strength of one side would overcome the other. If the grenadiers kept moving forward, many British troops would run. If the attack faltered under heavy fire, the French officers would have trouble urging any more men to go to a certain death or capture.

  Leach fired again and dropped one of the grenadiers. But most of those who’d been engaged that morning had weapons that had become too hot and fouled to fire. Cameron’s Scots, though, were fresh, and they kept up a lethal barrage of aimed shots at the head of the French column.

  It was the turn of the French grenadiers now to cower behind cover. Colonel Bechaud, shouting, trying to urge them on, made an obvious target for one of the British marksmen: he fired and put a bullet in the Frenchman’s chest. Captain Ninon, surrounded by wounded and dying men on the bridge, was unscathed by the hail of balls around him – but he did what even the bravest man must do when he sees the situation is hopeless, and doubled back to his own side of the bridge.

  By 4 p.m. the fire was dying down. Everybody knew that the French would not be able to force the crossing. It was not long before an officer appeared with a white flag of truce, calling out to the British side for their agreement to rescue the wounded. Both sides sent down parties to carry off the groaning men who lay mixed up on the bridge and its eastern side. In a few cases, words were exchanged between the two sides as they worked.

  The Rifles fell back some way from the bridge and made their bivouac. Many had been fighting for nine hours without interruption and were completely knocked up. Officers and soldiers with barely the energy to speak asked after friends. Half of 3rd Company were on the other side of the Coa, captured, as were quite a few men of the 1st Company. Some soldiers of the 52nd realised that they too had left dozens of men on the wrong side: in their case the result was happier, the men lay low and found their way back west later.

  What was clear to everyone, though, was that the Light Division had suffered hundreds of casualties: 333 to be precise. The 95th had accounted for 129 of them, including 12 killed and 54 missing, presumed captured. Among subalterns there had been a shocking toll of wounded – eight were on their way to the rear, where God knows what fate awaited them. O’Hare and Fairfoot had come through unscathed, as had William Brotherwood – one of those men in Leach’s company who had slogged all the way back from the outlying picket. The Light Division had at least exacted a heavy price from the enemy, inflicting around five hundred casualties.
r />   On the evening of the 24th and in the days that followed there was deep, hard anger. One subaltern mourned that ‘all this blood was shed for no purpose whatsoever’. As they talked it over, they found comfort in the heroism of MacLeod, leading his charge up the hill, or in the cool presence of Beckwith issuing orders when their divisional commander had been absent from the hot side of the Coa. One young officer was adamant: ‘But for Colonel Beckwith our whole force would have been sacrificed.’ In all of this, they sought to find something redeeming in the defeat of their division by Ney, for a defeat it most certainly was.

  The French were delighted with the day’s work. General Loison, whose division had struck the main blow, wrote in his official report to Ney, ‘The Combat of the 24th proves to [the British] there is no position the French infantry cannot take and to our soldiers that the English Army is not even as hard to beat as the Spanish and Portuguese.’

  Charles Napier, who had delivered several key orders, felt ‘the bloody business closed with as much honour for the officers and men as disgrace for Craufurd’s generalship’. Napier noted bitterly that Craufurd had almost repeated his feat of Buenos Aires, in having to surrender a British brigade. Others spoke of their close escape from Verdun, the huge French prison where so many British captives languished.

  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, those who reacted most bitterly were the officers who had already formed a deep dislike of Craufurd, with his floggings and tantrums. Jonathan Leach wrote home:

  He is a damned tyrant and a great blackguard and has proved himself totally unfit to command a company, much less a division … I am fully confident that any sergeant in the Army would have brought off the Division in better order, God be praised. If we had not all done something like our duty, I know not but that the Division might have been now on its march to Verdun.

  Word of mouth and vitriolic letters like Leach’s flew to the four corners of Wellington’s Army, and to various quarters in England. The angry young officers of the 95th had no way of knowing it, but Craufurd’s harsh regime during the Talavera campaign had already excited adverse comment at the highest levels in London. Wellington had received a letter from Horse Guards, early in 1810, expressing the Commander in Chief’s concerns, ‘that a very unusual degree of severity is exercised towards the soldiers in the brigades under the command of Brigadier General R. Craufurd’. Among those around Wellington, the dislike of Craufurd was very evident in the days after what became known as the Combat of the Coa. One staff officer hissed, ‘I never thought any good was to be expected from any thing of which General R. Craufurd had the direction.’

  The Commander of Forces was alive to these views, but he declined to send Craufurd home in disgrace. Wellington reasoned, ‘If I am to be hanged for it, I cannot accuse a man who I think has meant well, and whose error is one of judgement, and not of intention.’ The choice to keep Craufurd must indeed have been a lonely one. But he reasoned that Craufurd had fire in his belly and knew his profession, whereas most of his generals were timid, and ignoramuses to boot.

  Many of those sitting in the comfort of Horse Guards found Wellington’s decision incomprehensible. Colonel Torrens, who as Military Secretary was a key figure in the management of senior officers’ careers, told his representative in Portugal:

  The command of your advanced guard appears to be founded in more ignorance and incapacity than I could possibly have supposed any officer capable of … I had a very favourable opinion of Craufurd’s talents. But he appears to me to allow the violence of his passions and the impetuosity of his disposition to overthrow the exercise of his judgement.

