TWENTY-THREE
The columns that emerged from the little town of Rabastens, just north of Tarbes, on 20 March 1814 were full of confidence. The Light Division marched in the van as usual. Their chief, Lord Wellington, was among them, darting about in his plain coat, taking everything in with his owlish eye. Marshal Soult had suffered a succession of beatings since the beginning of the year and was now falling back on Toulouse.
The 1st Battalion riflemen had been given new suits, their previous ones having more or less fallen to pieces on their backs. Colonel Barnard wanted them to have as soldierly an appearance as possible and had managed to scrounge enough shakoes – the proper regimental headgear – for each man to wear. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions were still making do with forage caps instead of those black felt cylindrical hats. The general sense among the riflemen that their war was nearing its end had hardened into a certainty, for reports coming in the mail told them that the main Allied armies were pushing deep into northern France.
A mile or two up the road, looking up to the left at about midday, Wellington spied some French light troops on the ridge, moving among the gaps between thick clumps of trees. The general quickly ordered the 2nd Battalion of Rifles to fall out and prepare to sweep the enemy voltigeurs from the hill. These riflemen moved off from beside the road, extending as they went into the familiar chain, and began walking uphill.
The French general here, Jean Harispe, had a surprise in store for the Rifles. The test he made of them would be almost as tough as Sabugal in April 1811, and like that battle it came about – for the British at least – as something of an accident. Harispe had spent his war in Catalonia in the east of Spain and was not used to fighting the British – so it might be said he was not intimidated by them.
Harispe, a French Basque, knew the country around Tarbes intimately, having grown up just a few miles away. Behind the ridge that Wellington could see, there was a dip and then a further rise. Harispe had prepared a series of trenches on that piece of rising ground to the rear. This would allow him to ambush whoever came over the first ridge with several battalions of his own troops, arrayed on a hillside so that they could fire over one another’s heads.
This unpleasant surprise duly greeted the 2nd Battalion men (numbering about four hundred) as they cleared the initial ridge. One of the Rifle company commanders noted, ‘On gaining the summit of the hill we found a much larger force than was supposed to be there and we had to sustain a very severe fight against a large force before the remainder of our corps was sent forward to support.’
The six companies of the 1st Battalion and those of the 3rd Battalion now moved up the ridge. Costello recalled, ‘We went down the road at the “double”. As we passed them, some of our regiments of cavalry gave us an encouraging huzza.’
Many 2nd Battalion men were now dropping, falling under a withering fire of musketry. ‘The whole of their heavy infantry [was] drawn up on a steep acclivity, near the windmill, which allowed them to have line behind line, all of which could fire over each other’s heads, like the tiers of guns on a three decker.’
The French officers ordered a charge, seeing just skirmishers in front of them; they knew unformed men must fall back before a phalanx of cold steel. Harispe, wrote one Rifles officer, ‘having been accustomed for many years to oppose imperfectly organised Spaniards, probably did not calculate on so warm a reception’.
This charge drove the 2nd Battalion men back fifty yards or so and they now found firing positions among some stone-walled vineyards and orchards. The French battalion commanders were redressing their ranks and readying their men for another push forward when the 1st Battalion riflemen came trotting up, dropping into firing positions next to their 2nd Battalion mates. The French drums beat Old Trousers again, but these would-be chargers were discomfited by the 1st Battalion as it began to skirmish forwards. ‘This column was driven back by a rapid advance of the 1st Batt 95th Rifles and a close fire of a few yards literally mowed down the French officers at the head of the column with their drummers beating the “pas de charge”.’
Lieutenant George Simmons, seeing the French falter and begin to crumble, stood up to lead his men forward, but then, ‘a Frenchman took a long shot at me; the ball fractured my right knee pan and knocked me down as if I had been struck with a sledge-hammer’. Colonel Barnard, who commanded this battle of eighteen Rifle companies against a French brigade, had meanwhile sent the 3rd Battalion off to the right to turn the enemy flank. In the centre, ‘a heavy tirallade was then kept up in the vineyards between the riflemen and large bodies of French voltigeurs which caused loss to us as we had no cover and could not give up any of the ground we had taken’.
With the French falling back through walls and trees, the two sides blazed away in a withering contest of firearms. They were close enough for the Baker rifle’s advantages to be negated, the French being able to get aimed shots in over the twenty or thirty yards that separated them. The Rifles officers, leading their men forward, paid a heavy price, eleven becoming casualties. Captain William Cox, 2nd Battalion, got a ball in his left thigh, breaking the femur like a dry branch, and his brother John, still serving with the 1st, was shot in the right leg.
Harispe ordered a general withdrawal of his division, for there were other British formations advancing on his flanks and he needed to disentangle himself. With the enemy streaming back, the British buglers sounded the recall and Barnard’s companies formed up in case the French changed their minds and resumed the attack. Wellington rode up to see the 1st Battalion on top of the ridge, telling them, ‘Ah, there you are, as usual, just where you should be; not gone too far.’
