Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

by Mark Urban

  Wellington had walked along the forward slope of La Rhune with Colborne, Kempt and Alten, studying the French works on the opposite mountain. In forcing Soult’s entire system of fortifications, this was where he intended to open the ball, with the Light Division in its usual post of honour. To their front was a series of entrenchments on top of La Petite Rhune. The 43rd would be attacking this point. Slightly to the left and rear of that objective was another stone-built redoubt, the Mouiz fort, mounting several cannon, which Wellington wanted attacked by Colborne using the 52nd, 1st/95th, 3rd/95th and some Portuguese.

  ‘These fellows think themselves invulnerable,’ said Wellington as he studied the French lines in front, ‘but I will beat them out and with great ease.’ Colborne looked at his objective, protected in several places by precipitous rock faces, and replied: ‘That we shall beat them when your Lordship attacks, I have not doubt, but for the ease –’

  Wellington cut him short, telling Colborne that the French would be assailed in many places simultaneously and did not have the men to defend all of their battlements. The British commander told Alten to move his division down into the valley between the two Rhune peaks during the hours of darkness, ‘so as to rush La Petite Rhune as day dawned, it would be of vast importance and save great loss’.

  At 2 a.m. on 10 November, the Light Bobs were duly served up with the earliest of breakfasts and began filing down to the low ground at the base of their objective. The brigadiers, fearing the enemy would be alarmed, were terrified of some man firing off his musket by accident or losing his way. Both types of misfortune actually happened, rattling everyone’s nerves. ‘That this was an anxious, I might say awful moment may well be believed,’ wrote Leach. Somehow the French did not respond, and as the sun appeared across the peaks to the east, everyone was in their start positions. The 1st/95th and the rest of their column had to pick their way up a precipice in order to emerge on the flank of the French defences.

  Just after 6 a.m. the report of three cannon shots from a British battery echoed around the peaks: it was the signal for a general attack to commence. Within fifteen or twenty minutes all of the trenchworks in front of the Mouiz fort had been taken at the point of the bayonet. ‘We moved forward under a heavy fire from the enemy’s works without ever exchanging a shot until we got up to them and scaled the walls,’ wrote Simmons, ‘then the work of death commenced.’

  While younger officers in the 95th usually carried rifles in battle, it was unusual for them to use the blades fixed to their barrels. Although shooting could just about be reconciled with the status of a gentleman, bayoneting was another matter entirely. Lieutenant FitzMaurice, seeing a Frenchman impaled by Second Lieutenant James Church, one of the rougher Irish soldiers of fortune who had recently joined the 95th, asked him something along the lines of ‘How could you?’ Church looked around, the crackle of gunfire echoing about him, and replied: ‘Eh, but Fitz, just see how easy it slips in!’

  Storming into the positions, the riflemen found the French tents were still up and food on the boil in some of the positions. Leach looked around from this vantage point: ‘It is impossible to picture oneself anything finer than the general advance of the Army … as far as the eye could reach almost soon became one sheet of fire and smoke and of an infernal fire of light troops with frequent volleys of musquetry as the lines approached one another.’

  Across on the main part of La Petite Rhune, the 43rd’s assault was beginning. Six of the regiments’ companies went forward in extended order, four remaining formed in reserve. The redcoats ploughed through the first French defensive position before coming up against more serious resistance. It turned into a vicious close-range fight. ‘One of our officers gallantly jumped into the second fort,’ according to an officer of the 43rd. ‘A French soldier thrust a bayonet through his neckerchief, transfixed him to the wall, and fired his piece. This blew away the officer’s collar, but he jumped away unhurt.’

  Barnard led the 1st Battalion of Rifles across to support the 43rd at this point, and could be seen by its officers urging his men on, and firing a rifle at the French defenders himself. Soult’s officers, for their part, did everything they could to incite their companies to continue their resistance. Simmons ‘saw some French officers trying every means in their power to make their men remain. One officer was doing prodigies of valour and would not leave the wall; he was shot and came tumbling down.’

  At length, the 43rd, supported by Barnard’s riflemen, cleared La Petite Rhune and began pursuing the fleeing French down the back side of the mountain towards the sea. Barnard, who was following on horseback with his men, was at this moment shot in the chest, falling back off his horse, onto the rocky ground where several of his officers quickly attended him.

