Rifles - Mark Urban [7]
Having joined the 95th, George, the eldest of nine brothers and three sisters, saw his duty as helping to pay for the education of his siblings. In the letter he had posted from Dover, Simmons explained his motivation thus: ‘As a soldier, with perseverance, I must in time have promotion, which will soon enable me to be of use to my family; and at all times it will be my greatest pleasure and pride to take care that the boys go regularly to a good school, and I have no doubt of seeing them one day men of some experience through my interposition.’
For some sprig of the gentry, a second lieutenant’s pay, of just under £160 per annum, was not considered enough to live on. An allowance of £70 or £80 was considered quite normal, and some truly rich young men drew on their families for vastly more than that. Simmons, by contrast, not only intended to live within his means, but to remit £20 or £30 home to his parents each year, and his was not the most extreme case by any means. One young lieutenant of the 95th sailing with him was the main provider for his widowed mother and eight siblings back in County Cork.
Many of the 95th’s officers, then, could be described as desperate men. Their hunger for promotion arose from the harshness of their personal and family circumstances. The little flotilla of transports and warships was therefore bursting with anticipation for the new campaign. There was a ceaseless hubbub about what the coming months might bring, and nobody, right up to the brigadier in command, could really have described himself as immune to this febrile atmosphere. But the officers’ search for advancement, and that of many ordinary riflemen for fame among their peers, would soon expose them to horrible dangers.
Each man may have wanted to prove himself in battle, but there was also a collective will at work, a desire to show that a regiment of British riflemen could perform wonders on the battlefield, when all manner of savants believed no such thing was possible. Just a few months before the 95th’s departure, a veteran light infantry officer had declared in print that people such as the Germans and Swiss made the best sharpshooters, whereas the British rifleman, through upbringing and temperament, ‘can never be taught to be a perfect judge of distance’. Disproving this thinking would cost the regiment dear.
Only a minority of those who had sailed on 25 May 1809 would still be in the battalion’s ranks when it returned five years later. Many would be dead, others sent home as invalids to beg on the street, and some would have disappeared without trace, presumed deserted.
What of Captain O’Hare, Second Lieutenant Simmons, and Privates Almond, Brotherwood, Costello and Fairfoot? Of those six, half would never come home: one dying a hero’s death, another paying the price for a commander’s mistake and the third suffering the ultimate disgrace of execution at the hands of his own comrades. And the survivors? They would gorge themselves on fighting, experience some of the most intense hardships imaginable and, between the three of them, be wounded ten times. In the process of those campaigns, the 95th would become a legend and its soldiers a pattern for what a modern warrior should be.
TWO
Talavera
July–August 1809
It was hard to say which disturbed their first night ashore more: the din of bullfrogs, the churning of empty stomachs or the aching of limbs confined too long on the passage. The battalion landed at dusk on 3 July. After weeks on the transports they had been disgorged in Lisbon – for Portugal was indeed their destination – the previous day. Their relief at escaping the smelly old tubs on which they had been shut up throughout June was short-lived, because it was followed immediately by a