Rifles - Mark Urban [176]
– ‘The French in a second occupied the hill which we left’: Leach MS Journal.
62 ‘Colonel Jean-Pierre Bechaud called out to the grenadiers of his 66ème Régiment’: Capitaine Dumay, Historique du 66e Régiment d’Infanterie (1672–1900), Tours, 1900.
– ‘Captain Ninon, commander of the 82éme’s grenadier company’: Capitaine P. Arvers et al., Historique du 82e Regiment d’Infanterie de Ligne, Paris, 1876, contains a report by Ferey dated 10 September 1810 which relates the grenadiers’ attack.
63 ‘The 95th had accounted for 129 of them: including 12 killed and 54 missing’: Oman.
– ‘all this blood was shed for no purpose whatsoever’: John Cox MS Journal.
– ‘But for Colonel Beckwith our whole force would have been sacrificed’: Harry Smith.
64 ‘The Combat of the 24th proves to [the British] there is no position the French infantry cannot take’: Loison’s report of 26 July, contained in his letterbook in the SHAT Vincennes C 720.
– ‘that a very unusual degree of severity is exercised towards the soldiers’: this letter from the Adjutant General, Harry Calvert, to Wellington, dated 5 January 1810, is cited by Spurrier, apparently from the Wellington Papers at Southampton University.
64 ‘I never thought any good was to be expected from any thing of which General R. Craufurd had the direction’: Charles Gordon, letter of 1 August 1810, in family papers relayed to me by Air Commodore John Tomes.
– ‘If I am to be hanged for it, I cannot accuse a man who I think has meant well’: Wellington to Wellesley-Pole, as above.
65 ‘The command of your advanced guard appears to be founded in more ignorance’: Torrens to Colonel Bathurst (Military Secretary in Wellington’s HQ), 14 August 1810, Spurrier citing WO 3/597.
– ‘reports flew about that Craufurd would any moment be replaced by another general’: Sir Brent Spencer was fancied for the job, according to a letter by Lieutenant Henry Booth, of the 43rd, to his brother in England, 30 July 1810, reproduced in Levinge’s ‘Historical Records of the 43rd’.
SIX Wounded
66 ‘In the churches or barns where Wellington’s few surgeons struggled to cope with the Coa wounded’: the main sources for the first part of this chapter are Simmons, Smith and Costello.
68 ‘The surgeons had neither the time nor opportunity to look after us’: Costello.
69 ‘The people are not worthy of notice. I met with great barbarity all the way’: Simmons sent this letter home on 10 August 1810.
– ‘A lieutenant who had lost an eye or one of his arms could augment his income to the tune of £70 per annum’: see A Gentleman Volunteer, The Letters of George Hennell, ed. Michael Glover, London, 1979. Hennell came out to the Peninsula as a volunteer and was commissioned into the 43rd in 1812. His observations were often deeply perceptive, but we must wait several more chapters before his letters regularly inform this narrative.
– ‘a one-off gratuity of a year’s pay’: several 95th officers were to become eligible for this bounty, by virtue of serious wounds, but remain serving with their regiment. John FitzMaurice, a young subaltern who joined in 1811, on the other hand, went home for a year after being wounded at Badajoz.
70 ‘some got as much as ninepence a day’: this was William Green’s pension. There are various stories of soldiers getting less than this. The awards were usually decided by a board at somewhere like the Royal Hospital (Chelsea or Dublin).
– ‘It was a place noted for every species of skulk’: Costello.
70 ‘Late in the summer of 1810, Brigadier Craufurd wrote to Wellington estimating that’: Craufurd’s letter, 22 October 1810, cited by Spurrier.
– ‘Some of the younger soldiers, benefiting by the instruction given to them by old malingerers’: this was a surgeon called William Gibney, actually describing practices in Chelsea, where the interest in staying in hospital might well have been greater than in Portugal, where Belem barracks was a superior alternative. Gibney is quoted by Dr Martin Howard in Wellington’s Doctors, Spellmount, 2002, a very useful