Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

by Mark Urban

  It was just as well for the regiment that FitzMaurice remained on sick leave until early 1813, for he was the type who might easily have called out some Scot who gave a little too freely of his views about the Irish and their base qualities. But he was not there, for most of the winter at least, and any young Irish subaltern who considered settling matters with a Johnston or a Kincaid would have had to consider his position very carefully. To get away with duelling, one needed a powerful patron, just as Beckwith had saved Jonathan Layton from the consequences of killing Captain Grant in 1808. But a captain called out by a subaltern might, in the words of another Rifles officer, ‘take advantage of his superior rank, not only to decline giving me that satisfaction, but report me, thus destroying my prospects for life’.

  Gairdner thus felt himself oppressed and alone, resorting to writing his misery in code – to stop others reading it – in his journal: ‘Although the regimental mess has been the means of our living much better than we could have done by companies, I am sorry to observe that the conduct of our Commandant and a few of his adherents is tending to establish parties and foment discord in the battalion.’ He tried to steer clear of his enemies, spending hours striding across the moors, joining in hunting trips and finding a quiet corner to write poetry.

  From the middle of December, Captain Leach was among those channelling their energies into some more constructive direction. The performances in Madrid had whetted the appetites of many for theatricals, but had also established a standard of production that would be rather hard to match for men who now scurried about a blasted moorland, living in hovels. Leach jotted in his journal, ‘We are now busily employed in considering where we shall find a building that may answer for a theatre … dresses and scenery will be rather a puzzler.’ Frequent gatherings were convened either in the 95th’s quarters or those of the 43rd, who were their partners in the venture. Eventually, an old chapel in the Spanish village of Gallegos was found, the mayor giving his permission for its conversion into a theatre. Soldier carpenters were pressed into action once more, casting began, and there was much copying out by hand of lines from The Rivals.

  There was no question of getting locals to play the female parts, which instead went to wan subalterns, one Rifle officer commenting, ‘Lieutenant Gore and Lord Charles Spencer who are both good looking, very young and by no means badly dressed might have passed for fine handsome women.’ Assuming his familiar role as banker, the fabulously rich Samuel Hobkirk of the 43rd snapped up the plum part of Mrs Malaprop. His military career was also being advanced by cash that December with the purchase of a captaincy.

  When The Rivals was finally staged, Wellington and his senior staff were counted among the audience:

  At one very nervous period of the play where a certain worthy amongst the actors had forgotten his part, and everyone felt awkward about it, the Marquis of Wellington rose up and began clapping his hands and crying Bravo! This not only restored instant confidence but the part was recollected and the play went off much to the satisfaction of all parties.

  Jonathan Leach looked across the theatre admiringly at his chief. Of course, he had seen the general in action many times in the field and knew him to be a skilful commander. There had been much debate about the peer’s qualities and limitations following his angry General Order in November, but whatever rancour Leach might have felt a few weeks before, gazing upon his hero in the half-light of Gallegos’s little auditorium, he forgave him:

  This is the right sort of man to be at the head of an Army. Whether in the field near the enemy or in winter quarters during the temporary inactivity of his Army he is all alive and up to anything. He gives no trouble to us whatever and knows perfectly well that the more the officers and soldiers enjoy themselves during winter, the more heartily will they embark in the operations of the forthcoming campaign.

  With theatrical preparations continuing into the Christmas season, there was much riding about the uplands to receive hospitality at the messes of other Light Division regiments. On 25 December, the Rifles were hosts, staging a cockfight for the amusement of their brother officers. Major General Karl von Alten, who had been in command of the Light Division since the summer, also invited various officers to enjoy his food and wine. ‘He is equally delightful at the festive board as at the head of his Division in the field. I spent several very pleasant evenings at his table,’ wrote one captain. Alten was an officer of the Hanoverian service which, maintaining its close historic connection with George III, had furnished his army with brigades of German Legion troops and many fine officers.

  The new commander of the Light Division was the kind of man who was punctilious about the regulation of outposts, usually at the hottest part of the action, and easy in his manners. In short, he was professional without being overly gifted or assuming any airs and graces. This suited Wellington perfectly, for he liked to keep his hand closely upon his troops but had been obliged to tread carefully with his light regiments in Craufurd’s time. Alten, if anything, was a little too timid in defence of his prerogative, for during November’s Huebra engagement, Major General Erskine (in command of a cavalry brigade) had at one point tried to give orders to the 95th to cover his withdrawal. Alten’s attempts to assert his authority were rather weak, and it took the arrival of Wellington in person to countermand Erskine’s order. This, though, was a failing that his Lordship could live with more easily than Craufurd’s overweening pride. In future, Wellington was to take a closer personal role in commanding his advanced guard.

  That winter, the riflemen saw quite a bit of their Commander of Forces, since his headquarters was just a few miles away in Frenada. Every couple of days, Wellington hunted across the moorland. A blaring of horns and barking of hounds signalled the arrival of his party, consisting usually of the finely mounted sons of the aristocracy on his staff.

