Rifles - Mark Urban [97]
The storm of the Picurina was a desperate business – much less easy than the San Francisco redoubt on 8 January – for the defenders had been able to pour fire on the British as they struggled to break in to the fort, killing or wounding half of the five hundred attackers. The surviving stormers returned to their camps in the early hours to regale their expectant messmates with the horrific tale of that night’s storm.
Sergeant Fairfoot and Corporal Brotherwood both survived. The latter, already well known to his fellow riflemen as a wag, furnished those who had not been there with a good yarn about how the Green Jacket put the redcoat in his place. Some of the 3rd Division stormers, knowing the Picurina business to be theirs, were evidently furious at the arrival of the Rifles ‘volunteers’. One of them had shouted at the riflemen to place their ladders and get out of the way. ‘Damn your eyes!’ Brotherwood had bellowed back above the din. ‘Do you think we Light Division fetch ladders for such chaps as you to climb up? Follow us.’ That was putting the lobsters down, and it was repeated among many of the 95th.
The desperate business of grinding down the city’s defences continued from one day to the next, the incessant banging of cannon filling the waking hours, giving way at night to mortars with their distinctive double bangs. There was an almost febrile air of anticipation among the British troops. Some regretted holding back at Rodrigo; the losses had not been so great and the stormers got drunk for a month on the proceeds. Others wanted to get Badajoz over with. Some officers may have thought a coming war with Russia might shorten the Iberian conflict. Alexander Cameron read in a letter from a friend in England that ‘the Russian army is 400 thousand strong on the frontiers … war commences, Boney will have too much to do to think of the Peninsula.’
It was in this atmosphere that a party of hospital convalescents marched up to the 95th’s bivouac one morning. Major O’Hare, back in good health, was in acting command of the battalion and greeted the returnees, including Sergeant Esau Jackson, who’d spent almost two years as an orderly at Belem. ‘We anticipated a scene,’ said Costello, ‘we were not deceived.’
O’Hare spotted his man: ‘Is that you, Mr Sergeant Jackson? And pray where, in God’s name, have you been for the past two years? The company have seen a little fighting during that period.’
Jackson, aware no doubt that the eyes of all were now trained on him, replied, ‘The doctors wouldn’t allow me to leave the hospital, sir.’
O’Hare looked hard at him, ‘I’m sorry for that, because all I can do is give you the choice of a court martial for absenting yourself from duty without leave, or I can have your stripes taken off.’
Jackson knew he had no choice but to surrender the sash around his waist and the stripes on his shoulder, the symbols of his rank. O’Hare turned and said loud enough for all his soldiers to hear, ‘By God, I will not have these brave fellows commanded by skulkers.’ Corporal George Ballard, another 3rd Company man, was promoted in his stead.
Had Jackson’s desire for redemption exceeded his zeal for selfpreservation, he could have volunteered for the storming party. Many of those who went were soldiers who chanced their lives because they were desperate to gain resurrection in the eyes of their comrades. Private Thomas Mayberry was one of those readying himself for the moment when men were called to assault Badajoz. Mayberry, too, had been a sergeant once, but he had been broken and flogged back in England for defrauding his company’s paybooks in order to pay off gambling debts. ‘Mayberry was held in contempt