Rifles - Mark Urban [16]
6th August. Marched at half past three this morning and did not reach our position until six in the evening. This day’s march was remarkably harassing. Numbers of men of different regts. dropped on the road from excessive fatigue and the heat of the sun.
The mountainous borderland was bare at the best of times, and it could not sustain tens of thousands of hungry soldiers. One evening during that march, with the troops bivoaucking dejectedly in clumps of trees by the roadside, Brigadier Craufurd allowed his Light Brigade soldiers to shoot some pigs rooting around the groves. Mad with hunger, they had instantly set upon the animals, shooting and clubbing them, their death squeals filling the dark forest. The men had little doubt that this herd of swine must belong to somebody and had appreciated Craufurd’s relaxation of the usual strictures against plundering civilians. But if the brigadier was normally a pedant about rules, he was also a man of volatile temper and he had been driven to distraction by the failure of the Army’s commissaries to supply his men.
On 7 August, the Rifles reached Almaraz, a dusty crossroads in the sierra where they were to spend the next two weeks. The importance of the place derived from a bridge across the Tagus, which is sufficiently broad, even this high in its course, to form a serious obstacle to movement. The river’s shape and that of the surrounding peaks made it a key point in both east–west and north–south communications. Although Almaraz had great strategic value, few people lived around the river, so the Rifles’ arrival there did little to ease the supply shortage.
In order to guard the crossing, two companies of the 95th were deployed in turn as pickets, with the remainder of the battalion camped nearby and able to support them, should the French try to rush the place. From the moment they arrived at Almaraz, it became clear to the officers that the swampy ground about the Tagus and the heavy dews made this an unhealthy place, charged with ill vapours and miasmas.
‘Here we remained a miserable fortnight,’ one young lieutenant wrote in his journal, ‘moving at sunset to a damp valley near the river (where the seeds of ague were sown in hundreds) and returning at daybreak to repose under the shelter of some cork trees which indifferently sheltered us from a scorching sun – no regular issue of rations – which never amounted to more than a handful of coarse flour, a little goat’s flesh and neither wine nor spirits.’
The main bivouac, with its precious shade, was on a low hill a few hundred yards back from the river. Officers had chosen this spot because they believed it healthier than the low-lying land. Some of the flour that the men were supplied was actually made from grain, but much of it consisted of ground dried peas. They mixed it with water, and sometimes a little straw for binding, and formed it into little dumplings they called dough boys. They boiled or grilled them on flat stones. As often as not, the dough boys gave them cramps and the flux – but they still failed to sate their hunger. The riflemen named their camp Dough Boy Hill.
Every soldier, from private to captain, had noticed a dramatic change in himself since their disembarkation a little more than a month before. The hot sun had tanned their faces and cracked their lips. Constant marching and poor diet meant their clothes had begun to hang loose on them. One officer, deploying trademark Rifles irony, wrote, ‘If any corpulent person despairs of reducing his weight by the means usually adopted, I strongly recommend a few weeks’ change of air and scene at Almaraz.’
As the 3rd Company men sat one evening looking over the river and trying to stay their hunger pangs, two countrymen who’d volunteered into the 95th from the Leicestershire Militia considered their plight.
‘Bill, I think we shall be kept on this Dough-boy Hill till we shall all die of want,’ said the first.
‘I think so too,’ Private Green replied,