Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

by Mark Urban

  The rank and file knew that joining would earn the respect of their comrades – and the chance of plunder. ‘This was a momentous occasion in the life of a soldier, and so we considered it,’ Costello recorded. ‘The entire company gathered round our little party, each pressing us to have a sup from his canteen. We shook hands with friendly sincerity, and speculated on whether we would outlive the assault. If truth must be told, we also speculated on the chances of plunder in the town.’

  At 7 p.m. the storming columns moved down through one of the city’s suburbs to a point about three hundred yards from the lesser breach. They would wait there until a rocket was fired, giving them and Picton’s boys the signal. Their advance had almost certainly been spotted by the French officer who served high up in the cathedral tower as a lookout. Riflemen in the covering party were leading the way. Craufurd came up with them, annoyed that they were not moving faster, and accused them of lacking courage – ‘Move on, will you, 95th? or we will get some who will!’

  The sense of anticipation had reached a high pitch among the stormers, some trying to dissipate it with a last-minute bout of activity and chatter. Harry Smith sent Lieutenant George Simmons to bring up some ladders. Making his way through the darkness to bring them, Simmons was intercepted by Craufurd. The general asked the young lieutenant why he had brought short ladders rather than long ones, Simmons replying that he had only done what the engineers had told him to do. Craufurd told him, ‘Go back, sir, and get others; I am astonished at such stupidity.’

  Captain Uniacke and Lieutenant John FitzMaurice looked up at the defences, looming ahead of them in the darkness. They were meant to be part of the covering party, but like many of the Light Division officers, both could barely wait to rush in and get the business over with. The two Irishmen shared the loss of a father young in life. Uniacke turned to his lieutenant, ‘Look there, Fitz, what would our mothers say, if they saw what was preparing for us?’ FitzMaurice replied, ‘Far better they should not,’ before pointing out that Uniacke had put on an expensive new jacket – ‘But what extravagance to put on a new pelisse for a night such as this!’ The captain replied, ‘I shall be all the better worth taking.’ He had a point, for every man – defender or stormer – imagined what he might gain on a night like this: plunder; a handsome new pelisse; a glorious reputation; or just the chance to avoid an ignominious death.

  Craufurd pushed his way through to the head of the column, and on finding a little higher ground he called out to his division: ‘Soldiers! the eyes of your country are upon you. Be steady, be cool, be firm in the assault. The town must be yours this night.’ The rocket was up, the leading parties began trotting forward.

  Whatever the garrison may or may not have seen, most of the approach was made before the eruption of fire that they all dreaded. At last, with the column moving up the first obstacle, less than fifty feet from the walls themselves, a French sentry called out and then the cacophony began. Hundreds of muskets opened up from the walls, and cannon too. Riflemen from the covering party were firing back from the embankment surrounding the walls as the stormers moved up to the lip of this great rampart. The first men began dropping down into the ditch.

  Craufurd, who was standing atop the feature, was hit by a bullet which went through his arm and one of his lungs, then lodged in his spine. The general was hurled over by the force of the impact and rolled down into the darkness. Believing the wound to be mortal, Craufurd asked the captain to tell his beloved wife he was ‘quite sure they would meet in heaven’.

  Down in the ditch in front of the breaches there was a mayhem of wounded men, screaming out in pain, officers calling on others to follow them and soldiers taking potshots at the French above them. Lieutenant Kincaid got himself to the foot of a ladder: ‘I mounted with a ferocious intent, carrying a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other; but, when I got up, I found nobody to fight except two of our own men, who were already laid dead across the top of the ladder.’ In the confusion he had stormed not the main wall, but an outlying ravelin unconnected to it.

  At the breach itself Gurwood was making his way up one of the ladders when he was either thrown or knocked off by one of the defenders, falling back to the ground with a thump, winded. Lieutenant Willie Johnston of the Rifles was soon up in his stead and so, as if from nowhere, was Captain Uniacke, who had rushed forward of his own accord and joined the stormers. Some cheers had gone up in the Great Breach and the Light Division men feared Picton’s were beating them to it.