  Craufurd’s soldiers did not know about this hair’s-breadth escape from ignominy, but they guessed at it in their own way. In the days after the Coa, reports flew about that Craufurd would any moment be replaced by another general. As night fell on 24 July, too many of Craufurd’s men were lying caked in blood in field hospitals, or bouncing along in the backs of rough Portuguese ox carts, their lives in the balance. Simmons and Costello were among those unfortunates, beginning their journey into the netherworld of what passed for the Army’s system of care for the battlefield wounded.

  SIX

  Wounded

  July–August 1810

  The first night for the Coa wounded was as rainy and miserable as anyone could imagine. George Simmons and many of the others found themselves packed together on the stone flagstones of a little church. Simmons was deposited next to a man of the 43rd: ‘I was on the ground, very ill from loss of blood; he had been placed on a palliasse of straw and was dying, but his noble nature would not allow him to die in peace when he saw an officer so humbled as to be laid near him on bare stones.’ In agony, the soldier moved himself so that Simmons could share his straw. He did not last the night.

  Strange as it may seem, Simmons and the dying man of the 43rd were among the lucky ones. There were others unable to move, bleeding to death, out on the hills, wallowing in the downpour. That night the French soldiers and their camp followers would be tracing the steps of Craufurd’s pickets, searching for fallen soldiers and their plunder. Often enough, a man who showed any sign of life was dispatched with a blow to the head as such thieves relieved him of his last earthly possessions.

  In the churches or barns where Wellington’s few surgeons struggled to cope with the Coa wounded, there was little to be done by way of treatment. Bandages might be tied around wounds, or plasters made from brown sticky paper slapped across less serious lesions. Simmons knew his surgery, for he had studied it before joining the Army, and he knew that the heavy loss of blood from his thigh made his case a doubtful one. He drew a piece of paper and pencil from his jacket and began scribbling a note to his brother Maud, who was also serving in Portugal, as an ensign with the 34th. In it, he directed Maud about how he might best sell his possessions after his death, so as to gain a few pounds for the education of their other siblings.

  To his own surprise, Simmons survived the night, and was transferred the next day to Pinhel, where there were many more wounded. The surgeons and commissaries who organised the evacuation had few proper wagons. The roads of the Beira frontier were in any case so atrocious that only little two-wheelers could negotiate them. Dozens of local peasants were therefore hired to drive bullock-drawn carts full of wounded. These wagons were themselves viewed as instruments of torture by many of the soldiers who were obliged to lie across their rude wooden slats. The vehicles were so crudely made that they lacked a proper axle; instead, the wheels rotated around a pole and emitted a head-splitting drone as they went along the roads.

  The makeshift hospital in Pinhel was another charnel house, one even cruder than Simmons’s billet of the first night. A sergeant from one of the regiments nearby, hearing of the sanguinary engagement on the Coa, allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and peered inside: ‘They were the most shocking spectacle I ever beheld – many without arms, hands, legs and every other part … the cries of them would pierce the heart of a slave.’ When he went back the next morning, many had died.

  In this miserable place, some of the 95th’s wounded subalterns found one another and joined forces. Lieutenant Harry Smith, an active fellow with a grasp of Spanish, was able to make himself understood to the Portuguese. He helped organise a party of wounded who would be taken over several days down the mountain tracks, to a place where they could be put in boats on the Mondego River, then cruise down to the coast where the Navy might be able to evacuate them.

  Smith, who had a knack of emerging on top in any situation, was loaded into a local worthy’s sedan chair, hitched between two mules, while the others would ride in the back of bullock carts. Officers and men alike were thrown into these conveyances. It cannot be claimed that the commissioned class received any higher standard of care at this stage of the journey, except in one particular: each officer, even the pipsqueak subalterns, was assigned a soldier of his company to act as his servant. The day after the battle Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith sent these m
en down to ease the miseries of his young officers. The riflemen were able to look after their charges in the most basic way, by fetching water and guarding them as the convoy of sick made its way down towards the Mondego.

  Private Costello, with his two leg wounds, was also one of those being bumped along in the carts. A couple of days out of Pinhel, one of the seriously wounded men who’d been propped up close by slumped across him: ‘Foam mixed with blood ran from his mouth which, with his glassy eyes fixed on mine, made me feel very uncomfortable. Being weak and wounded myself, I had no power to move him. Death put an end to his sufferings, and his struggles having ceased, I was able to recover myself a little.’ Costello called out to the driver again and again, trying to make himself heard above the din of the wheels. He was convinced the surly old Portuguese had heard him all right, but the shouts were ignored, and Costello endured hours before the dead man was lifted off him.

  The journey itself was too much for many. Lieutenant O’Reilly of the 95th died two days after the battle. Not long after that, Lieutenant Pratt, whose neck wound left him in hideous discomfort, had grown angry with a Portuguese who would not help him: his shouting caused the artery in his neck to burst, and he quickly bled to death in front of his anguished friends.

  At the end of each day’s stage, the men would be left in a barn or some little shrine, with scant chance of a visit from one of the handful of medics who accompanied the convoy. One soldier recorded, ‘The surgeons had neither the time nor opportunity to look after us. As a consequence of this neglect, maggots were engendered in the sores, and the bandages, when withdrawn, brought away on them lumps of putrid flesh and maggots.’ During the daytime marches, many a dressing slipped off or was clawed away by some delirious man scratching at his wounds. Hordes of flies would then swarm around the wound, laying eggs in the rotting matter.