Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (28 page)

While the soldiers doubtless revelled in the image of the Light Division as peerless scavengers or
banditti
, it posed no small problem for Lieutenant Colonel Barnard in his command of the Rifles. The last thing he wanted was for the banditry of his wilder soldiers to tarnish the laurels he had won on 21 June. Although some were now beginning to prophesy the end of Bonaparte’s rule, he knew that he would have to use both the carrot and the stick to combat the disorderly tendencies of his men.

At least nobody doubted the Light Division’s marching prowess as it found itself heading in the direction of the River Bidassoa, Spain’s border with France, early in July. General Kempt had been deeply struck by the quality of soldiers under his command, telling Barnard one day on the march, ‘By God I never saw fellows march so well and in such weather and roads too. I will order the Commissary to issue them a
double allowance of spirits tonight.’ The Pyrenees loomed ahead of them. French forces remained isolated in two Spanish fortresses: Pampluna inland, at the base of those mountains, and on the coast at San Sebastian. Wellington did not intend to advance into France itself until those places were reduced, and sieges, as he had discovered, could be a tedious and bloody business.

The smoky hovels of the Portuguese frontier were behind them. They knew enough about the French losses against the mighty coalition ranged against Napoleon in Germany to begin hoping that the final battle was under way. The French, though, were determined to exact a high price in blood in the mountain ranges of their southern border.

The Pyrenean mountain air echoed to the sounds of picks, shovels and cursing throughout that late summer of 1813. Local workmen, the National Guard and the army proper had all been pressed into service, creating a line of outposts along the peaks of the western Pyrenees.

Following Vitoria and the collapse of Joseph’s Kingdom of Spain, Napoleon had sacked his brother ignominiously and appointed Marshal Jean de Dieu Soult to reorganise his southern armies. The marshal drew thousands of men into his scheme to turn the mountainous frontier into a solid defensive wall. Dozens of redoubts had been built, usually on heights. These were garnished with artillery pieces, heaved up the slopes with ropes, block and tackle. Once emplaced, these guns were positioned to sweep any likely approach with fire. The strongpoints were sited to allow each to support its neighbours, with others further back to allow a defence in depth.

Less than a month after Vitoria, the Light Division men marched within view of these fortifications and were duly impressed. They knew that if they were called upon to storm the forts, it would be warm work, for a soldier lumbering slowly up a mountainside would be exposed to enemy fire for far longer than those who had broken the French line at San Millan or taken Arinez. One officer of the 43rd wrote home, ‘By throwing up redoubts on the heights one regiment may hold up an entire army.’

There were obvious parallels with the lines of Torres Vedras, which the pick of Napoleon’s generals had not even dared to attack. Perhaps the French saw it as a chance to inflict a Busaco on Wellington too. Attacking this system, though, was a bigger prospect than that ridge in Portugal, for the Bidassoa defence line stretched for forty miles south
east, from the Bay of Biscay into the high mountains. Marshal Soult predicted that his enemy would suffer 25,000 casualties breaking the line. He issued patriotic edicts, exhorting his men to prevent the English setting foot on the ‘sacred soil of France’.

Wellington’s concerns were first and foremost to find his own defensive positions in this mountainous terrain, for he felt it likely that Soult would try some attacks to relieve the French garrisons left behind inside Spain at Pampluna and San Sebastian. Once these places had been reduced by the Allies, Wellington would have to attack the Bidassoa line.

It became readily apparent as the Army adjusted to its new fighting ground that this work would belong largely to the infantry. Many positions could only be reached by shepherds’ tracks, making them impassable to limbered guns, and the steep slopes were too tricky for mounted troops. ‘Our cavalry therefore and I understand a considerable part of our artillery’, wrote Captain Leach, never missing his chance for a put-down, ‘are living in clover in different towns as snug and as far from the possibility of surprise by the enemy as if they were in England.’

British generals soon discovered other qualities to this new arena of war. The Pyrenees could only be crossed by certain passes and the ridges or mountains separating those could make it very hard to move troops to a threatened sector, if the enemy were able to gain a local surprise. Just as movement along the British or French defensive lines could be very tricky, so too were communications.

