Rifles - Mark Urban [48]
Captain Marcel, who had led his men to the top, was a small part of Maucune’s brigade. He looked around: where was their support? There was nobody behind the 69ème, and looking across to his right, Marcel could see Simon’s brigade, ‘going back down the slope, under a terrible artillery fire and under attack from a column of English of four times its strength [sic]; very soon, that same column hit us, and it was our turn to be thrown back.’
For the Light Division men and Pack’s Portuguese, weeks of retreating across muddy, execrable roads were being paid back: their blood lust was up. Ney’s corps suffered almost 2,500 casualties that day, with Simon’s brigade losing the most. Elsewhere, the initial attack by Reynier’s corps had met the greatest success: its columns had reached the plateau at the highest point of the ridge and begun to deploy, and only a countercharge by Picton’s division had managed to turn the tide.
On the slope in front of Sula it was impossible to say exactly who had lost his life to the 95th, and who to the 52nd or indeed the Portuguese. But it is clear that the six battalions taken forward by Simon suffered terrible casualties among their officers. The Légion Hanovrienne had nine of them killed or wounded, including eight of its twelve company commanders. The 26ème Régiment had twenty-one officer casualties (a little under half of those present with its two battalions). Ferey’s brigade, which had tried to follow Simon up the hill, also suffered badly: Colonel Bechaud of the 66ème, for example, having recovered from his chest wound in July at the Coa, received the same compliment at Busaco. These losses among leaders were the telltale symptom of well-aimed fire.
Busaco, despite this, was a fight in which traditional notions might have seemed, to a British general of conservative cast, to have given Wellington his triumph: devastating volleys at point-blank range and bayonet charges delivered with perfect timing. Even the laurels for successful skirmishing had to be shared between the 95th, Portuguese Cacadores and the light companies of various line battalions. The French, though, deduced a general lesson from their officer casualties: that, in the words of one staff officer, ‘the English were the only troops who were perfectly practised in the use of small arms, whence their firing was much more accurate than that of any other infantry.’ They had become ‘the best marksmen in Europe’. That this had come about could be attributed in large part to the training pioneered by the 95th’s founders and the growing influence of the system developed before the Peninsular War by General Sir John Moore at Shorncliffe – even the Cacadores had fallen under it, for they had been retrained by British officers, including several of the 95th.
If Beckwith and the other officers of the 95th had only a general idea of how well they had picked off the French commanders, they certainly knew that their own losses had been slight: just nine men killed and thirty-two wounded in the battalion. None of the casualties had been officers. Simon’s skirmishers had made a great deal of noise and smoke as they came up the mountain, but their effect on the crouching riflemen had been minimal. Concealment was an important factor in this, for the riflemen had become expert in this, whereas other regiments, such as the Portuguese light troops, were less experienced and so suffered more heavily. But there was something else at work here too. Just as the British Army might have its idées fixes about the bayonet or flogging, so the French had been blunted in their effectiveness by their generals’ received wisdoms about rifles and target shooting.
The French did not want to issue rifles to their men. A small-scale experiment had ended in 1807, the weapons being hard to load and their barrels fouling too easily (since they were of inferior design to