by Mark Urban
Wellington’s position was a very long one, but he had made sure that there were sufficient forces to hold the col at Sula, where he felt sure the French would hit him. The night before he had gone about the ridge, deploying each battalion. The 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry were waiting in Sula, out of view of the French, supported by a couple of guns from the Royal Horse Artillery. To their left and right there were brigades of Portuguese infantry, stiffened with British officers and retrained by them.
As the minutes ticked by that morning, it became apparent that Reynier’s attack was going in first, just as Masséna had ordered. These troops clambered up the slope – for in places it is so steep that a heavily laden man will have to help himself with his hands – towards the centre of the line, held by General Picton’s 3rd Division.
Beckwith’s troops could not see the fighting going on in Picton’s sector, but they could certainly hear it. Masséna, on the other hand, had positioned himself near a windmill at Moura and could make out the head of Reynier’s corps mounting the ridge. The battle was going to plan; it was time to hurl Ney forward.
Loison’s division of Ney’s corps marched directly up the Sula road. Another division, under General Maucune, followed somewhat behind and veered off to the left, where a Portuguese brigade under the British general Pack awaited them. As soon as the heads of Loison’s columns were in range, the Rifles and Portuguese began taking shots at them. They had already seen enough of the French Army in action to know the importance of aiming for the officers first.
General Simon, commanding one of the two brigades now coming towards the Light Division, was out in front, having assumed personal control of the skirmishers. Simon’s six battalions were marching behind in tight, long columns, little more than thirty or forty men across the front of each. The French brigade commander’s aim was to suppress the Rifles, by making them worry more about preserving themselves than about hitting the dense infantry columns. The Rifles, though, had the benefit of height, as they scampered from rock to rock, moving up the ridge ahead of the French, and so could fire over the heads of the voltigeurs, picking their targets with ease. Of course, they could not stop the advance of thousands of Ney’s troops – as one 95th officer observed, ‘We must give the French their due and say that no men could come up in a more resolute manner.’
With riflemen starting to scurry back over the lip at the top of the ridge, Craufurd could not contain his curiosity. He would dart to the edge, watching the French, hearing the thumping of their drums and shouts of their officers. Then he would rush back again, making sure that the 43rd and 52nd were aligned just right, ready to receive Loison’s division with a volley and bayonets when its men came into view at last.
Near the top of the ridge, the French found themselves under devilish fire. Craufurd sent more Portuguese light infantrymen from the 3rd Cacadores down to help Beckwith. Several guns firing grapeshot had joined in the British barrage, and were cutting down swaths of men. The colonel of the 6ème Léger fell to the ground, his head taken clean off by a piece of grape. The French attack was faltering. The officers shouted until they were hoarse, urging the men forward one more time, ‘En avant! En avant!’ Simon, who had himself been shot in the face, was close to the Royal Horse Artillery’s guns near Sula: he had to silence the battery. With one last effort, a few score of exhausted, blood-spattered troops followed him over the ridge.
The first French had staggered up in front of Craufurd’s formed battalions as the last riflemen were running, fast as their legs could carry them, to get behind the red-coated wall. The artillery gunners left their pieces, pelting back too. Simon had got his guns. The shout went around the decimated French companies: the guns were captured! But this triumph was to be short-lived indeed.
‘When I saw the head of the French column within about twenty yards of the top of the hill,’ wrote Craufurd, ‘I turned about to the 43rd and 52nd Regiments and ordered them to charge.’ An officer of the 52nd recalled that ‘the head of the enemy’s column was within a very few yards of [Craufurd], he turned around, came up to the 52nd, and called out, “Now 52nd, revenge the death of Sir John Moore! Charge! Charge! Huzza!” and waving his hat in the air, he was answered by a shout that appalled the enemy and in one instant the brow of the hill bristled with two thousand British bayonets.’
The few French soldiers who had made it to the top never managed to form a firing line, as Masséna had planned. Instead they loosed off a ragged volley at the chargers, but in seconds they were thrown back. Some men were bayoneted, other stumbled, fell and were trodden underfoot. Among those lying wounded on the ridge as the British passed was General Simon himself, who was taken prisoner. The 43rd and 52nd went to the front of the ridge, where they could look down on hundreds of French troops milling about in confusion on the slope. There the British light infantry gave them a thundering volley. The RHA men ran back to their guns and began to serve them again. ‘We kept firing and bayoneting till we reached the bottom,’ wrote an officer of the 52nd.
Many of the Rifles, left behind and watching this maelstrom, now turned to their right and looked up to where Maucune’s brigade was about to suffer the same fate at the hands of Pack’s Portuguese. The Scottish general gave the order to advance. Captain Leach of the 95th wrote home, ‘I was quite hoarse with cheering and hallooing. Whenever we saw the Portuguese about to charge, who were nearly a mile distant, we all set up a howl which undoubtedly spirited them on.’
Captain Marcel, who had led his men to the top, was a small part of Maucune’s brigade. He looked around: where was their support? There was nobody behind the 69ème, and looking across to his right, Marcel could see Simon’s brigade, ‘going back down the slope, under a terrible artillery fire and under attack from a column of English of four times its strength [sic]; very soon, that same column hit us, and it was our turn to be thrown back.’
