The Disgrace
April 1812
Major Cameron walked slowly and deliberately up and down the ranks of riflemen. The four companies under his command had been formed up on top of Badajoz's defensive rampart once the French firing stopped. It was about 4 a.m., and the men could hear gunshots and women's screams occasionally rising above the constant moaning of the hundreds of wounded still lying just below them in the ditch. Cameron fixed them with his grey eyes; the flashes of gunfire and flames licking around buildings behind them occasionally lit up the Celtic pallor of his countenance. He knew they were itching to join the plunder. 'If any man leaves the ranks,' he shouted, 'I shall have him put to death on the spot.'
Down inside the town's streets, the cement that held discipline together in Wellington's Army was crumbling. Ned Costello, wounded, had dragged himself in once he heard the town had fallen. In the streets mobs of stormers mixed together, shooting locks open with their rifles and breaking into houses to see what they might find.
Some soldiers came running down the street, manhandling a French prisoner. Costello stopped them. The rifleman, caked with blood, powder and filth, stared into the Frenchman's eyes, snapped back the hammer on his weapon and levelled it at the prisoner's head. None of the other lads was going to stop him. The prisoner dropped to the ground, sobbing and pleading for mercy: 'The rifle dropped from my hand. I felt ashamed.'
The Frenchman joined his new-found saviour as he prowled about. 'We now looked around for a house where we could obtain refreshment and, if truth must be told, a little money, for wounded though I was, I had made up my mind to gain by our victory,' Costello later wrote.
A small gang, 'who by this time were tolerably drunk', broke into a prosperous-looking home to find the patrone patrone quivering with fear. After threatening him, he revealed something up to 150 dollars which the men divided, and answered their demands for more drink. Costello and the others had found their spot for the night, but were soon obliged to defend it at the point of the bayonet against some Portuguese troops who tried to evict them. Eventually the prowling soldiers discovered their terrified host's greatest hidden treasure, his two young daughters and wife. Costello alluded later to the 'frightful scenes that followed'. quivering with fear. After threatening him, he revealed something up to 150 dollars which the men divided, and answered their demands for more drink. Costello and the others had found their spot for the night, but were soon obliged to defend it at the point of the bayonet against some Portuguese troops who tried to evict them. Eventually the prowling soldiers discovered their terrified host's greatest hidden treasure, his two young daughters and wife. Costello alluded later to the 'frightful scenes that followed'.
Two or three hours into the sack and the mob had consumed enough alcohol to be well and truly steaming. The rapes began, some women violated repeatedly to the point of insensibility. And there were Spanish inhabitants murdered when the soldiers thought they were not handing over their money, their booze or their women.
Elsewhere in the town, the stormers of the 94th stood in ranks, still in perfect order. 'I hear our soldiers in some instances behaved very ill I only saw two and stopped them both,' George Hennell, the volunteer who had led them up the ladders, wrote home. Had the officers marched their men out of the city at that moment, as the sun's first rays broke into the dull Estremaduran sky over the San Miguel ridge, it is possible that all manner of catastrophes might have been averted. But the officers understood something very well: their men had laboured under shot and shell for two weeks and run the most terrible risks in the storm. A few kind mentions of the regiment in His Lordship's dispatch weren't worth a damn to them. They expected a reward. They had earned a reward. The officers commanding the 94th called out to their soldiers that they were free to fall out for two hours' plunder.
Over on the escarpment in front of the Santa Marta breach, four companies of the 95th were still standing under arms. No man had dared risk death by moving during the hours they had stayed there. Was Cameron determined to protect the regiment's good name at any cost? Or was he simply trying to ensure that the bravest men, those selected for the storming parties, got what they deserved: the right to a few hours' plunder on their own? Cameron looked at his watch. It was getting light. He called out to his soldiers: 'Now, my men, you may fall out and enjoy yourselves for the remainder of the day, but I expect to see you all in camp at the usual roll-call in the evening!'
During the daylight hours of 7 April thousands more troops flooded into Badajoz. In places, officers were knocked to the ground when they tried to stop the outrages. For the most part, though, they did not try. Some, among them Captain Harry Smith, attempted to rescue women from the mayhem. Smith emerged with two young ladies from one of the city's better families. One of them, Juana Dolores de Leon, was fourteen years old. The rescue changed Smith's life for ever. He later wrote:
Never was one so honoured and distinguished as I have been by the possession of this dear child (for she was little more than a child at this moment), one with a sense of honour no knight ever exceeded in the most romantic days of chivalry, an understanding superior to her years, a masculine mind with a force of character no consideration could turn from her own just sense of rectitude, and all encased in a frame of Nature's fairest and most delicate moulding, the figure of an angel, with an eye of light and an expression which then inspired me with a maddening love.
