Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

by Mark Urban

  Marching down towards the border, they went in long stages in order to stay ahead of the French; they were frequently drenched by chilly autumn downpours and generally grumbled at their reversal of fortunes. The talk after the order ‘March at Ease’ often took a darker tone on this journey, as one Light Division officer vividly described in a letter:

  The conversation among the men is interspersed with the most horrid oaths declaring what they will do with the fellow they lay hands on. What they intend to get in plunder, hoping they will stand a chance that they may split two at once. Then someone more expert at low wit than his companions draws a ludicrous picture of a Frenchman with a bayonet stuck in him or something of the kind … as they grow tired they begin to swear at the country and the inhabitants. As they get more so, at soldiering and commissaries and when they are nearly exhausted there is little said except now and then a faint dispute about the distance &c. But when they arrive, if they can get wine, all their troubles are instantly forgotten and songs and hoarse laughs resound through the place.

  As the marches continued into November, the supply of booze – that essential lubricant for Wellington’s Army – began to break down, along with that of all other rations. The commissaries simply could not cope with the sudden reappearance of the main Army in the impoverished borderlands, for they had been buying much locally in more prosperous parts of Spain during the late campaigns. The hard marching had taken its toll in every sense. Lieutenant George Simmons, for example, had been obliged to put his sick brother Joseph on his pack mule and, having bought no new horse to replace the one lost in July, was himself walking. He had worn through the bottoms of his shoes, and as for many of his riflemen, each squelch into the mire brought his bare sole into contact with muddy road. By 16 November, matters were assuming a desperate aspect, Simmons noting in his journal: ‘Most of us walking barefooted, my shoes having no bottoms, as well as my friends’; my legs and feet much frost-bitten; could hardly crawl.’

  It was under these trying conditions that the Craufurd system proved itself once again: its Standing Orders provided a means of regulating the marches and determining what to do with men who couldn’t keep up. For Wellington’s Army had begun to disintegrate: the failure to issue rations had combined with the weather and long marches, meaning that around five thousand British and Portuguese soldiers, straggling behind the divisions, were listed as missing. The Light Division remained one of the least affected by this phenomenon, which in others saw one in six or one in seven soldiers going absent without leave. The French picked up about two thousand of these men, while others eventually returned to their colours.

  The French were still there, nipping at their bloody heels. Even a British Army in what the soldiers of the previous generation would have called a ‘flight forward’ could not outstrip the advanced guard of a French Army, so practised were Napoleon’s men in the business of marching, living off the land and pursuing an advantage.

  On 17 November, the French caught up, falling upon the British rearguard (formed of course by the Light Division), as the Army made its way across the foaming waters of the Huebra at a place called San Munoz. Crossing a difficult obstacle like this river inevitably caused a blockage. ‘The road was covered with carcasses of all descriptions, and at every deep slough we found horses, mules, donkeys and bullocks mingled together, some dead, others dying, all mingled with baggage,’ wrote Simmons. Taking advantage of the exhaustion and congestion that morning, advanced French patrols of dragoons attacked the British waiting in the oak forests to cross the river.

  The 95th’s baggage train fell into French hands at one point, a company of Rifles attacking through the trees to drive off the plundering dragoons. General Sir Edward Paget, the Army’s second in command, was captured during these chaotic events. The French forces arriving on the heights overlooking the Huebra and held by the Light Division began to build up to the critical point where a determined attack would be launched. Fortunately for the British, the crossing was continuing apace.

  When the Rifles finally quit the heights and began marching down the slope leading to the ford, the French were able to give them a heavy fire of musketry and cannon. ‘It is impossible to conceive of anything more regular than the march of the Light Division from the heights to the river and across it although the whole time under a heavy cannonade,’ wrote Leach in his journal. ‘No troops at a field day ever preserved their formation in better order.’