For the Light Division men and Pack’s Portuguese, weeks of retreating across muddy, execrable roads were being paid back: their blood lust was up. Ney’s corps suffered almost 2,500 casualties that day, with Simon’s brigade losing the most. Elsewhere, the initial attack by Reynier’s corps had met the greatest success: its columns had reached the plateau at the highest point of the ridge and begun to deploy, and only a countercharge by Picton’s division had managed to turn the tide.
On the slope in front of Sula it was impossible to say exactly who had lost his life to the 95th, and who to the 52nd or indeed the Portuguese. But it is clear that the six battalions taken forward by Simon suffered terrible casualties among their officers. The Légion Hanovrienne had nine of them killed or wounded, including eight of its twelve company commanders. The 26ème Régiment had twenty-one officer casualties (a little under half of those present with its two battalions). Ferey’s brigade, which had tried to follow Simon up the hill, also suffered badly: Colonel Bechaud of the 66ème, for example, having recovered from his chest wound in July at the Coa, received the same compliment at Busaco. These losses among leaders were the telltale symptom of well-aimed fire.
Busaco, despite this, was a fight in which traditional notions might have seemed, to a British general of conservative cast, to have given Wellington his triumph: devastating volleys at point-blank range and bayonet charges delivered with perfect timing. Even the laurels for successful skirmishing had to be shared between the 95th, Portuguese Cacadores and the light companies of various line battalions. The French, though, deduced a general lesson from their officer casualties: that, in the words of one staff officer, ‘the English were the only troops who were perfectly practised in the use of small arms, whence their firing was much more accurate than that of any other infantry.’ They had become ‘the best marksmen in Europe’. That this had come about could be attributed in large part to the training pioneered by the 95th’s founders and the growing influence of the system developed before the Peninsular War by General Sir John Moore at Shorncliffe – even the Cacadores had fallen under it, for they had been retrained b
y British officers, including several of the 95th.
If Beckwith and the other officers of the 95th had only a general idea of how well they had picked off the French commanders, they certainly knew that their own losses had been slight: just nine men killed and thirty-two wounded in the battalion. None of the casualties had been officers. Simon’s skirmishers had made a great deal of noise and smoke as they came up the mountain, but their effect on the crouching riflemen had been minimal. Concealment was an important factor in this, for the riflemen had become expert in this, whereas other regiments, such as the Portuguese light troops, were less experienced and so suffered more heavily. But there was something else at work here too. Just as the British Army might have its idées fixes about the bayonet or flogging, so the French had been blunted in their effectiveness by their generals’ received wisdoms about rifles and target shooting.
The French did not want to issue rifles to their men. A small-scale experiment had ended in 1807, the weapons being hard to load and their barrels fouling too easily (since they were of inferior design to the British Baker). The French also considered the rifle a very suspect thing if it just caused the soldier to sit, trying to pick off his enemy at long range, rather than close with him and decide the matter by bayonet. Napoleon’s generals understood why such a weapon might be of use in the hands of an American frontiersman, a German forester or even an Englishman, but it would not do for their own people, ruled in war as in so many other matters by Gallic passion. One leading French theorist summed up the aversion to the rifle: ‘It was an unsuitable weapon for the French soldier, and would only have suited phlegmatic, patient, assassins.’
Napoleon’s light infantry carried instead the fusil de dragons, a smoothbore musket slightly shorter than that of the rest of the infantry, and originally designed for mounted troops. As for the whole business of aiming, the French were in something of a muddle. The fusil had a fore-sight, a metal blade close to its muzzle, but no back-sight with which to align it. What’s more, conscripts like Sub-Lieutenant Marcel’s received no training in marksmanship. They pointed at their targets all right, but were self-taught in the business of aiming, that is, adjusting their fire to take account of the distance and movement of their prey. By Busaco some French officers were beginning to appreciate the cost of this neglect.
At the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo just a few months before, one of the more professional French generals present had been staggered by the poor shooting of Ney’s infantry. Writing to Paris in order to request an urgent shipment of musket cartridges, he wrote:
The consumption of this munition is quite incredible; it has happened through the inexperience and the negligence of the soldiers, by the carelessness of officers and by the numerous detachments marching with convoys of supplies and munitions. The siege of Rodrigo has seen the consumption of more than nine hundred thousand infantry cartridges solely by skirmishers.
This enormous expenditure of ammunition occurred in one month by light companies whose combined strength did not amount to more than a couple of thousand of Ney’s corps. It might be supposed that Marcel’s men and the other voltigeurs firing off so many rounds might have become first-rate marksmen, but actually the effect was more haphazard. While some did indeed become good shots, others never grasped the basic principles of adjusting their fire.
Despite these apparently basic limitations, Napoleon’s light troops had gained a considerable reputation in the wars of the previous decade. Audacious command and high morale had generally more than compensated for their poor shooting. However, from Busaco onwards, quite a few French officers realised that they were condemmed to fight the British skirmishers at a considerable disadvantage, one that arose from their lack of systematic marksmanship training.
