Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters (42 page)

143 ‘Lieutenant Colonel Colborne led his column forward’: G. C. Moore Smith’s life of Colborne contains extensive details of this enterprise.

144 ‘Corporal Robert Fairfoot had joined the party’: this emerges from Fairfoot’s service record in the 2nd Battalion Description Book for 1830, WO25/559.

– ‘What’s that drunken man doing?’: Moore Smith again.

145 ‘Yer honour, I’ll lend him my greatcoat if ye’ll allow me’: Costello.

– ‘Uniacke enjoyed his men’s renown for his handsome looks and athletic prowess’: e.g. Costello. Others make mention of him too, like Harry Smith and Simmons.

– ‘His mother had long been a widow, and her survival and that of John’s eight siblings depended on his remittances from the Peninsula’: details of Uniacke’s family circumstances emerge in WO 42/47U3, an application by Mrs Uniacke for a pension.

146 ‘When that young subaltern eventually reached the battalion, on 13 January, he exhibited the whey face’: Gairdner’s journal, NAM MSS 6902-5-1.

148 ‘Gairdner, another officer, and thirty men were sent down to their position at about 8 p. m.’: details of this operation and the subsequent quotation are in a letter to his father of 19 January 1812, NAM MSS 7101-20.

149 ‘the Royal Wagon Train supported by the
mounted
14th Light Dragoons’: these words come from
Rambles along the Styx
, by Lieutenant Colonel Leach, London, 1847. This work, a curious combination of fact and fiction, takes the form of dialogues between old soldiers in the after-life. Leach suggests this wind-up was perpetrated on a volunteer just before Ciudad Rodrigo. I cannot be completely sure it was Gairdner, hence my weasel ‘it would seem’, but the circumstantial details fit neatly with Gairdner’s arrival during the siege.

150 ‘Craufurd and Picton did not intend to throw their divisions forwards in the usual order’: these details of the Light Division storming arrangements from Verner.

– ‘while the subaltern commanding the forlorn hope may look for death or a company’: Kincaid,
Random Shots
.

151 ‘The advantage of being on a storming party’: Kincaid,
Adventures
.

– ‘Move on, will you, 95th? or we will get some who will!’: Moore Smith, Colborne recalled that Craufurd ‘squeaked out’ this insult, an example of the pitch in his voice produced by anger.

– ‘Go back, sir, and get others; I am astonished at such stupidity’: Simmons.

152 ‘Look there, Fitz, what would our mothers say, if they saw what was preparing for us?’: FitzMaurice.

– ‘Soldiers! the eyes of your country are upon you’: these words of Craufurd’s come from Costello, written long after the event. It seems a little surprising that none of the other Light Division diarists recorded them at the time, but on the other hand it is likely that he would have said something inspiring to his men.

– ‘I mounted with a ferocious intent’: Kincaid,
Adventures
.

153 ‘Gurwood was making his way up one of the ladders when he was either thrown or knocked off’: Smith.

– ‘Looking up in the murk, they could see the mouth of a cannon facing down and across the breach’: Green.

– ‘When the battle is over, and crowned with victory, he finds himself elevated for a while into the regions of absolute bliss’: Kincaid at his descriptive best.

154 ‘broke into different squads, which went in different directions’: Costello.

– ‘If I had not seen it, I never could have supposed that British soldiers would become so wild and furious’: John Cooke, of the 43rd, from
A
True Soldier and Gentleman
, the version edited by Eileen Hathaway and published by her Shinglepicker Press, 2000. Cooke records the unfortunate private as Evans.

– ‘What, sir, are you firing at?’: Kincaid,
Adventures
.

156 ‘We marched over the bridge dressed in all variety of clothes imaginable’: Costello.

– ‘I walked around the ramparts that morning at daybreak’: Gairdner MS letter, dated 19 January, but like many officers in these campaigns, he started the letter on that day and finished it, with various postscripts, somewhat later.

– ‘The general’s coffin was borne by sergeant majors from each of the Light Division’s battalions’: from the account by G. R. Gleig, published in
The Gem
, London, 1829.

157 ‘some Light Division men marching straight through a great slushy puddle’: this is Gleig again, speculating about the soldiers’ motivation on the basis of a few days with the Army since he had only joined during the siege. Personally I’m sceptical, but the muddy puddle has been a part of many subsequent accounts of Craufurd. Gleig’s account is generally colourful, almost to the point of Victorian high camp.