  Their order might have been good, but they were suffering. Knowing that the enemy cavalry infested the woods, Cameron had no choice but to form the battalion in column for the crossing. This allowed the French gunners an unusual opportunity to make good practice on the 95th, in tight ranks instead of its usual skirmish order, ‘which was fun for them but death to us’. Several soldiers were struck down by the shot as the column finally plunged, chest-high, into the icy waters. Once across, the Light Division deployed with its usual alacrity. A French column was seen heading down to the left of the fords, clearly with the idea of trying to force a passage. Cameron sent the Highland and 1st Companies out to the water’s edge as skirmishers to kill some of them, while the other four companies remained formed in line some way back from the bank, ready to charge with fixed swords any French who attempted an assault. Some companies of the 52nd joined in the skirmishing.

  As the crackling fire continued, most of the British felt themselves safe for the first time that day. But George Simmons looked around. Where was his brother Joseph, whom he’d last seen on the other side, slumped across his mule? He asked others. Simmons realised he had been left behind. He hurled himself into the water and began sloshing his way up the enemy slope, bullets whistling around him, finally finding Joseph in one of the oak groves. He dodged the parties of French dragoons in the trees and hurried back to safety. The incessant downpour of recent days had resumed again now, and to add to their general misery, the light was failing too. Simmons wrapped his brother in his own cloak, fearing from his shivering and pallid countenance that he might not survive until morning.

  Gathering themselves together in the dark woods overlooking their bank of the Huebra, the company messes faced a bleak night. The cavalry action of earlier that day had claimed many officers’ baggage – James Gairdner, for example, had lost his pack horse and, with it, all his belongings except a boat cloak he had earlier confided to his captain, Jonathan Leach. The wheel of fortune had thus turned full circle: the beast bought at such a knockdown price not so far away in July had now been reclaimed by its former owners, the imperial cavalry. Gairdner fumed, accusing his servant of negligence in allowing it to happen.

  Leach, Gairdner and Spencer tried kindling a fire but found it extremely difficult, for the wood was green and the downpour continuous. Someone nearby had slaughtered one of the draught animals, a bullock, and great slabs of bloody meat were soon parcelled out. But how to cook it? Each time they thought they had a blaze going, the wind shook the trees, showering them and extinguishing the flames.

  ‘About midnight, in spite of the elements and green wood, my jolly subalterns and myself contrived to make a fire of some sort,’ wrote Leach in his journal. ‘We instantly began toasting on sharp pointed sticks pieces of the newly slain bullock. Swallowing the meat was out of the question but we continued grinding with our teeth this delicious morsel without salt or bread. We stretched ourselves on the ground in our cloaks wet to the skin as near as possible to this apology for a fire.’

  The following morning, they awoke to the news that there would be no issue of provisions whatsoever that day. Those who wanted to have some breakfast could try cooking the acorns that lay about them in the embers of their fire. Charles Spencer, distraught at the prospect, burst into tears. The old sweats of Leach’s company, far from having contempt for this sprig of the aristocracy, rushed to offer him morsels of their last biscuits. Leach himself settled for some grilled acorns washed down with a glass of rum.

  With rumbling stomachs and bleeding f
eet they marched on that day, towards the familiar post of Ciudad Rodrigo. By that evening the quartermasters managed finally to bring some stale biscuits up to the regiment. The soldiers were desperate by this point, having gone seventy-two hours without any real food, and the officers, fearing a riot, posted ‘sentries with fixed bayonets placed around the piles while commissaries and Quarter Masters of regiments divided the biscuit’. Each man got to fill his blackjack with a ration of rum, too, and this most basic meal ‘soon appeared to set everything right again’, according to Leach. Viewed from the ranks, the experience of the retreat had been a bitter one – the kind that rendered many soldiers miserable enough to resign themselves to death. Private Costello commented, ‘Some men, from the privations they endured, wished to be shot, and exposed themselves in action for that purpose.’

  The following day, the Light Division marched into the pasture that surrounded Ciudad Rodrigo. The Army’s crisis, like the campaign of 1812, was over. Three days’ ration of biscuit was issued to every man. Wellington’s Army was about to enter its winter quarters yet again. It should have been a time of peaceful reflection, but for many officers of the 95th it was to be a winter of intrigue and bad feeling.

