Rifles - Mark Urban [92]
Uniacke’s farewell, by contrast, was more of a wake. His honour guard was formed of several dozen men of the 3rd Company, and the funeral dirge was played by the band of the 1st Battalion. They marched from their quarters to Gallegos, a nearby Spanish village, where a resting place had been prepared in the little churchyard. Finding a grave in consecrated ground had required Corporal Fairfoot, who’d won his spurs as a fighter in two storms that month, to show a rare kind of tact. At first, the priest at Gallegos had refused to allow the burial, claiming it would be an outrage to inter a heretic in his place. Fairfoot assured the priest that Uniacke was Irish, thereby hinting at his Catholicism. The corporal transmitted his message without exposing the dissimulation required of Uniacke in life, an evasion made necessary by the British laws against Papists holding commissions.
Many of Uniacke’s lads had been boozing ever since the storm. ‘The men, who had obtained plenty of money at Rodrigo, got drinking,’ wrote Costello, ‘and while conveying the body to the grave, they stumbled under the weight of the coffin. The lid had not been nailed down so out rolled the mangled remains of our brave captain.’ This profane incident did not shock men so inured to death. Instead, they slung their officer back into his box, resumed their journey, then buried him, before returning to their camp for many a toast to Uniacke’s memory and much late-night talk of his courage.
Harry Smith, recuperating from his own wounds, remembered the last thing the captain had said to him before the storm on the 19th, a reminder that, as senior lieutenant, Smith would probably be a captain by morning. ‘Little, poor fellow, did he think he was to make the vacancy,’ wrote Smith. That was the essence of their business, a highly risky game in which the advancement the officers craved could often be gained only at the expense of comrades. As for Uniacke’s mother Eliza, her situation became quite miserable, and she ended up petitioning for charity, seeking a Royal Bounty or pension to make up for the lost remittances from her dead son.
For some days after the storm, the British troops made new discoveries of deserters in Rodrigo. There had been around two dozen turncoats serving the French garrison there, sixteen of whom were now prisoners. Some were doubtless killed during the siege or storm, and Almond at least had escaped. One of the five men of the 1st/95th who’d deserted the previous autumn, William MacFarlane, having entered Rodrigo before the others, was apparently able to escape with the last French relief column the previous November and to soldier on as a turncoat. As far as his former messmates knew, though, he might well have been slung into a mass grave with the other dead.
On 12 February the captured deserters were marched into a makeshift military courtroom, a hall in the village of Nava de Haver, a place familiar enough to the Light Division men as it was very near where they’d fought on 5 May the previous year. In a garrison, courts martial might have several members, particularly when hearing a capital case. In the field, though, a major general sat in judgement as the president and a captain, the deputy judge advocate, put the case for the prosecution. The men were entitled to