Rifles - Mark Urban [130]
Less than a month after Vitoria, the Light Division men marched within view of these fortifications and were duly impressed. They knew that if they were called upon to storm the forts, it would be warm work, for a soldier lumbering slowly up a mountainside would be exposed to enemy fire for far longer than those who had broken the French line at San Millan or taken Arinez. One officer of the 43rd wrote home, ‘By throwing up redoubts on the heights one regiment may hold up an entire army.’
There were obvious parallels with the lines of Torres Vedras, which the pick of Napoleon’s generals had not even dared to attack. Perhaps the French saw it as a chance to inflict a Busaco on Wellington too. Attacking this system, though, was a bigger prospect than that ridge in Portugal, for the Bidassoa defence line stretched for forty miles southeast, from the Bay of Biscay into the high mountains. Marshal Soult predicted that his enemy would suffer 25,000 casualties breaking the line. He issued patriotic edicts, exhorting his men to prevent the English setting foot on the ‘sacred soil of France’.
Wellington’s concerns were first and foremost to find his own defensive positions in this mountainous terrain, for he felt it likely that Soult would try some attacks to relieve the French garrisons left behind inside Spain at Pampluna and San Sebastian. Once these places had been reduced by the Allies, Wellington would have to attack the Bidassoa line.
It became readily apparent as the Army adjusted to its new fighting ground that this work would belong largely to the infantry. Many positions could only be reached by shepherds’ tracks, making them impassable to limbered guns, and the steep slopes were too tricky for mounted troops. ‘Our cavalry therefore and I understand a considerable part of our artillery’, wrote Captain Leach, never missing his chance for a put-down, ‘are living in clover in different towns as snug and as far from the possibility of surprise by the enemy as if they were in England.’
British generals soon discovered other qualities to this new arena of war. The Pyrenees could only be crossed by certain passes and the ridges or mountains separating those could make it very hard to move troops to a threatened sector, if the enemy were able to gain a local surprise. Just as movement along the British or French defensive lines could be very tricky, so too were communications.
The Pyrenean battlefield was therefore one in which every commander would have to be on his mettle. It was unfortunate, then, for the Light Division that the idiocies of the Army hierarchy deprived it of General Vandeleur, the respected commander of its 2nd Brigade at this time. He was replaced by Major General John Skerrett, to whom the brigade major, Captain Harry Smith of the 95th, instantly took exception. ‘My new General,’ wrote Smith, ‘I soon discovered, was by nature a gallant Grenadier, and no Light Troop officer.’ Smith termed him gallant because Skerrett’s personal courage was never in doubt. But for the 95th it was almost an insult to call someone a grenadier, for they used that term to evoke a picture of pipeclay, parade-ground formalism and pedantry which belonged firmly in the previous century.
The Light Division was fortunate at this time in having some exceptional commanding officers and these men did much to adapt its tactics during this final phase of the Peninsular War. Colonel John Colborne, recovered from his Ciudad Rodrigo wounds, was back at the head of the 52nd (often conspiring with Harry Smith to do things their own way rather than Skerrett’s), and Andrew Barnard enjoyed a high reputation after his shrewd handling of the 1st/95th at Vitoria.
Barnard had that inner confidence, arising from education, wealth and political connections, that Alexander Cameron had clearly lacked when in command of the battalion. At forty, Barnard was no youngster, and had entered the 95th only three years earlier after a long career in the line infantry. The Rifles officers were very hard to impress, being convinced they knew their