Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (36 page)

Fired up by such eulogies, the public would want to hear more from these unsung heroes. Memoirs had started appearing, and many extolled the valour of the Rifles. Major Blakiston’s, for example, published in 1829, noted, ‘I never saw such skirmishers as the 95th.’

The stage was set for the Rifles to tell their own story. John Kincaid led off in 1830 with
Adventures in the Rifle Brigade
. While many such books had a print run of only two or three hundred copies, Kincaid’s is thought to have been double or treble this figure. Not to be outdone, in 1831, Jonathan Leach, the only officer of the 1st Battalion to have gone uninjured all the way through the events of 1809–14, followed with his
Rough Sketches
. The books sold out almost immediately. Kincaid followed up with
Random Shots from a Rifleman
in 1835. In 1838 the publishers issued a second edition of Kincaid’s Adventures and Leach wrote three more books.

Kincaid and Leach adopted a similar style: laconic, picaresque, heroic in an understated way. Consciously or not, they pandered to their public and its preconceptions about the British character in adversity. They are stirring accounts and the evergreen nature of their appeal is such that it is easy to buy reprints even today. Their philosophy of soldiering neatly dovetailed with the requirements of the market; there were many anecdotes about officers and ordinary riflemen. While avoiding any personal trumpet-blowing of the kind favoured by French diarists, they did not refrain from hyperbole in describing the feats of Wellington’s Army in general or the Light Division in particular. One wrote that ‘there, perhaps, never was, nor ever again will be, such a war brigade’.

In the Kincaid and Leach accounts there was hardly a mention of the flogging that punctuated their marches, and none at all of incidents such as the resignation of the cowardly Lieutenant Bell after Badajoz or the flight of a hundred or so men at the battle of Waterloo. Some other indiscretions, such as the large-scale larceny on the campaigns or the bullying of Second Lieutenant Sarsfield, were briefly recounted, but presented as humorous episodes. The memoirs did discuss the execution of the Ciudad Rodrigo deserters, presenting it as a tough but justified measure, but kept from the reader how many other riflemen deserters had escaped this draconian fate.

The memoir writers were perhaps most guilty of selective memory or indeed hagiography in their treatment of General Robert Craufurd. Both Leach and Kincaid, it is true, acknowledged his unpopularity in a coded way. Neither, however, was willing to share the intense hatred felt for him during the campaigns with their readers. Indeed Leach – one of the general’s bitterest critics – seemed to reverse some of his views in the most perverse way. In 1809 in his (unpublished) journal he had castigated Craufurd for issuing the ‘most
tyrannical
and
oppressive
standing orders
that were ever compiled by a British officer’; but in one of his books of 1835 the same orders were described as ‘most excellent, and extremely well calculated to ensure regularity on the march’.

It is evident that Craufurd grew in the estimation of many Light Division veterans after he had fallen in battle, and Kincaid explicitly said so. This revisionism stemmed in part from negative experiences under other generals, particularly the hopeless Erskine. It seems, however, that the attitudes to their long-dead chief expressed in print were coloured to a great extent by the fact that Craufurd had ascended into a sort of pantheon of national martyrs of the anti-Bonaparte struggle, along with the likes of Sir John Moore and even Nelson. Craufurd had many political friends who saw to it that his reputation was extolled in print, as did Moore. Besmirching his name might have led a Leach or Kincaid into all sorts of difficulties, ranging from a lawsuit from some relative to a duel.

The lionisation of Craufurd took a further turn with the publication of two memoirs from the ranks: Edward Costello’s in 1841 and Benjamin Harris’s in 1848. Both men expressed warm approbation for Black Bob – but both did so with the assistance of gentlemanly ghost writers. Harris, an illiterate, was written up by a former officer in the 52nd and stated, ‘I don’t think the world ever saw a more perfect soldier than General Craufurd.’ Notwithstanding that Harris only served alongside his hero for a few weeks in late 1808 and early 1809, his book was full of anecdote and had a lasting appeal.

