by Mark Urban
The 5th Battalion of the 60th, the mercenary corps that predated the Rifles and also served in the Peninsula, did not escape the disbandments. With its passing, it might be said that the Army finally abandoned the eighteenth-century notion that the rifleman was a born woodsman, best recruited from Germany or Switzerland. Britain and Ireland would henceforth be quite capable of furnishing the raw material for its rifle corps.
Even the formation of the Rifle Brigade, however, did not completely protect it: the 3rd Battalion was wound up a couple of years later. This event helped to ensure that George Simmons, who had written to his parents in 1810 that a man could get his company in five years in the Rifles, did not achieve that goal until nineteen years after he entered the regiment – despite all the suffering that attended his service.
In the meantime, the 1st Battalion returned home in November 1818, losing many veterans before being sent first to Scotland and then Ireland to protect the ministry from the anger of the mob. Although these were simply the exigencies of the service, none of the old sweats could pretend that keeping rioting Celts in check was a particularly pleasing occupation.
Ned Costello was among those invalided out of the regiment – aged thirty-one, he was awarded the miserly sum of sixpence a day. He later married, but finding the money insufficient to keep him, he ended up volunteering to fight in a British Legion which took part in the Spanish civil war in 1835. Costello’s previous services qualified him for the rank of lieutenant in this mercenary force, and he returned to England in 1836. A year and a half later, Costello’s difficulties in maintaining his wife and seven children finally came to an end with his appointment as a Yeoman warder at the Tower of London.
Many of the private soldiers who had served with Costello were a good deal less fortunate. Several succumbed to drink, becoming penniless drifters, begging beside the roads. Tom Plunket, the man who killed the French general during the Corunna campaign and was held up by his colonel as a ‘pattern for the battalion’, was sighted years later selling matches on the streets of London. In his case, the best efforts of that old commanding officer to obtain him a good pension failed to save the old soldier from alcoholism.
George Baller was another veteran of O’Hare’s company whose fate gives some insight into the pitiful circumstances into which many of the old 95th men fell. Baller was one of the hard core of the regiment, having been given the skulker Esau Jackson’s stripes outside the walls of Badajoz in 1812. He was invalided out in 1816, while the regiment was still in France, aged just twenty-eight. Baller had attained the status of colour sergeant but could not carry on due to the severity of his five wounds. One month after his discharge Baller was awarded a pension of ninepence per day by the board at Chelsea. Once married, Baller found himself too sick to work, with a pension too small to provide for his children. He ended up making a desperate appeal to the Chelsea board for more money in 1819. Baller’s exact fate is unknown, but it is clear that despite the most exemplary record, and testimonials from Andrew Barnard, he lived what remained of his life in grinding poverty and great physical pain.
As the years of the 95th’s great Peninsular fights receded, so those who were still fit and serving in the regiment found themselves living, as they had before the war, according to the petty routines of a peacetime army. For an officer like Jonathan Leach, who personified the ‘wild sportsman’ of those campaigning days, this was all too much. ‘I feel no particular penchant for passing the remainder of my days in marching off guards, going grand rounds and visiting rounds and performing other dull, monotonous and uninteresting duties of the kind, on which great stress is laid, and to which vast importance is attached, in various stiff-starched garrisons,’ he wrote. Leach resigned from the Army with the rank of lieutenant colonel to pursue other business.
Those with less wealth did not have this option. While serving on in the Rifle Brigade, Robert Fairfoot committed himself to raising a family, his wife Catherine bearing four children between 1817 and 1823. He named his son Joseph George Fairfoot, thus commemorating his father and his closest friend. Fairfoot eventually joined Simmons in the commissioned class, being made quartermaster in 1825. He had been a model soldier and was long overdue his reward. Andrew Barnard, writing to recommend the promotion, stated, ‘I cannot give a stronger proof of his merit than the anxiety that all the officers who command the Battalion to which he belongs feel for him.’
Simmons was destined to raise a family too, although he did not marry until 1836, by which time he had reached the ripe old age of fifty. The poorer officer’s life was not conducive to romance, involving as it did periods of unaccompanied service which might go on for years at a time. Several, including John Kincaid, never married.
In the years after Waterloo, the admiration for the 95th that permeated the old Peninsular Army spread pretty much throughout the service. In line regiments, an officer who survived the Peninsula might have considered himself lucky to have participated in a couple of general engagements and a lesser affair or two. The average soldier in any of the usual regiments simply did not have a turn at the centre of the action any more often than that. Even George Simmons’s brother Maud, of the 34th Foot, was in just four major actions, despite serving throughout the war. The Light Division, though, was usually first on the field and last off, as its men boasted. This meant that many years later, when a general-service medal was finally awarded for the Iberian campaigns, the metal clasps across its ribbon numbered two or maybe three for the average veteran, but twelve for Leach and eight for Simmons. Had Fairfoot lived long enough to get the wretched thing, his medal would have had nine.