Juana remained under Smith's protection in the months after the siege and they eventually married.
Another young officer who went to gaze at Badajoz that afternoon came away only with bitter reflections: 'Every atom of furniture was broken and mattresses ripped open in search of treasure. One street was strewed with articles, knee deep. A convent was in flames and the poor nuns in dishabille, striving to burrow themselves into some place of security.'
Elsewhere some of the surviving Light Division officers were hurrying desperately to save the lives of their friends lying strewn across the area before the breaches where their men had struggled vainly for hours to break in to the fortress. Daylight had revealed several hundred bodies packing the area immediately in front of the two demolished bastions. Some of these men, drained of blood, were just clinging to life. Scavengers were already flitting amongst them, taking their boots or trousers, rifling pockets.
Lieutenant Colonel Barnard and several other officers went about, trying to find those with a beating heart and then organise their evacuation to the surgeons' tents. Quarter Master Surtees found his friend Lieutenant Cary with a bullet wound to the head,
stripped completely naked, save a flannel waistcoat which he bore next to his skin. I had him taken up and placed upon a shutter, (he still breathed a little, though was quite insensible) and carried him to the camp. A sergeant and some men, whom we had pressed to carry him, were so drunk that they let him fall from their shoulders, and his body fell with great force to the ground.
Cary did not survive his wound. Amazingly, Sergeant Fairfoot, who had a bullet lodged in his forehead, came through the surgery to extract it. He was taken to a makeshift hospital, as were young officers like James Gairdner and John FitzMaurice, who had also survived their wounds.
Among those dead in the breach was Peter O'Hare. He'd been stripped and his naked torso showed the holes made by several musket balls. When his personal effects were, by the usual custom, sold off to his brother officers, they amounted to a little over twenty pounds and five shillings. O'Hare's property at home was more substantial, some six hundred pounds' worth, which was duly passed on to his widow Mary and daughter Marianne. His rise in the Army had been remarkable for a man of such humble origins, but in the end it relied upon incessant campaigning, the very thing that finally did for him.
Captain Jeremiah Crampton of the 8th Company had joined O'Hare's storming party, just as he had put himself forward at Rodrigo, and was taken away on 7 April severely wounded. He would probably have preferred O'Hare's end at the foot of the breach, for poor Crampton was to suffer a lingering agony of several months in dark hospital quarters before succumbing to an infection.
In an army with so many brothers serving, it was inevitable that the breach would produce some heart-rending scenes. One Rifles officer was asked by a distraught Guards major to take a lock of hair from his dead brother who lay before them so that he might send it to their mother. Having kept himself composed in the heat of battle, this exhausted man was unable to contain his emotions any longer.
Lieutenant Maud Simmons, hearing of the carnage, came to search for his brother. It was quite common for false reports to fly about after a battle and Maud was distraught when one rifleman told him that his brother had been mortally wounded in the breach before expiring in his tent. Rushing to find the corpse, Maud discovered George lying on his blanket, deep in sleep. Such was his relief, that Maud slumped to the ground, sobbing. George took his brother in his arms and told him, 'My brave fellow, you ought to laugh. I am sound and untouched.'
George Hennell, the young volunteer, took a walk across the battlefield to the surgeons' tents. There they were working like possessed men to save life, while much of the Army carried on with the sack of the city. 'I have seen limbs amputated on the field, the dead lying in heaps like rats after a hunt, some thrown in a ditch,' Hennell wrote home. 'I have seen them afterwards putrid. This horrible scene I have contemplated over and over again.'
He went back towards the town, to see drunken soldiers emerging from the city to talk over their experiences and compare plunder, just feet away from their comrades in the breaches. Hennell was perplexed: 'The want of reflection in numbers of the men surprised me. They were singing and swearing and talking of having a damned narrow escape while their comrades lay around them in heaps dead.' Hennell's bewilderment at the lack of compassion among the soldiers was that of the ingenue, for it was his first time in action, just as Rodrigo had been Gairdner's. But veterans too had been shocked by the soldiers' behaviour after Badajoz. Quarter Master Surtees believed many of the riflemen had been brutalised by their three years of campaigning: 'They had ... become quite reckless about life from so long an exposure to death.'
