Rifles - Mark Urban [2]
Lieutenant General Sir Christopher Wallace was the key that opened the door of the Royal Green Jackets Archive in Winchester for me. Once there, I relied time and again on the extraordinary recall and patience of Major Ron Cassidy who, in retirement, administers this vital resource as a labour of love for his regiment. It was here that Verner’s notes and many other vital accounts were found.
For some new material, I have a debt to Caroline Craufurd, a descendant of Major General Robert Craufurd, who helped me to much information about that tormented figure. In working on the official records, I sometimes deployed the skills of professional researchers in the shape of Eileen Hathaway and Roger Nixon. George Caldwell and Robert Cooper gave freely of their particular expertise on the 95th. On the French accounts, Cyril Canet assisted in the Vincennes archives. John Montgomery, librarian of the Royal United Services Institute in London, rallied to the cause this time just as energetically as he did with my last book.
Throughout the research, I benefited enormously from the kindness of John Sandler, the leading collector of Napoleonic literature in Britain, whose library, amassed over more than sixty years, contains fifteen thousand volumes. I was able to consult this vast resource at will and draw on his great expertise. The Sandler Collection was particularly useful for digging up early French published accounts.
The task of licking my tract into shape fell to Julian Loose and Angus Cargill at Faber and I am delighted to complete this fourth collaboration with that house. Dr Rory Muir once again did me the enormous favour of vetting my text for more egregious errors – but of course I alone take responsibility for any that remain. Many others – too numerous to mention – have shared their knowledge or books, often through virtual communities such as the Napoleon Series internet forum.
Finally I must also thank those who have had to put up with me while I got this obsession out of my system: my wife Hilary, as well as daughters who showed an understanding far in advance of their years, Isabelle and Madeleine.
Mark Urban
London, October 2003
ONE
Departures
May 1809
Just before 6 a.m. the head of the battalion entered Dover. There were many people watching from upstairs windows as the green phalanx wound its way down to the port. Of course they drew onlookers; the battalion’s buglers had seen to that by shattering the twilight stillness as they arrived. A good blast on the horns was usually used to announce them and to tell ignorant civilians that, having heard a strange cacophony, their eyes were about to register something quite unusual too: the first regiment of British riflemen.
At the head of the column rode several officers resplendent in their dark-green uniforms, with a pelisse, that fashionable braided jacket beloved of hussars and other cavalry dandies, thrown over one shoulder. On their crowns, tall caps with a bugle badge and a tuft of green. Behind them about 1,100 troops tramped along, the thumping cadence of their marching echoing through narrow streets.
They had already been going for four hours when they filed into Dover, having quit their barracks a little further down the coast after the briefest of nights. Many of them were bursting with anticipation, for they were embarking on foreign service. In a letter that he posted that morning, 25 May 1809, Second Lieutenant George Simmons wrote home to Yorkshire, ‘This, my dear parents, is the happiest moment of my life; and I hope, if I come where there is an opportunity of showing courage, your son will not disgrace the name of a British soldier.’
Simmons, with all the patriotic fervour of the military virgin, marched behind his captain, Peter O’Hare, a grizzled veteran who had fought in a dozen battles around the world. Putting the newest officer under one of the oldest; that, of course, was the commanding officer’s intent.
The whole battalion had been formed on the same principle. It had returned from campaigning against the French in