– ‘He is a man of a very extraordinary temper and disposition’: Somerset’s letter to his brother, 22nd January 1812, Beaufort Papers FmM 4/1/8.

– ‘His honour guard was formed of several dozen men of the 3rd Company’: Gairdner MS Journal.

– ‘Fairfoot assured the priest that Uniacke was Irish’: this fascinating anecdote was first published in F. M. FitzMaurice’s
Recollections of a
Rifleman’s Wife at Home and Abroad
, London, 1851. Mrs FitzMaurice was the wife of John, who was serving at the time of Uniacke’s funeral as a subaltern in his company.

– ‘an evasion made necessary by the British laws against Papists holding commissions’: the laws concerning Catholics holding officers’ rank had been modified away from an absolute ban in the last decades of the eighteenth century. However, it was to be some time before they were formally allowed to be commissioned and so a system of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ had emerged. I am grateful to Dr Rory Muir for bringing to my attention an article in the
English Historical Review
, Vol. 70, 1955, on ‘Roman Catholics holding Military Commissions in 1798’, for a description of this state of affairs.

158 ‘There had been around two dozen turncoats serving the French garrison there’: Green puts the figure as high as forty. I’m sceptical that it was that high, given the numbers of men returned in the previous months as having deserted. On the other hand, the 1st/95th returned five deserters in November and December 1811 and with Mills, McInnes, Hogdson and Almond accounted for, that still leaves one rifleman who either died in the siege or successfully escaped.

159 ‘Murphy of the 95th had been sentenced to six months’: this emerges in General Orders, the court martial having taken place on 5 January 1812. Neither Murphy nor the man he killed seems to have been a 1st Battalion man.

159 ‘The court having considered the evidence’: General Orders.

– ‘Miles Hodgson of the 95th was among those saved’: this emerges in Costello, who gives an account of Hodgson’s later wounding in battle. It was Surtees who said McInnes was seduced into desertion.

– ‘everyone was pretty much agreed that they would get what was due to them’: those who showed no compassion towards the deserters included Green and Simmons.

– ‘Some held that the deserters had fought twice as well as any Frenchers’: Surtees reports these feelings among the soldiers. To me, the tale of the soldiers taunting their former comrades in English during the storm has the whiff of an urban myth about it. None of the many diarists reported hearing such calls, first person, and the fondness for morbid tales around the camp fire (described by such Light Division types as Kincaid, Cooke and Hennell) probably accounts for these claims.

160 ‘They soon after appeared, poor wretches, moving towards the square’: Surtees.

– ‘Oh, Mr Smith, put me out of my misery’: Smith. Given his unpleasant role in these proceedings, Smith’s omission of any mention of his duty as prosecutor in the subsequent trial of Almond is curious.

161 ‘Joseph Almond had been captured by a patrol of Spanish guerrillas’: Costello, who provides the basis for much of this section.

162 ‘The Court having duly considered the evidence’: General Orders, 7 March 1812.

– ‘the execution could not be carried out until these several pounds had been received’: Kincaid.

165 ‘This had the desired effect; and the field pieces were withdrawn into the fort’: Leach,
Rough Sketches
.

166 ‘He’d developed a thirst for action that, on that very day, got him promoted to sergeant’: the date of the promotion and the fact of Fairfoot’s volunteering for the Picurina storm emerge from the description book WO25/559; Brotherwood’s volunteering emerges in Harry Smith’s autobiography.

– ‘Damn your eyes!’: Smith, evidently one of those who heard the story from Brotherwood himself.

– ‘the Russian army is 400 thousand strong’: Cameron’s friend wrote his letter on 15 May, a little later, but war with Russia was confidently expected by many in the Peninsular army. The letter resides in the Cameron Head Papers at the Highland Region Archive office in Inverness.

167 ‘Major O’Hare … greeted the returnees, including Sergeant Esau Jackson’: Costello. This is my favourite O’Hare anecdote.

– ‘Private Thomas Mayberry was one of those readying himself for the moment’: Harris is the source of this story and of the quotation about Mayberry being held in contempt.

– ‘one of those wild untamable animals that, the moment the place was carried, would run to every species of excess’: Kincaid on Burke,
Random Shots
. His Kilkenny origins emerge from the muster rolls.

