by Mark Urban
2 An illustration from Ezekiel Baker’s 33 Years Practice and Observation with Rifle Guns, showing how the inventor was just as interested in firing techniques as he was in the design of the rifle itself. Not only is the correct alignment of fore and back sights shown, but the rifleman has also tensed the weapon’s sling around his elbow to give a steadier shot.
3 This dramatic depiction shows one of the targets used in the Board of Ordnance trials that selected the Baker rifle.
4 This detail of a map from James Wyld’s Maps and Plans shows the northern Portuguese–Spanish frontier, scene of the Light Division’s celebrated exploits from 1809 to 1812. Although Wyld took the credit for publication, most of his maps were surveyed and drawn by Thomas Mitchell, an officer of the 95th, who joined the regiment early in 1811 as a ‘gentleman volunteer’. The border runs down the centre of the left hand page; parallel with it are the Coa and Agueda rivers, just across it the walled city of Ciudad Rodrigo, and near the top of the right hand page is the city of Salamanca.
5 Top left: Sidney Beckwith the 1st Battalion’s Commanding Officer during the campaigns of 1809–11 whose inspired leadership did so much to establish the regiment’s reputation. Top right: Andrew Barnard initially led the 3rd Battalion of Rifles in Spain, later commanding the 1st, where the self confidence born of family money and an Anglo-Irish pedigree won him Wellington’s respect. Bottom right: Robert Craufurd pictured in the uniform of the 5th Battalion, 60th Foot, some years before 1809 when he became the 1st/95th’s brigadier. Bottom left: Alexander Cameron, painted after the Napoleonic wars and showing signs of the sixteen wounds that effectively invalided him out of the service; he commanded the 1st/95th between Beckwith and Barnard.
6 Top left: Ned Costello painted after leaving the 95th and his service in the Spanish Carlist (civil) War. Right: Jonathan Leach, commander of the 2nd Company for almost all of the Peninsular Wars, who personified the ‘wild sportsman’ officers of the 95th. Bottom left: Harry Smith an instensely ambitious 95th officer who rose to become a successful Victorian general.
7 The Combat of the Coa. French forces moved down from the top (east) of this engraving to the bottom – the legend below the scale indicates that Craufurd’s troops have been drawn on in three stages as the battle developed.
8 Top: Busaco. Units of Ney’s 6th corps d’armée are marked ‘X’; the Light Division, near Sula, is ‘m’; and Pack’s (Portuguese) Brigade ‘k’. Bottom: Foz d’Arouce, the most successful of the Light Division’s combats against Ney’s rearguard leaving Portugal. The initial Light Division march is marked ‘D’ and its attack ‘d’.
9 Sabugal. The Light Division’s attack formations are marked ‘h’, upper right. The 3rd and 5th Division attacks, ‘i’ and ‘k’ respectively, were elements of Wellington’s plan that went into effect far later than planned, leaving the Light Division dangerously exposed.
10 Above: a fine view of Ciudad Rodrigo just after the siege, done in watercolour by Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell of the 95th. Two brother officers stand in the foreground; the right-hand breach in the walls was assaulted by the 3rd Division and the left by the Light Division. Bottom: the Great Breach at Badajoz, painted by Atkinson who, unlike Mitchell, was not present.
11 Mitchell’s view of Fuentes d’Onoro. ‘Q’ shows the Light Division covering the withdrawal of the 7th Division, which took up new positions at ‘R’. Once Wellington had pulled back his right flank, the 1st and Light Divisions occupied positions at ‘T’. It was from there that Guards and 95th skirmishers went into the Turon valley.
12 Vitoria. The Light Division’s attacks are marked ‘D’, Barnard’s Brigade being the lefthand one which found its way around the hairpin bend in the Zadorra river. Wellington’s grand design can be seen with the arrival of the flanking columns, ‘F’ (3rd and 7th Divisions). The main French defensive line, ‘B’, was pushed pack as the British broke their centre at Arinez.
13 Wellington breaches the French Pyrenean defensive line at Nivelle with attacks by the 3rd, 4th, 7th and Light Divisions, marked ‘L’. They fought through their initial objectives to positions marked ‘N’.
