Rifles - Mark Urban [144]
Harispe ordered a general withdrawal of his division, for there were other British formations advancing on his flanks and he needed to disentangle himself. With the enemy streaming back, the British buglers sounded the recall and Barnard’s companies formed up in case the French changed their minds and resumed the attack. Wellington rode up to see the 1st Battalion on top of the ridge, telling them, ‘Ah, there you are, as usual, just where you should be; not gone too far.’
Barnard found the general and insisted that he should come further, for there had been a great slaughter of the attacking French. Wellington told him, ‘Well, Barnard, to please you, I will go, but I require no novel proof of the destructive fire of your Rifles.’ The 95th’s officers were quite taken aback by the casualties: ‘The loss of the enemy from the fire of our Rifles was so great that one could not believe one’s eyes. I certainly had never seen the dead lie so thick, nor ever did, except subsequently at Waterloo.’
It is unclear exactly how many men the French lost. Official French returns indicate only around 180 killed and wounded. The Rifles officers, though, were adamant that the numbers had been substantial. Their estimates ranged from asserting that the French suffered as many casualties as the entire number of riflemen engaged (over a thousand) to suggestions that they had suffered double the British losses (those being 111 officers and men, killed and wounded), an estimate not so hard to reconcile with the official French figures. It is quite possible, though, that French casualties may have reached three or even four hundred, Lieutenant James Gairdner commenting in his journal, ‘I never saw on any occasion so many men killed by skirmishers as the enemy lost on this occasion.’
Although the French Army was pretty well knocked up by this point in the campaign, the importance of the engagement at Tarbes was that it was the 95th’s own battle – a mass employment of Rifles which involved taking an entrenched position by frontal assault and then withstanding a countercharge by enemy assault columns. There had been no partnership with the 43rd or 52nd at Tarbes, as in so many other battles. It thus marked the final emphatic vindication of the 95th’s tactics and methods of the Peninsular War.
‘On the 20th the Army advanced near Tarbes and we had quite a 95th affair,’ Barnard wrote to Cameron, his predecessor as commanding officer.
I assure you the rifles were laid very strait … the enemy lost as many men as I think it possible to be knocked over in so short a time – the beauty of the business was that we were formed and ready for another attack in a few minutes. Lord W. saw the whole business and was most pleased with the rapidity with which the corps made its attacks and equally so with the quickness with which they got together when it was over.
Lest this seem too much like the 95th trumpeting its own achievement, it is worth quoting the views of a British officer from another regiment who was attached to the Portuguese army at the time of Tarbes:
I never saw such skirmishers as the 95th, now the Rifle Brigade. They could do the work much better, and with infinitely less loss than any other of our best light troops. They possessed an individual boldness, a mutual understanding, and a quickness of eye, in taking advantage of the ground, which taken together, I never saw equalled.
George Simmons, in agony from his smashed knee, was taken back to Tarbes in a wagon with some other casualties. There, to his delight, he found that his brother Maud had been appointed the town major. Maud soon installed George in the best lodgings at his disposal. The two brothers were to spend weeks together there as Wellington’s Army marched towards the last