Rifles - Mark Urban [49]
Napoleon’s light infantry carried instead the fusil de dragons, a smoothbore musket slightly shorter than that of the rest of the infantry, and originally designed for mounted troops. As for the whole business of aiming, the French were in something of a muddle. The fusil had a fore-sight, a metal blade close to its muzzle, but no back-sight with which to align it. What’s more, conscripts like Sub-Lieutenant Marcel’s received no training in marksmanship. They pointed at their targets all right, but were self-taught in the business of aiming, that is, adjusting their fire to take account of the distance and movement of their prey. By Busaco some French officers were beginning to appreciate the cost of this neglect.
At the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo just a few months before, one of the more professional French generals present had been staggered by the poor shooting of Ney’s infantry. Writing to Paris in order to request an urgent shipment of musket cartridges, he wrote:
The consumption of this munition is quite incredible; it has happened through the inexperience and the negligence of the soldiers, by the carelessness of officers and by the numerous detachments marching with convoys of supplies and munitions. The siege of Rodrigo has seen the consumption of more than nine hundred thousand infantry cartridges solely by skirmishers.
This enormous expenditure of ammunition occurred in one month by light companies whose combined strength did not amount to more than a couple of thousand of Ney’s corps. It might be supposed that Marcel’s men and the other voltigeurs firing off so many rounds might have become first-rate marksmen, but actually the effect was more haphazard. While some did indeed become good shots, others never grasped the basic principles of adjusting their fire.
Despite these apparently basic limitations, Napoleon’s light troops had gained a considerable reputation in the wars of the previous decade. Audacious command and high morale had generally more than compensated for their poor shooting. However, from Busaco onwards, quite a few French officers realised that they were condemmed to fight the British skirmishers at a considerable disadvantage, one that arose from their lack of systematic marksmanship training.
Masséna’s defeat came as a profound shock to his people. One eyewitness lamented the army’s ‘enormous loss of officers’. For the marshal, any hope of hurling the British out of Portugal began to falter. On 28 September, Wellington returned to his old tricks, falling back towards his prepared lines of defence at Torres Vedras. The French could not understand his lack of aggression. Why wasn’t he following up his success of the day before? But the British general only liked to give battle on terms of his own choosing. He had succeeded in causing Masséna almost 4,500 casualties and was now inviting an army that had failed to carry the heights of Busaco to come and try its luck against the trenchworks and batteries of Torres Vedras. There Masséna would have to deal with the psychological impact of the Busaco defeat, one staff officer commenting, ‘Our heavy losses at Busaco had chilled the ardour of Masséna’s lieutenants, and bred ill-will between them and him; so that now all were trying to paralyse his operations, and representing every little hillock to be a new height of Busaco the capture of which would cost copious bloodshed.’
The battle was an enormous relief