Rifles - Mark Urban [51]
Few riflemen were housed; instead some tents were issued (for the first time since they had arrived in Portugal) to allow them to escape the cold and rain. The soldiers, though, wasted no time in beginning expeditions in Arruda, breaking into houses, where ‘many of them had some food in the larder, and a plentiful supply of good wines in the cellar’.
The 95th were guilty of a good deal of vandalism on these missions, since they assumed that Arruda would eventually fall into French hands. Houses were stripped, and ornate furniture was broken up for firewood. ‘This was the only instance during the war in which the light division had reason to blush for their conduct,’ one veteran later wrote.
Reunited with his messmates, Simmons heard for himself about Busaco and the skirmishes of the retreat from the frontier. He reacquainted himself with old friends and recounted his experiences in Lisbon.
Simmons was pleased to see Private Robert Fairfoot, for the rifleman, who celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday in Arruda, had become something of a friend and a personal project. During his brief campaigns, Simmons had come to learn the value of a steady soldier. He had seen the Belem Rangers, and when he and Harry Smith had been placed at the head of a party of eight hundred convalescents for the three-day march from Lisbon to the lines of Torres Vedras, a quarter of these ‘heroes’ disappeared before they reached their destination.
Fairfoot had gone absent without leave three times while in the Royal Surrey Militia, but on joining the 95th he had at last been able to show his true colours. The 2nd Royal Surreys were ruled by one Major Hudson, ‘as great a tyrant as ever disgraced the Army’. The men called him ‘Bloody Bob’ or ‘Wheel ’em again Bob’ because of his penchant for the lash and drill respectively. Fairfoot found himself buffeted between the ranks, where he had to drill all day under Hudson’s beady eye, and the post of drummer, where his duties included whipping his comrades. Fairfoot’s desertions arose from the unhappiness that follows when a man must pick morsels of his comrades’ flesh from the knots of his cat, having been forced to flog them all day for no good reason.
Early in the spring of 1809, when the 2nd Royal Surreys found themselves in the south of England as volunteers for the regulars were called for, hundreds had escaped the militia. One of their privates wrote home, ‘I have taken the first opportunity and volunteered … into what regiment I cared not a straw.’ Some 127 of the Royal Surreys went into the 51st (a smart light-infantry regiment) and around 90 joined Fairfoot in the Rifles.
In the 95th, Fairfoot had learnt the difference between parade-ground drill and the life of danger and comradeship in the Rifles. He had shown himself so good a soldier at Barba del Puerco, the Coa and Busaco that he had been marked down for promotion.
The 95th prided itself on giving advancement to deserving, bright men. One of its sergeants, William Weddeburne, had argued in print that the regiment’s form of warfare meant that ‘frequent opportunities are afforded for the display of personal courage, activity, and intelligence, and, to persons possessed of such qualities, it is a certain road to distinction’. The publication of Weddeburne’s text on training light troops was in itself a mark of the unusual position an NCO could achieve in the Rifles. It was evident to any soldier, once in the 95th, that serving in small groups in outposts or patrols rather than in line regiments offered many more opportunities for the deserving soldier to show his mettle, or for a corporal to demonstrate he was fit for further promotion.
As it was, the rank of corporal was a recent introduction to the Army. The printed Monthly Returns forms sent out for the 95th’s adjutant to complete had columns marked for ‘sergeants’, ‘buglers’ and ‘rank and file’,