Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

by Mark Urban

  Confirmed or not, there was still time for some last intercession by the men’s commanding officers. Miles Hodgson of the 95th was among those saved from the firing squad by his superiors, presumably because of the notion that he had been a good soldier in most respects prior to his desertion. Hearing of this in their bivouac, the injustice was not lost on the riflemen, some of whom blamed Hodgson for persuading McInnes of the Highland Company to desert in the first place.

  It was not that the others held McInnes entirely innocent in the matter – rather that they would have preferred to see Hodgson share his punishment. As they discussed the condemned men’s fate around the campfire, everyone was pretty much agreed that they would get what was due to them. Some held that the deserters had fought twice as well as any Frenchers and that they had even called out in English as the storm began, ‘Now here comes the Light Division; let us give it them, the rascals!’

  McInnes and nine others were duly taken to a clearing in the upland forest one week after their sentence was passed. In order that the lesson not be lost on their comrades, the Light Division was paraded to witness the punishment, and the firing party made up from contingents of its battalions. Each of the prisoners would be shot by members of his own regiment. ‘They soon after appeared, poor wretches, moving towards the square, with faces pale and wan, and all with the dejection such a situation is calculated to produce,’ one witness remembered. The provost marshal and Lieutenant Harry Smith, as major of brigade, supervised proceedings.

  Graves had been dug for the prisoners, each being stopped in front of his own last resting place. They then kneeled with their backs to the grave and facing their old regiments. Blindfolds were fastened and they were ‘left for a few moments to their own reflections or prayers, the Provost Marshal proceeded to the firing party’. At the order, the firing squad levelled its weapons and fired.

  The smoke from the volley cleared to reveal two men still upright. One, a rifleman, was wounded. The other, Cameron of the Royal Horse Artillery, was untouched, for in a piece of sad incompetence, the provost marshal had forgotten to include members of his regiment in the firing squad.

  Harry Smith recalled what happened next: ‘“Oh, Mr Smith, put me out of my misery,” called the wounded rifleman, and I literally ordered the firing party, when reloaded, to run up and shoot the poor wretches. It was an awful scene.’ The provost marshal walked up and finished off each man with a shot to the head.

  The regiments of the Light Division filed away from the execution ground. They had seen plenty of death in battle, but there was something deeply disturbing about what they had just witnessed. Quarter Master William Surtees wrote:

  I cannot describe the uncomfortable feelings this spectacle produced in my mind – nay, not only there, but in my body also – for I felt sick at heart; a sort of loathing ensued; and from the recollection of what I then suffered, I could not easily be persuaded to witness such another scene, if I had the option of staying away.

  Following the execution of its former members, the Light Division was soon under way again, marching south for an appointment with another siege. Badajoz, the last remaining border fortress still in French hands, was their objective, Wellington having resolved to take it as quickly as possible so that he might press on with the campaign of 1812, deeper into Spain. The 95th and its brother regiments faced a series of marches, down through the Sierra d’Estrella mountains to the plains of Alemtejo (where they had suffered such sickness before) and across the Guadiana into Spain.

  The columns moving south were commanded under improvised arrangements. Craufurd was dead, Colborne of the 52nd seriously wounded. Others accompanied the column in a state of fragile health, either through wounds or sickness, drifting in and out of their posts as each bout of delirium subsided or rose. Among these officers were: Colonel Beckwith, who had returned from England, in theory to resume command of the 1st Brigade, though in fact he was never well enough to do so; Major General John Vandeleur, the 2nd Brigade chief who now coveted the command of the entire division but had also been wounded at Rodrigo; and Major O’Hare, the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Rifles, who had been laid low by a series of fevers. So it was a time of acting commands throughout: lieutenants led companies; Cameron, a brevet major but technically still a captain, commanded the 1st/95th; majors from the 43rd and 52nd ran the brigades; and Lieutenant Colonel Barnard, having arrived less than a year before, was in charge of the entire Light Division.