The Pyrenean battlefield was therefore one in which every commander would have to be on his mettle. It was unfortunate, then, for the Light Division that the idiocies of the Army hierarchy deprived it of General Vandeleur, the respected commander of its 2nd Brigade at this time. He was replaced by Major General John Skerrett, to whom the brigade major, Captain Harry Smith of the 95th, instantly took exception. ‘My new General,’ wrote Smith, ‘I soon discovered, was by nature a gallant Grenadier, and no Light Troop officer.’ Smith termed him gallant because Skerrett’s personal courage was never in doubt. But for the 95th it was almost an insult to call someone a grenadier, for they used that term to evoke a picture of pipeclay, parade-ground formalism and pedantry which belonged firmly in the previous century.

The Light Division was fortunate at this time in having some exceptional commanding officers and these men did much to adapt its tactics
during this final phase of the Peninsular War. Colonel John Colborne, recovered from his Ciudad Rodrigo wounds, was back at the head of the 52nd (often conspiring with Harry Smith to do things their own way rather than Skerrett’s), and Andrew Barnard enjoyed a high reputation after his shrewd handling of the 1st/95th at Vitoria.

Barnard had that inner confidence, arising from education, wealth and political connections, that Alexander Cameron had clearly lacked when in command of the battalion. At forty, Barnard was no youngster, and had entered the 95th only three years earlier after a long career in the line infantry. The Rifles officers were very hard to impress, being convinced they knew their business best, but Barnard succeeded by becoming an enthusiastic apostle of light troops and the rifle. As a representative of a significant Anglo-Irish family, he also had a familiar relationship with Wellington (often the prickliest of customers), which in turn made him the kind of advocate the regiment needed.

Late in July, Soult attacked in the direction of Pampluna, surprising British brigades in several places and forcing Wellington back. After the initial setbacks, the British commander rallied his divisions and began pressing in on the French. Following days of hard fighting, with both sides having little food, Marshal Soult resolved to head back into France by a different route to the pass he had entered by. He turned his forces northwards and sent them towards a village called Yanzi.

The Light Division had not been involved in the early stages of this, but was sent to try to intercept the French withdrawal. The last two days of July and 1 August were thus ones of hideous marching for General Alten’s men. The retreat of an enemy down a narrow mountain valley could not be overtaken and intercepted by moving along an equally easy path: it required the Light Division to haul themselves up precipitous ridges and across deep valleys in what was still high summer. In short, the terrain forced the pursuers to work twice as hard as the pursued. This was to prove a death march for several Light Division soldiers, who succumbed to exhaustion, dying by the sides of dusty shepherds’ tracks. After an infernally hot march of thirty miles across the peaks, scouts sighted the French at Yanzi, and Alten urged his 1st Brigade to make one last effort to reach them. They came upon the French in faltering light, across a river, and evidently just as hungry and exhausted as they were. Some of the riflemen began shooting – and it was very easy shooting, for the French were hemmed in by a rock face, crowded
along the banks of a fast-flowing mountain river. There was utter panic in their ranks: litters bearing injured soldiers were dropped by their porters; men were trampled underfoot; others, tipped into the river by the scrum, disappeared under its waters. It was every man for himself, one Rifles officer being shocked to observe that some French dragoons ‘actually flogged the infantry with their sabres to drive them before the rearguard’. ‘Happily, and to the honour of the British soldiers,’ wrote Costello, ‘many of our men, knowing that the French suffered from what they had themselves endured, declined firing, and called out to the others to spare them, as it was little better than murder.’

The following day, after hundreds of French prisoners were taken, their divisions were escorted through the pass of Vera, back onto their side of the border. The Rifles were involved in a brief but sharp skirmish to retake one of the heights dominating the Spanish side of that gateway. This mountain, the Santa Barbera, became their home for some weeks.

A quiet interlude for the Light Division then followed as Wellington and Soult’s attention switched to the coast, where the besieged imperial garrison in San Sebastian was holding out stubbornly. The British meanwhile advanced their batteries and trenches around the fortresses, just as they had at Rodrigo and Badajoz.

On 20 August, an appeal reached the Light Division for 250 volunteers to take part in a storming party. This was to prove an interesting test of the men’s moral state and the degree to which the wounds of Badajoz had healed. When faced with the possible storms of some redoubts in Salamanca, in June 1812 (ten weeks after Badajoz), the Light Division’s officers had been obliged to nominate men, since it was clear there would be virtually no volunteering. Thirteen months later there had been some change, but for the great majority of those survivors who had sailed in May 1809, there was no desire to go, or need to prove themselves.