  Simmons, not for the first time, put his surgeon’s training to use. He unbuttoned Barnard’s tunic and examined the wound. Foaming blood was coming from the colonel’s mouth and the gaping hole in his chest made a sucking sound – neither augured well. Barnard, fully conscious, looked up at Simmons and asked, ‘Simmons, you know my situation. Am I mortally wounded?’ The young lieutenant put a couple of fingers into the wound and probed, feeling the bottom lobe of Barnard’s left lung.

  ‘Colonel, it is useless to mince the matter; you are dangerously wounded, but not immediately mortally.’

  ‘Be candid,’ Barnard answered. ‘I am not afraid to die.’

  ‘I am candid.’

  Barnard looked away, saying, ‘Then I am satisfied.’

  The colonel was carried off in a blanket by several riflemen, attended by Simmons as they went.

  Elsewhere, Colborne’s 52nd had reached the Mouiz fortress, the toughest objective by far. Attempts to rush the walls met with failure, a hail of bullets and grapeshot cutting down dozens of men. They crouched in cover, the cracking and whistling of metal just over their heads. Colborne waited until the attacks around them had succeeded and then called upon the French commander to surrender. For the second time in as many months, his nerve paid off and the defenders marched out and into captivity. By 3 p.m. the fighting in what became known as the Battle of the Nivelle was over.

  Some 4,300 French had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The officer commanding the French division struck by the Light Division reported that ‘a swarm of skirmishers’ had made the attack. Wellington’s casualties, combined with those of his Portuguese and Spanish allies, came to just below three thousand.

  Simmons was asked to stay with Barnard, as the crisis of his wound passed. There had not been too many strokes of good fortune in Simmons’s life, and he was quite sure he had to take advantage of fate. He wrote to his parents, telling them that he would not be coming home on leave: ‘To gain the friendship of a man of Colonel Barnard’s ability, who will next year be a General Officer, will always be of use.’ Perhaps, at this late stage, Simmons believed his commanding officer might make him the prize of an ADC’s job.

  Fate was unkind, however, to Sergeant Robert Fairfoot. He had survived the Pyrenean battles, along with most of his comrades, and was considered such a trusty fellow that he was made the company pay sergeant. Since this job involved collecting large amounts of cash from the paymaster and doling it out to the men, it was a weighty responsibility.

  Not long after he received this new duty, Fairfoot awoke, having – if truth be told – drunk a little too much the night before, to discover that he had been robbed of £31. It disgusted him to think that one of his own company was probably the culprit. The sergeant knew he was liable and was soon in a high pitch of anxiety about what to do. He went to Ned Costello and told him what had happened. Costello recorded that his sergeant ‘said his credit would be for ever destroyed in the regiment, and he could not endure remaining in the battalion afterwards’. Sergeant Fairfoot had made up his mind to desert.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Nive

  November–December 1813

  It would perhaps have been better if Captain Hobkirk of the 43rd had c
onfined his flamboyance to the stage. But on 23 November the Mrs Malaprop of February’s Light Division theatricals opened his mouth and well and truly said the wrong thing. The result this time was not farce but tragedy.

  They were skirmishing up towards a little French village called Arcangues in the foothills north of the Pyrenees. It was handsomely made, with a chateau, a tall church spire and woods to both sides. The Light Division’s Right Brigade was advancing to take the village and the French were falling back through it. Behind Arcangues the ground rose up to a feature called the Bassussarry ridge where the French had dug some trenches.

  Brigadier Kempt sent Hobkirk with two companies of the 43rd into the trees on the left of Arcangues, with the words ‘Now mind, you are not to go beyond the wood.’ The redcoats moved gingerly forward, ‘to the front of the wood, each man to his tree, and kept up a fire upon their trenches. They did not forget to return it but they did little mischief as we were all covered by the trees. The boughs dropped fast around us and the leaves were knocked up by our sides.’