  It was in this atmosphere, in which nobody exactly felt confident of his place, that a grubby prisoner was taken swiftly down the division’s march route and delivered to its provost. Shortly after the previous executions, Joseph Almond had been captured by a patrol of Spanish guerrillas while trying to make his way through to Salamanca. The forests and byways between Rodrigo and that city were intensively patrolled by Don Julian’s men, who were always on the lookout for Spanish collaborators or spies carrying messages. Anyone who seemed out of place soon attracted their attention.

  Almond’s former comrades were quickly aware of his capture because he had to join their daily marches, manacled, at the rear of the column. February’s executions had, for many of the men, righted the wrong caused by the deserters’ defection to the French – accounts had been settled. Quite a few of them had been disgusted by the spectacle of the firing squads too. So when it came to Almond, there was a general feeling that they did not want to see another capital trial.

  Since the division was marching, it was not possible to convene even the semblance of a general court martial, as had been done the previous month. Instead, the recuperating General Vandeleur would act as president and his staff officer or major of brigade, Harry Smith, would be given the prosecuting role of acting deputy advocate general. The ‘court’ was convened in Castello Branco on 4 March and its proceedings would last but an hour or two. Almond, like the others, pleaded not guilty on the grounds of the sufferings he had faced the previous November.

  Smith and Vandeleur did what they believed Headquarters expected of them:

  The Court having duly considered the evidence on the part of the prosecution, as well as what the Prisoner has stated in his defence, are of the opinion that he is Guilty of the crime laid to his charge, and do therefore sentence him the Prisoner Joseph Allman [sic] to be shot to death at such time and place as His Excellency the Commander of the Forces may deem fit.

  ‘The fate of this man excited much commiseration,’ according to Costello. ‘Because of his previous good character, and the fact that he had marched as a prisoner for many days, it was commonly thought he would be pardoned.’ Everybody had learnt the lesson that they were intended to learn from February’s firing squad. Surely someone would step forward and say a few good words for Almond, saving him as Hodgson had been saved – but who? At the time of his desertion, his company had been under the command of George Simmons, a junior lieutenant. As for O’Hare or Cameron, they were hard men all right, but they lacked the connections to feel confident about putting their heads above the parapet in such a situation. Only someone with the stature of a Beckwith could have saved Almond, and he was confined to a sickbed.

  On 9 March, the division halted in Castello de Vide, a little hillside spa town in the northern part of Alemtejo Province. Almond’s execution had been fixed by the court martial for the next day. Costello found himself, with several comrades, guarding the prisoner. They were playing cards and chatting among themselves when the provost arrived. There was to be no pardon: the sentence would be carried out the following morning at ten.

  Almond sent for the 5th Company pay sergeant and asked for his arrears. Indeed, the prisoner was insistent on the point that the execution could not be carried out until these several pounds had been received. These were made over, one of the guards being sent out to buy some good wine with it. What remained was signed over to Almond’s mother. The prisoner then noticed that one of his keepers had worn-out shoes, so he swapped his own with him, say
ing, ‘They will last me as long as I shall require them.’

  The following morning, 10 March, the Light Division was drawn up as ordered, to witness another execution. A muffled drum was beaten and the band played the Dead March as the prisoner was led out. It was raining a typical, damnable Portuguese winter’s rain, and the grave that had been dug for Almond was soon waterlogged. The prisoner marched up, looked into it and said, ‘Although a watery one, I shall sleep sound enough in it.’ He seemed completely composed, showing no signs of fear either in his step or in the timbre of his voice.

  Almond knelt and declined the blindfold with the words, ‘There is no occasion, I shall not flinch.’ The provost, embarrassed, explained that these were the rules. As the firing party made ready, he called out to his guards of the previous night, giving each of them a word and a farewell. ‘As I nodded to him in return,’ wrote Costello, ‘I fancied it was to a dead man. And in two minutes, he was no more. The intrepid and cool manner in which he met his fate drew forth a general feeling of admiration.’ The blindfold went on at last, rifles were presented at their mark, and the damp stillness was shattered by a volley. Almond tipped back into his grave and sploshed into the muddy water like a sack of butcher’s scraps.