  A sportsman like Leach would have liked nothing more than to join in such fun, but he did not have the money. ‘Lord Wellington’s fox hounds often met within reach of our cantonments, but such was the miserable state of our horses that the staff-men only could avail themselves of it,’ he wrote. The Rifle officers would look at their bony nags and call them Rosinantes. A fellow on the staff was expected to keep two or three horses to ride on, because he was about delivering orders day and night, and he therefore received extra allowances for forage. In truth, though, it was not simply a matter of a few shillings’ stipend here or there, since the young bloods would think nothing of spending a lieutenant’s annual pay on a horse and its upkeep.

  Even the slowest-witted Rifles officers, seeing their well-bred comrades disappear to the staff, had concluded that such a post offered a far better opportunity for advancement than fighting with the 95th. George Simmons was wise enough to have grasped this early on, and his parents, learning these facts of military life from his letters, had begun their own efforts to help. Being straightforward Yorkshire folk, and bereft of any great interest, they had begun their campaign with the local Member of Parliament. George wrote back to them, touched by their efforts but clearly considering the case hopeless: ‘I am too well hackneyed in the ways of the world to for a moment imagine that a Member of Parliament would give me anything, or, in other words, ask for a company for a perfect stranger who had not given him the least assistance.’ Simmons’s father had evidently seen Harry Smith’s rise as a pattern for his own son, but George had to disabuse him that he could even aspire to such a thing: ‘You make me laugh with the idea of an aide-de-camp being the high road to a Brigade-major’s situation. Aides-de-camp are generally chosen by general officers through relationship or family connections or friends. My ideas of the world since I became a soldier are quite changed.’

  Simmons was perfectly right, for he predicted Lord Charles Spencer’s departure from the regiment several months in advance. That officer exploited a family connection to get onto Major General Sir William Stewart’s staff, after serving around a year with the 95th.

  The technique of us
ing the dashing and dangerous 95th as a stepping stone into a somewhat safer and better-remunerated staff job was sufficiently well known to those officers without connections to generate some resentment. It was generally felt that one year’s regimental service was the bare minimum, Leach noting:

  If there is one school worse than another for a youngster, on his first obtaining a commission, it is that of being placed, instanter, on the staff as an aide-de-camp, before he has done duty with his regiment for a year or two. If a sprig of aristocracy assumes any airs with his regimental companions, he pretty quickly learns a useful lesson – and finds that system will not do.

  Cameron, always comfortable in the role of curmudgeon, felt strongly that young subalterns needed whipping into shape – indeed, this may have been the sole basis of his antipathy to Gairdner. During the final weeks of 1812, Cameron tried to obtain the recall of Second Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell, whose regimental career had lasted a bare three months in 1811 before secondment to the Quarter Master General’s staff. Mitchell, ironically, was a young man who had come into the Army almost bereft of interest, volunteering like Cameron himself had done long before. This, though, brought no sympathy whatsoever and Cameron had written angrily to Headquarters: ‘2nd Lieut Mitchell being a young officer and entirely unacquainted with his duty as a Regimental Officer, I have to beg that his Excellency the Commander of the Forces will be pleased to order him to join his Regt forthwith, being deficient in subaltern officers.’ In order to ram home his point, Cameron recalled Mitchell’s servant, a private rifleman, to the regiment.

  Mitchell, however, had proven himself an exquisite map-maker and the staff needed his services. Cameron soon found he had bitten off more than he could chew. The Quarter Master General himself wrote to Wellington that Cameron’s actions in castigating Mitchell and recalling his servant ‘appeared to me such a measure of harshness and irregularity that I wrote to M General Alten intending to lay the whole matter before the Commander of the Forces’. Little could the commanding officer of the 1st/95th have imagined that in trying to exercise his rights over a penniless pipsqueak barely in his twenties, he would end up having to explain himself to General Alten and Lord Wellington. Cameron stood his ground, though, falling back, as military pedants were apt to do, on regulations, insisting that Second Lieutenants were too junior to be attached to the staff. Mitchell sheepishly returned, doubtless further improving the brittle dinner-table atmosphere in Alemada. The matter did not rest there: a new QMG arrived, someone in whom Wellington had complete trust, and a few weeks after he had appeared in his regiment, Mitchell packed his bags once more and rode back to Frenada.

  In a number of small ways, then, Cameron’s character and the limitations of his command became known to those in charge of the Army. All of this must have been extremely vexing for him, since he was a man who believed in solving problems, as far as he was able, inside the regimental family. For example, when Private George Stratton was caught by Don Julian’s guerrillas trying to make his way to the French lines, having robbed some of his comrades, Cameron resolved to deal with the matter himself. The battalion was marched out to witness the punishment of four hundred lashes, and Cameron told him: ‘I ought to have had you tried by General Court Martial – in which case you should have been shot – but the high character the regiment has borne in the army prevents me from having it mentioned in General Orders that a man of the Rifles could be guilty of the heinous crime of desertion.’ The case of Almond and the others one year before appears to have taught the officers that execution would not operate in the deterrent manner that Wellington had hoped and that it was best to resolve these matters in ways that would not make it into the newspapers at home.

