Rifles - Mark Urban [72]
Kincaid’s businesslike attitude to passing the night next to this dying man reflected how used the 95th had become to being surrounded by death. It was the currency of much of their daily conversation, be they rankers or officers. Among the latter the topic of sudden death was so common that endless euphemisms were coined to provide a little conversational variety: ‘biting the dust’, ‘entered in today’s Gazette’, ‘acquainted with the Grand Secret’, ‘going across the Styx’.
Those who were unable to deal with the odds in the 95th sought a post elsewhere if they were an officer, or skulked in the hospitals if they belonged to the rank and file. For the most part, though, the veterans who had sailed to Portugal two years earlier embraced their destiny, resigning themselves with a grim fatalism. Reviewing the results of his two months on the march, George Simmons wrote home to Yorkshire just after Fuentes d’Onoro:
Since our advance from Santarem on 6 March, seven of our officers have laid down their lives, and a great number have been wounded. I soon expect to have my lieutenancy. If I live, I shall get a company sooner in this regiment than any other. In six months we see as much service as half the army can boast of in ten years.
The adventurers among the 95th’s officers constantly related the risks they ran to their chances of advancement. A little later that summer, doubtless after some maudlin reflection on the events of that year, Simmons told his father, ‘It of course makes one gloomy to see so many fine fellows fall round one, but one day or other we must all go. The difference is very immaterial in the long run whether a bullet or the hand of time does your business. This is my way of moralising when I go into a fight.’
Simmons’s bargain with danger in the 95th was not quite as he portrayed it to his parents; for while he kept his end of it, the Army was unable to advance him at the speed he expected. George’s brother Maud, serving with the 34th Foot, was promoted to lieutenant on 13 March 1811, one year and eleven months after he had joined. Two years on from joining the 95th, George was still a second lieutenant.
Some riflemen had realised that their risks in any single battle were relatively small, skirmishing among the rocks and trees, when compared to those of a line battalion sent shoulder to shoulder into a hail of metal in some hell like Fuentes d’Onoro. The 79th had nine officers wounded in a day there. When a southern detachment of the British Army fought at Albuera later that May, some regiments were completely crushed: the 57th suffering 428 casualties, including two-thirds of its officers killed or wounded in a few hours. Maud Simmons’s 34th were at Albuera too, suffering 128 casualties, including three officers killed.
For the average line regiment, though, the odds of being sent into the burning heart of some terrible battle like this were very low. Some served years in the Peninsula without being heavily engaged with the enemy. Since marching towards one’s enemy required a moral strength and a resignation to destiny, the Army at large became all the more aware that men in the Light Division were unusual, in that they had to summon up these qualities repeatedly. And within this division, the 95th were called upon most often. Not long after Fuentes d’Onoro, one officer of the 43rd wrote home that his division’s ‘conduct is spoken of by all the Army in the