168 ‘The more the danger, the more the honour’: this phrase was used by Simmons in a letter home late in 1810. He wrote it inside inverted commas, suggesting that it was a common saying in the Army at the time.

– ‘so great was the rage for passports to eternity in our battalion’: another nice turn of phrase from Kincaid,
Adventures
.

– ‘Lieutenant Willie Johnston would not be put off’: Kincaid,
Random
Shots
.

– ‘He insisted on his right as going as senior lieutenant’: this comment on Harvest comes from Surtees, but Cooke of the 43rd also mentions his conduct.

169 ‘One subaltern of the 43rd chanced upon Horatio Harvest’: Cooke.

– ‘Bell … had joined the 1st/95th in February, just after Rodrigo, with two other subalterns’: the arrival of these three officers (Bell, Austen and Foster) is mentioned in the monthly return, 25th February 1812, WO 17/217. The return lists officers in order of seniority within each rank, hence the comment about Bell’s superiority to Kincaid.

– ‘Lieutenant Bell chose this moment to complain of feeling sick’: Bell’s feigning illness is reported in a letter from James Gairdner, part of the NAM MS, and will be dealt with more fully in the next chapter.

– ‘O’Hare was ill at ease. Captain Jones, of the 52nd, asked him’: this exchange is quoted by Costello, who couldn’t resist morbid portents of this kind.

171 ‘A lieutenant colonel or cold meat in a few hours’: O’Hare’s comment is quoted by Simmons and has been seized upon, quite rightly I think, by various historians as an extraordinary expression of the fatalism prevalent among these men.

– ‘Instantly a volley of grape-shot, canister, and small arms poured in’: Costello.

– ‘What a sight! The enemy crowding the ramparts’: Cooke of the 43rd.

172 ‘Lieutenant James Gairdner fell on this slope’: Gairdner MS Journal. – ‘the musket ball hit the peak of his cap, going through it into his left temple’: this is described by Green and the injury appears in WO 25/559.

172 ‘No going to the rear for me’: Harris.

173 ‘Another man of ours (resolved to win or die)’: Kincaid,
Random Shots
.

– ‘French troops were standing upon the walls taunting and inviting our men to come up and try again’: Cooke.

– ‘Why don’t you come into Badajoz?’: William Napier’s
History
.

174 ‘In the awful charnel pit we were then traversing’: Kincaid,
Random
Shots
.

– ‘The men were not so eager to go up the ladders as I expected them to be’: Hennell in a letter home dated 5 April 1812, but with postscripts describing that awful night. Hennell had been sent to the 94th as a volunteer and, for his heroic conduct at Badajoz, was commissioned as an ensign in the 43rd.

176 ‘Major Cameron walked slowly and deliberately up and down the ranks of riflemen’: this scene is described by Kincaid,
Random Shots
.

177 ‘who by this time were tolerably drunk’: Costello.

– ‘I hear our soldiers in some instances behaved very ill’: Hennell’s comments were made in letters – the best kind of record. I’ve used the volume edited by Michael Glover throughout.

178 ‘Every atom of furniture was broken and mattresses ripped open in search of treasure’: Cooke.

179 ‘O’Hare’s property at home was more substantial’: PROB 6/189 Acts of Administrations. The
£
20 figure comes from the register of Officers’ Effects.

180 ‘in place of the usual tattoo report of all present, it was all absent’: Kincaid,
Random Shots
.

181 ‘The defences on the tops of the breaches ought to have been cleared’: Kincaid,
Random Shots
.

– ‘They blamed Wellington and his engineers’: Verner discovered some interesting, if unsourced, evidence of this, an angry comment about Wellington, clearly from a Light Division veteran, scribbled in the margins of a Rifles memoir.

– ‘I was before this last action sixth from the top of the Second Lieutenants’: Gairdner MS letter, 25 April 1812.

– ‘This regimental havoc will give me promotion’: this was Lieutenant Robert Fernyhough quoted in Thomas Fernyhough,
Military Memoirs of
Four Brothers
, London, 1829. Although Fernyhough served in the 95th, this is the only quotation of his I have used in this book. His record of service was in fact a series of missed opportunities and illnesses that resulted in him missing every significant moment of the regiment’s campaigns.