  The 43rd could maintain this position for as long as was necessary, for they were in cover and far enough (120 to 150 yards) from the French positions for their fire to be poorly aimed. But then Hobkirk’s bugler sounded the advance. The soldiers looked at one another for a moment and then the first men began running out of cover and into the open ground. The banging of French muskets suddenly increased, and the redcoats started dropping. Lieutenant Hennell, running forward, saw Baillie, another subaltern in his company, felled with an almighty crack as a bullet smacked into the centre of his forehead.

  Having covered about twenty yards, just to a low hedge that offered some slight cover, the companies that had burst out of the wood were pinned down. They lay with their faces pressed to the wet earth, musket balls cracking and ricocheting around them. Looking about, the British officers could see that they had come into a killing ground raked by fire on three sides. A regiment of Frenchmen was loading and firing their pieces – the cacophony was intense. Hennell, who survived these desperate moments, would write, ‘I have passed, as you will see, the hottest fire I ever saw, Badajoz not excepted.’ The lieutenant shouted to his men to stop firing since, ‘for every shot we gave them they sent five or six in return’. He knew they could not just lie there, for the ground afforded them almost no cover – a man lying next to Hennell suddenly had his jaw shot off. Looking off to his right, the officer spotted a small ditch, to which he led his men, crawling on their bellies.

  When the bugler finally sounded the retire, the soldiers knew they would have to stand up into this withering fire again to make their escape. But they went all the same, several more men falling. Seeing the retreat commence, the French launched a bayonet charge which captured Hobkirk and a dozen of his men. The remainder rallied in the woods and considered the cost of their little sally: the two companies had suffered seventy-six men killed, wounded or missing.

  The 43rd’s mistake at Arcangues had resulted primarily from wanting to cut a dash. The battalion’s commanding officer told his wife in a letter home, ‘Some young sanguine officers who are more vain than good, concluded that with three or four companies they could drive the whole French army before them.’

  Hobkirk, perhaps, had fallen victim to the desire to get written up in a dispatch for a daring act, and a great many men had paid for it. There was a feeling among the officers of the Light Division that peace could be close, a sense that changed the atmosphere. Latecomers felt that there might not be much more time to distinguish themselves. Even some of the poorer veterans in the 43rd or 95th realised that further laurels won in combat might be the only way to avoid being put on the half-pay list when the eventual disbandments or amalgamations happened. Others, though, having been through so much, just felt that they did not want to get killed in the last battle of a war whose outcome was becoming a foregone conclusion. Lieutenant George Simmons, for example, remained with the recuperating Barnard, having decided that he had already shown a great deal of pluck in battle and his advancement now required him to ingratiate himself with a man of influence.

  Barnard’s convalescence robbed the battalion of his energy and diligence at the very moment that its men faced a new challenge. There was an erosion of discipline on both sides, arising from the feeling of impending peace. Some Light Division officers had received The Times of 8 November and read of Napoleon’s complete defeat at Leipzig, the greatest battle of this epoch. They showed it to some French officers who had come down to inspect their own pickets, the two parties approaching each other with a friendly wave.

  Fraternisation was taking over among the outposts. When the division set up a new line of pickets on top of the Bassussarry ridge (the French having fallen back of their own accord), the enemy placed theirs close by, just thirty or forty yards in front. Officers would approach with a waved newspaper or a flask of alcohol prominently displayed, in order to signal their peaceful intent. It was understood that if one side were ordered to attack the other, the pickets would approach tapping the stocks of their weapons. This meant ‘We are in earnest’ and the other side would have the choice to fight or retire.

  So intimate were these understandings that only the most ardent fire-eater on the British side, or dyed-in-the-wool Jacobin on the other, would violate them. One morning Lieutenant James Gairdner (returned after his Vitoria wound) was with his company’s pickets when a French officer was seen approaching far closer than the agreed spot. The American-born officer and Kincaid, who was inspecting the outposts, watched this advance, before Gairdner concluded, ‘Well, I won’t kill these unfortunate rascals at all events, but shall tell them to go in and join their picket.’ Gairdner walked forward to point out the mistake only to be saluted with gunfire. ‘The balls all fell near, without touching him,’ according to Kincaid, ‘and, for the honour of the French army, I was glad to hear afterwards that the officer alluded to was a militia-man.’ It was this sort of fellow, having imbibed too much Bonapartist propaganda or just being a raw civilian, who violated the rules adopted by the chivalrous professionals.