  SIXTEEN

  Badajoz

  March–April 1812

  The French gun captain peering down the barrel of his great beast of a cannon could see enemy soldiers running across a trench, on the ridge five hundred yards or so from his position. Several nights before, the enemy had thrown up this earthen defence on the gentle rise overlooking Badajoz’s eastern wall. It was the first parallel of their siege works. Every day the gun captain and his company had been hurling heavy shot at it, trying from their platform on the city’s massive walls to flatten the insolent work of men with shovels. He watched the running figures, three of them. You could not lead running soldiers with a massive great gun in the way you did with a rifle. Instead you aimed for your target – the trench – and if you caught some member of the working parties in the process, then ça ira! But an experienced gun captain using the mental mechanism honed by years of practice and thousands of shots could judge very precisely the time required for the flight of his ball to a known range, add to it the moment’s delay of the powder burning from the touch hole through to the main charge and subtract from this the instant it would take running men to cover a given distance. The gun went off with an almighty thump.

  Private Costello was aware of the whoosh of air just behind him and the splash of something on his jacket. He jumped down into the trench and turned around, ‘and beheld the body of Brooks, headless, but quivering with life for a few seconds before it fell … the shot had smashed and carried away the whole of his head. My jacket was bespattered with the brains.’ Costello and Tom Treacy had made it, James Brooks had not. Another man who had sailed in May 1809 with the 3rd Company was dead. Brooks was one of the many captured on the Coa in July 1810, but he had managed to escape the French. In the days before his death, he had told Costello several times that he had dreamt of a headless corpse.

  The siege of Badajoz was already proving something harder fought and more desperate for the Rifles than their action at Rodrigo three months earlier. There were three times the number of French in Badajoz for one thing – and it was thrice the fortress for another, having thicker walls, deeper ditches, the works.

  On 22 March, the day after Brooks was killed, another party of riflemen was sent forward on a hazardous duty. Some French guns across the Guadiana River to their north had been playing havoc on Wellington’s first parallel. That trench ran atop the San Miguel ridge from north to south and the French on the other side of the river were able to send flanking shots right along it. The riflemen got themselves settled and waited in cover for daybreak.

  As it became lighter, they chose their targets. The sentry walking along the walls, appearing now and then in the gun embrasures. The gunner preparing one of the twenty-four-pounders for the day’s work ahead. Once the word was given, the 95th began picking off anyone who showed himself near the guns. It was long-range shooting – two hundred or more yards – much further than Gairdner and his party had been firing at Rodrigo. But with careful adjustment for distance, they soon began claiming victims, one officer noting, ‘This had the desired effect; and the field pieces were withdrawn into the fort, after some of the gunners had bitten the dust.’

  There were several more missions like this in the following days. Moving close to the city’s walls under cover of darkness, riflemen would dig pits for themselves and wait for dawn when any Frenchman on the ramparts was fair game. They tried to concentrate on the gun crews and this led the enemy to close up the embrasures in front of the cannon with planks or gabbions until just before the moment of firing. One French officer tried to counter the sniping by waving his hat on a stick to draw British fire and then having a party of picked shots try to kill the marksmen. This contest went on for a whole day before the French officer himself dropped, believed to be killed by a ball from the 95th. Lieutenant Simmons, who commanded such a party, wrote in his journal, ‘I was so delighted with the good practice I was making against Johnny that I kept it up from daylight till dark with forty as prime fellows who ever pulled a trigger.’

  There was another obstacle to the British plans: a strong redoubt on the San Miguel ridge called La Picurina. The task of storming it was set for the evening of 25 March and given to a brigade of the 3rd Division, but all manner of volunteers went along.

