Rifles - Mark Urban [39]
What was clear to everyone, though, was that the Light Division had suffered hundreds of casualties: 333 to be precise. The 95th had accounted for 129 of them, including 12 killed and 54 missing, presumed captured. Among subalterns there had been a shocking toll of wounded – eight were on their way to the rear, where God knows what fate awaited them. O’Hare and Fairfoot had come through unscathed, as had William Brotherwood – one of those men in Leach’s company who had slogged all the way back from the outlying picket. The Light Division had at least exacted a heavy price from the enemy, inflicting around five hundred casualties.
On the evening of the 24th and in the days that followed there was deep, hard anger. One subaltern mourned that ‘all this blood was shed for no purpose whatsoever’. As they talked it over, they found comfort in the heroism of MacLeod, leading his charge up the hill, or in the cool presence of Beckwith issuing orders when their divisional commander had been absent from the hot side of the Coa. One young officer was adamant: ‘But for Colonel Beckwith our whole force would have been sacrificed.’ In all of this, they sought to find something redeeming in the defeat of their division by Ney, for a defeat it most certainly was.
The French were delighted with the day’s work. General Loison, whose division had struck the main blow, wrote in his official report to Ney, ‘The Combat of the 24th proves to [the British] there is no position the French infantry cannot take and to our soldiers that the English Army is not even as hard to beat as the Spanish and Portuguese.’
Charles Napier, who had delivered several key orders, felt ‘the bloody business closed with as much honour for the officers and men as disgrace for Craufurd’s generalship’. Napier noted bitterly that Craufurd had almost repeated his feat of Buenos Aires, in having to surrender a British brigade. Others spoke of their close escape from Verdun, the huge French prison where so many British captives languished.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, those who reacted most bitterly were the officers who had already formed a deep dislike of Craufurd, with his floggings and tantrums. Jonathan Leach wrote home:
He is a damned tyrant and a great blackguard and has proved himself totally unfit to command a company, much less a division … I am fully confident that any sergeant in the Army would have brought off the Division in better order, God be praised. If we had not all done something like our duty, I know not but that the Division might have been now on its march to Verdun.
Word of mouth and vitriolic letters like Leach’s flew to the four corners of Wellington’s Army, and to various quarters in England. The angry young officers of the 95th had no way of knowing it, but Craufurd’s harsh regime during the Talavera campaign had already excited adverse comment at the highest levels in London. Wellington had received a letter from Horse Guards, early in 1810, expressing the Commander in Chief’s concerns, ‘that a very unusual degree of severity is exercised towards the soldiers in the brigades under the command of Brigadier General R. Craufurd’. Among those around Wellington, the dislike of Craufurd was very evident in the days after what became known as the Combat of the Coa. One staff officer hissed, ‘I never thought any good was to be expected from any thing of which General R. Craufurd had the direction.’
The Commander of Forces was alive to these views, but he declined to send Craufurd home in disgrace. Wellington reasoned, ‘If I am to be hanged