Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

by Mark Urban

  When they were barely fifty yards away, so close that the lines of French troops would almost fill his battalions’ field of view, the redcoats presented their pieces and fired. The slaughter was tremendous – hundreds of French troops dropped, perhaps one-third of the attacking echelon. The Brown Bess might be inaccurate but a man hit by its great slug of a ball suffered terrible trauma, often being hurled backwards several feet or having a limb ripped off by its shock.

  Then came the cheer, in order to remind Sherbrooke’s men not to get carried away in their musket shooting, the common soldier’s delusion being that making a lot of noise and smoke was a substitute for more decisive action. Of course, the cheer was also intended to frighten the reeling Frenchmen.

  As the Guards and King’s German Legion of the 1st Division rushed forward, Lapisse and Sebastiani’s men did not wait to be impaled on their bayonets: they broke, turned around and started running back towards their own lines. Six of Sherbrooke’s battalions hurtled forward, many of the men going beyond the Portina in pursuit. Their blood was up and their commanders lacked the experience or ability to check their headlong rush.

  It was at this point that the second echelons of Lapisse and Sebastiani’s divisions came into play: fresh troops with an unbroken formation. What was worse for the British was that two regiments of enemy dragoons were also close at hand. As the horsemen careered into the clumps of redcoats streaming across the ochre plain they began sabreing them mercilessly. Two battalions of the German Legion, mercenaries serving the British crown under mostly Hanoverian officers, got the full impact. In rushing forward, the Legion had lost all formation or order. Once cavalry appeared there was no way they could be rallied into the virtually impregnable defensive square. Half of this Legion brigade of 1,300 men were lost, even the brigade commander paying with his life for his moment of impetuous pursuit.

  The survivors among Sherbrooke’s battalions came running back to their own lines, exhausted, many bearing sabre wounds, and prepared to meet a fresh French assault. This, somehow, they succeeded in seeing off. Sherbrooke’s division ended the day with almost 1,700 killed, wounded and captured; the opposing French suffered similar losses despite their much greater initial numbers. The Battle of Talavera concluded with a British victory, but with heavy losses that Wellesley felt he could ill afford.

  The lessons of Sherbrooke’s fight would seem to have justified most of the British Army’s orthodoxies: effective musketry could only be delivered at very short range; at these distances fire achieved its devastating effect with a blast like a ship’s broadside, not with each man aiming; skirmishers capering about, trying to choose their own targets with inherently inaccurate weapons, would never decide the outcome of a battle between two forces of infantry formed in battle lines; steadiness was everything and to keep men in line required the maintenance of fierce discipline; once infantry lost their formation, they could be easily annihilated by charging infantry or cavalry. All of these principles, strongly held by Wellesley and his fellow generals, seemed to offer only an incidental role in battle for the Rifles.

  The 95th set out on the morning of 29 July from Oropesa, where they’d rested for two or three hours, for a five-hour march to Talavera. One young officer recorded that over ‘the last ten miles the road was covered with Spanish wounded and fugitive soldiers’.

  The final stage of the march saw the men struggling forward against the incline. Their leather straps cut into shoulders, the stock or collar on their necks partially throttled them. Within an hour or two of starting, tongues were lolling about parched mouths, and haversacks bobbing on top of sweat-soaked backs. As the battalion halted for a moment by a fetid pool, garnished with cow dung, many fell flat on their bellies and lapped at the greenish water like animals.

  When Craufurd’s column appeared near Talavera around 7 a.m., it was cheered by the exhausted British battalions that remained on the field after a battle that had left something like twelve thousand men of the two sides dead or wounded. In some places the dry grass had caught fire, touched off by the smouldering cartridge papers, and many wounded men, unable to crawl away, had been badly burned.

  Few of the French soldiers witnessed the scene on the 29th, for they had pulled back several miles from the battlefield. Wellesley wasted little time in pushing forward Craufurd’s brigade to secure this new front, as surgeons and stretcher parties struggled to answers the plaintive cries of the wounded.

  While the 95th had not tasted battle on the 28th, they most certainly saw its bloody consequences, one of the new soldiers remarking, ‘The horrid sights were beyond anything I could have imagined. Thousands dead and dying in every direction … and, I am sorry to say, Spaniards butchering the wounded Frenchmen at every opportunity, and stripping them naked, which gave admission to myriads of pernicious flies and the heat of a burning sun.’

  During the next two days, riflemen were posted on picket duty to observe the French scouts. Sometimes they exchanged fire, but to little effect. It took no more than a meal or two for everyone to realise that Wellesley would not be able to supply his army in this position. It was a horribly poor part of Spain, and its slender resources had already been stripped by the French. The British commissaries, inexperienced in operations of this scale, soon showed themselves incapable of acquiring either transport or the required number of rations.

  While General Wellesley was deciding on his best course of action, attempts were made to burn hundreds of the putrefying bodies that still littered the field. Recalling this miserable stay, one officer of the 95th remembered that ‘the feelings which constant hunger produces were, however, in some degree counteracted two days after the battle by the insufferable stench arising from hundreds of dead bodies of men and horses still unburied.’