The odyssey of the Rifles was therefore one of immense hardship and tough fighting, even by the harsh standards of the rest of Wellington’s Army. This left a passionate bond between its men. Simmons wrote to his parents, while recuperating after Waterloo, that he owed his life to Fairfoot, who ‘if I can do him a service may always command me; his character as a soldier stands with the first in the regiment’. The experience of campaigning with the 95th was so intense that it burned through the distinctions of rank and status that constrained so much of nineteenth-century society.
The great treasure of the Rifles’ experiences was hoarded by the British military caste for some time. It was inevitable, though, that the wider public would eventually come to learn the soldiers’ story, and that the 95th would become a legend.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Legend is Born
Although many individual Rifle veterans remained in obscurity, or indeed poverty, the regiment was to make a dramatic mark. As Simmons and Fairfoot aged in the role of lowly regimental officer, other veterans of the 1st/95th were scaling the heights of the Army. Sidney Beckwith, Andrew Barnard and Harry Smith all became generals. In fact, among those officers who sailed with the battalion in May 1809 and survived the wars, there were to be seven generals, although some, like Alexander Cameron, achieved the rank through seniority but did not serve actively in it. The 43rd and 52nd similarly produced many of the generals who would command Queen Victoria’s armies in India and elsewhere in the Empire; the three regiments of the old Light Division in aggregate provided the backbone of the Army’s staff throughout the mid-nineteenth century.
With the promotion of so many ex-Light Division officers into senior positions, the survival of the special Peninsular system of fighting and discipline was assured. The success of the tactics developed at Shorncliffe and then used to devastating effect in Iberia was enshrined in the issue of a new drill manual for the entire Army in 1824.
Major General Sir Henry Torrens’s book Field Exercise and Evolutions of the Army finally laid the 1792 Rules and Regulations to rest. Torrens extended the subtle skirmishing used by the Light Division to the Army as a whole, stipulating that a battalion in line could space its men, ‘at any distance, either by single or double files’. This gave official sanction to the breakdown of the old linear tactics (which had in fact been comprehensively subverted in the P
eninsula) in which the deployment of a compact, regulated line was deemed vital. Torrens also gave instructions on skirmishing that could be traced directly back through the 95th’s training manuals, such as Sergeant Weddeburne’s, to the original rules for riflemen published in 1798. In the pivoting of companies or the formation of squares, the light-infantry drills also became the order of the day.
If the Torrens rules contained a powerful dose of Light Division tactics, then it cannot be said that these new principles triumphed unchallenged. Quite a few officers emerged from the Napoleonic wars with the conviction that the bayonet was the key to success. This, after all, had seemed to be the lesson of Waterloo. To many observers, particularly those who had not been present at Wellington’s battles, the image of the impassive British line awaiting the shouting French, giving them the close-range volley and then the bayonet, seemed like the expression of a stoic national character, and this was an age in which such notions were extremely powerful.
A heated debate got under way about whether this blade was the arbiter of the battlefield. Lieutenant Colonel John Mitchell, a veteran of the Peninsular War, scorned what he saw as a myth, that the redcoats had charged across the fields of Spain impaling their enemies:
The bayonet may, in truth, be termed the grand mystifier of modern tactics … that in some scrambling attack of works or villages, a soldier may have been killed or wounded with a bayonet is possible; but to suppose that soldiers ever rushed into close combat, armed only with bayonets, is an absurdity; it never happened and can never happen.
Mitchell’s point was that an attack delivered in this way rarely connected with the enemy – either it faltered, or it resulted in that foe running away before they were skewered. The colonel argued that in every French attempt to break through the British line, Wellington’s men had galled them with long-range skirmisher fire before delivering a thumping close-range volley, which meant the enemy ‘halted in order to fire … and got into confusion’.
French theorists drew the opposite lesson from these contests, and developed a preoccupation with delivering an unstoppable bayonet charge. The musings of French generals on this subject led to the final obscenity of sending men on bayonet attacks in the First World War without any ammunition, so that they would be unable to halt and return fire, having no choice but to continue their onward rush or die where they stood. Colonel Mitchell would have had none of this nonsense, believing that attempts to charge were far too unpredictable in their consequences, and that instead, while some improvements in marksmanship had been made, the infantry as a whole needed to reach a much higher standard in it.
There were quite a few officers who took issue with Mitchell’s thesis in the columns of the United Service Journal. The intensity of military conservatism and the vehemence of some of the arguments can be judged by this passage:
It is discipline, which is nothing but each man, shoulder-to-shoulder, depending upon a whole, instead of himself alone, that has raised our ragamuffins to an equality … with more able bodied individuals; and it is this that has enabled civilised nations, with their very scum, first reduced to order and mechanical obedience, to overcome and conquer the boldest, bravest, and most athletic barbarians that ever dwelt on the face of the earth [the French].
The author of this vitriol, who signed himself only as W.D.B., added, ‘Each soldier is, comparatively speaking, but a sixpenny knife: therefore to make the soldier of infantry depend upon himself is the destruction, the pulling to pieces of the machine.’
W. D. B.’ s attitude, with its emphasis on rigid linear tactics and contempt for the ordinary soldier, flew in the face of everything the Rifles had demonstrated in their campaigns. It was hardly surprising, then, that John Kincaid was one of the Rifles officers who joined these debates in the Journal, giving Colonel Mitchell some supporting fire. The veterans of the old 95th would do much in their writings to try to give the lie to such repugnant ideas.
