Rifles - Mark Urban [32]
Little more than an hour after the first shots were fired, the last parties of French ran back across the bridge and the riflemen began collecting their prisoners. The colonel and several men collared one young conscript, who, terrified, remained clutching his musket. As Beckwith started to cross-examine him, the Frenchman pulled the trigger and, with an almighty flash and bang, sent a ball through Beckwith’s shako.
A rifle was levelled instantly at the Frenchman’s temple, but Beckwith, whose head was singed but intact, checked the rifleman who was about to pull the trigger: ‘Let him alone; I daresay the boy has a mother.’ The colonel ordered the French conscript to be disarmed and sent to the rear.
The fighting at Barba del Puerco was over by 1.30 a.m. on 20 March. It had cost the Rifles one officer and eight men killed, as well as fifteen wounded, and two prisoners – Moore and McCann had been spirited back to the French lines. Seeing few bodies on the ground the next morning, the riflemen convinced themselves that the French had suffered heavily and carried back many of their casualties. Ferey’s dispatch reported the losses: twelve dead and thirteen wounded. Three Frenchmen were also taken prisoner.
In the great scheme of the wars sweeping Europe, the fighting at Barba del Puerco was little more than a minor affair of the outposts. But for many of the men who had set sail on 25 May 1809, it was their first real test.
A certain guilty self-justification showed through, as some officers reflected upon why Ferey had made the attempt. Had the drunken carousing of the 95th’s officers alienated the locals to such an extent that they had spied for the French? Several suspected the village priest, who had shown a surly disdain for these goings-on. One officer speculated that the padre must have told Ferey ‘that the English officers in his village were in the habit of getting blind drunk every night and that he only had to march over at midnight to secure them almost without resistance’.
Simmons, though, had nothing to feel guilty about. He glowed in the days afterwards with all the self-assurance of a man who had confronted mortal danger for the first time and done his duty, writing that ‘after this night I was considered a soldier fit to face the devil in any shape’. From that day on, O’Hare’s attitude to Simmons changed profoundly, for the young subaltern had passed the only test his captain really cared about. ‘My captain’, Simmons breathlessly wrote home to his parents, ‘was pleased to say my conduct had given him the greatest satisfaction.’ Nobody knew how long the campaign would last – in fact many expected that the French would bring overwhelming numbers into Portugal soon afterwards – but at least these companies of the Rifles had shown what they were made of.
Those officers who remained at Shorncliffe camp with the 2nd and 3rd battalions were delighted at the news that filtered back in letters and official dispatches. One wrote of Barba del Puerco: ‘we … looked upon it as no inconsiderable addition to our regimental feather … with something less than half their number they had beaten off six hundred of the elite of the French Army’.
This little battle had also tested Craufurd’s line of observation posts and shown the wisdom of his calculations. Craufurd circulated an ecstatic order to his battalions, relaying Wellington’s pleasure in the outcome. But Craufurd also wanted to thumb his nose at those who had doubted what a Rifle regiment might achieve on service:
The action reflects honour on Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith and the Regiment, inasmuch that it was of a sort that Rifle Men of other armies would shun. In other Armies the Rifle is considered ill calculated for close action with an enemy armed with Musket and Bayonet, but the 95th Regiment has proved that the Rifle in the hands of a British soldier is a fully efficient weapon to enable him to defeat the French in the closest fight.
This was a key point for apostles of the new light weapons and tactics. Those light soldiers