  Robert Fairfoot was one of them. He’d developed a thirst for action that, on that very day, got him promoted to sergeant. Evidently there was no need for him to go. If Fairfoot kept volunteering, he’d soon be a dead sergeant. But why should a man who’d just been made up hold back and let others take the risk? That was the way they saw it. William Brotherwood, Kincaid’s old confederate in the bating of Tommy Sarsfield, went too. Four months before, he’d been promoted to corporal and, like Fairfoot, he was not a man to rest on his laurels.

  The storm of the Picurina was a desperate business – much less easy than the San Francisco redoubt on 8 January – for the defenders had been able to pour fire on the British as they struggled to break in to the fort, killing or wounding half of the five hundred attackers. The surviving stormers returned to their camps in the early hours to regale their expectant messmates with the horrific tale of that night’s storm.

  Sergeant Fairfoot and Corporal Brotherwood both survived. The latter, already well known to his fellow riflemen as a wag, furnished those who had not been there with a good yarn about how the Green Jacket put the redcoat in his place. Some of the 3rd Division stormers, knowing the Picurina business to be theirs, were evidently furious at the arrival of the Rifles ‘volunteers’. One of them had shouted at the riflemen to place their ladders and get out of the way. ‘Damn your eyes!’ Brotherwood had bellowed back above the din. ‘Do you think we Light Division fetch ladders for such chaps as you to climb up? Follow us.’ That was putting the lobsters down, and it was repeated among many of the 95th.

  The desperate business of grinding down the city’s defences continued from one day to the next, the incessant banging of cannon filling the waking hours, giving way at night to mortars with their distinctive double bangs. There was an almost febrile air of anticipation among the British troops. Some regretted holding back at Rodrigo; the losses had not been so great and the stormers got drunk for a month on the proceeds. Others wanted to get Badajoz over with. Some officers may have thought a coming war with Russia might shorten the Iberian conflict. Alexander Cameron read in a letter from a friend in England that ‘the Russian army is 400 thousand strong on the frontiers … war commences, Boney will have too much to do to think of the Peninsula.’

  It was in this atmosphere that a party of hospital convalescents marched up to the 95th’s bivouac one morning. Major O’Hare, back in good health, was in acting command of the battalion and greeted the returnees, including Sergeant Esau Jackson, who�
��d spent almost two years as an orderly at Belem. ‘We anticipated a scene,’ said Costello, ‘we were not deceived.’

  O’Hare spotted his man: ‘Is that you, Mr Sergeant Jackson? And pray where, in God’s name, have you been for the past two years? The company have seen a little fighting during that period.’

  Jackson, aware no doubt that the eyes of all were now trained on him, replied, ‘The doctors wouldn’t allow me to leave the hospital, sir.’

  O’Hare looked hard at him, ‘I’m sorry for that, because all I can do is give you the choice of a court martial for absenting yourself from duty without leave, or I can have your stripes taken off.’

  Jackson knew he had no choice but to surrender the sash around his waist and the stripes on his shoulder, the symbols of his rank. O’Hare turned and said loud enough for all his soldiers to hear, ‘By God, I will not have these brave fellows commanded by skulkers.’ Corporal George Ballard, another 3rd Company man, was promoted in his stead.

  Had Jackson’s desire for redemption exceeded his zeal for selfpreservation, he could have volunteered for the storming party. Many of those who went were soldiers who chanced their lives because they were desperate to gain resurrection in the eyes of their comrades. Private Thomas Mayberry was one of those readying himself for the moment when men were called to assault Badajoz. Mayberry, too, had been a sergeant once, but he had been broken and flogged back in England for defrauding his company’s paybooks in order to pay off gambling debts. ‘Mayberry was held in contempt by his fellow soldiers, and ill thought of by the officers,’ according to one private. He was fed up with the taunts and abuse of messmates and superiors alike – it was not a life he wanted to carry on living.