14 Top: a later portrayal by Simkin of the 95th fighting in the Pyrenees. Already, a certain mythologising of events shows through, for example with the pristine uniforms. Bottom: the Battle of the Nive, showing Arcangues and Bassussary, scene of several Light Division fights in November and December 1813.
15 Top: Morning at Waterloo by Aylward: Kincaid, Simmons and Barnard were probably all witnesses to this scene as riflemen offered a morning brew to the passing Wellington. Bottom: the fierce fighting in La Haye Sainte involved mostly riflemen of the King’s German Legion but also, just behind the wall pictured here, Leach’s companies of the 1st/95th.
Notes on Sources
ONE Departures
1 ‘Just before 6 a.m.’: general descriptive detail of the embarkation has come from several eyewitnesses, including George Simmons, A British Rifleman, Greenhill edition, 1986; William Green, A Brief Outline of Travels and Adventures of William Green, Coventry, 1857; and notes from the manuscript journals of Jonathan Leach and some other officers held at the Royal Green Jacket Museum in Winchester.
– ‘This, my dear parents, is the happiest moment of my life’: Simmons’s letter is one of those, along with his campaign journal, reproduced in A British Rifleman.
– ‘the commanding officer’s intent’: so says Simmons.
2 ‘Private Robert Fairfoot marched in the ranks’: details of Fairfoot’s background come from various official documents in the Public Record Office, Kew. His age and other information are in WO 25/559, details of his Surrey Militia service in WO 13/2089 to 13/2095.
3 ‘One of the old hands commented contemptuously’: Green.
– ‘assert they were headed to help the Austrians’: Simmons’s letter says the destination is a ‘profound secret’, although it is supposed to be Portugal or Austria.
– ‘There had been wives on the last expedition’: their fates are suggested by Benjamin Harris, a 1st Battalion rifleman who served in the Corunna campaign of 1808/9 but did not embark with the others on 25 May 1809. I have used the edition of Harris’s memoirs edited and published by Eileen Hathaway’s Shinglepicker Press in 1995 as A Dorset Rifleman.
– ‘It was such a parting scene’: Green.
4 ‘O’Hare’s 3rd Company … went aboard the Fortune’: Simmons.
– ‘For some of the men, like Private Joseph Almond’: details of Almond’s service have been extracted from the pay and muster lists, WO 12/9522, WO 17/217, WO 25/2139.
4 ‘some of the young officers took the opportunity to go ashore’: including Captain Jonathan Leach, Rough Sketches of An Old Soldier, London, 1831. Leach was to prove the most prolific of the 95th’s later author-officers; in addition to his books I have had access to the copy of his unpublished manuscript journal produced by Willoughby Verner when working on his History and Campaigns of the Rifle Brigade.
5 ‘Private Fairfoot knew a fair bit about desertion’: details of Fairfoot’s vicissitudes emerge from the Royal Surrey paylists, WO 13/2089 to 2095
6 ‘A very amusing plaything’: this description of the 95th came from Lord Cornwallis in a letter of 24 October 1800, and was reproduced in the Rifle Brigade Chronicle, 1893, and subsequently in Verner’s History. Quite why Cornwallis, a veteran of much irregular fighting in America and India, should have been so short-sighted about the value of a rifle regiment is a mystery.
– ‘The order of the day was to bombard the sea-fowl’: this description comes from Leach, Rough Sketches.
– ‘Tom Plunket, in 3rd Company, along with Fairfoot’: Tom Plunket’s saga is contained in Costello, The True Story of a Peninsular Rifleman, the Shinglepicker version of Costello’s memoirs, published in 1997.
7 ‘he’d loaded his razor and fired that at the French’: this anecdote of Brotherwood, along with comments on his character, is contained in Harris.
– ‘Costello had been s
educed by the yarns his uncle spun’: Costello.
– ‘it was a deeply unhappy battalion run on the lash and fear’: Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart (ed.), The Letters of Private Wheeler, London, 1951. By a stroke of serendipity, Wheeler served in the same militia battalion as Fairfoot and describes its unhappiness under a regime of fear in his early letters. Wheeler volunteered in the 51st.
