Rifles - Mark Urban [110]
Simmons’s loss, or indeed that of the French dragoon, happened in the same affair as Gairdner’s or Costello’s gain. It was all as arbitrary as the flight of bullets, or so it often seemed to them – this sense was summed up in the much-used phrase, ‘the fortunes of war’. It was the way that soldiers rationalised the inexplicable workings of fate and their own powerlessness in the face of them.
The fortunes of war also decreed that the 1st/95th played almost no part in the events of 22 July 1812. Posted on Wellington’s left flank, they observed a little light skirmishing around the middle of the day and were formed up to pursue the flying French as light faltered towards the end of it. In the intervening hours, the fate of Spain had been decided by Wellington’s crushing defeat of Marmont on the battlefield of Salamanca. It was later celebrated as the defeat of forty thousand men in forty minutes, and while not exactly conforming to this propagandistic hyperbole, Wellington’s battle marked his emergence as an offensive commander and one of the great captains of the age. ‘Our division, very much to our annoyance, came in for a very slender portion of this day’s glory,’ wrote a grumpy Kincaid.
With this French defeat, the wrecks of Marmont’s army streamed away from the frontier, pursued by the British, uncovering Madrid. After a march of a couple of hundred miles, Wellington’s Army entered the Spanish capital on 12 August to scenes of hysterical rejoicing. When the British commander left at the end of the month to continue his pursuit of the French Army, the Light Division was among those that remained behind to guard Madrid.
Once in Madrid, the men of the 95th felt they had reached civilisation again. ‘The public buildings are really splendid,’ one Rifles officer wrote in his journal, ‘no abominable dunghills in every direction, like Lisbon.’ More importantly for most of them, there were the women: this interlude was first and foremost a chance to gaze upon well-dressed, cultured, beautiful women. At dances in Gallegos and Ituera a man made do with what was available. For those long starved of female company, the frumpy maidens, occasionally mustachioed, of the Spanish peasantry had sufficed and even proven the stuff of many a romantic fantasy, for a soldier quickly learns to make do under such circumstances. In Madrid, it was a different story entirely.
The guapas were best observed at about 7 p.m. strolling on the Calle Mayor or in the pleasure gardens near the Retiro:
It is here the stranger may examine, with advantage, the costume, style and gait of the Spanish ladies. Their dress is composed of a mantilla or veil, gracefully thrown back over the head; a long-waisted satin body; black silk petticoats fringed from the knee downwards; white silk stockings with open clocks; and kid shoes of white or black.
At public dances twice a week in the assembly rooms of the Calle de Baños and El Principe, they could actually hold hands with these beauties and quadrille or waltz with them. The officers’ pleasure at taking in these sights and sounds was soon tempered by a sense of their own poverty. A fine meal could be had in Madrid, but it would cost you six shillings. The Army was desperately short of coin again and pay was six months in arrears.
The mortification of one well trained in dancing, like James Gairdner, can easily be imagined. He wrote in his journal, ‘I have been very unwell, add to that I never had money for the army has never been worse paid than since we have been here, so that I have not had much pleasure to boast of having