Many of the riflemen who had served in other regiments marvelled at the superiority of the 95th's techniques and instruction, one such commenting: 'Eight out of ten soldiers in our regular regiments will aim in the same manner at an object at the distance of three hundred yards, as at one only fifty. It must hence be evident that the greater part of those shots are lost or expended in vain; indeed the calculation has been made, that only one shot out of two hundred fired from muskets in the field takes effect, while one out of twenty from rifles is the average.' In this way, the Green Jackets hoped to more than compensate for the rifle's rate of fire, which with perhaps one shot per minute was two or three times slower than a smooth-bore musket.
Men like Beckwith believed that new qualities of initiative were required from the soldiers who wielded the rifle, and these were not best fostered by corporal punishment or drilling him until he became an automaton. One of the 95th's founders had written in 1806, 'Ambition and the love of distinction are the ruling passions of soldiers, prompting them to encounter every hardship.' In fostering that ambition, the regiment believed in teaching its soldiers to read and write an essential qualification for promotion, but a step considered highly suspect by many of the Army's more reactionary generals, including Wellington himself.
The 95th's raw material, though, was not much different from that of any other regiment, despite the wish of some officers to develop a more selective recruitment system. Its founders had tried, in the early days, to recruit among the tougher men on the country's Celtic fringes. As a result the regiment had, for a while, been almost equally divided between English, Scots and Irish. The admission of hundreds of militia volunteers (mainly from Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Surrey) early in 1809 had changed the 95th's character, bringing in more English, many of them former tradesmen. When setting out from Dover earlier that year, its composition had been roughly six Englishmen to two Scots and two Irish.
In the ranks of the 95th, there were soldiers with all the vices Lord Wellington associated with British or Irish recruits. Many officers felt the Irish were particularly prone to thieving. They almost all plundered, of course, especially when the failures of supply drove them mad with hunger. They also loved to drink, and it was liquor that gave Beckwith a particularly difficult problem of command while his battalion was in Campo Maior.
Tom Plunket, the Irish crack shot so admired on the passage out by Ned Costello, had by this stage been promoted from corporal to sergeant, and got blind drunk one day after training had finished. When his messmates tried to restrain his increasingly outrageous behaviour, Plunket became violent, grabbed his rifle and barricaded himself into a small hut. There was no choice but to send for an officer. Plunket, however, swore blind he would shoot the first person sent to arrest him. The stand-off continued until his passions cooled and some officers were able to persuade him to come out.
Under a draconian disciplinary regime, it is quite clear that Plunket could have ended up charged with mutiny, being marched in front of a general court martial. Such bodies tried the most serious offences, including capital ones, and had Plunket been convicted he might well have ended up on a rope. Beckwith's dilemma was all the more disturbing, given that just a few months before he had singled out Plunket for shooting the French general and called him a 'pattern for the whole battalion'.
Many of the older soldiers knew that back in 1805 Beckwith had proved his aversion to flogging in the most remarkable way. When a party of drunken Irish recruits to the battalion had chanced upon two women near the camp, abusing them verbally and physically, Beckwith had soon discovered the culprits and paraded the battalion. The regiment had learned with shock that the ladies, who had been treated in the most indecent manner, were none other than the colonel's wife and one of her maids. Beckwith told his men that he would have flogged them had it been anyone else, but since the injury had been done to his own wife he did not wish the punishment to have the appearance of personal vengeance.
Although Beckwith and the other founders of the 95th considered flogging both degrading and pointless, they did not rule it out under all circumstances. His predecessor as commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, for example, had campaigned publicly for the abolition of corporal punishment, 'except in cases of infamy'. Such was Plunket's case, for the battalion could not be allowed to see such an example of riot go unpunished.
Plunket's company commander and Beckwith evidently resolved to settle the matter within the battalion. Officers of the 95th were sensitive to cases which might damage the regiment's good name going before a general court martial, because such proceedings would inevitably come to the notice of Lord Wellington and, since they were published, of newspapers back in England. Plunket's punishment the loss of his sergeant's stripes and three hundred lashes was instead decided instanter instanter by a rapid regimental court martial. by a rapid regimental court martial.
'When the sentence became known, sorrow was felt for him throughout the regiment, by the officers almost as much as the men,' according to Private Costello, who had worshipped Plunket since joining O'Hare's company. The battalion was paraded to witness the punishment. Plunket was stripped to the waist, tied to a tree and two buglers stepped forward with their cats. After Beckwith refused a last appeal, the first bugler swung his whip onto the prisoner's back.
After a few strokes, the colonel suspected that Plunket's popularity was making the bugler lay it on a little light. 'Do your duty fairly, sir!' he shouted at the bugler, who completed the first ration of twenty-five lashes. But Beckwith could not stand the whole procedure, and after thirty-five had been administered, he ordered that Plunket be taken down. Beckwith spoke to the bloodied prisoner in a clear, loud voice, for the benefit of the whole battalion: 'You see now, sir, how very easy it is to commit a blackguard's crime, but how difficult to take his punishment.'