Hearing the commotion, Wellington had gone into the town himself on the afternoon of 7 April. Some drunken soldiers, seeing him, raised a glass, calling out, 'Old Boy! will you drink!' Returning to his bivouac, the general penned a furious General Order: 'It is now full time that the plunder of Badajoz should cease ... the Commander of Forces has ordered the Provost Marshal into the town, and he has orders to execute any men he may find in the act of plunder, after he shall arrive there.' He ordered Brigadier Powers and his Portuguese in with fixed bayonets to reassert order. Major Cameron's hope that the 95th would return in time for the evening roll-call on 7 April had proved a pious one: 'in place of the usual tattoo report of all present, it was all absent'.
Some men quit the town that night there was little left worth stealing in any case. They set about plundering the baggage of their own Army, a disciplinary nadir for the British in the Peninsula. Quarter Master Surtees awoke on the 8th to find that 'they stole no less than eight horses and mules belonging to my battalion, and took them to the other divisions, where they sold them as animals captured from the enemy. I lost on this occasion an excellent little mule, worth at least 20, and for which of course I never obtained a farthing.'
By that morning, Wellington was in a cold rage. Powers' Portuguese were joining the plunder instead of stopping it. It was time to start hanging the scum. 'The provost marshal erected a gallows, and proceeded to suspend a few of the delinquents, which very quickly cleared the town of the remainder,' wrote Kincaid. A further General Order was circulated to the Army, commanding that the muster rolls be read every hour as the marauders came in for with each missed roll their crime of absence was compounded.
Those few officers of the 95th, like George Simmons, who had emerged from the proceedings without a scratch, now gathered some reliable NCOs and soldiers around them and proceeded to round up their companies. 'Coercion was necessary on many occasions (with men who had never behaved ill before) and obliged to be resorted to,' wrote Simmons. 'The men were made to throw away a quantity of things, and to prevent them secreting any of the articles, their packs were examined, and the plunder that had not been made away with was collected into heaps and burnt.'
Overall, the Light Division had 919 men killed or wounded in the storm of Badajoz, out of total Allied casualties that night of 3,713. The losses for the siege as a whole brought that to more than 4,600.
There was a good deal of anger among the surviving Light Division officers who felt that hundreds of lives had been thrown away on an ill-considered venture. They did not believe it humanly possible for men to have conquered the obstacles set in their way by the French. 'The defences on the tops of the breaches ought to have been cleared away by our batteries before the assault commenced,' according to one. They blamed Wellington and his engineers for the failure to think through their plan, or to order light guns to be wheeled forward with the stormers to blast the blades of the chevaux de frises chevaux de frises out of the way. out of the way.
For officers of the Rifles, the anger at the slaughter and the sorrow of loss soon turned to consideration of the vacancies that had opened as a result. Gairdner wrote from his sickbed to his father: 'I was before this last action sixth from the top of the Second Lieutenants, and there being seven vacancies by deaths I shall of course get my first lieutenancy.' Another officer put it even more crudely: 'This regimental havoc will give me promotion.'
There would be one more vacant lieutenancy arising in the regiment from the horrific night of 6 April. It belonged to Thomas Bell. Major Cameron discovered him skulking in his tent the day after the storm. James Gairdner told his father what happened: One Thomas B has been kicked out of the regiment for cowardice. On the evening of the sixth when the regiment fell in to march to the attack, this said gentleman, who was moments before skipping about very merrily, pretended to be very ill and he actually lay in his tent the whole night. The next morning Major Cameron, the commanding officer, sent word to him that he might either resign his commission or stand an inquiry into his conduct, he chose the former, and was I think let off a great deal too easily. Such pitiful scoundrels ought to be shot, and ought not to disgrace the army by entering it.
EIGHTEEN.
The Salamanca Campaign
MayDecember 1812
The battalion that marched in stages back to the northern Portuguese frontier was a shadow of the one that had embarked three years before. Wellington was keen to have the men away from Badajoz as soon as possible, back into some sort of daily regimen. Major Cameron, who marched at the head of the column, was the man who would have to impose it on the 1st/95th. He and Captain McDearmid were the only two of the thirteen more senior officers who'd arrived in Portugal who were now left fit to march. There were four other captains lying wounded or sick and a couple more who'd got themselves staff jobs. But the leaders were simply not there to maintain the 1st/95th as an eight-company battalion.