– ‘the fickle dictates of fashion led to hundreds like him being cast out of work’: F. A. Wells, The British Hosiery and Knitwear Industry, London, 1935, describes the depression in this trade and its causes. Pay lists and casualty returns reveal that dozens of the Leicester Militia men had been weavers. WO 25/2139 gives Brotherwood’s trade as ‘stocking weaver’.
8 ‘the great majority had never purchased a commission’: this is my own research based on many sources, including War Office files and Royal Green Jackets archives. The one-time purchasers included Harry Smith and Hercules Pakenham.
– ‘officers and men alike knew him as a foul-tempered old Turk’: the term ‘obstinate old Turk’ is used by Harry Smith to describe O’Hare in The Autobiography of Lieutenant General Sir Harry Smith, London, 1901.
– ‘An allowance of £70 or £80 was considered quite normal’: see, for example, Cooke of the 43rd, one of the battalions brigaded with the Rifles.
8 ‘One young lieutenant … was the main provider for his widowed mother and his eight siblings’: this was John Uniacke. His family circumstances emerge from WO 42/47U3, papers relating to the later financial distress of his mother.
9 ‘can never be taught to be a perfect judge of distance’: Colonel George Hanger, a veteran of the American wars, in his 1808 Letter to Lord Castlereagh, cited by David Gates in his The British Light Infantry Arm, London, 1987.
TWO Talavera
11 ‘The quartermaster and a party of helpers soon appeared with dozens of mules they had bought in Lisbon’: this detail and many others in this opening passage from Simmons’s journal and letters.
– ‘There was an official allowance of pack animals’: these are set out in the volumes of General Orders published by Wellington’s headquarters. These papers, printed on an Army press, were collected and bound by various staff officers and individuals in the Peninsular Army, and quite a few have survived. I consulted those in the National Army Museum and the stupendous private collection of John Sandler.
– ‘The subaltern officers – thirty-three of them in the battalion’: this is my count of these officers on the 1st/95th’s pay rolls, not the standard establishment.
– ‘A pack animal might cost £10 or £12’: figures on the costs of various items emerge in many journals or sets of letters, including Cooke, Hennell and Gairdner.
12 ‘his “black muzzle” peered over’: this description of Craufurd belongs to Harry Smith in his autobiography. Smith also comments on the squeaky voice.
– ‘Craufurd’s character was … described by one newspaper’: Cobbett’s Political Register, 25 October 1806.
– ‘he would find himself again and again coming back to the memory of Buenos Aires’: this letter from Craufurd to his wife is dated 3 December 1811 and is quoted in a biography of Black Bob written by Michael Spurrier, which drew extensively on family papers. The unpublished typescript was kindly loaned to me by Caroline Craufurd, one of the general’s descendants. The key Craufurd letters remain in the family’s possession.
13 ‘Captain Jonathan Leach, commander of 2nd Company, wrote in his diary’: Leach’s MS Journal, RGJ Archive, this passage is also quoted in Verner.
13 ‘The Standing Orders set out’: I used ‘The Standing Orders of the Light Division’, Dublin, 1844.
15 ‘You have heard how universally General Craufurd was detested’: Leach MS Journal, RGJ Archive. Verner’s typescript of Leach’s journal is not complete (it is missing early 1812) but the great majority of his narrative can be found scattered in many different packets of Box 1 of the RGJ Archive.
– ‘We each had to carry a great weight’: this passage and the preceding comment about filling water bottles, Costello.
– ‘They began at 2 a.m. on the’: details, Leach MS Journal.
18 ‘They had drawn up their forces in two waves’: this passage on the centre at Talavera relies pretty heavily on Sir Charles Oman’s synthesis of eyewitness accounts in Vol. II of A History of the Peninsular War, Oxford, 1903.
21 ‘the last ten miles the road was covered’: John Cox MS Journal. Cox was a lieutenant in the 1st/95th at the time. His handwritten journals reside in Dublin, but Verner copies certain passages and these remain in the RGJ Archive.