The training at Campo Maior reached a peak on 23 September. A little after dawn, the 95th was joined by the other two battalions under Craufurd's command (the 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry) for a brigade field day. This was an opportunity for the brigadier to watch how quickly his men responded to his commands to change formation while moving across country. The more swiftly and precisely these evolutions were carried out, the greater the brigade's chance of prevailing on the battlefield.
The tactics taught to the 43rd and 52nd by Moore back in England, and drilled by Craufurd under that blazing Iberian sun, were a hybrid of orthodox and Rifle ones. They helped the battalions to change formation more quickly, to extend many companies in skirmish order (not just one, as was more usual in normal infantry battalions), and they encouraged a new type of shooting which gave the redcoats the added destructive power that the 95th had achieved through aimed fire, while retaining the devastating short-range potential of the volley. The Light Brigade system pioneered by the 52nd instructed men: 'On the word "Present!"... each man slowly and independently levelling at the particular object his eye has fixed upon, and as soon as he has covered it, fires of his own accord.'
For new soldiers like Simmons, Fairfoot and Costello, running about the dusty scrub was hard, thirsty work, particularly as the day became ferociously hot. At least, though, they were learning the tactics of their chosen corps, something that was new to them. For the old hands such as O'Hare, Almond and Brotherwood, these field days could be tiresome in the extreme: they had done it a hundred times before and were only likely to catch Craufurd's notice if they fouled up. They knew the difference, too, between the textbook evolutions of the training ground and the real business of staying alive once the balls were flying.
As week after week of intense training went on, the Light Brigade found its preparations for war being sapped by a sinister disease. The plain where they had bivouacked belonged to the Guadiana River, and the Caya, where they bathed, was one of its tributaries. The Guadiana marked Portugal's frontier and Wellington had chosen to keep his army there because it would allow him to re-enter Spain on another raid in support of the Spanish armies. However, the flatlands around this great river were known to be 'proverbially unhealthy'.
Privates Robert Fairfoot and Ned Costello and Second Lieutenant George Simmons all came down with Guadiana fever. Simmons, who had once been destined for a medical career himself, believed he had been stricken with 'the typhus', but the army's surgeons had their own diagnosis of intermittent fever. Once a man was stricken with this malady, he could be laid out for weeks, each apparent improvement of his condition giving way to some recurrent bout of sweats and delirium.
The number of cases built up quickly and the regimental hospital, manned by the 95th's surgeon and his two mates, soon proved inadequate for the care of more than a few dozen patients, so the feverish riflemen were transported to a general hospital established in a convent in the nearby garrison of Elvas. One patient noted, 'My case was really pitiable, my appetite and hearing gone; feet and legs like ice; three blisters on my back and feet untreated and undressed; my shirt sticking in the wounds caused by the blisters ... a little sympathy would have soothed, but sympathy there was none.' Private Costello, finding himself in the convent, recorded, 'I fortunately recovered after an illness of nearly six weeks, thanks to my good constitution, but none to the brute of an orderly, who, during a delirium of the fever beat me once most furiously with a broom stick.'
The surgeons were at a loss for a specific cause of the outbreak. Since the fever had evidently arisen because of the sickly miasmas that pervaded the Guadiana plain, they kept fires burning in the wards, so the smoke might keep out these noxious vapours. One of O'Hare's riflemen, dragooned into acting as an orderly, recorded another treatment for the raging fever: 'We were ordered to sit up with the sick in our turns, and about midnight to take each one out of bed (they all lay without shirts), lead them to a flight of steps, and pour two buckets of cold water on each. They were so deranged they knew nothing about it.'
Private Brotherwood, a fellow of iron constitution in his mid-twenties, was one of the minority not to succumb to Guadiana fever at all. Simmons, of similar age, managed to beat off the fever after three bouts of it. By mid-October he was on the mend. But by the time orders came through for an imminent march to northern Portugal, Guadiana fever had carried off thousands of Wellington's soldiers. Dozens died in the 95th, with O'Hare's company, for example, losing twelve soldiers.
Three of the eight Royal Surrey Militia men who had joined O'Hare's company with Fairfoot were among that dozen carried off by the fever. Fairfoot himself remained dangerously ill when the battalion joined the rest of the Light Brigade heading towards northern Portugal on 16 December. Costello was also too sick to march, languishing in the convent that the army had turned into a general hospital.
Before it had even crossed swords in earnest with the French, the 95th had lost a company's worth of men. Many of those who had sought the glories of a military career found themselves interred in unmarked graves in the dusty soil of Alemtejo. In Guildford or Dublin, mothers received an official notification of death, often with a promissory note for a few shillings of back pay, a last reminder of a rifleman son they would never see again.
The 95th would have many days on the road before it reached its destination on the northern Portuguese frontier of the Baixa Beira. The weather was turning, with increasingly heavy rains. Snows dusted the peaks of the sierras. At least the cooler temperatures made the marching easier, as did the knowledge that they were quitting that damnable Guadiana plain and heading, perhaps, for the trial with the French for which so many of them yearned.
FOUR.
Barba del Puerco
JanuaryJuly 1810.