There were huge gaps among the ranks too. Behind Cameron now marched 492 privates and NCOs, compared with the 1,093 who had come ashore in 1809. In many cases several dozen the men would be out of hospital and marched up the regiment as soon as their legs could carry them. Quite a few arrived in dribs and drabs at Ituero, the Spanish village where the battalion quartered during June. But down in Lisbon and elsewhere medical boards processed soldiers like Bugler Green and invalided them home as unfit for further service. Until Badajoz the number of 1st Battalion men who had departed the Peninsula in this way did not amount to more than four dozen, but by the late summer of 1812, taking in the human wrecks of that siege, the medical boards doubled the total of those sent home. Some would find their way into veteran, invalid or garrison battalions, others would be pensioned off on ninepence or a shilling a day.
For those who had survived Badajoz, the storm became a bloody, horrible watershed in their experience. Thereafter, men were divided according to whether or not they had been there. Had he somehow escaped Cameron's wrath, Lieutenant Bell could never have survived the veterans' taunts for his skulking. Badajoz became the yardstick when trying to describe the intensity of enemy fire. Such was the melancholy pall cast over the regiment after the siege that a couple of men committed suicide and quite a few fell into deep depression. For this reason there was a subtle and unmistakable change in the conduct of quite a few old sweats in the battalion. Having been to the gates of hell, and proven themselves in the most terrible situation, they wanted to survive to tell the tale.
Among the officers who disappeared after the siege to recover his health was Colonel Sidney Beckwith. He was destined never to return to the Peninsula. Having gained major general's rank, Beckwith was sent to America, an arduous service lacking any of the kudos of fighting the French. Wellington would no doubt have liked to keep him in the Peninsula, but he could not shield him indefinitely from the consequences of his promotion, Army rules dictating that a newly made general had to be available to command a brigade in any place the Horse Guards hierarchy dictated. Although Beckwith would retain a close interest in the welfare of his old corps and its men, his ability had carried him to a level where he could no longer lead them in battle. Following O'Hare's death, Cameron was the acting commanding officer. A mention in Wellington's Badajoz dispatch would mean brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel for him, and O'Hare's death a step in his substantive post to major.
Cameron was born and grew up in Lochaber on the west coast of Scotland, the eighth son in an important clan family. The Camerons had covered their bets during the 1745 Jacobite rising, serving both the Army and the Pretender. These days, though, perhaps by way of compensating for earlier deeds, their loyalty was intense, the Camerons having discovered that the monarchy was always grateful for the tough troops they could skim from their impoverished tenantry. Although of landed stock, Alexander Cameron had himself joined the regular Army as a volunteer, fighting with the 92nd Highlanders in Egypt. His relatives had kept too tight a grip on the family funds for him to advance himself by purchase and he had succeeded to the acting command of the battalion at what his promotion-hungry peers would have considered the ripe old age of thirty-four.
There was a dense web of Scottish patronage woven in the early nineteenth-century Army. Beckwith's predecessor as commanding officer, Sir William Stewart, had been a key figure in the formation of the 95th. He had promoted his officers in such a way as to ensure that the battalion that landed in 1809 had seven Scots among its dozen captains and majors. Stewart was a man of intense passions and strongly held views. He wanted tough recruits, and well knew that they could be found in the Highlands and across the Irish Sea. In the early days of the 95th, there had been intense recruiting among Scottish militia regiments and the poor peasantry. As a young subaltern during the early days of the regiment, Cameron was chosen to march a great party of Scots down from Lochaber. Stewart granted them the special privilege of forming the Highland Company, which paraded with bagpipes, whereas the nationalities mixed together in other parts of the regiment.
Later, during 18046, the 95th's officers looked more to Ireland for fresh men. Stewart believed they made excellent private soldiers, 'perhaps from being less spoiled and more hardy than British soldiers, better calculated for active light troops'. This generation of Hibernian recruits had, in their turn, been overtaken early in 1809 by a large number (like Fairfoot and Brotherwood) from English militia regiments. But the legacy of building the 95th on a bedrock of Scots remained: they were heavily represented among the more senior ranks, both commissioned and non-commissioned.