Masséna’s defeat came as a profound shock to his people. One eyewitness lamented the army’s ‘enormous loss of officers’. For the marshal, any hope of hurling the British out of Portugal began to falter. On 28 September, Wellington returned to his old tricks, falling back towards his prepared lines of defence at Torres Vedras. The French could not understand his lack of aggression. Why wasn’t he following up his success of the day before? But the British general only liked to give battle on terms of his own choosing. He had succeeded in causing Masséna almost 4,500 casualties and was now inviting an army that had failed to carry the heights of Busaco to come and try its luck against the trenchworks and batteries of Torres Vedras. There Masséna would have to deal with the psychological impact of the Busaco defeat, one staff officer commenting, ‘Our heavy losses at Busaco had chilled the ardour of Masséna’s lieutenants, and bred ill-will between them and him; so that now all were trying to paralyse his operations, and representing every little hillock to be a new height of Busaco the capture of which would cost copious bloodshed.’
The battle was an enormous relief for Craufurd. He had been despondent after the Combat of the Coa but even he probably did not understand that he had been a whisker away from being sent home. In his official Busaco dispatch, Wellington praised Craufurd for conducting a fighting withdrawal to the Busaco position, ‘with great regularity’, and for the bayonet charge which had caused the enemy ‘immense loss’.
Wellington’s Army had performed very well in a general action, the first of its kind since Talavera more than a year before. But whereas the losses at Talavera had been great, this was a more emphatic victory. British officers took pride in throwing back regiments that were veterans of France’s fabled triumphs in Italy or central Europe: the fields of Lodi, Marengo and Austerlitz where Napoleon had made his reputation. A company commander of the 95th walked about in the dusk of that September day gathering buttons from the coats of the French dead strewn across the hillside so that he might ascertain their regiments and therefore their pedigree. He was perfectly satisfied with what he found, writing home, ‘The 26th, 66th and 82nd are Bridge of Lodi boys, but of the heights of Busaco I daresay they will be less proud.’
EIGHT
The Corporal’s Stripes
September 1810–February 1811
It took from 28 September to 10 October for the Rifles to march down through the hilly Portuguese countryside to a little town called Arruda. It was a tortuous journey, attended by the usual hardships and more. Men with sore feet and empty bellies were drenched by daily downpours, one officer noting on the 8th, ‘This day’s march was about as miserable as I wish to see. Incessant rain all day. We got into a rascally hovel which we contrived to set fire to but soon put it out again.’
During the two-month withdrawal from the frontier, Wellington’s soldiers had become used to treating Portuguese property recklessly. It was their commander’s intention to fight in the style of Fabius, laying waste to the Portuguese hinterland so that the French would be unable to find food, or indeed people. Orders had been issued by the Portuguese authorities for the evacuation of all inhabitants, if necessary by force, from the path of Masséna’s army. Wellington’s rearguard daily raided abandoned houses for any food they could find, or indeed for firewood.
When they got to Arruda, the 95th took up a bivouac on a ridge overlooking the town. There they discovered one of the great secrets of the Napoleonic wars: that Wellington had ordered the construction of lines of fortifications stretching twenty-nine miles from the Atlantic coast in the west, in an arc through the hill country of the Peninsula behind Lisbon, to the River Tagus in the east. Arruda was close to the eastern end of this defence, being in a sector where there were twenty-three redoubts armed with ninety-six cannon. The whole programme, involving construction of scores of strongpoints, diversion of streams, emplacement of cannon and drilling of militia, had taken more than one year to accomplish, with a bill of £100,000 for the labour alone, and yet somehow it had remained unknown to the French.
The 95th’s task in this scheme was not to man some fort, a task that had been assigned to third-rate troops of the Portuguese militia. The Rifles would remain part of the reserve that would rush to any threatened poi
nt and also patrol no man’s land in this eastern part of the lines, so as to prevent French penetrations – be they for foraging or surprise attacks.
After such a miserable march, Captain O’Hare’s pleasure at finding Second Lieutenant George Simmons in charge of a roaring fire and a laid table can easily be imagined. Simmons had come up from Lisbon with a party of convalescents and quickly commandeered a suitable little house for the officers of his 3rd Company.
It took no time for natural scavengers such as the men of the 95th to start investigating the place in front of their position. ‘Never was a town more completely deserted than Arruda,’ one officer remarked. ‘The inhabitants, dreading the approach of the French, had taken flight to Lisbon, leaving their houses, many of which were magnificently furnished, without a human being in them. The chairs and tables were subsequently carried up to the camp.’
Few riflemen were housed; instead some tents were issued (for the first time since they had arrived in Portugal) to allow them to escape the cold and rain. The soldiers, though, wasted no time in beginning expeditions in Arruda, breaking into houses, where ‘many of them had some food in the larder, and a plentiful supply of good wines in the cellar’.
The 95th were guilty of a good deal of vandalism on these missions, since they assumed that Arruda would eventually fall into French hands. Houses were stripped, and ornate furniture was broken up for firewood. ‘This was the only instance during the war in which the light division had reason to blush for their conduct,’ one veteran later wrote.