On 6 January, the Rifles crossed the River Coa, on Portugal's northern border. It was their first glimpse of the deeply incised gorge, its fast-flowing torrent, and the ancient arched bridge that crossed it, leading to the fortress of Almeida guarding the gateway to the north of the country. The barrier of the Coa, with its few crossing points, and the poor peasant villages of the mountain country around it were destined to be the setting for many of the 95th's exploits in the coming years.
The journey north from Campo Maior had taken the Rifles three hundred miles through the dramatic peaks of the Sierra d'Estrella and up onto the barren plateau of the frontier. There, great lumps of rock littered the ground like giants' playthings and the few, poverty-stricken inhabitants lived in hovels with earthen floors and smoking chimneys. The driving rain and the covering of heather and ferns, as well as the frosts, reminded many riflemen of western Ireland or the Yorkshire moors.
As the battalion tramped away from the infernal Guadiana, many of the soldiers had come to appreciate the pleasures of life in the field. Each day as they marched up through the mountains, some ravishing new prospect greeted them they experienced a host of sensations that the boyhood playmates they had left behind in Yorkshire or Chester would never know. One novice marching with the battalion wrote of the scenery, 'It was beyond anything I could have conceived, and it has highly compensated me for my labour.'
Craufurd pushed his troops beyond the Coa, closer to Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortified town on the Spanish side of the uplands. There they would take up a line of observation posts along another river, the Agueda, which ran parallel to the Coa and like it flowed down into the Douro, the great river of northern Portugal. For the most part, this upland landscape consisted of open plains or rolling groves of black oaks and other trees. In places, though, the underlying rock burst through this covering, providing vantage points, and where the Agueda cut its way down to meet the Douro, a deep gorge many miles long presented itself.
The Light Brigade had been posted to this remote corner of Portugal to guard Wellington's army against the possibility of surprise. It was well known that tens of thousands of French troops lurked not far away in Spain, and everybody predicted it would not be long before these corps d'armee corps d'armee marched into Portugal to throw out the British. Brigadier Craufurd convinced his leader that posting a chain of lookouts on the peaks of this highland would provide warning of any hostile movement, allowing the rest of the army to train and rest in comfort many miles to the rear. One of Craufurd's staff noted, 'This extraordinary undertaking was in a great measure one of his own bringing about. He almost led the Commander in Chief into it by the enthusiastic zeal with which he carried it through.' marched into Portugal to throw out the British. Brigadier Craufurd convinced his leader that posting a chain of lookouts on the peaks of this highland would provide warning of any hostile movement, allowing the rest of the army to train and rest in comfort many miles to the rear. One of Craufurd's staff noted, 'This extraordinary undertaking was in a great measure one of his own bringing about. He almost led the Commander in Chief into it by the enthusiastic zeal with which he carried it through.'
There were great dangers to occupying scattered posts so far ahead of friendly lines. The principal one was that enemy cavalry might pass the Agueda by some ford and cut off Craufurd's parties: then they would not only fail to give warning, but fall into the French bag to boot. For this reason, the forward line of outposts was to be occupied by Allied cavalry, two squadrons of the 1st Hussars of the King's German Legion, who might make good their escape just as quickly as any enemy tried to move on them. In one place, though, Craufurd posted infantry: he sent four companies of the 95th to the Agueda gorge and a small Spanish village called Barba del Puerco. Here the terrain was so rocky that enemy cavalry could not approach the little bridge across the river and Craufurd considered that if the Rifles were sufficiently hard-pressed, they could defend the pass for long enough for him to bring reserves up to cover their withdrawal.
In late January 1810, Craufurd started posting his observation parties. Most of them consisted of a few hussars. In key places, a British officer was attached. These groups could alert the reserves some miles behind them by lighting beacons or firing off their guns. Craufurd instructed these mustachioed veterans of the German Legion in great detail and in their own language. He told them how to conduct themselves and how to take daily measurements of the Agueda, so that he could reassure himself that the river remained high enough to protect his posts against surprise. 'General Craufurd in fact worked out the most difficult part of the oupost duty with them,' wrote James Shaw Kennedy, a staff officer who was one of the brigadier's few real admirers in the Army at the time. 'They knew his plan for each space they covered, but not his general plan; and each worked out his part most admirably. The General communicated with them direct. He had the advantage of possessing, with great abilities and activity and energy, uncommon bodily strength, so that he could be on horseback almost any length of time.'
Craufurd was skilled at working out complex problems of time and distance. When he applied this to his brigade's marching, and how small deviations might hold up the whole, he drove many of his officers to distraction. But in his appraisal of the time it would take the French to move on his people, and then how long his reserves of the 43rd and 52nd would need to extricate the forward parties, his ideas were perfectly sound. They would allow the Light Brigade to fulfil its warning role for the army as a whole without endangering itself unduly. Shaw Kennedy summed up the scheme and the 95th's role within it: 'He kept his infantry back entirely with the exception of the infantry post of four companies of the Rifles at Barba del Puerco, upon the calculation calculation of the time that would be required to retire the infantry to the Coa ... the of the time that would be required to retire the infantry to the Coa ... the calculation calculation, as above stated, must never be lost sight of; for it was upon that calculation calculation that he acted all along [emphasis in original].' that he acted all along [emphasis in original].'