Costello at least benefited from being one of those who had gone all the way through from 1809. His memoirs, initially published in a magazine, managed an honesty unmatched in almost all other accounts of the Peninsular War. He freely described the soldiers’ thieving along with their bravery in battle and contempt for skulkers, and he even dealt frankly with the rapes and other crimes committed after the fall of Badajoz.

Leaving aside Costello’s honourable exception, the memoirs, particularly of officers, generally eschewed the sordid or cowardly and extolled the heroic. As one 95th author joined another in print there was a sort of upward spiral of praise for the regiment, with the most effusive panegyrics often coming from those who had been in other corps. Major General Bell, who had served in the 34th alongside George Simmons’s brother Maud, and may well have been influenced by discussions with him, described the 95th, for example, as ‘the most celebrated old fighting corps in the Army or perhaps the world’. By the 1860s, when most of the Peninsular veterans had died, the laudatory parameters for these works had been set – the 95th had achieved legendary status. That said, it is quite possible that the numbers of copies of all of the 95th memoirs put together circulating in, say, 1865 did not exceed twenty thousand.

It took another twenty-five or thirty years, until the end of the nineteenth century, with the Wellingtonian generation long buried, the price of books falling and literacy burgeoning, for the popular appeal of the Rifles’ story really to show itself.

‘A remarkable revival of curiosity in the events of the time of Napoleon has lately arisen,’ wrote one author in a magazine article presenting the reminiscences of an old Rifles man, ‘and there is a romance and interest in the wars of those times which attach to none of the more recent contests.’

The ‘romance’ derived from several factors. Napier had already shrewdly identified that the public ignorance of the Peninsular Army’s years of privation and suffering at the time of the campaigns created a kind of national debt to the veterans. What better way to discharge it than to patronise their writings? In the case of the Light Division or 95th men, the sense of indebtedness was even stronger because they had fought so often and regularly performed their duty against dreadful odds. There was something too about the rifleman’s personal sovereignty – deciding when to fire or when to drop into cover before getting up and charging forward again – that seems to have appealed to British sensibilities.

Kincaid’s
Adventures
were reprinted in 1900 and 1909. George Simmons’s journals and letters were ‘discovered’, edited and printed in 1899. Harry Smith’s memoir was finally published too, having hitherto only existed as a manuscript for circulation within the family. Sir Charles Oman meanwhile fed the interest by publishing the massive
and authoritative
A History of the Peninsular War
, starting in 1902. The growing secondary literature emphasised glory and self-sacrifice, holding Wellington’s Army up as mythic warriors, examples to a nationalistic Britain at the peak of its powers.

The 95th’s specific role in this publishing phenomenon grew out of the popular appeal of their saga. These were not the memoirs of cannon fodder, packed into their red-coated ranks awaiting death, but of spirited individuals who, by slaying a senior French officer or storming a post, somehow made a difference to the tide of history.

Inevitably, as the essence of these first-hand accounts was boiled down by writers or historians who were not present, certain episodes were glossed over or mythologised. Costello, for example, bore an early share of the responsibility for promulgating a widely held view that the men of the 95th were rarely flogged and had somehow escaped the system of brutality that typified the eighteenth-century Army. The early twentieth-century authors often took this rosy picture at face value. As we have seen, though, the desire of the officers who founded the 95th that their men should be spared the lash was to prove no more than a noble aspiration, particularly under Craufurd. But it is also only fair to the general to point out that even regimental officers of the 95th such as Beckwith, Barnard, Cameron and O’Hare, as well as lowly fellows like Lieutenant James Gairdner, all ordered riflemen flogged. In short, riflemen got no special treatment in this regard.