The Highland or 7th Company had survived Stewart's passing, and indeed the vicissitudes of the Peninsular campaign. It was still strong enough to take part in the coming march into Spain that everyone expected as they waited at Ituero. Now Cameron enlisted the help of his fellow Scot John Kincaid as adjutant, the lieutenant having served as acting commander of the Highland Company for several months before. The new adjutant was certainly grateful for this prestigious post, and there was evidently a high regard between the two men, for he later wrote of Cameron: 'As a friend friend, his heart was in the right place, and, as a soldier soldier, his right place was at the head of a regiment in the face of the enemy. I never saw an officer feel more at home in such a situation, nor do I know any one who could fill it better.'
Cameron resolved that the battalion would have to dissolve two of its companies in order to keep the six that would remain in the field up to reasonable numbers. The axe would fall on the 3rd and 4th. Without doubt the 3rd, previously O'Hare's and Uniacke's, had been among the hardest fighting if not the toughest in the regiment. It had been at the centre of the Barba del Puerco action and in every important fight since. At Ciudad Rodrigo, four officers had messed together: Uniacke, Tom Smith (Harry's brother), FitzMaurice and Gairdner. Now Smith dined alone as acting commander of 3rd Company, Uniacke being dead and the other two subalterns casualties of Badajoz. One officer simply could not perform the duties previously given to four. The company's men would now be scattered about the remains of the battalion.
James Gairdner, newly promoted lieutenant, would go to the 2nd Company once he recovered his health, under that wild sportsman Jonathan Leach; Sergeant Fairfoot, rejoining after he recuperated from his head wound, to the 8th Company. Ned Costello, another 3rd Company veteran, also went to Leach's 2nd Company, where fellow stormer and regimental character Corporal William Brotherwood was also serving. Costello rejoined in mid-June, by which time the battalion was in motion again. Having taken Rodrigo and Badajoz, Wellington was striking into Spain, seeking to take the fight to the French.
McDearmid, the commander of the 4th Company, was sent home, in theory to recruit, as was Second Lieutenant Tommy Sarsfield. The onetime volunteer had not disgraced himself like Thomas Bell, but Cameron and Kincaid wanted rid of him in any case. The 95th had been so short of subalterns that it had commissioned Sarsfield but everyone wanted rid of him. Kincaid damned him, saying his only mistake 'was in his choice of profession'. Colonel Beckwith wrote to Cameron that Sarsfield was 'not suited to our specie of troop specie of troop'.
It was a matter of recruiting at home 'in theory', because the 9th and 10th Company cadres, posted back more than a year before, had performed poorly in providing the battalion with fresh drafts. Some eighty-eight men sent out from England during 1812 were to be the only replacements of this type during several years of campaigning. Bereft of a man of Stewart or Beckwith's rank and force of character directing matters in England, the junior officers presiding over the regimental depot achieved little. What's more, the effective collapse of four companies into a single depot one would help frustrate officers like George Simmons who had believed that the terrible risks they took would be rewarded by 'a company in five years'. The battalion's casualties meant three fewer captains' posts to aspire to.
In trying to make up its losses, the Army resorted at last to a desperate expedient that had been contemplated for some time: it recruited Spaniards from the border country. Initially there had been hopes of finding twelve men per company. The experiment was racked with difficulty from the start, only being attempted in some battalions (including the 95th) and then bedevilled with problems. Since many of the men whom the local authorities clapped hold of were more or less pressed into service against their will, and since local Spanish commanders claimed many of the choice specimens for their own regiments, a great many of these new recruits deserted the British service as soon as they could. It might also be surmised that it was a rare kind of campesino campesino who could adapt to the brutal codes both official and those self-imposed strictures of the soldiers' messes that governed Wellington's Army. Lazarro Blanco, though, was to prove one of the survivors. He found himself in Leach's 2nd Company and soon impressed Costello both with his courage in the field and his facility for foul Spanish oaths. Blanco joined the others in the trials of the late summer of 1812. who could adapt to the brutal codes both official and those self-imposed strictures of the soldiers' messes that governed Wellington's Army. Lazarro Blanco, though, was to prove one of the survivors. He found himself in Leach's 2nd Company and soon impressed Costello both with his courage in the field and his facility for foul Spanish oaths. Blanco joined the others in the trials of the late summer of 1812.