Lord Wellington wanted his outposts to frustrate French reconnaissance of his deployments, as well as warning of any large-scale attack. The scheme worked out by him and Craufurd thus threw a chain of light or Rifle companies across the front of his army in much the same way as he screened the battalions of his army in battle, by using lines of individual skirmishers and undulations of the ground. Wellington was evidently very impressed with the way Craufurd supervised his observing parties, although in time he would become anxious for the safety of his forward scouts.
This use of Craufurd's troops in this way was novel in its scale, and Wellington was quite open to new ideas on how a Rifle regiment might act on the battlefield. There had been Rifles under his direct command in Denmark three years earlier, and his first battle against the French in Portugal during the brief 1808 campaign had been touched off 'by the over-eagerness of the riflemen'. Wellington did not resent them for this wild spirit on the contrary, he had already come to value the 95th as soldiers. They in turn thought highly of him. Although Wellington's manners were of the eighteenth-century school, and his politics distinctly conservative, he was all for developing the use of light troops. He rejected, for example, the old system of forming ad hoc battalions from the light companies of several line regiments, favouring instead the deployment of specially trained corps of these men like those under Craufurd's command. Wellington soon realised that these regiments the 43rd, 52nd and 95th were among the very best troops he had. He also rejected the doctrine of many conservative generals that riflemen, owing to their slower rate of fire and skirmishers' vulnerability to cavalry, could only ever be deployed in penny packets, supporting regular infantry. Craufurd, although a conservative in many matters, accepted that the 95th could be used as a regiment rather than being broadcast about like the riflemen of the 60th were. Wellington and the commander of the Light Division between them came to the conclusion that the way to nullify clouds of French light infantry on the battlefield was to use their own Green Jackets or red-coated light infantry in large numbers too.
In the early part of 1810, though, they were not contemplating a general action; rather, they needed to frustrate the various French probing movements on the upland frontier. The Rifles were posted in villages about the uplands with savage-sounding names like Mata de Lobos (Death of Wolves), eventually taking up their position in Barba del Puerco (Pig's Beard) towards the end of February. This followed two months in which they had been marching hither and thither almost constantly, time which had afforded Second Lieutenant Simmons a chance to see the less likeable side of Captain Peter O'Hare, his company commander.
O'Hare was a rough diamond typical of the Irish adventurers who made up much of the 95th's officer cadre. If he was harsh with the young officers, that was because this was the Rifles system and because he had never gained anything easily in his military career. O'Hare had joined the Rifles when they formed and served under Beckwith's predecessor, a man who believed in tough superintendence of his officers, one of them commenting, 'With him the field officers must first be steady, and then he goes downwards: hence the privates say, we had better look sharp if he is so strict with the officers.'
For someone who had experienced O'Hare's slow rise through the ranks, beasting some young puppy of a subaltern came all too easily. Simmons noticed that each time they were quartered in a Portuguese household during their march up from Campo Maior, O'Hare would take the best sleeping quarters and give the next best to his company's two lieutenants. 'Being the junior officer,' Simmons noted, 'I consequently got the last choice of quarters, which too frequently was a dirty floor with my blanket only. Captain O'Hare did not show me much kindness.'
The captain's rough speech and slow advancement marked him out to officers and men alike as someone bereft of even the smallest quantum of patronage. O'Hare's soldiers believed him to be such a rough one that he must have started his career in the ranks. This was not quite true, for he had begun his military career as a surgeon's mate in the 69th Foot. This post was a sort of halfway house between the rank and file and an officer's commission. However, O'Hare's men were right in one essential: a surgeon's mate could be flogged for his misdemeanours, something quite out of the question for an officer.
He was not long in that lowly station: having been commissioned in the 69th, O'Hare had taken the opportunity offered by the creation of the Rifle Corps to transfer out of his original regiment and reinvent himself. His officers in this new corps appreciated his diligence and bravery, providing him at last with patrons to fight for his advancement. O'Hare had served as adjutant, a sign of his commanding officer's favour but a post also requiring him to police the regiment's young subalterns, acting as his colonel's truncheon. He had been promoted to captain in 1803 after that same commanding officer wrote of his 'anxious wish that the eldest lieutenant of the Rifle Regt, Adjt O'Hare, should be recommended to the succession to the 3rd ... company ... Lieut. O'Hare is a subaltern of very long standing and a very good officer.'
By early 1810, O'Hare was in a similar situation to that of seven years earlier. He had served longer in his rank than any other regimental officer and he was next on the list for promotion, unless he was overtaken by another captain who had the money to purchase a majority or had shown heroism on the field of battle. O'Hare had grown quite used to these vicissitudes, and was of course aware that now he was on campaign, he might secure the coveted major's post through heroics of his own.
In order to make the best of his chances, O'Hare had to ensure that his company's every duty was carried out punctiliously. He also intended to keep certain things about his own origins and his private life to himself. His brother officers were ignorant of the wife, Mary, and daughter, Marianne, that O'Hare left behind in England. To little Marianne, he was something of a stranger, his campaigns having kept him overseas for around half of her six years. As for Mary, he chose not to introduce her into regimental society.