  Cameron, for all his clumsiness in dealing with brother officers, understood the soldier’s mentality well, and told the assembled regiment, ‘If his own company shall be answerable for his good behaviour, I shall forgive him.’ Nobody spoke up for Stratton. The soldiers were happy enough as the buglers started laying on the lash. After all, someone who stole from his messmates ranked second only to a skulker in their book of villains. After sixty or seventy strokes, though, one of the men did call out, a private called Robinson whom Cameron said was as bad as Stratton. Reluctantly, the colonel halted the punishment.

  Stratton’s desertion was almost a singular event that winter. The Spanish drafted in to the 95th earlier that year, on the other hand, proved rather more prone to it. The Spanish experiment was tried in several of Wellington’s regiments, the 1st/95th’s quota being forty-six men. Most of these deserted during the last few months of 1812, the battalion’s monthly return for 25th November containing a rather tart annotation next to the figure of nine for soldiers who deserted: ‘Only one is a native of Great Britain.’

  For the most part, it was not a winter to rival the previous one for privations. The men had been given arrears of pay shortly after going into winter quarters, enabling them to buy drink, tobacco and some other comforts. There was a better supply system in place too, bringing up each man’s daily pound of beef with biscuit and rum to boot.

  Wellington was keen for his Army to be re-equipped during this winter, for its clothes had fallen apart during 1812’s tough fights and marches. The 95th’s quartermaster was able to buy some dark-green cloth in Lisbon, which tailors ran up into new trousers and jackets for those needing them. ‘Green having become the least conspicuous colour in the regiment,’ wrote Costello, ‘it was amusing to see our fellows strutting about as proud as peacocks among the Spanish peasant girls.’

  The soldiers also had their dances and assemblies. This was their fourth winter away from home, and during the long stay in Alemada some became smitten with local girls. Many might have thought it wiser not to have a woman trailing around with the regimental baggage, but they had been through such horrors in their campaigns that they wanted to live for the moment. A few dozen men in the 95th took Spanish or Portuguese wives, although these unions were rarely consecrated in church, for the men were mostly heretics in local eyes. But enough impoverished families were sufficiently content to see their daughters fall in with a British soldier, who would take some sort of financial care of them, that these arrangements did not cause scandal. Some of these women would march with the regiment, playing the sort of roles – washing, mending and peddling drink or smoking fodder – that regimental wives embarked on service might have done, before Beckwith banned them in May 1809.

  In all the boozing, smoking and easy living of those months, the Light Division lost some of its fighting edge. One officer of the 95th wrote to a friend in London, ‘We have acted some plays … with various success, we have got drunk with constant success.’

  Early in 1813, with the prospect of a further campaign against the French in the offing, General Alten began a programme of marches, firing practice and field days designed to bring his division back up to scratch. Matters were made more difficult for him by the replacement of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Barnard in command of the 1st Brigade by Major General James Kempt. The 2nd Brigade remained for the time being under General John Vandeleur, who had proven a tough and effective officer, earning the affectionate nickname Old Vans from his men.

  Barnard had enjoyed nearly a year in acting command of the 1st Brigade (and indeed of the whole Light Division at Badajoz), a mark of the faith Lord Wellington placed in him. Eventually, though, those who ran the Army at Horse Guards insisted on a general holding substantive rank taking over the command. Barnard took the setback philosophically, and began plotting how he might make his promotion to full colonel permanent. He devoured political news and pleaded in his letters home for more papers and caricatures to help pass the hours in his billets. In the meantime, he knew he was about to return to regimental soldiering, taking over command of the 1st Battalion of Rifles just before the start of the new campaign. Cameron would be pushed aside as acting commanding officer, just as Barnard himself had been displaced from the next rung up the military ladder by Kempt’s
arrival.

  Barnard had not yet taken over when the long winter lay-off and changes in command made themselves felt on 8 April, as the 1st Brigade was put through its paces. ‘We had a brigade field day this day on the plain between this and Espeja, the movements were done very badly indeed,’ one officer of the 95th wrote.

  With its mixture of men hardened almost to the point of villainy with others who had campaigned too much, the battalion would not be easy to command in the forthcoming campaign. In his last weeks as commanding officer, Cameron took an opportunity to pack off several older men in the battalion who were simply too broken down to keep up with another season’s tough marching. Ten were sent away early in 1813, most to the 13th Royal Veteran Battalion, where they could at least still live with some dignity, wearing a red coat and having all the essentials of life found for them. Had the supply of fresh recruits been better, there can be little doubt that the expedient of invaliding men home in this way would have been used much more widely, for those unable to keep up with a regiment were frequently the source of all sorts of difficulties.

  Some tough weeks of training lay ahead for everyone. George Simmons broke off a message to his parents on 30 April with the words: ‘I must end my letter, as the company are already mustering at my door for target practice. I shall pass the remainder of the day in proving the abilities of my men in hitting a mark in order to do justice to our enemies when we meet with them.’ When the brigade held another field day on 8 May, its performance was much improved. There was still time for some further preparation before Lord Wellington reviewed the Light Division on 17 May.