  Looking up in the murk, they could see the mouth of a cannon facing down and across the breach. Doubtless it was double-charged with canister and the French were just waiting their moment to cut down the storming party. But some soldiers scrambled up the jagged rocks at the edge of the breach and emerged in the top of the wall just beside the cannon’s mouth. One of the 95th brought the butt of his rifle down like an axe across the head of the French gunner and the danger to the men on the ladders was removed. Men now quickly fanned out along the walls and the defence began to crumble.

  In this chaos of shouting and shooting, one of the French engineers touched a match to the fuse on a mine. As Harry Smith and John Uniacke ran along the ramparts with soldiers not far behind, it blew up with massive force. ‘I shall never forget the concussion when it struck me, throwing me back many feet into a lot of charged fuses of shells,’ wrote Smith. ‘My cocked hat was blown away, my clothes all singed.’ Uniacke was not so fortunate: he staggered back, charred black, with one of his arms hanging only by threads of skin. As he was led away by comrades, Uniacke murmured, ‘Remember, I was the first.’

  Soldiers poured into the town, often refusing quarter. Some of the ‘French’, throwing down their muskets, called out that they were only poor Italians. But according to Kincaid, ‘Our men had, somehow, imbibed a horrible antipathy to the Italians, and every appeal they made in that name was instantly answered with “You’re Italians are you? then, damn you, here’s a shot for you”; and the action instantly followed the word.’

  Those who had survived the breaches were flushed with the joy of being alive: ‘When the battle is over, and crowned with victory, he finds himself elevated for a while into the regions of absolute bliss.’ The Forlorn Hope and storming party volunteers ‘broke into different squads, which went in different directions and entered different streets according to the fancy of their leaders.’

  Costello stripped some French soldiers of their money and an officer of his watch. He and his party then found their way into the house of a Spanish doctor, who was hiding with his pretty young niece, fully expecting the sack of Rodrigo to conform to all the horrors of medieval warfare, whereby those inside a stormed town forfeited their lives and property. ‘Like himself, she was shivering with fear,’ according to Costello. ‘This we soon dispelled, and were rewarded with a good supper crowned by a bowl of excellent punch which, at the time, seemed to compensate us for all the sufferings we had endured in the trenches during the siege.’ Elsewhere, the sources of liquor were soon discovered and gallons of the stuff rapidly thrown down the stormers’ necks.

  In Rodrigo’s ancient plaza, the jubilant soldiery gathered in mobs, cheering and firing into windows. The alcohol was taking its effect now, and a general riot seemed imminent. ‘If I had not seen it, I never could have supposed that British soldiers would become so wild and furious,’ wrote a young officer of the 43rd. As the firing at nothing in particular built up, one private of the 43rd dropped dead, a bullet through his head.

  Major Alexander Cameron, who’d been commanding the covering party of riflemen, arrived with Lieutenant Colonel Barnard and tried to check the collapse in order. ‘What, sir, are you firing at?’ Cameron bellowed at one rifleman, who shouted back at him, ‘I don’t know sir! I am firing because everybody else is.’ Cameron and Barnard looked about them at the debris on the streets, each seizing a broken musket which they used to beat their soldiers into some kind of order.

  The search for plunder was not
confined to the soldiery. Lieutenant FitzMaurice helped himself to the governor’s silver snuffbox. Lieutenant Gurwood, having been overtaken by keener men in the breach, was determined to recover the situation. ‘Gurwood’s a sharp fellow,’ noted Harry Smith in admiration of a glory seeker equal to himself, ‘and he cut off in search of the Governor, and brought his sword to the Duke, and Lord Fitzroy Somerset buckled it on him in the breach. Gurwood made the most of it.’