When 3rd Company soldiers supping their grog gossiped about their captain, they talked about his love of wine and women. Before their departure, O'Hare had spent some time pursuing a young lady in Hythe, not far from Shorncliffe camp. As the couple walked arm in arm along the sea promenade, they would be greeted by soldiers from the company, many of whom would ask favours of their captain, knowing that he dare not decline, lest he forfeit her good opinion. O'Hare was not the brightest spark, but even he eventually tumbled to their tactics and swore to 'flog the first man who made another attempt'. In his pursuit of the maid of Hythe, O'Hare had eventually antagonised a rival in the form of a militia officer who challenged him to a duel. The captain sent word back to his challenger that he was a fool, and in any case the 95th was imminently departing on service.
The Irish captain was no oil painting he was characterised by one of his riflemen as having an 'extremely ugly countenance'. Having sprung from obscure origins to the status and pay of a captain of the Rifles, he intended to make the most of his position, particularly when it came to the opposite sex. On campaign, he took many a chance to enjoy good wine and company.
During their march north, on Christmas night, O'Hare had been drinking with fellow officers and retired to his quarters, in the words of one of the party, 'having enjoyed the wine very much'. A rifleman, taking advantage of O'Hare's deep sleep, stole his boots. The intention, presumably, was to sell them for drink, since he could never have worn them publicly. The soldier was caught and ordered to be flogged. O'Hare supervised the punishment, 'gave the man every lash, and recommended the buglers to lay it on lustily and save the fellow from the gallows'.
Someone like O'Hare, having entered the Army as a surgeon's mate with Irish Catholic origins, could not claim to have started life at a station any higher than had most of the rankers. Many of the soldiers found it harder to defer to such a man. One private of the 95th summed it up pithily: 'In our army the men prefer to be officered by gentlemen, by men whose education has rendered them more kind in manners than a coarse officer who has sprung from obscure origins, and whose style is brutal and overbearing.'
From the officers' side of the divide for O'Hare's predicament in this regard was far from unique in the Rifles it was difficult to overcome the familiarity which many soldiers showed to someone of low birth. The riflemen could detect a natural gentleman easily enough by his manners. Whereas, for example, Lieutenant Harry Smith, a dashing young English subaltern who had bought his commission in the 95th, was addressed as 'Mr Smith', 'Your Honour' or 'Lieutenant Smith, Sir', O'Hare's men often called him by his first name.
'We had but a slender sprinkling of the aristocracy among us,' one officer of the 95th wrote later, perceptively summing up the difficult question of social status. 'They were not braver officers, nor were they better or braver men than the soldiers of fortune, with which they were mingled; but there was a degree of refinement in all their actions, even in mischief, which commanded the respect of the soldiers, while those who had been framed in rougher moulds, and left unpolished, were sometimes obliged to have recourse to harsh measures.' Such was the medicine that O'Hare had been obliged to give to the man who stole his boots.
Once serving on the frontier between the Coa and the Agueda, the captain and several other officers had come to enjoy what modest social opportunities the little Spanish villages could give them. They soon took over the small cantinas cantinas, inviting local girls to join them in nightly drinking, dancing and song.
The rankers also benefited from a relaxation of discipline in Barba and the other villages they had occupied since 1810 began. This was in part the result of the distance of their billets from the main Army and its officious staff men. One captain of the 95th noted in his journal, 'Various amusements were exhibited this morning in our village. Jack ass racing, pig hunting, fighting all the cocks in the village was also introduced. I afterwards shot one of the cocks with a single ball at one hundred and seven yards. Several matches at football were also played.'
Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith, who took personal command of the four companies in Barba, was quite content for these amusements to take place. His calculation, one officer surmised, was 'that to divert and to amuse his men and to allow them every possible indulgence compatible with the discipline of the battalion ... was the surest way to make the soldiers follow him cheerfully through fire and water, when the day of trial came.'
As a Christmas treat, Beckwith bought a hog and had it greased and set loose through the narrow alleys of one village. The men went bounding after, hallooing and tumbling, generally disturbing the peace. One by one they would leap or lunge at the careering animal, until a dextrous fellow eventually caught the swine, earning himself the right to butcher and eat it, making him the hero of his messmates.
Some of the soldiers thieved, of course, as did some of the officers. Just a few weeks after Wellington had caused his entire 4th Division to parade before dawn for days as punishment for stealing honeycombs, the 95th's officers, led by Captain Leach, cheerfully plundered the hives around Mata de Lobos or Barba and took delight from shooting and consuming the locals' pigeons. While Leach was aware enough of his and others' infractions to describe the 95th as 'a nefarious corps of poachers', it was during this period on the frontier that the soldiers honed their sense of how much larceny was fair game and how much might bring unhappy consequences for themselves and the battalion. Pinching the odd bird was acceptable, holding up a Spaniard at gunpoint and robbing him was not and would soon enough have brought the provost marshal and his hanging noose in to shatter their mountain idyll. When a party of convalescents, including Robert Fairfoot and Ned Costello, marched up from the south to join the regiment early that year, they were able to tell the others of the draconian punishments being meted out to those caught robbing the Portuguese in the Army's rear.
