Rifles - Mark Urban [145]
They wrote home, George reflecting that the French Army’s performance in 1814 had improved somewhat but that ‘Every cock ought to fight better upon its own dung hill.’ Although Marshal Soult had been able to inspire those who stayed within the ranks to fight well, thousands had deserted from the French Army in expectation of the imminent collapse of the Empire.
The brothers managed to lay in large supplies of excellent Bordeaux at one shilling a bottle and spent the evenings talking over the fate of Europe and of the Simmons clan. George proudly showed off an inscribed gold watch that Colonel Barnard had given him in thanks for his nursing after the Battle of the Nivelle. He was relieved that his own wound would not disqualify him from further service.
Maud Simmons was evidently more reconciled to the end of hostilities, telling his parents that ‘peace must shortly bring us together’. George talked of getting back to his regiment and of enlisting in some other country’s army if indeed Bonaparte was really done for. His feelings, and the degree to which he accepted the vicissitudes and simple pleasures of a soldier’s life, were quite unusual. Captain Leach was speaking for far more when he stated, ‘The general and universal feeling … was that, for the present we had had enough of campaigning.’
Those days of late March involved the battalion in another reckoning, one infinitely less to its credit than the combat of Tarbes. The facts were as follows: on 18 March several soldiers had entered a French farmer’s house near the village of Plaisance. When he refused them drink and cash, an argument began and the farmer struck one of the soldiers. This cuff cost the Frenchman his life, for one of the intruders, flying into a fury, killed him on the spot.
When British officers investigated the complaints of the villagers in Plaisance, they soon determined that the criminals were riflemen. ‘We tried every means to find out the villain, but to no purpose,’ wrote one officer. Soldiers were paraded and told that they would all suffer if they did not give up the culprit. There was little chance, however, of intimidating the men. Not only were they grizzled veterans who would be loath to rat on a messmate – they all also knew the strict orders against pillaging the French that had been issued by Lord Wellington. If you handed over a man for this crime, it would be as good as putting him on a rope yourself.
Careful consideration of the timing of the murder led some to suspect the 1st Battalion and, indeed, Leach’s company. Many of the officers, though, chose to blame the crime on the Portuguese and to turn a page on the whole affair. A collection of a hundred guineas was made for the French farmer’s wife; the battalion marched away and the murderer remained undetected. But just as the men of Lieutenant James Gairdner’s platoon had deceived him about the degree of their fraternisation and commerce with the enemy the previous autumn, so some of them were now keeping secret the identity of the murderer and his accomplices within 2nd Company’s ranks.
TWENTY-FOUR
Castel Sarrazin
April–June 1814
Almost a month had passed since Simmons’s wounding at Tarbes when he reached Toulouse. He was still limping heavily, but was fit, in his own view, to rejoin the regiment. There he was able to gaze upon the city’s defences, shattered that April in the battle that marked the final chapter in the Peninsular War. The fight, with its thousands killed and maimed, was doubly futile, since a messenger carrying news of Napoleon’s abdication reached Marshal Soult just too late to stop it happening. Toulouse was another of those large set pieces in which the 95th’s role had not been great.
Simmons pressed on until 20 May, when he reached a town called Castel Sarrazin. There he ‘found the officers living in the gayest manner possible. The people extremely kind to us.’ Those who had spent years living in rude bivouacs, not knowing whether each day would be their last, found an idyll in Sarrazin. They walked