Rifles - Mark Urban [186]
171 ‘A lieutenant colonel or cold meat in a few hours’: O’Hare’s comment is quoted by Simmons and has been seized upon, quite rightly I think, by various historians as an extraordinary expression of the fatalism prevalent among these men.
– ‘Instantly a volley of grape-shot, canister, and small arms poured in’: Costello.
– ‘What a sight! The enemy crowding the ramparts’: Cooke of the 43rd.
172 ‘Lieutenant James Gairdner fell on this slope’: Gairdner MS Journal. – ‘the musket ball hit the peak of his cap, going through it into his left temple’: this is described by Green and the injury appears in WO 25/559.
172 ‘No going to the rear for me’: Harris.
173 ‘Another man of ours (resolved to win or die)’: Kincaid, Random Shots.
– ‘French troops were standing upon the walls taunting and inviting our men to come up and try again’: Cooke.
– ‘Why don’t you come into Badajoz?’: William Napier’s History.
174 ‘In the awful charnel pit we were then traversing’: Kincaid, Random Shots.
– ‘The men were not so eager to go up the ladders as I expected them to be’: Hennell in a letter home dated 5 April 1812, but with postscripts describing that awful night. Hennell had been sent to the 94th as a volunteer and, for his heroic conduct at Badajoz, was commissioned as an ensign in the 43rd.
SEVENTEEN The Disgrace
176 ‘Major Cameron walked slowly and deliberately up and down the ranks of riflemen’: this scene is described by Kincaid, Random Shots.
177 ‘who by this time were tolerably drunk’: Costello.
– ‘I hear our soldiers in some instances behaved very ill’: Hennell’s comments were made in letters – the best kind of record. I’ve used the volume edited by Michael Glover throughout.
178 ‘Every atom of furniture was broken and mattresses ripped open in search of treasure’: Cooke.
179 ‘O’Hare’s property at home was more substantial’: PROB 6/189 Acts of Administrations. The £20 figure comes from the register of Officers’ Effects.
180 ‘in place of the usual tattoo report of all present, it was all absent’: Kincaid, Random Shots.
181 ‘The defences on the tops of the breaches ought to have been cleared’: Kincaid, Random Shots.
– ‘They blamed Wellington and his engineers’: Verner discovered some interesting, if unsourced, evidence of this, an angry comment about Wellington, clearly from a Light Division veteran, scribbled in the margins of a Rifles memoir.
– ‘I was before this last action sixth from the top of the Second Lieutenants’: Gairdner MS letter, 25 April 1812.
– ‘This regimental havoc will give me promotion’: this was Lieutenant Robert Fernyhough quoted in Thomas Fernyhough, Military Memoirs of Four Brothers, London, 1829. Although Fernyhough served in the 95th, this is the only quotation of his I have used in this book. His record of service was in fact a series of missed opportunities and illnesses that resulted in him missing every significant moment of the regiment’s campaigns.
EIGHTEEN The Salamanca Campaign
183 ‘He and Captain McDearmid were the only two of the thirteen senior officers … left fit to march’: my own research with the monthly returns, WO 17/217, and the Challis Index. The figures for men fit to march and invalided home also come from the monthly returns.
184 ‘a subtle and unmistakable change in the conduct of quite a few old sweats in the battalion’: this is such a sensitive subject, being connected with powerful concepts of courage and honour, that it is hard to find direct evidence for it. Kincaid, in comments made about Vitoria (see Chapter 20) is one of the few to tackle it explicitly, stating that a man who survives a great battle wants to be able to tell the tale. Leach and Cooke (of the 43rd) both, for example, measured subsequent battles in comparison to Badajoz and one only has to look at the pattern of volunteering for the Salamanca forts and San Sebastian to see that most of those who came forward at Rodrigo or Badajoz did not go on these later storming parties.
– ‘a couple of men committed