That June and July was a period of intense marching for the Light Division. They struck out hundreds of miles into the open country of Castile and Leon, marching up through Salamanca, north-east to the River Duero. Having gone all the way there, they doubled back down towards Salamanca as Wellington sought to fight the French on the most advantageous terms, but failed to find them. This slogging was conducted across parched plains in baking midsummer heat. In order to achieve as much as possible before the sun was at its zenith, reveille was sounded earlier and earlier, with many 'nights' ending rudely with a blaring of bugles at 1 a.m. Throughout these movements the Light Division's prowess in marching and manoeuvre was noted by other regiments. An account of their routine by one of the 95th's company commanders is worth quoting at length both for its detail and its colour: The march was commenced with precisely the same regularity as would be observed by a regiment or regiments moving into or out of a garrison town; the bands playing, the light infantry with arms sloped, and those of the riflemen slung over the shoulder, the exact wheeling distances of the sections preserved and perfect silence observed. After having proceeded a short distance in this manner, the word of command, 'March at Ease' was given by the general at the head of the leading battalion, and this was passed, quickly on to the rear from company to company ... the soldiers now carried their arms in the manner most convenient, some slung them over their shoulders (most of them, indeed preferred this mode as the least fatiguing), others sloped them, and many trailed them, and they constantly changed from the right hand or right shoulder to the left. Whilst some lighted their black pipes, others sung or amused their comrades with stories and jests, as is usual on those occasions. Although allowed to prosecute their march in this easy and unrestrained manner, a heavy penalty, nevertheless, awaited the man who quitted the ranks without permission. The march was commenced with precisely the same regularity as would be observed by a regiment or regiments moving into or out of a garrison town; the bands playing, the light infantry with arms sloped, and those of the riflemen slung over the shoulder, the exact wheeling distances of the sections preserved and perfect silence observed. After having proceeded a short distance in this manner, the word of command, 'March at Ease' was given by the general at the head of the leading battalion, and this was passed, quickly on to the rear from company to company ... the soldiers now carried their arms in the manner most convenient, some slung them over their shoulders (most of them, indeed preferred this mode as the least fatiguing), others sloped them, and many trailed them, and they constantly changed from the right hand or right shoulder to the left. Whilst some lighted their black pipes, others sung or amused their comrades with stories and jests, as is usual on those occasions. Although allowed to prosecute their march in this easy and unrestrained manner, a heavy penalty, nevertheless, awaited the man who quitted the ranks without permission.
At the end of the march, the battalion would arrive in its bivoauc for the night: The alarm post or place of general assembly having been pointed out to every one, the men were dismissed; the arms were piled, the cooking immediately commenced, and all further parades dispensed with for the day, except a rollcall about sunset. The alarm post or place of general assembly having been pointed out to every one, the men were dismissed; the arms were piled, the cooking immediately commenced, and all further parades dispensed with for the day, except a rollcall about sunset.
During all of this wearing out of shoe leather, Wellington had been trying to bring his enemy, Marshal Auguste Marmont, to battle; he, meanwhile, wanted to turn the tables by exploiting the French Army's skill at manoeuvre. On 18 July, there was a sharp little skirmish at a place called Castrillo. This engagement did not figure greatly in the story of 1812, nor indeed did the 95th have much to do in it, but it is worth mentioning as it showed the vicissitudes of life on campaign.
The two armies had been marching in parallel across the open country when one of the French divisions turned onto the British line of march and attacked. The British had fallen back for miles across the countryside before Wellington prepared a stand and checked them. During this rush, Lieutenant George Simmons had been obliged to abandon a pack mule. He had begun his campaigns three years earlier on foot, largely to save money, but by July 1812 he had acquired both a riding animal and one for his baggage. The second had received a kick from a stallion, keeled over and died, and Simmons's servant had not had time to take off all its saddles. Simmons was only grateful that he had not been carrying the company pay-chest on his person, for he was liable for any losses under such circumstances. He had, in any case, lost skins containing a hundred pints of the local wine, sundry other baggage and the mule itself, all to the value of around a hundred dollars. This was pretty much exactly the sum 20 in English money that he had been hoping to remit to his father as one of his twice-yearly contributions to his siblings' education.
'All these misfortunes coming at once played the devil with me,' Simmons wrote home; but with the calm of a man who had come unscathed through Badajoz, 'I took up my pipe and thought to myself that things might have been worse ... the life of a soldier is well calculated to make a man bear up against misfortunes.'