– ‘The horrid sights were beyond anything I could have imagined’: Simmons.
22 ‘the feelings which constant hunger produces’: Leach, Rough Sketches.
23 ‘This will perhaps be a subject of joy to you’: Craufurd’s letter to his wife is in the British Library, MSS Add 69441.
THREE Guadiana
24 ‘The diary of one company commander read’: Leach MS Journal.
– ‘Brigadier Craufurd allowed his Light Brigade soldiers to shoot some pigs’: this incident appears in various accounts, including Leach, Rough Sketches.
25 ‘Here we remained a miserable fortnight’: this was William Cox, brother of John, also of the 1st/95th, MS Journal, Verner’s copies in the RGJ Archive.
27 ‘Captain Jonathan Leach wrote in his diary on 27 August’: MS Journal.
– ‘Before Simmons knew it, he’d been collared by Craufurd’: Simmons.
28 ‘Beckwith was a model of self-control’: this picture of Beckwith is a collage drawn from Kincaid, Leach, Simmons, Smith and other Light Division diarists.
29 ‘Not a little disgusted, Beckwith asked him’: this priceless anecdote was evidently related by Barclay to Colborne, a subsequent CO of the 52nd, and is contained in his biography, The Life of John Colborne, Field Marshal Lord Seaton, by G. C. Moore Smith, London, 1903.
– ‘One 95th officer described why it worked so admirably’: this description of the 95th’s system is contained in Recollections and Reflections Relative to the Duties of Troops Composing the Advanced Corps of An Army, by Lieutenant Colonel Leach, London, 1835 – one of Jonathan Leach’s lesser-known works, but full of interesting detail nevertheless.
30 ‘Every corps did harness and march forth to the river in that form except our own’: Leach, Rough Sketches.
– ‘British generals had learned many valuable lessons’: these lessons of America are culled from various sources, but principally General Sir William Howe’s orders of 1 August 1776.
31 ‘Craufurd felt the Army was guilty of forgetting many valuable lessons of the American war’: this point was made by Craufurd in speeches he made as a Member of Parliament in December 1803 and is quoted by Spurrier.
– ‘His Lordship … approves of your expending, for practice’: letter from the Adjutant General to Craufurd, 13 November 1809, in the published Dispatches of the Duke of Wellington, London, 1852.
– ‘Many of the battalion’s subalterns and even captains carried a rifle’: Costello states wrongly in his memoir (written many years later, of course) that he cannot see why officers did not carry rifles too. It is obvious from various accounts that Leach and Crampton among captains in the first battalion did, likewise many subalterns.
– ‘As soon as the rifleman has fixed upon his object’: this quotation comes from Regulations for the Exercise of Riflemen and Light Infantry and Instructions for Their Conduct in the Field, London, 1803. This was a translated and slightly edited version of the first regulations produced five years earlier by the commanding officer of the new 5th/60th, Colonel Rottenburg.
32 ‘posted behind thickets, and scattered wide in the country’: this account of the American war is related in an article about the formation of the Rifle Corps (which became the 95th) in The English Military Library, no. XXIX, Feb 1801.
– ‘Rules and Regulations for the Army as a whole’: these are General Dundas’s Rules and
Regulations for the Formation, Field Exercise and Movement of His Majesty’s Forces, 1792.
– ‘Dundas thought any large-scale skirmishing’: these quotations come from Dundas’s Principles of Military Movements, Chiefly Applied to Infantry, London, 1788, a work that formed the basis of the later Rules and Regulations. The fight between conservatives and reformers on tactics is also debated at length in David Gates’s The British Light Infantry Arm c. 1790–1815, London, 1987. Moore’s quotation is also cited in Gates.
– ‘ape grenadiers’: this phrase was used by Leach in Rough Sketches to deride the orthodoxy.
33 ‘One was to stress the limited roles of the light-infantry’: this and the ‘born not made’ explanation emerge in Essai Historique sur l’Infanterie Légère, Comte Duhesme, Paris, 1814. Colonel F. de Brack, an experienced French officer, stated in his classic Light Cavalry Outposts that ‘a man must be born a light cavalry soldier’.