While some of the riflemen tested the limits of Colonel Beckwith's tolerance for petty crime, there was a serious military purpose to their presence. The French had soon detected the outposts in Barba del Puerco. Across the gorge, and behind the ridge facing the 95th's station, was San Felices, a small village where a French infantry brigade had made its headquarters.
The French commander, General Claude-Francois Ferey, was one of those hard-fighting warriors who personified all that was best about the imperial officer corps. Ferey had been campaigning for most of his thirty-nine years: he had gone through the revolutionary ferment, rising from the ranks, and his service record as a brigade commander included Marengo and Austerlitz, two of Napoleon's most brilliant battles. Ferey's pickets occupied forward positions very close to the bridge at Barba. Their reports suggested the British force was very small. He also knew that the riflemen picketed at the bridge had evolved the same cheerful modus vivendi with their French partners as had existed down at Almaraz a few months earlier.
There was great uncertainty in the French command about whether Craufurd's line of outposts was at all supported. For an aggressive general like Ferey, the fact that there was a small number of defenders, apparently unsupported, offered the tempting prospect of a coup de coup de main main attack to take the bridge, seize some prisoners and test the general effectiveness of the British outpost line. The friendly relations that existed between sentries would simply allow him to get his storming party close enough to pounce with virtually no warning. attack to take the bridge, seize some prisoners and test the general effectiveness of the British outpost line. The friendly relations that existed between sentries would simply allow him to get his storming party close enough to pounce with virtually no warning.
Early in the evening of 19 March, O'Hare's company took over the task of manning the outlying picket. Two men would stand sentry just by the British-held end of the bridge. Fifty yards to their rear, sheltering among the rocks on the steep hillside, were Sergeant Tuttle Betts and a further dozen troops. The remainder of the 3rd Company, about forty men, for it was at little over half strength due to sickness, would take turns standing guard and sleeping in a little chapel a couple of hundred yards further back. If there was a real emergency, the other three companies, under Beckwith's command, were billeted in Barba itself, about twenty or thirty minutes away to the rear. It was a system that kept most men dry and warm, but one that could only work if the company on duty at the bridge maintained its vigilance even those who slept were fully clothed, rifles by their sides, ready to respond to any alarm.
As O'Hare did his rounds, shortly after dusk, he was accompanied by Simmons, since it was O'Hare's job to teach the boy something about pickets, supports and all the other arcane business of manning outposts. Such was Simmons's desire to please his captain that he crawled across the bridge so that he could make some brief observations on the French side. With this, the young subaltern retired to a tent near the chapel at about 9 p.m. O'Hare, who had 'been taken unwell', retired to a bed in Barba del Puerco itself. The company's two lieutenants, Mercer and Coane, took turns visiting the pickets.
It was raining heavily, with gusts of icy wind causing those on duty to shiver in their greatcoats or crouch under heavy cloaks, counting the minutes until their relief by fresh sentries. But while most of O'Hare's company slept, Ferey was leading storming parties of his men up the steep mountain paths out of San Felices and towards the bridge of Barba del Puerco.
Ferey had picked his soldiers carefully. A storming party of about two hundred from the elite companies of several battalions would be responsible for seizing the bridge. A larger group would form up beside the bridge once the attack began, so that they could fire at any British supports that came to the assistance of the outlying picket. The general knew that his men were undertaking a difficult mission, at night, over narrow mountain paths. He promised them a double ration of food and wine if they succeeded.
At about 11.30 p.m., the French stormers crept up to the eastern end of the bridge. As the supporting party made its way over the rocks to form a firing line to the left side, there was a kerfuffle of men stumbling in the darkness. Ferey felt sure the British had heard.
The leading French tirailleurs tirailleurs and and carabiniers, carabiniers, the picked soldiers of the 32 the picked soldiers of the 32eme Leger or light infantry, hastened across the bridge. Two riflemen posted at the British end, Moore and McCann, heard footsteps and shouted a challenge. or light infantry, hastened across the bridge. Two riflemen posted at the British end, Moore and McCann, heard footsteps and shouted a challenge.
In seconds the stormers were past Moore and McCann. The alarm was shouted at last, and shots rang out. Moments later Sergeant Betts's party, including Fairfoot, was desperately trying to defend itself. Lieutenant Mercer, the officer on duty, quickly began shouting an alarm, sending Lieutenant Coane to fetch those slumbering in the chapel to spring to their arms and follow him to the bridge. Costello was among the men who stumbled out into the darkness.
'Be quick, men, and load as you go to the brow of the hill!' one of the officers shouted, as the riflemen rushed towards the firing.
Down at the bridge, dozens of French were across; Moore, McCann, Fairfoot and others had been disarmed and collared. The remainder of the sergeant's picket had fled higher up the British side of the hill and were crouched behind rocks, trying to pick off the French with rifle fire. Shooting in the darkness, the men were little more than twenty or thirty yards apart in places. As Sergeant Betts shouted orders to his men, a musket ball smashed into his jaw, leaving a bloody mess as he crumpled to the ground. Mercer and a first party of reinforcements joined them.
