Rifles - Mark Urban [135]
Many of the officers thought that the arrival of heavy frosts and snows would freeze the armies into winter quarters somewhere along the Pyrenean chain. George Simmons had experienced enough of campaigning and being truly wet and cold to yearn for a trip home. ‘I have been thinking of visiting you this winter after the campaign is over and we go into winter quarters … I could have leave when I chose,’ he told his parents. The only obstacle was money. While he felt he might afford the passage on a packet boat, he realised he only owned what he was wearing: ‘There is another consideration – plain clothes, which are very expensive, and I have nothing but military attire, which would make people gaze at me as upon a dancing bear.’
Simmons’s plans, alas, were arrested, and his curiosity about how the English public might react to the sight of a fighting Green Jacket on their streets was not to be satisfied. Early in November it became apparent that Wellington was preparing to force the Bidassoa line proper. For the Light Division, this would mean assaulting the slightly smaller mountain in front of theirs – named La Petite Rhune, appropriately enough – and its system of defences.
Wellington had walked along the forward slope of La Rhune with Colborne, Kempt and Alten, studying the French works on the opposite mountain. In forcing Soult’s entire system of fortifications, this was where he intended to open the ball, with the Light Division in its usual post of honour. To their front was a series of entrenchments on top of La Petite Rhune. The 43rd would be attacking this point. Slightly to the left and rear of that objective was another stone-built redoubt, the Mouiz fort, mounting several cannon, which Wellington wanted attacked by Colborne using the 52nd, 1st/95th, 3rd/95th and some Portuguese.
‘These fellows think themselves invulnerable,’ said Wellington as he studied the French lines in front, ‘but I will beat them out and with great ease.’ Colborne looked at his objective, protected in several places by precipitous rock faces, and replied: ‘That we shall beat them when your Lordship attacks, I have not doubt, but for the ease –’
Wellington cut him short, telling Colborne that the French would be assailed in many places simultaneously and did not have the men to defend all of their battlements. The British commander told Alten to move his division down into the valley between the two Rhune peaks during the hours of darkness, ‘so as to rush La Petite Rhune as day dawned, it would be of vast importance and save great loss’.
At 2 a.m. on 10 November, the Light Bobs were duly served up with the earliest of breakfasts and began filing down to the low ground at the base of their objective. The brigadiers, fearing the enemy would be alarmed, were terrified of some man firing off his musket by accident or losing his way. Both types of misfortune actually happened, rattling everyone’s nerves. ‘That this was an anxious, I might say awful moment may well be believed,’ wrote Leach. Somehow the French did not respond, and as the sun appeared across the peaks to the east, everyone was in their start positions. The 1st/95th and the rest of their column had to pick their way up a