Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (24 page)

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.

‘About midnight, in spite of the elements and green wood, my jolly subalterns and myself contrived to make a fire of some sort,’ wrote Leach in his journal. ‘We instantly began toasting on sharp pointed sticks pieces of the newly slain bullock. Swallowing the meat was out of the question but we continued grinding with our teeth this delicious morsel without salt or bread. We stretched ourselves on the ground in our cloaks wet to the skin as near as possible to this apology for a fire.’

The following morning, they awoke to the news that there would be no issue of provisions whatsoever that day. Those who wanted to have
some breakfast could try cooking the acorns that lay about them in the embers of their fire. Charles Spencer, distraught at the prospect, burst into tears. The old sweats of Leach’s company, far from having contempt for this sprig of the aristocracy, rushed to offer him morsels of their last biscuits. Leach himself settled for some grilled acorns washed down with a glass of rum.

With rumbling stomachs and bleeding feet they marched on that day, towards the familiar post of Ciudad Rodrigo. By that evening the quartermasters managed finally to bring some stale biscuits up to the regiment. The soldiers were desperate by this point, having gone seventy-two hours without any real food, and the officers, fearing a riot, posted ‘sentries with fixed bayonets placed around the piles while commissaries and Quarter Masters of regiments divided the biscuit’. Each man got to fill his blackjack with a ration of rum, too, and this most basic meal ‘soon appeared to set everything right again’, according to Leach. Viewed from the ranks, the experience of the retreat had been a bitter one – the kind that rendered many soldiers miserable enough to resign themselves to death. Private Costello commented, ‘Some men, from the privations they endured, wished to be shot, and exposed themselves in action for that purpose.’

The following day, the Light Division marched into the pasture that surrounded Ciudad Rodrigo. The Army’s crisis, like the campaign of 1812, was over. Three days’ ration of biscuit was issued to every man. Wellington’s Army was about to enter its winter quarters yet again. It should have been a time of peaceful reflection, but for many officers of the 95th it was to be a winter of intrigue and bad feeling.

A banging of hammers, sawing of wood and hallooing of names filled the crisp air of Alemada. The little border village had become home once more to the 1st Battalion, 95th, and a barn had been commandeered as an officers’ mess. For the first time since landing in 1809, these gentlemen would be dining together instead of in the twos, threes or fours of their respective company arrangements. Hands were clapped, that 1 December, on some riflemen carpenters, and two great brick chimneys were built in the improvised dining hall: ‘Fire places of no small dimensions were made by our soldiers of the most uncouth and gigantic description, into which we heaped an abundance of ilex or Spanish oak.’ Each company mess pooled its cutlery, pots and pans and great dining tables were knocked together too. ‘Having ransacked the canteens of each company for knives, forks, spoons, &c., and purchased wine glasses and tumblers nearby, nothing was now wanting but a mess room and some good Douro wine.’

Settling down to a few months without constant marching and fighting would afford the officers a chance to get to know one another, for many serving in different wings of the battalion were on little more than nodding acquaintance and plenty of new men had arrived during the preceding campaign. Faces were windburned and uniforms tattered, leaving them looking ‘a most ruffian-like class of fellows’. But the optimists among the company, like Leach, believed an atmosphere of brotherly companionship would soon be cemented by some communal singing around the supper table.

Lieutenant Gairdner, who had carried on happily enough in Leach’s company mess, was not so sure. He would have preferred to keep out of Colonel Cameron’s way. Several days before, near Rodrigo,
Gairdner had had an altercation with his colonel which showed how easily such proud gentlemen could fall out – and all over apparent trifles. Gairdner had just received a
£
27 bill from his family and was keen to go into town to cash it so that he might replace the personal belongings he had lost with the baggage at Munoz. It was a matter of some urgency, since he did not even have a razor or a spare shirt with which to maintain an officer-like appearance. Cameron, in Gairdner’s words, ‘after a great deal of needless and ungentlemanly blustering, gave me leave. I had not gone one hundred yards towards the town when the adjutant came and told me that it was the colonel’s order that I should go on command with the sick.’ The matter of who should take charge of the little parties of feverish stragglers, so that they did not commit robberies along the road, was one regulated by a strict rota, and Gairdner was quite sure that it was not his turn.

Gairdner remonstrated with Cameron that the honour belonged to Lieutenant MacNamara, but he could not refuse his colonel’s order. Cameron told him: ‘You may think it a hard case and may be it is, but if you think so, do the duty first and make your complaint afterwards.’ The young lieutenant could not refuse a direct order and sloped off to find the sick party. Gairdner’s feelings were deeply hurt and he fumed in his journal: ‘I cursed the service in which a low-lifed brute can with impunity annoy an officer, even though he does not fail in one point of his duty, merely because he has a command. That Cameron dislikes me I know, but of his reasons for doing so I am perfectly ignorant.’