Sergeant Robert Fairfoot, having volunteered four times in 1812 for these desperate duties, did not go to San Sebastian, the livid crater on his forehead testifying to the closeness of his brush with death at Badajoz. It was only in one or two cases, such as that ‘wild untamable animal’ Private James Burke – who saw the chance for rape and plunder – that there was a strong desire to repeat the Badajoz experience. With officers it was a little different, the requirement of honour dictating that they aspire in principle at least to this most dangerous of
duties. As George Simmons wrote, ‘It is a melancholy thing to be a junior lieutenant in such times as these, because the senior claims the first offer. Whenever a party is detached upon such an occasion, our boys are so proud of it that, according to seniority, they would not think of letting it pass them.’ In truth, though, neither of the officers who went from the 95th were original members of the battalion.

The division’s stay at Vera allowed dozens of officers to sit down to dinner together on 25 August, celebrated as the 95th’s founding day. The feast took place in a field, with trenches cut to form benches and the ground itself forming a natural table. The bands played, songs were sung and vast quantities of wine drunk.

Those last days of the summer of 1813 were marked by the frequent echoing of the battering guns at San Sebastian through the peaks. Everyone was aware that, for the time being, the outcome of the siege would determine when they would move forward, attacking the Bidassoa line of defences that stared them in the face. Marshal Soult, though, was determined to try one last effort in favour of the besieged garrison, just as he had at Pampluna in July. A series of battles thus raged on the lower Bidassoa, close to the sea, at the end of August. One French division, having struck into Spain and finding its line of retreat blocked, was forced to attempt a different route back to safety: it approached the Vera pass late on 31 August.

General Skerrett had left two companies of Rifles, under Captain Cadoux of the 2nd Battalion, down at the bridge to secure it, and it was against these hundred or so defenders that General Lubin-Martin Vandermaesen flung thousands of troops on the night of 31 August. The French, several battalions of whom approached the bridge through driving rain at 2 a.m., knew that the defenders were all that stood between them and captivity. The riflemen, however, managed to hold their positions in barricaded houses at the bridgehead as Vandermaesen led his men in one attack after another.

The gunfire woke the remainder of the Light Division, who were on higher ground. Despite the remonstrations of his staff, General Skerrett refused to send any reinforcement to the bridge. The chance to cut off thousands of French was lost, along with the Rifle company commander and sixteen of his men. The French finally forced their way across, but paid a heavy price of around two hundred troops, including Vandermaesen himself, who was at the head of his troops when shot dead by a British rifleman. This affair caused lasting rancour
between the Rifles and Skerrett, whom they blamed for utter incompetence in failing to reinforce Cadoux.

The battles of July and August had taught Marshal Soult a lesson too. His experience of the British Army during the Peninsular War had been limited before the late summer of 1813. But when fighting it in the Pyrenees, he was deeply shocked by the effect that accurate rifle and skirmisher fire had in blunting the success of his attacks. The quality of the British marksmen – not just the 95th, for such weapons and tactics had been adopted in various parts of the Army by this point – had shown Soult that his divisions would be decapitated almost as soon as their officers tried to lead them into battle. Soult told the Minister of War in Paris about the British light troops:

Soult’s lesson in the new ways of war was not over yet, though. Just as the Light Division had pioneered new levels of marksmanship, so its style of movement under fire would prove an important ingredient in the battle for the Bidassoa line. The French in San Sebastian had finally surrendered on 8 September, after weeks of heroic resistance. Wellington was now ready to breach Soult’s defences and enter France. This would require some preparation, and on 7 October the Light Division was given a mission vital to the opening of the Vera pass. They would have to storm some of the French lines at the mouth of this natural gateway, positions that dominated Santa Barbera, their resting place of the previous weeks.

Early in the morning the Light Division columns began moving out of Vera and up the slopes to the left of the feature towering above them, La Rhune. Right Brigade, including the 1st and 3rd of the 95th, the 43rd and some Portuguese rangers, all under Kempt, would attack a ridge on the right of La Rhune. Left Brigade, appropriately enough, would hit, to the left of them, a stone-built redoubt called Saint Benoit which dominated the narrow road up into the pass. Colonel Colborne had taken over acting command of this brigade, Skerrett having gone away sick.