Simmons was up just in time to see Mercer take a shot through the forehead and drop dead at his feet. One rifleman leapt out of his cover: shouting 'Revenge the death of Mr Mercer!' he ran down the slope until he reached a French officer, and in one deft movement swung his rifle to the Frenchman's head and blew it off. As the officer dropped, there was a cacophony of firing, and the rifleman fell dead too. With Mercer's death, Simmons was in command of the men trying to hold their ground. Lieutenant Coane had rushed off to get their captain.
In the terror of this close-quarter fighting, men loaded and fired like demons. Private Green, in combat for the first time, forgot his ramrod and fired it and the ball it had pushed home through the body of a French grenadier who was charging him. Costello wrote, 'I felt an indescribable thrill, for never before had I been under the fire of a French musket.'
For a moment the moonlight shone through the scudding clouds and several riflemen were able to find the most excellent mark: the white crossbelts that the French soldiers wore across their greatcoats. 'X' marked the spot for their firing. The 95th's shots began opening holes in the ranks of Ferey's storming party and their commander faced the choice of trying to fight further up the slope, to clear the riflemen from their firing positions, or to give up the game and retreat across the bridge. He chose to fight. The French officers tried to urge their men onwards, into the 'well nourished fire' of the British skirmishers. Ferey's drummers started beating the pas de charge pas de charge, the repetitive signal heard above the din of battle that communicated one idea: forward.
O'Hare appeared and joined in the general turmoil, bellowing out for all his men to hear it: 'We will never retire. Here we will stand. They shall not pass but over my body.'
The firing, drumming and shouting had been going on for half an hour when the first of Beckwith's reinforcements appeared. One company had been sent to cover a flank two others came to the top of the feature that overlooked the bridge. Riflemen loaded their weapons and joined in the general melee. With each flash of a Frenchman's firing musket briefly illuminating their targets, Beckwith could see enough through the murk to detect signs that the French attack had faltered, with the officers capering about, beating the backs of their soldiers with the flats of their swords, trying to get them to quit their cover and move up the slope. It was time to use the close-quarters weapon issued to each of his riflemen: a bayonet that was so large and fearsome-looking that they called it a sword.
Orders were given swiftly; there was the sound of metal on metal as the blades were slotted onto the muzzles of each Baker rifle, and then a great cheer. One of the subalterns who was part of the reinforcements Beckwith brought up recorded: 'Our swords were soon fixed and giving the war cheer we closed on the foe sending them helter skelter into the gorge and down the pass as far as their legs could carry them.'
Many of the French turned and began fleeing across the bridge. Moore and McCann were bundled over too, as prisoners but Fairfoot and one or two others seized their moment to break free and throw themselves into cover.
As Beckwith led his chargers down the difficult slope towards the bridge, they became mixed with the more steadfast remnants of the French, who were still trying to defend themselves. The adjutant fought hand to hand with a couple of enemy soldiers, before being delivered by a rifleman's timely bayonet thrust into one of them.
Little more than an hour after the first shots were fired, the last parties of French ran back across the bridge and the riflemen began collecting their prisoners. The colonel and several men collared one young conscript, who, terrified, remained clutching his musket. As Beckwith started to cross-examine him, the Frenchman pulled the trigger and, with an almighty flash and bang, sent a ball through Beckwith's shako.
A rifle was levelled instantly at the Frenchman's temple, but Beckwith, whose head was singed but intact, checked the rifleman who was about to pull the trigger: 'Let him alone; I daresay the boy has a mother.' The colonel ordered the French conscript to be disarmed and sent to the rear.
The fighting at Barba del Puerco was over by 1.30 a.m. on 20 March. It had cost the Rifles one officer and eight men killed, as well as fifteen wounded, and two prisoners Moore and McCann had been spirited back to the French lines. Seeing few bodies on the ground the next morning, the riflemen convinced themselves that the French had suffered heavily and carried back many of their casualties. Ferey's dispatch reported the losses: twelve dead and thirteen wounded. Three Frenchmen were also taken prisoner.
In the great scheme of the wars sweeping Europe, the fighting at Barba del Puerco was little more than a minor affair of the outposts. But for many of the men who had set sail on 25 May 1809, it was their first real test.
A certain guilty self-justification showed through, as some officers reflected upon why Ferey had made the attempt. Had the drunken carousing of the 95th's officers alienated the locals to such an extent that they had spied for the French? Several suspected the village priest, who had shown a surly disdain for these goings-on. One officer speculated that the padre must have told Ferey 'that the English officers in his village were in the habit of getting blind drunk every night and that he only had to march over at midnight to secure them almost without resistance'.
Simmons, though, had nothing to feel guilty about. He glowed in the days afterwards with all the self-assurance of a man who had confronted mortal danger for the first time and done his duty, writing that 'after this night I was considered a soldier fit to face the devil in any shape'. From that day on, O'Hare's attitude to Simmons changed profoundly, for the young subaltern had passed the only test his captain really cared about. 'My captain', Simmons breathlessly wrote home to his parents, 'was pleased to say my conduct had given him the greatest satisfaction.' Nobody knew how long the campaign would last in fact many expected that the French would bring overwhelming numbers into Portugal soon afterwards but at least these companies of the Rifles had shown what they were made of.
