Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (22 page)

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 1804–6, 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
, his heart was in the right place, and, as a
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
’.

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 desper
ate 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
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:

At the end of the march, the battalion would arrive in its bivoauc for the night:

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.