Rifles - Mark Urban [14]
It was at this point that the second echelons of Lapisse and Sebastiani’s divisions came into play: fresh troops with an unbroken formation. What was worse for the British was that two regiments of enemy dragoons were also close at hand. As the horsemen careered into the clumps of redcoats streaming across the ochre plain they began sabreing them mercilessly. Two battalions of the German Legion, mercenaries serving the British crown under mostly Hanoverian officers, got the full impact. In rushing forward, the Legion had lost all formation or order. Once cavalry appeared there was no way they could be rallied into the virtually impregnable defensive square. Half of this Legion brigade of 1,300 men were lost, even the brigade commander paying with his life for his moment of impetuous pursuit.
The survivors among Sherbrooke’s battalions came running back to their own lines, exhausted, many bearing sabre wounds, and prepared to meet a fresh French assault. This, somehow, they succeeded in seeing off. Sherbrooke’s division ended the day with almost 1,700 killed, wounded and captured; the opposing French suffered similar losses despite their much greater initial numbers. The Battle of Talavera concluded with a British victory, but with heavy losses that Wellesley felt he could ill afford.
The lessons of Sherbrooke’s fight would seem to have justified most of the British Army’s orthodoxies: effective musketry could only be delivered at very short range; at these distances fire achieved its devastating effect with a blast like a ship’s broadside, not with each man aiming; skirmishers capering about, trying to choose their own targets with inherently inaccurate weapons, would never decide the outcome of a battle between two forces of infantry formed in battle lines; steadiness was everything and to keep men in line required the maintenance of fierce discipline; once infantry lost their formation, they could be easily annihilated by charging infantry or cavalry. All of these principles, strongly held by Wellesley and his fellow generals, seemed to offer only an incidental role in battle for the Rifles.
The 95th set out on the morning of 29 July from Oropesa, where they’d rested for two or three hours, for a five-hour march to Talavera. One young officer recorded that over ‘the last ten miles the road was covered with Spanish wounded and fugitive soldiers’.
The final stage of the march saw the men struggling forward against the incline. Their leather straps cut into shoulders, the stock or collar on their necks partially throttled them. Within an hour or two of starting, tongues were lolling about parched mouths, and haversacks bobbing on top of sweat-soaked backs. As the battalion halted for a moment by a fetid pool, garnished with cow dung, many fell flat on their bellies and lapped at the greenish water like animals.
When Craufurd’s column appeared near Talavera around 7 a.m., it was cheered by the exhausted British battalions that remained on the field after a battle that had left something like twelve thousand men of the two sides dead or wounded. In some places the dry grass had caught fire, touched off by the smouldering cartridge papers, and many wounded men, unable to crawl away, had been badly burned.
Few of the French soldiers witnessed the scene on the 29th, for they had pulled back several miles from the battlefield. Wellesley wasted little time in pushing forward Craufurd’s brigade to secure this new front, as surgeons and stretcher parties struggled to answers the plaintive cries of the wounded.
While the 95th had not tasted battle on the 28th, they most certainly saw its bloody consequences, one of the new soldiers remarking, ‘The horrid sights were beyond anything I could have imagined. Thousands dead and dying in every direction … and, I am sorry to say, Spaniards butchering the wounded Frenchmen