  Among the rank and file, these arrangements went rather further. A roaring contraband trade grew up, with deals being done almost nightly at the outposts: the French bought cheap but delicious brandy on behalf of les Goddams whereas the riflemen provided food and tobacco for Johnny. ‘We frequently went into each other’s picket houses,’ Costello recollected. ‘This state of things at our outposts was too subversive of discipline to be tolerated by those in command, and it was only done on the sly, upon a reliance of mutual honour.’ In the soldiers’ case, this code of behaviour meant keeping the officers in the dark, and Costello himself cheerfully admitted to deceiving Gairdner on these occasions.

  Sergeant Robert Fairfoot was able to join in these barters because Costello had managed to stop him deserting. Taking some of his Vitoria windfall, Costello gave Fairfoot £31 to replace the stolen pay. Such were the bonds between old comrades.

  Arcangues, just behind the Bassussarry ridge, was turned into a kind of strongpoint during the last week of November and first of December. The chateau, church and surrounding walled enclosures had been barricaded and put into a state of defence by the 43rd and 95th. The officers made their mess in the chateau, where their host was happy to sell them many a fine bottle from the cellars.

  Although the French footslogger anticipated the end of the Napoleonic system, there were still plenty, from Marshal Soult downwards, who insisted that they should do their duty in defending the sacred soil of their country. To this end, he was determined to launch an offensive against the new British lines, and it began on 9 December. An attack by General Clausel, leading two divisions onto the Bassussarry ridge and Arcangues, was ordered for the next day.

  The night before the French attack there had been heavy, driving rain. It was still coming down early the following morning as the French columns were mustered and moved forwards. Everything was slowing down in the mud, particularly the artil
lery, which, in places, was sinking up to its axles on the tracks. The French general ordered his men to press on in any case and a first wave of skirmishers was within a hundred yards of the British pickets by 9 a.m.

  On the ridge some of the mounted Light Division staff officers were trotting along with their brigadiers. The fighting elsewhere the previous day made them alive to the possibility of an attack and their battalions had been stood to arms in the valley behind them at dawn, but the day was wearing on and nothing seemed imminent. Both brigadiers – Kempt and Colborne – stood their men down. The formed regiments began returning to their billets, the pickets remaining on the ridge, hunched under their coats, trying to stay dry. Colborne’s brigade major, Smith, and the divisional staff officer, Charlie Beckwith (another Rifles officer, and nephew of Colonel Sidney Beckwith), were both worried, though. They could see parties of Frenchmen moving about in the woods to their front. ‘The enemy are going to attack us,’ said Smith. Colborne replied, ‘No, they are only going to resume their ordinary posts in our front.’ Smith became agitated: ‘I prayed him to allow me to order my Brigade under arms. At last he consented.’

  Some Frenchers, led by officers, walked right up to some pickets of the 43rd: ‘The French soldiers witnessing our civility to their small party, were determined not to be outdone in politeness, and called out to our sentinels, in French and Spanish, to retire.’ A few minutes later, at around 9.30 a.m., hundreds of French troops began appearing out of the woods in front of the Bassussarry ridge. The British pickets started firing but could see immediately that they would be driven in. On one part of the ridge, where the Highland Company had made its outposts, fourteen riflemen swiftly fell as prisoners into enemy hands.

  Hearing the alarm back in Arcangues, Lieutenant Gairdner was mustered along with the reserve for the outlying picket and ordered by Lieutenant Colonel Gilmour, who was in acting command of the 1st/95th (in Barnard’s absence), to go onto the ridge and reinforce the picket. Gairdner discussed this briefly with Hopwood, another subaltern of the 2nd Company, to which they both belonged, and could see no sense to it. If the might of the French Army was falling on their front, there was no point in reinforcing a hopeless situation. Best to withdraw the pickets and fight at Arcangues, where a strong defensive position had been prepared. They looked up to the source of the firing, the ridge, and could see some British soldiers running back. Gilmour was insistent. Gairdner recorded his feelings: