Rifles - Mark Urban [109]
At the end of the march, the battalion would arrive in its bivoauc for the night:
The alarm post or place of general assembly having been pointed out to every one, the men were dismissed; the arms were piled, the cooking immediately commenced, and all further parades dispensed with for the day, except a rollcall about sunset.
During all of this wearing out of shoe leather, Wellington had been trying to bring his enemy, Marshal Auguste Marmont, to battle; he, meanwhile, wanted to turn the tables by exploiting the French Army’s skill at manoeuvre. On 18 July, there was a sharp little skirmish at a place called Castrillo. This engagement did not figure greatly in the story of 1812, nor indeed did the 95th have much to do in it, but it is worth mentioning as it showed the vicissitudes of life on campaign.
The two armies had been marching in parallel across the open country when one of the French divisions turned onto the British line of march and attacked. The British had fallen back for miles across the countryside before Wellington prepared a stand and checked them. During this rush, Lieutenant George Simmons had been obliged to abandon a pack mule. He had begun his campaigns three years earlier on foot, largely to save money, but by July 1812 he had acquired both a riding animal and one for his baggage. The second had received a kick from a stallion, keeled over and died, and Simmons’s servant had not had time to take off all its saddles. Simmons was only grateful that he had not been carrying the company pay-chest on his person, for he was liable for any losses under such circumstances. He had, in any case, lost skins containing a hundred pints of the local wine, sundry other baggage and the mule itself, all to the value of around a hundred dollars. This was pretty much exactly the sum – £20 in English money – that he had been hoping to remit to his father as one of his twice-yearly contributions to his siblings’ education.
‘All these misfortunes coming at once played the devil with me,’ Simmons wrote home; but with the calm of a man who had come unscathed through Badajoz, ‘I took up my pipe and thought to myself that things might have been worse … the life of a soldier is well calculated to make a man bear up against misfortunes.’
As the same engagement came to an end, the British cavalry charged some Frenchmen, driving them off. A trooper of the 14th Light Dragoons captured a French cavalier on his mount in this fight and, seeing the 95th, rode over, wishing to cash in his prize forthwith. He chanced upon Private Costello, his countryman from Queen’s County, and greeted him cordially. Lieutenant Gairdner was standing nearby and was soon drawn into the conversation, as he was able to translate the Frenchman’s plaintive cries. The French dragoon insisted that he would never have been captured if he’d been as well mounted as his Hibernian captor. The trooper turned to Gairdner and said, ‘Than by Jasus Sir, tell him if he had the best horse in France, I would bring him prisoner if he stood to fight me.’ The riflemen all had a good laugh at this Irish bravado. Then it was down to business. What would your Honour give me for his horse? Gairdner, knowing the trooper’s time was short and the Army