  NINETEEN

  The Regimental Mess

  December 1812–May 1813

  A banging of hammers, sawing of wood and hallooing of names filled the crisp air of Alemada. The little border village had become home once more to the 1st Battalion, 95th, and a barn had been commandeered as an officers’ mess. For the first time since landing in 1809, these gentlemen would be dining together instead of in the twos, threes or fours of their respective company arrangements. Hands were clapped, that 1 December, on some riflemen carpenters, and two great brick chimneys were built in the improvised dining hall: ‘Fire places of no small dimensions were made by our soldiers of the most uncouth and gigantic description, into which we heaped an abundance of ilex or Spanish oak.’ Each company mess pooled its cutlery, pots and pans and great dining tables were knocked together too. ‘Having ransacked the canteens of each company for knives, forks, spoons, &c., and purchased wine glasses and tumblers nearby, nothing was now wanting but a mess room and some good Douro wine.’

  Settling down to a few months without constant marching and fighting would afford the officers a chance to get to know one another, for many serving in different wings of the battalion were on little more than nodding acquaintance and plenty of new men had arrived during the preceding campaign. Faces were windburned and uniforms tattered, leaving them looking ‘a most ruffian-like class of fellows’. But the optimists among the company, like Leach, believed an atmosphere of brotherly companionship would soon be cemented by some communal singing around the supper table.

  Lieutenant Gairdner, who had carried on happily enough in Leach’s company mess, was not so sure. He would have preferred to keep out of Colonel Cameron’s way. Several days before, near Rodrigo, Gairdner had had an altercation with his colonel which showed how easily such proud gentlemen could fall out – and all over apparent trifles. Gairdner had just received a £27 bill from his family and was keen to go into town to cash it so that he might replace the personal belongings he had lost with the baggage at Munoz. It was a matter of some urgency, since he did not even have a razor or a spare shirt with which to maintain an officer-like appearance. Cameron, in Gairdner’s words, ‘after a great deal of needless and ungentlemanly blustering, gave me leave. I had not gone one hundred yards towards the town when the adjutant came and told me that it was the colonel’s order that I should go on command with the sick.’ The matter of who should take charge of the little parties of feverish stragglers, so that they did not commit robberies along the road, was one regulated by a strict rota, and Gairdner was quite sure that it was not his turn.

  Gairdner remonstrated with Cameron that the honour belonged to Lieutenant MacNamara, but he could not refuse his colonel’s order. Cameron told him: ‘You may think it a hard case and may be it is, but if you think so, do the duty first and make your complaint afterwards.’ The young lieutenant could not refuse a direct order and sloped off to find the sick party. Gairdner’s feelings were deeply hurt and he fumed in his journal: ‘I cursed the service in which a low-lifed brute can with impunity annoy an officer, even though he does not fail in one point of his duty, merely because he has a command. That Cameron dislikes me I know, but of his reasons for doing so I am perfectly ignorant.’

  The following day, another young lieutenant was sent to take over the sick and tried to soothe Gairdner, telling him that Cameron had made an innocent mistake, not realising that he had called Gairdner out of his turn. But through glances or tone of voice the colonel and his aggrieved American lieutenant communicated their dislike for each other. The day before they marched into Alemada, Gairdner was 2nd Company’s duty officer and he felt the commanding officer hovering about him throughout the march, noting in his journal, ‘Col. Cameron … took every opportunity of finding fault with me and with the Company because I commanded it today – dirty low-lifed work!’