As the same engagement came to an end, the British cavalry charged some Frenchmen, driving them off. A trooper of the 14th Light Dragoons captured a French cavalier on his mount in this fight and, seeing the 95th, rode over, wishing to cash in his prize forthwith. He chanced upon Private Costello, his countryman from Queen's County, and greeted him cordially. Lieutenant Gairdner was standing nearby and was soon drawn into the conversation, as he was able to translate the Frenchman's plaintive cries. The French dragoon insisted that he would never have been captured if he'd been as well mounted as his Hibernian captor. The trooper turned to Gairdner and said, 'Than by Jasus Sir, tell him if he had the best horse in France, I would bring him prisoner if he stood to fight me.' The riflemen all had a good laugh at this Irish bravado. Then it was down to business. What would your Honour give me for his horse? Gairdner, knowing the trooper's time was short and the Army was going through one of its periods of short pay, struck an excellent bargain, buying the beast for five dollars, or little more than one pound. Pocketing his cash, the trooper started rooting through the Frenchman's valise, eventually drawing out a pair of cavalryman's strong trousers, which he threw to Costello, gratis. It was only fair to share one's good fortune. Gairdner had picked up a cheap packhorse and the Irish trooper galloped off with enough for several bottles of wine.
Simmons's loss, or indeed that of the French dragoon, happened in the same affair as Gairdner's or Costello's gain. It was all as arbitrary as the flight of bullets, or so it often seemed to them this sense was summed up in the much-used phrase, 'the fortunes of war'. It was the way that soldiers rationalised the inexplicable workings of fate and their own powerlessness in the face of them.
The fortunes of war also decreed that the 1st/95th played almost no part in the events of 22 July 1812. Posted on Wellington's left flank, they observed a little light skirmishing around the middle of the day and were formed up to pursue the flying French as light faltered towards the end of it. In the intervening hours, the fate of Spain had been decided by Wellington's crushing defeat of Marmont on the battlefield of Salamanca. It was later celebrated as the defeat of forty thousand men in forty minutes, and while not exactly conforming to this propagandistic hyperbole, Wellington's battle marked his emergence as an offensive commander and one of the great captains of the age. 'Our division, very much to our annoyance, came in for a very slender portion of this day's glory,' wrote a grumpy Kincaid.
With this French defeat, the wrecks of Marmont's army streamed away from the frontier, pursued by the British, uncovering Madrid. After a march of a couple of hundred miles, Wellington's Army entered the Spanish capital on 12 August to scenes of hysterical rejoicing. When the British commander left at the end of the month to continue his pursuit of the French Army, the Light Division was among those that remained behind to guard Madrid.
Once in Madrid, the men of the 95th felt they had reached civilisation again. 'The public buildings are really splendid,' one Rifles officer wrote in his journal, 'no abominable dunghills in every direction, like Lisbon.' More importantly for most of them, there were the women: this interlude was first and foremost a chance to gaze upon well-dressed, cultured, beautiful women. At dances in Gallegos and Ituera a man made do with what was available. For those long starved of female company, the frumpy maidens, occasionally mustachioed, of the Spanish peasantry had sufficed and even proven the stuff of many a romantic fantasy, for a soldier quickly learns to make do under such circumstances. In Madrid, it was a different story entirely.
The guapas guapas were best observed at about 7 p.m. strolling on the Calle Mayor or in the pleasure gardens near the Retiro: were best observed at about 7 p.m. strolling on the Calle Mayor or in the pleasure gardens near the Retiro: It is here the stranger may examine, with advantage, the costume, style and gait of the Spanish ladies. Their dress is composed of a mantilla or veil, gracefully thrown back over the head; a long-waisted satin body; black silk petticoats fringed from the knee downwards; white silk stockings with open clocks; and kid shoes of white or black. It is here the stranger may examine, with advantage, the costume, style and gait of the Spanish ladies. Their dress is composed of a mantilla or veil, gracefully thrown back over the head; a long-waisted satin body; black silk petticoats fringed from the knee downwards; white silk stockings with open clocks; and kid shoes of white or black.
At public dances twice a week in the assembly rooms of the Calle de Banos and El Principe, they could actually hold hands with these beauties and quadrille or waltz with them. The officers' pleasure at taking in these sights and sounds was soon tempered by a sense of their own poverty. A fine meal could be had in Madrid, but it would cost you six shillings. The Army was desperately short of coin again and pay was six months in arrears.
