Rifles - Mark Urban [184]
– ‘Soldiers! the eyes of your country are upon you’: these words of Craufurd’s come from Costello, written long after the event. It seems a little surprising that none of the other Light Division diarists recorded them at the time, but on the other hand it is likely that he would have said something inspiring to his men.
– ‘I mounted with a ferocious intent’: Kincaid, Adventures.
153 ‘Gurwood was making his way up one of the ladders when he was either thrown or knocked off’: Smith.
– ‘Looking up in the murk, they could see the mouth of a cannon facing down and across the breach’: Green.
– ‘When the battle is over, and crowned with victory, he finds himself elevated for a while into the regions of absolute bliss’: Kincaid at his descriptive best.
154 ‘broke into different squads, which went in different directions’: Costello.
– ‘If I had not seen it, I never could have supposed that British soldiers would become so wild and furious’: John Cooke, of the 43rd, from A True Soldier and Gentleman, the version edited by Eileen Hathaway and published by her Shinglepicker Press, 2000. Cooke records the unfortunate private as Evans.
– ‘What, sir, are you firing at?’: Kincaid, Adventures.
FIFTEEN The Reckoning
156 ‘We marched over the bridge dressed in all variety of clothes imaginable’: Costello.
– ‘I walked around the ramparts that morning at daybreak’: Gairdner MS letter, dated 19 January, but like many officers in these campaigns, he started the letter on that day and finished it, with various postscripts, somewhat later.
– ‘The general’s coffin was borne by sergeant majors from each of the Light Division’s battalions’: from the account by G. R. Gleig, published in The Gem, London, 1829.
157 ‘some Light Division men marching straight through a great slushy puddle’: this is Gleig again, speculating about the soldiers’ motivation on the basis of a few days with the Army since he had only joined during the siege. Personally I’m sceptical, but the muddy puddle has been a part of many subsequent accounts of Craufurd. Gleig’s account is generally colourful, almost to the point of Victorian high camp.
– ‘He is a man of a very extraordinary temper and disposition’: Somerset’s letter to his brother, 22nd January 1812, Beaufort Papers FmM 4/1/8.
– ‘His honour guard was formed of several dozen men of the 3rd Company’: Gairdner MS Journal.
– ‘Fairfoot assured the priest that Uniacke was Irish’: this fascinating anecdote was first published in F. M. FitzMaurice’s Recollections of a Rifleman’s Wife at Home and Abroad, London, 1851. Mrs FitzMaurice was the wife of John, who was serving at the time of Uniacke’s funeral as a subaltern in his company.
– ‘an evasion made necessary by the British laws against Papists holding commissions’: the laws concerning Catholics holding officers’ rank had been modified away from an absolute ban in the last decades of the eighteenth century. However, it was to be some time before they were formally allowed to be commissioned and so a system of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ had emerged. I am grateful to Dr Rory Muir for bringing to my attention an article in the English Historical Review, Vol. 70, 1955, on ‘Roman Catholics holding Military Commissions in 1798’, for a description of this state of affairs.
158 ‘There had been around two dozen turncoats serving the French garrison there’: Green puts the figure as high as forty. I’m sceptical that it was that high, given the numbers of men returned in the previous months as having deserted. On the other hand, the 1st/95th returned five deserters in November and December 1811 and with Mills, McInnes, Hogdson and Almond accounted for, that still leaves one rifleman who either died in the siege or successfully escaped.
159 ‘Murphy of the 95th had been sentenced to six months’: this emerges in General Orders, the court martial having taken place on 5 January 1812. Neither Murphy nor the man he killed seems to have been a 1st Battalion man.
159 ‘The court having considered the evidence’: General Orders.
– ‘Miles