Jonathan Leach, never one to mince words, wrote, ‘Our corps gained the reputation, which it wrung from friends and foes, not by aping the drill of grenadiers, but by its activity and intelligence at the outposts; by being able to cope with, in all situations, the most experienced and best trained light troops which the continent of Europe could produce; and by the deadly application of the rifle in action.’ Holding up to scorn the image of the grenadier, like some clockwork automaton, Leach insisted that the rifleman was a universal soldier able to undertake all duties from skirmishing behind rocks to standing in the firing line or storming a fortress like Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz – the business reserved for those parade-ground soldiers in the eighteenth-century conception of warfare. In such bloody storms, Leach boasted, the 95th ‘proved itself equally efficient in the form of grenadiers’.
Wellington managed to synthesise the opposed views expressed in these debates. He did indeed appreciate the value of well-trained riflemen as well as light infantry, although he sought to differentiate these special troops from the common or garden line. As far as those regiments were concerned, the Iron Duke readily accepted that the British recruit was ‘scum’ who had to be kept in his place by fierce discipline.
The 95th’s officers considered these questions during their later years with humanity and realism. The rifleman was not some component in a machine, let alone a ‘sixpenny knife’, but a man who had to be motivated, praised, even kept amused. They gave much thought to the psychology of battle, Kincaid for example arguing that skirmishing soldiers needed to be kept moving in order to stop them dwelling on the dangers they faced under fire. In this way it was actually easier to fight in skirmish order, since the men did not have that sickening feeling of powerlessness that came from standing in packed ranks while enemy gunners knocked over your comrades with roundshot.
Distinctions between different types of soldiers, of the kind Wellington and many other senior officers believed in, were an important part of military psychology before the Peninsular campaigns and were to prove so again after them, but while the regiments were fighting hard against a shared enemy it was apparent that the different categories had rather more in common than was supposed. Before the Peninsula, many of the 95th’s enthusiasts had believed that the regiment would only be really effective when firing at long range – even over 250 yards. There had been concern that the rifleman’s slower rate of fire might make him unable to defend himself in a close-range fight.
In battle, though, the rifleman was rarely able to engage targets at very long range. On one of the occasions when he did, the action at Arcangues in December 1813, the 43rd with its smooth-bore light-infantry muskets joined in the fusillade at some enemy artillery 350 to 400 yards away with equal effect. At Barba del Puerco, early in 1810, the Rifles had shown themselves able to stand against greatly superior numbers in a close-range fight – circumstances which the pre-war orthodoxies suggested would spell deep trouble for them.
Similarly, the use of a great proportion of a regiment, sometimes the entire corps, in extended or skirmish order, might before the wars have been regarded as the preserve of the 95th, but these tactics were practised so successfully by the other regiments of the Light Division that they were spread to the entire infantry in Torrens’s 1824 regulations. The rifleman’s mission of picking off leaders – which proved highly effective in the campaigns against the French – was clearly not invented by the 95th, and had also spread pretty extensively through the Army by the end of the Peninsular War.
Because of the constant cross-fertilisation between Light Division corps like the 43rd and 95th, many issues in the emergence of light-infantry tactics became blurred. Many could claim paternity of the Light Division’s success: Colonel Rottenburg for laying out the original ideas on skirmishing; Colonels Stewart and Manningham for founding the 95th and inculcating new ideas on discipline and promotion; Colonel Kenneth MacKenzie of the 52nd and General Sir John Moore for spreading those to the red-coated 43rd and 52nd while developing new drills for them too; Craufurd for his
emphasis on vigilance in the outposts as well as his scheme of marching; Colonel Beckwith of the Rifles for being the most successful tactical commander of the Light Division and providing his superb model of leadership at Sabugal; Barnard for maintaining this high standard of command during years when much of the battalion was sick of fighting and longed for peace. In the years after the wars, partisans for Moore and Craufurd in particular would claim one or other to have been the key architect, but no single figure can be given all the glory.
Although there was much gradual evolution and cribbing of others’ ideas in the way that a recognisably modern British soldier emerged from Wellington’s campaigns, it is worth recording that certain honours must be reserved for the 95th. Their uniqueness derived from several factors. The emphasis on marksmanship training or skill at arms made them the Army’s best shots and showed the future shape of warfare in engagements such as Sabugal or Tarbes, demonstrating that firepower would prevail over mass. Their dark clothes, emphasis on using cover while skirmishing and on concealment in their observation positions were novel and, as an unwanted by-product, often resulted (for example at the Coa, Ciudad Rodrigo and Vitoria) in the thoroughly modern phenomenon of the 95th being accidentally engaged by its own side. And although credit can be given to the 5th/60th Rifles for many innovations, this mercenary battalion was almost always split in penny packets and therefore unable to demonstrate, as the 95th did, the power of riflemen en masse. In deploying whole battalions of these special troops (or even eighteen companies together, at Tarbes), the 95th was able to show that even powerful fortifications such as the French works in the Pyrenees did not require the old linear tactics, but could be taken by skirmishers in a frontal assault.