  Some 1,360 unwounded French troops were taken prisoner, along with 500 or so injured men. A little over 1,100 British and Portuguese troops were casualties during the entire siege, about one-fifth of the total being killed.

  It did not take much time for the parties of stormers to recognise one or two familiar faces skulking in the dark alleys of Rodrigo that night. A Cummins or a Hodgson was soon spotted by his messmates, no matter the French uniforms that they wore as disguise – or doffed, depending on what they thought offered the better hope of escape. Lucky not to get a ball on the spot, these men were quickly clapped under arrest and into the hands of the provost marshal.

  There was one exception, though. Joseph Almond had managed to slip out in the chaos following the storm. He scrambled down the steep slope leading away from Rodrigo. Hurling himself headlong into the black night, he tried to get his bearings for Salamanca, from whence the French reinforcing column would arrive. He ran and ran, puffing and panting, knowing that he could expect little mercy if he fell into the hands of his old comrades.

  FIFTEEN

  The Reckoning

  January–March 1812

  The sack of Rodrigo lasted one intense night. Brandy flowed in the gutters and troops moved from one house to another, turning everything upside down in their desperate search for plunder. The following day, one private of the 95th recollected, ‘We marched over the bridge dressed in all variety of clothes imaginable. Some had jack-boots on, others wore frock coats, or had epaulettes, and some had monkeys on their shoulders.’ The mood was buoyant: many had gained materially by the victory and the butcher’s bill had not been so high.

  For those not hardened to war, of course, the sights and sounds of Rodrigo on 20 January aroused feelings of turmoil. Young James Gairdner told his father, ‘I walked around the ramparts that morning at daybreak and never saw such a shocking sight in my life, there lay Frenchman and Englishman dead and dying in every direction, stript and mangled shockingly.’

  In small billets in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, outside the walls, there were men in their death agonies. Neither General Craufurd nor Captain Uniacke was to survive his wounds. Craufurd, to the last, murmured his love for his wife. For Uniacke, unmarried, slow death must have been accompanied by anxiety about how his mother, Eliza, would look after her other children. Both men were laid to rest on 25 January.

  Craufurd and Uniacke received the military obsequies appropriate to their rank: a slow march, pall-bearers, soldiers with reversed arms at the graveside. In Craufurd’s case, the ceremony was grander, of course – thousands of men of the 5th Division were paraded to line the route. The general’s coffin was borne by sergeant majors from each of the Light Division’s battalions, and behind it walked his friends, Sir Charles Stewart, the Adjutant General at Headquarters and his aidesde-camp, followed by Lord Wellington and the Army’s other generals and staff. Some soldiers had cut a niche at the foot of the breach in Rodrigo’s walls and it was into this space that Craufurd was to be interred. After the reading of a short funeral service, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, the general’s coffin was lowered. A volley of musketry saluted him, followed by another salvo, much louder, from a battery of cannon on ramparts overlooking the ceremony.

  The soldiers dispersed afterwards, some Light Division men marching straight through a great slushy puddle as they went – at least one observer detected a kind of silent tribute to their fallen general in this. Wellington’s words home marked Craufurd’s passing in a correct, formal tone, lamenting him as an ‘ornament to his profession’. In their letters and thoughts, the British staff reflected on the passing of a man whose services they had valued but who had been almost impossible to deal with. ‘He is a man of a very extraordinary temper and disposition, it will be difficult to find a person qualified to replace him in the command of the advance,’ FitzRoy Somerset had written, businesslike, shortly before Craufurd’s death. William Napier, who served under Craufurd as a major in the 43rd, later wrote of his character: ‘At one time he was all fire and intelligence, a master-spirit in war; at another, as if possessed by the demon, he would madly rush from blunder to blunder, raging in folly.’

  Uniacke’s farewell, by contrast, was more of a wake. His honour guard was formed of several dozen men of the 3rd Company, and the funeral dirge was played by the band of the 1st Battalion. They marched from their quarters to Gallegos, a nearby Spanish village, where a resting place had been prepared in the little churchyard. Finding a grave in consecrated ground had required Corporal Fairfoot, who’d won his spurs as a fighter in two storms that month, to show a rare kind of tact. At first, the priest at Gallegos had refused to allow the burial, claiming it would be an outrage to inter a heretic in his place. Fairfoot assured the priest that Uniacke was Irish, thereby hinting at his Catholicism. The corporal transmitted his message without exposing the dissimulation required of Uniacke in life, an evasion made necessary by the British laws against Papists holding commissions.

  Many of Uniacke’s lads had been boozing ever since the storm. ‘The men, who had obtained plenty of money at Rodrigo, got drinking,’ wrote Costello, ‘and while conveying the body to the grave, they stumbled under the weight of the coffin. The lid had not been nailed down so out rolled the mangled remains of our brave captain.’ This profane incident did not shock men so inured to death. Instead, they slung their officer back into his box, resumed their journey, then buried him, before returning to their camp for many a toast to Uniacke’s memory and much late-night talk of his courage.

  Harry Smith, recuperating from his own wounds, remembered the last thing the captain had said to him before the storm on the 19th, a reminder that, as senior lieutenant, Smith would probably be a captain by morning. ‘Little, poor fellow, did he think he was to make the vacancy,’ wrote Smith. That was the essence of their business, a highly risky game in which the advancement the officers craved could often be gained only at the expense of comrades. As for Uniacke’s mother Eliza, her situation became quite miserable, and she ended up petitioning for charity, seeking a Royal Bounty or pension to make up for the lost remittances from her dead son.

  For some days after the storm, the British troops made new discoveries of deserters in Rodrigo. There had been around two dozen turncoats serving the French garrison there, sixteen of whom were now prisoners. Some were doubtless killed during the siege or storm, and Almond at least had escaped. One of the five men of the 1st/95th who’d deserted the previous autumn, William MacFarlane, having entered Rodrigo before the others, was apparently able to escape with the last French relief column the previous November and to soldier on as a turncoat. As far as his former messmates knew, though, he might well have been slung into a mass grave with the other dead.

  On 12 February the captured deserters were marched into a makeshift military courtroom, a hall in the village of Nava de Haver, a place familiar enough to the Light Division men as it was very near where they’d fought on 5 May the previous year. In a garrison, courts martial might have several members, particularly when hearing a capital case. In the field, though, a major general sat in judgement as the president and a captain, the deputy judge advocate, put the case for the prosecution. The men were entitled to speak in their own defence, but much of the first day was taken up with the lengthy reading of charges detailing when they had deserted and the circumstances of their capture.

  For those among the prisoners who still dared to hope, there was the consolation that even serious cases of desertion were only punished in England by transportation for life to some dingy Austra
lian colony. As for killing your fellow soldiers, why, Murphy of the 95th had been sentenced to six months’ incarceration for that just before the siege. On the other hand, there had been evidence aplenty in the execution of the Brunswick deserters and some others during the previous two years that Lord Wellington was determined to make a severe example of any men who deserted in the face of the enemy – and those fellows had not even served the French.

  When asked why they had all pleaded not guilty, the soldiers spoke of the privations of the previous autumn. They argued they had been driven to desertion by hunger and suffering.

  General Kempt gave his verdict on 13 February, the business having lasted a day and a half from beginning to end. ‘The court having considered the evidence adduced on the prosecution against the prisoners, together with what they have severally offered in their defence, are of opinion that they are guilty of the charge preferred against them,’ the official verdict read, ‘and do thereby sentence them, the prisoners [all named] to be shot to death, at such time and place as his Excellency the Commander of Forces may be pleased to direct. Which sentence has been confirmed by his Excellency the Commander of the Forces.’ It was to become quite evident that Wellington wanted examples made of these men.