Rifles - Mark Urban [85]
Fairfoot returned to his company, as the digging of siege trenches began in earnest, right on top of the Teson ridge. This drew fire from the garrison’s heavy guns and each day now became a slugging match between the two sides’ gunners, the working parties of infantry toiling away at night to shore up or advance the trenches. The eventual aim would be to progress them down the forward slope of the Greater Teson and onto the Little Teson, a smaller feature between it and the walls. Here the Royal Artillery would be able to blast away at the town’s walls from little more than two hundred yards, hammering them down bit by bit with twenty-four-pound and eighteen-pound shot. Once breached, storming parties would be formed to rush through the openings and take Rodrigo.
All of this lay ahead of the riflemen, though, as they congregated about their tin pots brewing up some hot tea on the morning of 9 January. O’Hare’s old company, the 3rd, in which Fairfoot and Costello still served, had been placed under the command of Captain John Uniacke. Like O’Hare, Uniacke was an Irishman, but while O’Hare was famed for ugliness and ripe age, Uniacke enjoyed his men’s renown for his handsome looks and athletic prowess. He was no son of the Ascendancy gentry, though – on the contrary, his family circumstances were among the most desperate of any officer in the regiment. A Catholic from Cloyne in County Cork, Uniacke carried the hopes of his entire family on his broad shoulders. His mother had long been a widow, and her survival and that of John’s eight siblings depended on his remittances from the Peninsula. He had sailed with the others in May 1809. After a turn with the 3rd Battalion he was promoted to captain back in the 1st – the extra pay allowed him to send home anything up to £100 each year. If Uniacke thirsted for advancement, it was only so that his mother might have food on the table and his brothers and sisters some sort of education.
The contrast between Uniacke and Second Lieutenant James Gairdner was also pronounced. When that young subaltern eventually reached the battalion, on 13 January, he exhibited the whey face, soft hands and general demeanour of a know-nothing. Uniacke had been serving in the Peninsula for two and a half years, but his new second lieutenant – for it was to the 3rd Company that the Johnny Newcome was sent – had joined the 95th in August 1810 and spent the next eighteen months sitting it out in Shorncliffe, polishing up his dancing, drawing and mathematics. Gairdner was wealthy, too, if not fabulously so: his family enjoyed considerable material success in Atlanta, Georgia. They straddled the Atlantic: while James’s aunt and her branch remained in England, his father carried on his business in America without difficulty. Georgia was one of the states least enthused by the Revolution of 1775; the family politics were liberal and generally supportive of reconciliation between the brother peoples.
Each night working parties had to dig away in the shallow topsoil of the Teson, completing the first parallel in the days following the capture of the San Francisco redoubt. The defenders used many cannon to fire on these working parties, so the whole business was conducted at night: the clanking of picks and shovels was interrupted by the cracks of the heavy guns and the whump of the heavy mortars, lofting explosive shells into the air over the British excavators. Having established their own batteries on the Teson, Wellington’s gunners would fire back by day, trying to aim their shells through the narrow embrasures in the walls used by the enemy for firing. A bull’s eye was a shot that smacked the French cannon right on the mouth, hurling it from its carriage or rendering it useless in some other way; less fortunate hits would eliminate some of the gunners serving these pieces.
For the French