Rifles - Mark Urban [141]
Having taken the ridge, but failed to make any progress into Arcangues, the French wheeled up twelve cannon. This powerful battery would support a general attack on Arcangues by thousands of infantry. It took until midday for the French to place their battery, the gunners sliding and falling many times as they wheeled their pieces through the boggy fields.
Seeing the guns about 350 yards away on the ridge, the British knew that effective artillery fire could cost them dear. The 95th’s officers had been trained in a technique for shooting gunners at these extreme ranges: ‘Riflemen may be employed also with great success against field artillery … keeping up a steady fire, the enemy’s guns, if unsupported will soon be obliged to withdraw.’ This tactic had been rarely practised, even during the long years of the Peninsular War, and it required a remarkable degree of skill on the part of the shooters, for firing was rarely considered effective – even with rifles – beyond 100 or 150 yards. Some of the soldiers had done it before, though, against the batteries near Badajoz, for example, and the 43rd’s men were up for it too.
When the French battery opened up, its shells ripped through the dank air and smacked into the church tower, showering shards of masonry onto the men below. However, the French had fired barely half a dozen times when a hail of bullets began to fall among them. The defenders of Arcangues had to tip their muzzles up at an angle in order for the balls to carry all the way up to the ridgeline. But they could see their balls arcing through the sky and adjusted their shot. The French gunners were soon falling. ‘We kept up an incessant discharge of small arms, which so annoyed the French gunners that, during the latter part of the day, they ceased to molest us.’ The artillerymen fled back over to the safe side of the ridge. A general French offensive along the line of the River Nive had been defeated with more than four thousand casualties.
From their vantage point near the church, the Rifles could see some of their dead comrades lying on the Bassussarry hill, and at twilight, some French soldiers approached them. These men were saluted with rifle fire, the men of Leach’s company being determined to drill any dog who came to plunder Corporal Brotherwood or the others. Eventually a French officer came forward waving a white handkerchief, followed by men with shovels. Assuming them to be a burial party, the riflemen held their fire.
Gairdner looked back on the day’s events with considerable anger, noting in his journal, ‘Both Hopwood and myself were too aware of the useless danger we were going to meet to have done it without an order … Hopwood lost his life through the ignorance of the commanding officer and if Colonel Barnard had commanded this day Hopwood, Brotherwood and the other sufferers from the company this day would have been spared.’
The next day, the Light Division re-established its line of outposts on the ridge. There they were saddened to discover that Hopwood and Brotherwood had been stripped of all their belongings by the ‘burial party’ and had no more than a sprinkling of earth on them. Among the rank and file there was much close examination of the men and the place where they had fallen, the tale of how one bullet had killed two fine men being told around many a campfire in the following months.
Reports of the action at Arcangues spread quickly in the Army. The capture of the fourteen Highland Company men was an embarrassment to the 95th of a kind it had not experienced since the Coa more than three years before. One officer of the 43rd, finding himself away from the Light Division a few days later, was asked, ‘whether we had been surprised on 10 December? When assured to the contrary, he assured us that it was generally supposed to be the case … before