Rifles - Mark Urban [47]
General Simon, commanding one of the two brigades now coming towards the Light Division, was out in front, having assumed personal control of the skirmishers. Simon’s six battalions were marching behind in tight, long columns, little more than thirty or forty men across the front of each. The French brigade commander’s aim was to suppress the Rifles, by making them worry more about preserving themselves than about hitting the dense infantry columns. The Rifles, though, had the benefit of height, as they scampered from rock to rock, moving up the ridge ahead of the French, and so could fire over the heads of the voltigeurs, picking their targets with ease. Of course, they could not stop the advance of thousands of Ney’s troops – as one 95th officer observed, ‘We must give the French their due and say that no men could come up in a more resolute manner.’
With riflemen starting to scurry back over the lip at the top of the ridge, Craufurd could not contain his curiosity. He would dart to the edge, watching the French, hearing the thumping of their drums and shouts of their officers. Then he would rush back again, making sure that the 43rd and 52nd were aligned just right, ready to receive Loison’s division with a volley and bayonets when its men came into view at last.
Near the top of the ridge, the French found themselves under devilish fire. Craufurd sent more Portuguese light infantrymen from the 3rd Cacadores down to help Beckwith. Several guns firing grapeshot had joined in the British barrage, and were cutting down swaths of men. The colonel of the 6ème Léger fell to the ground, his head taken clean off by a piece of grape. The French attack was faltering. The officers shouted until they were hoarse, urging the men forward one more time, ‘En avant! En avant!’ Simon, who had himself been shot in the face, was close to the Royal Horse Artillery’s guns near Sula: he had to silence the battery. With one last effort, a few score of exhausted, blood-spattered troops followed him over the ridge.
The first French had staggered up in front of Craufurd’s formed battalions as the last riflemen were running, fast as their legs could carry them, to get behind the red-coated wall. The artillery gunners left their pieces, pelting back too. Simon had got his guns. The shout went around the decimated French companies: the guns were captured! But this triumph was to be short-lived indeed.
‘When I saw the head of the French column within about twenty yards of the top of the hill,’ wrote Craufurd, ‘I turned about to the 43rd and 52nd Regiments and ordered them to charge.’ An officer of the 52nd recalled that ‘the head of the enemy’s column was within a very few yards of [Craufurd], he turned around, came up to the 52nd, and called out, “Now 52nd, revenge the death of Sir John Moore! Charge! Charge! Huzza!” and waving his hat in the air, he was answered by a shout that appalled the enemy and in one instant the brow of the hill bristled with two thousand British bayonets.’
The few French soldiers who had made it to the top never managed to form a firing line, as Masséna had planned. Instead they loosed off a ragged volley at the chargers, but in seconds they were thrown back. Some men were bayoneted, other stumbled, fell and were trodden underfoot. Among those lying wounded on the ridge as the British passed was General Simon himself, who was taken prisoner. The 43rd and 52nd went to the front of the ridge, where they could look down on hundreds of French troops milling about in confusion on the slope. There the British light infantry gave them a thundering volley. The RHA men ran back to their guns and began to serve them again. ‘We kept firing and bayoneting till we reached the bottom,’ wrote an officer of the 52nd.
Many of the Rifles, left behind and watching this maelstrom, now turned to their right and looked up to where Maucune’s brigade was about to suffer the same fate at the hands of Pack’s Portuguese. The Scottish general gave the order to advance. Captain Leach of the 95th wrote