While the 95th were not spared the stick, they were offered various carrots by way of incentive. Some of these, such as the pillage of French convoys, were regarded as the reward due to enterprising fellows in the advance guard. In other respects, though, the acknowledgement of the Rifles officers – particularly Colonel Beckwith – that bathing, football, coursing and races could all make a soldier’s life enjoyable, marked a radical new departure for the Army. Beckwith’s approach in this regard was complemented by a reduction to the minimum of the drills repeated endlessly in other regiments. Many redcoats, for example, practised the ‘manual exercise’ of loading their musket ad nauseam on the drill square but almost never actually fired a cartridge. The 95th, on the other hand, maintained its high standards of marksmanship by constant target practice, even when they were just a few miles from enemy outposts. The fun and games helped build regimental and company spirit and, as Leach and others explicitly pointed out, meant the soldiers were ready to follow Beckwith into hell when the time came.
They also helped maintain physical fitness, an Army preoccupation that can also be said to have begun with the Light Division. As for the marksmanship, it laid the ground for a far more professional attitude to soldiering.

The 95th’s founders also wanted to provide motivation in the shape of promotion and distinction for deserving soldiers. Here too they achieved remarkable results. Robert Fairfoot can be seen as a prototype. His father served almost twenty-nine years in the Army without escaping the rank of private. But young Fairfoot ended his days as a commissioned officer and a perfect model for young riflemen to emulate. William Brotherwood might well also have ended up as a sergeant major or even an officer had he not been killed in 1813. The Rifles did not invent this type of promotion, but in trying to extend it widely, by educating privates and non-commissioned officers, the 95th was quite directly subverting the class system. Conservatives did not like it one bit: Wellington himself commented that this ‘new fangled school mastering’ would be the cause of revolution in England if there ever was one.

The way that the 95th undermined the old social hierarchy during its Iberian campaigns may be seen, along with its innovative tactics, as its most lasting and significant achievement. A life on outposts or in the skirmish line meant officers and soldiers shared the same hardships. A captain of the Rifles or the 52nd usually slept out in the pouring rain, just like his men did. Their position in the advance guard meant they were not allowed the tents and other officers’ camp comforts enjoyed in the eighteenth-century Army or even in many of the other Peninsular regiments. The spirit of mutual respect between battle-hardened soldiers became the cement that held the regiment together and that allowed it to enter battle again and again, to the admiration of so many others in Wellington’s Army.

In the Rifles, a passionate bond emerged between fighting soldiers, and it usually extended to the leaders as well as the led. While such feelings became quite a common hallmark of the twentieth-century experience of war, this was a strange new feeling to men of the early nineteenth century. Costello summed up these feelings admirably when telling the tale of how the soldiers had given their last biscuits to a sobbing toff, eighteen-year-old Second Lieutenant the Honourable Charles Spencer, as they all starved during the retreat to Portugal in November 1812: ‘These are times when Lords find that they are men and men that
they are comrades.’ John Kincaid even referred to the 95th as a ‘band of brothers’.

The bonds were all the stronger between those who came through the 95th’s final trials without succumbing to battle exhaustion or stress. Between August 1813 and the battle of Quatre Bras in June 1815, more than thirty men deserted the 1st Battalion of the 95th, many of them veterans. This marked a significant proportion of those who had survived the Peninsular campaign and set the scene for the flight of something like a hundred rieflemen at Waterloo. Clearly they had been pushed by years of fighting beyond some personal cracking point. But for those who had not – still the majority of the old hands – there was all the more reason to marvel at the depth of their own camaraderie and forbearance.

Officers of the Rifles were unusual, even within the Light Division, in that they often fought with firearms. This was another decided break with custom – for most commissioned men considered the sword to be the only gentlemanly weapon. There were no illusions of this kind in the 95th, particularly among the young subalterns, at least one of whom managed to bayonet a French soldier to death. While all officers died like common soldiers, and those of the Light Division often lived like them, those of the 95th actually
killed
like them too.

Some of the officers did not know how to respond to this subversion of the usual assumptions about the social divide. A man who had raised himself by his bootstraps, like Peter O’Hare, was therefore more likely to respond to carping in the ranks by cuffing the culprit, bellowing obscenities at him or even having him flogged. The officers most respected by the men were those who were comfortable with the exercise of their authority in this relatively informal atmosphere. For their part, these successful leaders – like Simmons, Leach or Harry Smith – lived for the esteem of a soldiery whom others derided as scum. The friendship between Simmons and Fairfoot, it is clear, was lifelong and intense.