Rifles - Mark Urban [105]
Hearing the commotion, Wellington had gone into the town himself on the afternoon of 7 April. Some drunken soldiers, seeing him, raised a glass, calling out, ‘Old Boy! will you drink!’ Returning to his bivouac, the general penned a furious General Order: ‘It is now full time that the plunder of Badajoz should cease … the Commander of Forces has ordered the Provost Marshal into the town, and he has orders to execute any men he may find in the act of plunder, after he shall arrive there.’ He ordered Brigadier Powers and his Portuguese in with fixed bayonets to reassert order. Major Cameron’s hope that the 95th would return in time for the evening roll-call on 7 April had proved a pious one: ‘in place of the usual tattoo report of all present, it was all absent’.
Some men quit the town that night – there was little left worth stealing in any case. They set about plundering the baggage of their own Army, a disciplinary nadir for the British in the Peninsula. Quarter Master Surtees awoke on the 8th to find that ‘they stole no less than eight horses and mules belonging to my battalion, and took them to the other divisions, where they sold them as animals captured from the enemy. I lost on this occasion an excellent little mule, worth at least £20, and for which of course I never obtained a farthing.’
By that morning, Wellington was in a cold rage. Powers’ Portuguese were joining the plunder instead of stopping it. It was time to start hanging the scum. ‘The provost marshal erected a gallows, and proceeded to suspend a few of the delinquents, which very quickly cleared the town of the remainder,’ wrote Kincaid. A further General Order was circulated to the Army, commanding that the muster rolls be read every hour as the marauders came in – for with each missed roll their crime of absence was compounded.
Those few officers of the 95th, like George Simmons, who had emerged from the proceedings without a scratch, now gathered some reliable NCOs and soldiers around them and proceeded to round up their companies. ‘Coercion was necessary on many occasions (with men who had never behaved ill before) and obliged to be resorted to,’ wrote Simmons. ‘The men were made to throw away a quantity of things, and to prevent them secreting any of the articles, their packs were examined, and the plunder that had not been made away with was collected into heaps and burnt.’
Overall, the Light Division had 919 men killed or wounded in the storm of Badajoz, out of total Allied casualties that night of 3,713. The losses for the siege as a whole brought that to more than 4,600.
There was a good deal of anger among the surviving Light Division officers who felt that hundreds of lives had been thrown away on an ill-considered venture. They did not believe it humanly possible for men to have conquered the obstacles set in their way by the French. ‘The defences on the tops of the breaches ought to have been cleared away by our batteries before the assault commenced,’ according to one. They blamed Wellington and his engineers for the failure to think through their plan, or to order light guns to be wheeled forward with the stormers to blast the blades of the chevaux de frises out of the way.
For officers of the Rifles, the anger at the slaughter and the sorrow of loss soon turned to consideration of the vacancies that had opened as a result. Gairdner wrote from his sickbed to his father: ‘I was before this last action sixth from the top of the Second Lieutenants, and there being seven vacancies by deaths I shall of course get my first lieutenancy.’ Another officer put it even more crudely: ‘This regimental havoc will give me promotion.’
There would be one more vacant lieutenancy arising in the regiment from the horrific night of 6 April. It belonged to Thomas Bell. Major Cameron discovered him skulking in his tent the day after the storm. James Gairdner told his father what happened:
One Thomas B– has been kicked out of the regiment for cowardice. On the evening of the sixth when the regiment fell in to march to the attack,