Those officers who remained at Shorncliffe camp with the 2nd and 3rd battalions were delighted at the news that filtered back in letters and official dispatches. One wrote of Barba del Puerco: 'we ... looked upon it as no inconsiderable addition to our regimental feather ... with something less than half their number they had beaten off six hundred of the elite of the French Army'.
This little battle had also tested Craufurd's line of observation posts and shown the wisdom of his calculations. Craufurd circulated an ecstatic order to his battalions, relaying Wellington's pleasure in the outcome. But Craufurd also wanted to thumb his nose at those who had doubted what a Rifle regiment might achieve on service: The action reflects honour on Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith and the Regiment, inasmuch that it was of a sort that Rifle Men of other armies would shun. In other Armies the Rifle is considered ill calculated for close action with an enemy armed with Musket and Bayonet, but the 95th Regiment has proved that the Rifle in the hands of a British soldier is a fully efficient weapon to enable him to defeat the French in the closest fight. The action reflects honour on Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith and the Regiment, inasmuch that it was of a sort that Rifle Men of other armies would shun. In other Armies the Rifle is considered ill calculated for close action with an enemy armed with Musket and Bayonet, but the 95th Regiment has proved that the Rifle in the hands of a British soldier is a fully efficient weapon to enable him to defeat the French in the closest fight.
This was a key point for apostles of the new light weapons and tactics. Those light soldiers that Craufurd had seen during his European campaigns would not have been expected to stand their ground against storm troops, particularly if armed with an esoteric weapon like the rifle, one that was seen by some officers and theorists as slow to load and difficult to use. At Barba, the riflemen had shown they could load as fast as any musketman and withstand a close assault too.
In the days after Barba, Craufurd exploited his new standing with Wellington to the fullest extent possible. He pursuaded the Commander of Forces to place more troops under his command: a troop of guns (meaning six pieces) of the Royal Horse Artillery, two battalions of Portuguese light infantry, more cavalry. With these reinforcements Craufurd converted the Light Brigade into a Light Division. He formed two brigades: the 1st or Right Brigade would consist of half of the 95th (known as Right Wing of the battalion) and the 43rd Light Infantry; the 2nd or Left Brigade would have the Left Wing of the 95th as well as the 52nd Light Infantry. The Portuguese battalions would either work together as their own brigade, or one battalion would be attached to each of the British brigades.
The losses of Barba del Puerco and, more significantly, of Guadiana fever and the many long marches of previous months caused Beckwith to change the structure of his battalion too. Two companies, the 9th and 10th, were disbanded. Some officers and NCOs (generally older, worn-out men) were sent home to recruit, and their rank and file were placed under the captains that were staying in the Peninsula. Right Wing and Left Wing would thus consist of four companies each.
Having built up his little military empire and proved his outpost line, Craufurd also began to lobby Wellington for more exciting missions some escapades that might show him and his battalions to advantage. The brigadier moved some of his red-coated light infantry companies forward a little, closer to the Coa, and began sending schemes to Headquarters for various raids into no man's land. He hoped to cut off some French foraging parties, some of which moved about in groups of hundreds of men, and take them prisoner.
Spring comes late in the Beira uplands: those who subsist on that high plateau must often wait until May for the incessant rains of winter to give way to its flowerings. As the seasons changed, so the number of French troops moving about the plateau grew. One of Napoleon's most able marshals, Michel Ney, arrived with his 6th Corps to encircle the nearby Spanish fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo. The French intended to take it by regular approaches: trenches and breaching batteries, leading eventually to a storm. With many thousands of troops now supporting this operation, the meagre resources of the frontier were soon picked bare, and Ney's foraging parties began going out in wider circles. Since Spanish guerrillas patrolled the hills, murdering French stragglers without ceremony, they could not scavenge supplies in small groups.
Wellington batted away a series of proposed operations by Craufurd. Eventually, though, the brigadier set off regardless, and on 11 July, Craufurd led a mixed force of Rifles, light infantry and cavalry to surprise a French foraging party of about two hundred infantry and a few dozen cavalry.
This little combat, at a place called Barquilla, was mismanaged by Craufurd. He held the infantry back and tried to defeat the French with cavalry alone. The enemy formed square and saw off repeated attacks. The British cavalry limped home, having lost several men, and the French party made it back to Ciudad Rodrigo, its commander receiving the Legion d'honneur Legion d'honneur for his stubborn resistance. for his stubborn resistance.
Resentment of Craufurd simmered once again in his battalions. One of his own staff commented, 'Craufurd cruelly tried to cut up a handful of brave men, and they thrashed him.' Many of the party considered that sending several hundred cavalry against the French had been a sort of sadistic experiment on Craufurd's part to see whether such a small group of infantry could defend themselves effectively against cavalry. They also speculated whether their commander was seeking such engagements purely to buttress his own reputation. But Marshal Ney was not the man to meddle with if you just wanted a few glorious mentions in dispatches: the affair at Barquilla would prove a portent of a far more costly humiliation for Craufurd, little over a fortnight later.