  If the battalion’s recent arrivals had now seen a battlefield for the charnel house it was, not a few also took advantage of its fruits, plundering the dead. Second Lieutenant Simmons relieved one fallen Frenchman of his backpack: as an officer he’d not been issued with one, but he’d keenly felt the need for such a contraption during his march.

  That dash was already the subject of comment in the brigade and the Army at large. During the last twenty-four hours they had covered something between twenty-nine and thirty miles on atrocious stone-strewn roads that were little better than goat tracks. Their whole journey over the previous twenty-five days was something like 360 miles. Men had dropped dead trying to keep pace with that. The rest of the Army was deeply impressed by this march, so much so that the final day’s mileage was exaggerated as reports circulated on how Craufurd had driven his men onwards.

  For Craufurd, though, it had all been futile. He had not made it in time to share in the laurels of a hard-fought general action. Like many officers in Wellesley’s army, he suspected that this campaign would last no longer than the previous one in Iberia – a matter of several months – and then they would be embarked and taken home again, and it was to home that the despondent brigadier’s thoughts turned. Craufurd was a faithful and loving correspondent with his wife Fanny. His letters to her were full of a tenderness and sympathy of which his many detractors would never have imagined him capable. They ended with passages like, ‘God of Heaven bless you, my dearest love, Ever your most affectionate husband, R. C.’ On 31 July he sat down to write her a swift note from his bivouac near Talavera. Noting his brigade’s failure to reach the town in time for the battle, it ended, ‘This will perhaps be a subject of joy to you, though you will at the same time find it natural that it should have mortified us.’ Craufurd’s desire to prove himself and his brigade burned with an undiminished intensity.

  THREE

  Guadiana

  August–December 1809

  Early in August the Army redeployed back to the Portuguese frontier. The 95th found itself marching in stages just as harsh as those before the Battle of Talavera. But whereas the chance of meeting the enemy had motivated that earlier struggle, they were now tramping away from him as q
uickly as their blistered feet and aching legs could carry them. Instead of a shot at glory, they had Craufurd hovering about them, taking the names of men who fell foul of Standing Orders and promising to punish them.

  The diary of one company commander read:

  3rd August. The whole British Army marched at two this morning to Oropesa where we arrived at 2 p.m. This day’s march excessively severe; being twelve hours on the road; a suffocating heat, clouds of dust and not a drop of water to be got …

  5th August. We finished our march this day about 2 p.m. The weather was immoderately hot and a great scarcity of water on the road. We were thirteen hours marching on the worst roads I ever travelled.

  6th August. Marched at half past three this morning and did not reach our position until six in the evening. This day’s march was remarkably harassing. Numbers of men of different regts. dropped on the road from excessive fatigue and the heat of the sun.

  The mountainous borderland was bare at the best of times, and it could not sustain tens of thousands of hungry soldiers. One evening during that march, with the troops bivoaucking dejectedly in clumps of trees by the roadside, Brigadier Craufurd allowed his Light Brigade soldiers to shoot some pigs rooting around the groves. Mad with hunger, they had instantly set upon the animals, shooting and clubbing them, their death squeals filling the dark forest. The men had little doubt that this herd of swine must belong to somebody and had appreciated Craufurd’s relaxation of the usual strictures against plundering civilians. But if the brigadier was normally a pedant about rules, he was also a man of volatile temper and he had been driven to distraction by the failure of the Army’s commissaries to supply his men.

  On 7 August, the Rifles reached Almaraz, a dusty crossroads in the sierra where they were to spend the next two weeks. The importance of the place derived from a bridge across the Tagus, which is sufficiently broad, even this high in its course, to form a serious obstacle to movement. The river’s shape and that of the surrounding peaks made it a key point in both east–west and north–south communications. Although Almaraz had great strategic value, few people lived around the river, so the Rifles’ arrival there did little to ease the supply shortage.

  In order to guard the crossing, two companies of the 95th were deployed in turn as pickets, with the remainder of the battalion camped nearby and able to support them, should the French try to rush the place. From the moment they arrived at Almaraz, it became clear to the officers that the swampy ground about the Tagus and the heavy dews made this an unhealthy place, charged with ill vapours and miasmas.

  ‘Here we remained a miserable fortnight,’ one young lieutenant wrote in his journal, ‘moving at sunset to a damp valley near the river (where the seeds of ague were sown in hundreds) and returning at daybreak to repose under the shelter of some cork trees which indifferently sheltered us from a scorching sun – no regular issue of rations – which never amounted to more than a handful of coarse flour, a little goat’s flesh and neither wine nor spirits.’

  The main bivouac, with its precious shade, was on a low hill a few hundred yards back from the river. Officers had chosen this spot because they believed it healthier than the low-lying land. Some of the flour that the men were supplied was actually made from grain, but much of it consisted of ground dried peas. They mixed it with water, and sometimes a little straw for binding, and formed it into little dumplings they called dough boys. They boiled or grilled them on flat stones. As often as not, the dough boys gave them cramps and the flux – but they still failed to sate their hunger. The riflemen named their camp Dough Boy Hill.