The following day, another young lieutenant was sent to take over the sick and tried to soothe Gairdner, telling him that Cameron had made an innocent mistake, not realising that he had called Gairdner out of his turn. But through glances or tone of voice the colonel and his aggrieved American lieutenant communicated their dislike for each other. The day before they marched into Alemada, Gairdner was 2nd Company’s duty officer and he felt the commanding officer hovering about him throughout the march, noting in his journal, ‘Col. Cameron … took every opportunity of finding fault with me and with the Company because I commanded it today – dirty low-lifed work!’

For a few days, Gairdner felt pleasantly surprised by the new arrangements in the officers’ mess. When Captain Jeremiah Crampton died (of the injuries sustained at Badajoz), Gairdner had bought his rifle; he now joined Leach in various hunting expeditions on the Beira
moorlands, some partridge and other luckless beasts falling into his bag. ‘Between field sports by day and harmony and conviviality at night in our banditti-like mess house, we certainly do contrive not only to kill time but to make it pass very happily,’ wrote Leach. Their conversation ranged from unhappiness with the angry General Order that Wellington had published on 28 November, venting his fury on the Army for its straggling, to sad regrets about having to leave new-found friends in Madrid. ‘Up to this period Lord Wellington had been adored by the army,’ according to Kincaid. However, ‘as his censure, on this occasion, was not strictly confined to the guilty, it afforded a handle to disappointed persons, and excited a feeling against him, on the part of individuals which has probably never since been obliterated.’

There were other subjects too, relating to Britain’s interests in the wider world. The officers were all aware of Napoleon’s march into Russia and heartily wished every disaster possible on the Corsican upstart. The newspapers reaching them early in December seemed to answer these hopes. For some months these same papers had also charted a new and most curious conflict: one between Britain and the United States. Congress had declared war in June 1812, having become aggrieved at Britain’s attempts to shut it out of European trade and to press its citizens as sailors. While the American armies had suffered some reverses, their small fleet managed to humble the Royal Navy in a number of frigate actions.

For James Gairdner, who had been born and raised in Georgia, this new war provoked some anxiety, not least because the reinforcement of the British Canadian garrison might require the dispatch of some riflemen. Gairdner’s father would eventually write to him that he would have no option but resignation if the 95th received orders for America. Few in Britain felt much enthusiasm for this new war and in general those who tried to justify it belonged to a certain class of high Tory who supported the ministry right or wrong. These were the same sort of fellows who aped George III’s horror at the idea of any Catholic emancipation in Ireland.

As the winter wore on, the initial mess conversation about leaving Madrid or Wellington’s intemperate General Order gave way to a more sensitive kind of discussion, lubricated by many bottles of Douro, concerning the divisions within the English-speaking nation itself: between Englishman and American, Protestant and Catholic. Among these prickly, dangerous fellows, these were tricky subjects. Things were
made all the more difficult by the fact that certain Scottish officers took the Tory part in these debates, doing so with the apparent backing of Colonel Cameron.

Lieutenant Willie Johnston, having returned from his Badajoz sick leave with his right arm shattered, became a leading light in these proceedings. According to John Kincaid, Johnston was ‘the most ultra of all ultra-Tories … many of his warmest friends were Irish, but as a nation he held them cheap, and made no secret of his opinions’. Kincaid’s prejudices had shown themselves too, for example in his treatment of Sarsfield, whom he described as having ‘the usual sinister cast of the eye worn by common Irish country countenances’. In an attempt to pacify the Irish and buy off those who might otherwise be tempted to repeat the rising of 1798, the ministry scattered patronage liberally about the island. Commissions in the Army were part of this effort, and evidently the Sarsfields of this world were considered by some to be far too vulgar to act the part of gentleman, rightful holder of the King’s Commission. The Scots, by contrast, had atoned for their own 1745 rebellion with such zealous military service to George III that many officers from north of the Tweed considered themselves to be loyalists par excellence. Had an O’Hare or a Uniacke overheard the Irish disparaged by Johnston or Kincaid, there is no telling what the result might have been, but they were both dead, and MacDiarmid, the other Irish captain in the battalion, had been packed off home that summer with Sarsfield.

Just before Christmas, Johnston was appointed to the captaincy left vacant by Crampton’s death. There was nothing outrageous in this, for Johnston was high on the seniority list of lieutenants and had shown himself as brave as any man, having volunteered for both Rodrigo and Badajoz. Along with Kincaid’s nomination to the adjutancy, however, this decision served to convince certain observers that Cameron conformed to Dr Johnson’s stereotype of the Scot, as one who would advance his people ahead of others. This left lasting rancour, John FitzMaurice’s son noting years later that his father’s ‘prejudice against the Scots was caused by what he considered the injustice of a Scotch colonel … who never lost an opportunity of favouring his own countrymen at the expense of English and Irish officers’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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