Rifles - Mark Urban [108]
McDearmid, the commander of the 4th Company, was sent home, in theory to recruit, as was Second Lieutenant Tommy Sarsfield. The onetime volunteer had not disgraced himself like Thomas Bell, but Cameron and Kincaid wanted rid of him in any case. The 95th had been so short of subalterns that it had commissioned Sarsfield – but everyone wanted rid of him. Kincaid damned him, saying his only mistake ‘was in his choice of profession’. Colonel Beckwith wrote to Cameron that Sarsfield was ‘not suited to our specie of troop’.
It was a matter of recruiting at home ‘in theory’, because the 9th and 10th Company cadres, posted back more than a year before, had performed poorly in providing the battalion with fresh drafts. Some eighty-eight men sent out from England during 1812 were to be the only replacements of this type during several years of campaigning. Bereft of a man of Stewart or Beckwith’s rank and force of character directing matters in England, the junior officers presiding over the regimental depot achieved little. What’s more, the effective collapse of four companies into a single depot one would help frustrate officers like George Simmons who had believed that the terrible risks they took would be rewarded by ‘a company in five years’. The battalion’s casualties meant three fewer captains’ posts to aspire to.
In trying to make up its losses, the Army resorted at last to a desperate expedient that had been contemplated for some time: it recruited Spaniards from the border country. Initially there had been hopes of finding twelve men per company. The experiment was racked with difficulty from the start, only being attempted in some battalions (including the 95th) and then bedevilled with problems. Since many of the men whom the local authorities clapped hold of were more or less pressed into service against their will, and since local Spanish commanders claimed many of the choice specimens for their own regiments, a great many of these new recruits deserted the British service as soon as they could. It might also be surmised that it was a rare kind of campesino who could adapt to the brutal codes – both official and those self-imposed strictures of the soldiers’ messes – that governed Wellington’s Army. Lazarro Blanco, though, was to prove one of the survivors. He found himself in Leach’s 2nd Company and soon impressed Costello both with his courage in the field and his facility for foul Spanish oaths. Blanco joined the others in the trials of the late summer of 1812.
That June and July was a period of intense marching for the Light Division. They struck out hundreds of miles into the open country of Castile and Leon, marching up through Salamanca, north-east to the River Duero. Having gone all the way there, they doubled back down towards Salamanca as Wellington sought to fight the French on the most advantageous terms, but failed to find them. This slogging was conducted across parched plains in baking midsummer heat. In order to achieve as much as possible before the sun was at its zenith, reveille was sounded earlier and earlier, with many ‘nights’ ending rudely with a blaring of bugles at 1 a.m. Throughout these movements the Light Division’s prowess in marching and manoeuvre was noted by other regiments. An account of their routine by one of the 95th’s company commanders is worth quoting at length both for its detail and its colour:
The march was commenced with precisely the same regularity as would be observed by a regiment or regiments moving into or out of a garrison town; the bands playing, the light infantry with arms sloped, and those of the riflemen slung over the shoulder, the exact wheeling distances of the sections preserved and perfect silence