The mortification of one well trained in dancing, like James Gairdner, can easily be imagined. He wrote in his journal, 'I have been very unwell, add to that I never had money for the army has never been worse paid than since we have been here, so that I have not had much pleasure to boast of having enjoyed the capital of Spain.' He sent to his family for some cash to rectify matters. Those who could not fall back on family help were reduced to all kinds of expedients. One captain of the 95th recorded, 'I sold some silver spoons and a watch to raise the wind.'
George Simmons, serious-minded and dedicated to his family as ever, managed in the few months after his losses of July to scrape together 22 6s 7d to send home. The money was first sent to a banking house in Lisbon who produced a bill which came back to Simmons. He then posted it home, his family cashing it with an English money dealer who, along with the issuing house in Lisbon, skimmed off his cut. Simmons, always ready to stand in loco in loco parentis, had decided that his brother Joseph was at risk. Having come to the Peninsula as a volunteer in Maud's regiment, the 34th, Joseph had been commissioned into the 23rd Fusiliers, a fashionable corps in which a young boy from Beverley could fall in with all sorts of moneyed blades with extravagant habits. To add to George's concerns, Joseph had fallen ill and been placed in hospital in Salamanca. parentis, had decided that his brother Joseph was at risk. Having come to the Peninsula as a volunteer in Maud's regiment, the 34th, Joseph had been commissioned into the 23rd Fusiliers, a fashionable corps in which a young boy from Beverley could fall in with all sorts of moneyed blades with extravagant habits. To add to George's concerns, Joseph had fallen ill and been placed in hospital in Salamanca.
Knowing that this would be the best way for Joseph to avoid mounting debts or the kind of disaster that had befallen Tommy Sarsfield, George Simmons arranged to have his younger brother transferred to the 95th. There he could instruct him, protect him from muttering his youthful opinions aloud, and indeed from that type of older officer who delighted in torturing young subalterns with their tricks. The mentor principle had worked very well for all brothers in the regiment: the Smiths, Coxes, Coanes and Travers among them.
Many officers also found themselves enjoying the largesse of those who could afford to give generous hospitality, like Lieutenant Samuel Hobkirk of the 43rd. He had an allowance of 700 a year but was rumoured to spend 1,000 on his uniforms and campaign comforts. Hobkirk threw a party in Madrid which provided many a comrade with a night's lavish entertainment. The 95th did not have a figure to compare with Hobkirk, in terms of spreading money about, but its most recently joined subaltern, Lord Charles Spencer, a callow youth of eighteen, was at least able to subsidise his mess.
The officers in Madrid also took to organising their own entertainments so that they might extend some hospitality to the youth and beauty of the city. Light Division theatricals had begun in the Torres Vedras winter of 1810. There had been further performances during the winter quarters of 181112. In Madrid, they were able to find a proper theatre to put on two plays: The Revenge and The Mayor of Garrett The Revenge and The Mayor of Garrett. These performances were acted by young, high-spirited officers such as Freer, Havelock, Hennell and Hobkirk of the 43rd (the last bankrolling the production, as might be expected) and the newly arrived Spencer and Gairdner of the 95th. Their Madrid efforts were a great success, netting such a large profit from the curious, paying Spanish public that the officers were able to donate $250 to the city's poor.
This happy interlude was destined to be short-lived. Wellington's push to the north-east had been checked at the fortress of Burgos. He had known that the Light and 4th Divisions could not be asked to storm again, after the recent horrors of Badajoz, and had therefore left them near Madrid. However, his attempts to take the citadel with other troops resulted in a number of costly rebuffs and he realised he would have to march all the way back to the Portuguese frontier in order to avoid defeat at the hands of the French armies now massing against him.
The British Army quit Madrid on 31 October, their departure arousing the ire and contempt of the Madrilenos Madrilenos. Being left to their fate among the French dashed the hopes of many Spanish. Men shouted insults at the marching redcoats and the young women, so delightful at weekly dances, hissed accusations of cowardice and effeminacy. 'I was truly glad to get away from this unfortunate place,' one officer wrote in his journal. 'We could not do the people any good and pity is at best (under the circumstances) a sorry way of showing good wishes.'
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. 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.