  For a few days, Gairdner felt pleasantly surprised by the new arrangements in the officers’ mess. When Captain Jeremiah Crampton died (of the injuries sustained at Badajoz), Gairdner had bought his rifle; he now joined Leach in various hunting expeditions on the Beira moorlands, some partridge and other luckless beasts falling into his bag. ‘Between field sports by day and harmony and conviviality at night in our banditti-like mess house, we certainly do contrive not only to kill time but to make it pass very happily,’ wrote Leach. Their conversation ranged from unhappiness with the angry General Order that Wellington had published on 28 November, venting his fury on the Army for its straggling, to sad regrets about having to leave new-found friends in Madrid. ‘Up to this period Lord Wellington had been adored by the army,’ according to Kincaid. However, ‘as his censure, on this occasion, was not strictly confined to the guilty, it afforded a handle to disappointed persons, and excited a feeling against him, on the part of individuals which has probably never since been obliterated.’

  There were other subjects too, relating to Britain’s interests in the wider world. The officers were all aware of Napoleon’s march into Russia and heartily wished every disaster possible on the Corsican upstart. The newspapers reaching them early in December seemed to answer these hopes. For some months these same papers had also charted a new and most curious conflict: one between Britain and the United States. Congress had declared war in June 1812, having become aggrieved at Britain’s attempts to shut it out of European trade and to press its citizens as sailors. While the American armies had suffered some reverses, their small fleet managed to humble the Royal Navy in a number of frigate actions.

  For James Gairdner, who had been born and raised in Georgia, this new war provoked some anxiety, not least because the reinforcement of the British Canadian garrison might require the dispatch of some riflemen. Gairdner’s father would eventually write to him that he would have no option but resignation if the 95th received orders for America. Few in Britain felt much enthusiasm for this new war and in general those who tried to justify it belonged to a certain class of high Tory who supported the ministry right or wrong. These were the same sort of fellows who aped George III’s horror at the idea of any Catholic emancipation in Ireland.

  As the winter wore on, the initial mess conversation about leaving Madrid or Wellington’s intemperate General Order gave way to a more sensitive kind of discussion, lubricated by many bottles of Douro, concerning the divisions within the English-speaking nation itself: between Englishman and American, Protestant and Catholic. Among these prickly, dangerous fellows, these were tricky subjects. Things were made all the more difficult by the fact that certain Scottish officers took the Tory part in these debates, doing so with the apparent backing of Colonel Cameron.

  Lieutenant Willie Johnston, having returned from his Badajoz sick leave with his right arm shattered, became a leading light in these proceedings. According to John K
incaid, Johnston was ‘the most ultra of all ultra-Tories … many of his warmest friends were Irish, but as a nation he held them cheap, and made no secret of his opinions’. Kincaid’s prejudices had shown themselves too, for example in his treatment of Sarsfield, whom he described as having ‘the usual sinister cast of the eye worn by common Irish country countenances’. In an attempt to pacify the Irish and buy off those who might otherwise be tempted to repeat the rising of 1798, the ministry scattered patronage liberally about the island. Commissions in the Army were part of this effort, and evidently the Sarsfields of this world were considered by some to be far too vulgar to act the part of gentleman, rightful holder of the King’s Commission. The Scots, by contrast, had atoned for their own 1745 rebellion with such zealous military service to George III that many officers from north of the Tweed considered themselves to be loyalists par excellence. Had an O’Hare or a Uniacke overheard the Irish disparaged by Johnston or Kincaid, there is no telling what the result might have been, but they were both dead, and MacDiarmid, the other Irish captain in the battalion, had been packed off home that summer with Sarsfield.

  Just before Christmas, Johnston was appointed to the captaincy left vacant by Crampton’s death. There was nothing outrageous in this, for Johnston was high on the seniority list of lieutenants and had shown himself as brave as any man, having volunteered for both Rodrigo and Badajoz. Along with Kincaid’s nomination to the adjutancy, however, this decision served to convince certain observers that Cameron conformed to Dr Johnson’s stereotype of the Scot, as one who would advance his people ahead of others. This left lasting rancour, John FitzMaurice’s son noting years later that his father’s ‘prejudice against the Scots was caused by what he considered the injustice of a Scotch colonel … who never lost an opportunity of favouring his own countrymen at the expense of English and Irish officers’.