Barnard found the general and insisted that he should come further, for there had been a great slaughter of the attacking French. Wellington told him, ‘Well, Barnard, to please you, I will go, but I require no novel proof of the destructive fire of your Rifles.’ The 95th’s officers were quite taken aback by the casualties: ‘The loss of the enemy from the fire of our Rifles was so great that one could not believe one’s eyes. I certainly had never seen the dead lie so thick, nor ever did, except subsequently at Waterloo.’
It is unclear exactly how many men the French lost. Official French returns indicate only around 180 killed and wounded. The Rifles officers, though, were adamant that the numbers had been substantial. Their estimates ranged from asserting that the French suffered as many casualties as the entire number of riflemen engaged (over a thousand) to suggestions that they had suffered double the British losses (those being 111 officers and men, killed and wounded), an estimate not so hard to reconcile with the official French figures. It is quite possible, though, that French casualties may have reached three or even four hundred, Lieutenant James Gairdner commenting in his journal, ‘I never saw on any occasion so many men killed by skirmishers as the enemy lost on this occasion.’
Although the French Army was pretty well knocked up by this point in the campaign, the importance of the engagement at Tarbes was that it was the 95th’s own battle – a mass employment of Rifles which involved taking an entrenched position by frontal assault and then withstanding a countercharge by enemy assault columns. There had been no partnership with the 43rd or 52nd at Tarbes, as in so many other battles. It thus marked the final emphatic vindication of the 95th’s tactics and methods of the Peninsular War.
‘On the 20th the Army advanced near Tarbes and we had quite a 95th affair,’ Barnard wrote to Cameron, his predecessor as commanding officer.
I assure you the rifles were laid very strait … the enemy lost as many men as I think it possible to be knocked over in so short a time – the beauty of the business was that we were formed and ready for another attack in a few minutes. Lord W. saw the whole business and was most pleased with the rapidity with which the corps made its attacks and equally so with the quickness with which they got together when it was over.
Lest this seem too much like the 95th trumpeting its own achievement, it is worth quoting the views of a British officer from another regiment who was attached to the Portuguese army at the time of Tarbes:
I never saw such skirmishers as the 95th, now the Rifle Brigade. They could do the work much better, and with infinitely less loss than any other of our best light troops. They possessed an individual boldness, a mutual understanding, and a quickness of eye, in taking advantage of the ground, which taken together, I never saw equalled.
George Simmons, in agony from his smashed knee, was taken back to Tarbes in a wagon with some other casualties. There, to his delight, he found that his brother Maud had been appointed the town major. Maud soon installed George in the best lodgings at his disposal. The two brothers were to spend weeks together there as Wellington’s Army marched towards the last act of the Peninsular War in Toulouse.
They wrote home, George reflecting that the French Army’s performance in 1814 had improved somewhat but that ‘Every cock ought to fight better upon its own dung hill.’ Although Marshal Soult had been able to inspire those who stayed within the ranks to fight well, thousands had deserted from the French Army in expectation of the imminent collapse of the Empire.
The brothers managed to lay in large supplies of excellent Bordeaux at one shilling a bottle and spent the evenings talking over the fate of Europe and of the Simmons clan. George proudly showed off an inscribed gold watch that Colonel Barnard had given him in thanks for his nursing after the Battle of the Nivelle. He was relieved that his own wound would not disqualify him from further service.
Maud Simmons was evidently more reconciled to the end of hostilities, telling his parents that ‘peace must shortly bring us together’. George talked of getting back to his regiment and of enlisting in some other country’s army if indeed Bonaparte was really done for. His feelings, and the degree to which he accepted the vicissitudes and simple pleasures of a soldier’s life, were quite unusual. Captain Leach was speaking for far more when he stated, ‘The general and universal feeling … was that, for the present we had had enough of campaigning.’
Those days of late March involved the battalion in another reckoning, one infinitely less to its credit than the combat of Tarbes. The facts were as follows: on 18 March several soldiers had entered a French farmer’s house near the village of Plaisance. When he refused them drink and cash, an argument began and the farmer struck one of the soldiers. This cuff cost the Frenchman his life, for one of the intruders, flying into a fury, killed him on the spot.
When British officers investigated the complaints of the villagers in Plaisance, they soon determined that the criminals were riflemen. ‘We tried every means to find out the villain, but to no purpose,’ wrote one officer. Soldiers were paraded and told that they would all suffer if they did not give up the culprit. There was little chance, however, of intimidating the men. Not only were they grizzled veterans who would be loath to rat on a messmate – they all also knew the strict orders against pillaging the French that had been issued by Lord Wellington. If you handed over a man for this crime, it would be as good as putting him on a rope yourself.
Careful consideration of the timing of the murder led some to suspect the 1st Battalion and, indeed, Leach’s company. Many of the officers, though, chose to blame the crime on the Portuguese and to turn a page on the whole affair. A collection of a hundred guineas was made for the French farmer’s wife; the battalion marched away and the murderer remained undetected. But just as the men of Lieutenant James Gairdner’s platoon had deceived him about the degree of their fraternisation and commerce with the enemy the previous autumn, so some of them were now keeping secret the identity of the murderer and his accomplices within 2nd Company’s ranks.