Rifles - Mark Urban [15]
During the next two days, riflemen were posted on picket duty to observe the French scouts. Sometimes they exchanged fire, but to little effect. It took no more than a meal or two for everyone to realise that Wellesley would not be able to supply his army in this position. It was a horribly poor part of Spain, and its slender resources had already been stripped by the French. The British commissaries, inexperienced in operations of this scale, soon showed themselves incapable of acquiring either transport or the required number of rations.
While General Wellesley was deciding on his best course of action, attempts were made to burn hundreds of the putrefying bodies that still littered the field. Recalling this miserable stay, one officer of the 95th remembered that ‘the feelings which constant hunger produces were, however, in some degree counteracted two days after the battle by the insufferable stench arising from hundreds of dead bodies of men and horses still unburied.’
If the battalion’s recent arrivals had now seen a battlefield for the charnel house it was, not a few also took advantage of its fruits, plundering the dead. Second Lieutenant Simmons relieved one fallen Frenchman of his backpack: as an officer he’d not been issued with one, but he’d keenly felt the need for such a contraption during his march.
That dash was already the subject of comment in the brigade and the Army at large. During the last twenty-four hours they had covered something between twenty-nine and thirty miles on atrocious stone-strewn roads that were little better than goat tracks. Their whole journey over the previous twenty-five days was something like 360 miles. Men had dropped dead trying to keep pace with that. The rest of the Army was deeply impressed by this march, so much so that the final day’s mileage was exaggerated as reports circulated on how Craufurd had driven his men onwards.
For Craufurd, though, it had all been futile. He had not made it in time to share in the laurels of a hard-fought general action. Like many officers in Wellesley’s army, he suspected that this campaign would last no longer than the previous one in Iberia – a matter of several months – and then they would be embarked and taken home again, and it was to home that the despondent brigadier’s thoughts turned. Craufurd was a faithful and loving correspondent with his wife Fanny. His letters to her were full of a tenderness and sympathy of which his many detractors would never have imagined him capable. They ended with passages like, ‘God of Heaven bless you, my dearest love, Ever your most affectionate husband, R. C.’ On 31 July he sat down to write her a swift note from his bivouac near Talavera. Noting his brigade’s failure to reach the town in time for the battle, it ended, ‘This will perhaps be a subject of joy to you, though you will at the same time find it natural that it should have mortified us.’ Craufurd’s desire to prove himself and his brigade burned with an undiminished intensity.
THREE
Guadiana
August–December 1809
Early in August the Army redeployed back to the Portuguese frontier. The 95th found itself marching in stages just as harsh as those before the Battle of Talavera. But whereas the chance of meeting the enemy had motivated that earlier struggle, they were now tramping away from him as quickly as their blistered feet and aching legs could carry them. Instead of a shot at glory, they had Craufurd hovering about them, taking the names of men who fell foul of Standing Orders and promising to punish them.
The diary of one company commander read:
3rd August. The whole British Army marched at two this morning to Oropesa where we arrived at 2 p.m. This day’s march excessively severe; being twelve hours on the road; a suffocating heat, clouds of dust and not a drop of water to be got …
5th August. We finished our march this day about 2 p.m. The weather was immoderately hot and a great