  Every soldier, from private to captain, had noticed a dramatic change in himself since their disembarkation a little more than a month before. The hot sun had tanned their faces and cracked their lips. Constant marching and poor diet meant their clothes had begun to hang loose on them. One officer, deploying trademark Rifles irony, wrote, ‘If any corpulent person despairs of reducing his weight by the means usually adopted, I strongly recommend a few weeks’ change of air and scene at Almaraz.’

  As the 3rd Company men sat one evening looking over the river and trying to stay their hunger pangs, two countrymen who’d volunteered into the 95th from the Leicestershire Militia considered their plight.

  ‘Bill, I think we shall be kept on this Dough-boy Hill till we shall all die of want,’ said the first.

  ‘I think so too,’ Private Green replied, before reflecting wistfully, ‘it is Lutterworth feast today. Our friends will be eating plum pudding and roast beef!’

  ‘Ah! They little think what we pass through and suffer.’

  The Leicestershire Militia boys like Green and William Brotherwood in the 2nd Company were perhaps more alive to the misery of their situation than many others. The weavers who made up their bulk had joined up through need, having lost a good living. They were also bright men, having worked looms and been proud of their craftsmanship.

  It took until 15 August for the French, following up Sir Arthur Wellesley’s withdrawal, to appear on the other side of the Tagus. They placed their own pickets, in case the British should try to surprise them, and the two sides observed one another across the waters. The Rifle company commanders were sure enough of one thing: that while neither side intended to attack the other and while life remained as miserable as it was there, night alarms and other symptoms of the presence of an enemy could safely be dispensed with. By calling out to their French opposite numbers and using sign language, they evolved a system of signals to ensure a quiet stay. As one officer wrote, ‘So far from a single shot being exchanged, our men and the French had the best possible understanding; and it frequently happened that the officers of both parties took off their hats and saluted each other across the river.’

  This system was suspended several days later, when the 95th received orders to march almost a hundred miles south-east to the town of Campo Maior. With this movement, the campaigning season would effectively end, Wellesley deciding to abandon any further diversion on behalf of the Spanish and concentrate instead on solving the supply and other problems that debilitated his army while readying them for the defence of Portugal. Napoleon’s attempts to take over Spain and Portugal had triggered such widespread resistance that a quarter of a million French troops were being tied down. Britain was doing its best to exacerbate these difficulties by landing expeditionary forces in Portugal and southern Spain, at the extremes of the Iberian Peninsula furthest from the French border. In this way they hoped to stiffen local resistance while forcing Napoleon’s commanders to extend deeper and deeper into guerrilla-infested country.

  The march down to Campo Maior required the riflemen to traverse some high mountains – known as the Sierra de Guadalupe – all the time under the eye of Black Bob Craufurd. Captain Jonathan Leach wrote in his diary on 27 August,

  The Division paraded at six this evening when we got volleys of abuse and blasphemous language from that infernal scoundrel Brigadier Robert Craufurd, who, after flogging half a dozen men for some very frivolous offences committed on our late harassing marches, we were dismissed. Lay down to sleep at nine o’clock but not without offering hearty prayers for the discomfiture of our cursed commander.

  Eight days later, the 2nd Company commander noted the flogging of a soldier from one of the other Light Brigade battalions and another ‘long harangue from General Craufurd’.

  As the battalion snaked its way down one of the steep mountain tracks leading from the sierra to the river plain that was their destination, Second Lieutenant George Simmons marched towards his brigadier, just off the road and in full flow, heaping scorn and abuse upon the head of the provost marshal. Before Simmons knew it, he’d been collared by Craufurd, taken out of the line of march, and, in one of the brigadier’s squeaking furies, told to arrest the provost marshal, the man who himself was meant to be the brigade’s enforcer of military discipline. Taking some riflemen to assist, Simmons found himself escorting the provost marshal, several soldiers already under arres
t in his charge as well as some baggage. As for Craufurd, he galloped off to the head of the column.

  A little further down the road, as it sloped steeply downhill, two of the mules, pulling one of the carts, decided to stop. After pushing, pulling and cajoling but all to no avail, one of the riflemen detached the sling from his weapon, got astride one of the beasts, and smacked it about the rump with the leather strap. The animals stampeded down the precipitous road, throwing the rifleman clear. Simmons and the others watched dumbstruck as the cart bounced about the narrow track, gathering speed until eventually the inevitable happened and it was hurled over a precipice, dashed to pieces on rocks below. It had been carrying Brigadier Craufurd’s personal supply of wine and other delicacies.

  Simmons found Craufurd that evening in a commandeered house at the end of their march:

  He had a party at dinner, and was expecting his light cart every moment with its contents in the best possible order. When I related the sad catastrophe he became nearly furious, and directed me to march up the prisoners to their various regiments, to obtain drummers, and in front of each regiment to flog the culprits – in fact, to become a provost marshal for the occasion.

  The young subaltern, the most junior officer in the 95th, found himself the instrument of his brigadier’s fury. ‘I was highly indignant at such usage,’ Simmons wrote in his journal, ‘having exerted myself zealously to serve him.’ Noting that Black Bob ‘never forgave me’, Simmons resolved not to obey his brigadier’s order. Instead he went off to locate his own commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sidney Beckwith.