Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters by Mark Urban Page B

them. As they caught sight of the first Frenchmen, bobbing and ducking among the trees and drystone walls, they started finding their targets, leading them, squeezing the trigger and watching them drop with a yelp or a slap of metal on flesh. But these tirailleurs were no recruits. They moved with a mutual confidence born of years of campaigning, timing their dash from one bit of cover to another during moments when they calculated their enemy would be reloading. Some were good shots too: Lieutenant Coane, falling wounded with a ball in his guts, was sent to the rear.
    This contest between light troops had been going on for an hour when the main assault columns closed up and began their evolution into attack formation. Simmons observed: ‘The enemy’s infantry formed line and, with an innumerable multitude of skirmishers, attacked us fiercely; we repulsed them; they came on again, yelling withdrums beating, frequently with the drummers leading, often in front of the line, French officers like mountebanks running forward and placing their hats on their swords and capering about like madmen.’
    A company or two of Rifles, totalling perhaps 120 men, would stand no hope of defending themselves against whole battalions of French, each one four times their number. Ney’s men had been able to get some of the cannon up too, and they were beginning to belch fire. O’Hare knew that his boys would be slaughtered or overwhelmed if they did not fall back. He ordered half his company, Lieutenant Coane’s platoon (under Simmons now), to move to a new defensive line, while Lieutenant Johnston’s covered them.
    Craufurd’s line could defend itself better for as long as its flanks were anchored; the left or northern one on Almeida fortress, with its heavy artillery, the right on the Coa gorge. As the Rifles were pushed back, though, the French commanders could see a gap opening on the British left. Some squadrons of the 3 ième Hussards saw their moment and rode around the riflemen, turning the Light Division’s flank.
    The moment soldiers realised they had been outflanked, there was every risk of panic. A cry of ‘The French cavalry are upon us!’ went up around O’Hare’s company. They were running now, desperate to save themselves, glancing over their shoulders, gasping for breath as the cantering hussars got closer. The riflemen were trying to reach a line of the 43rd that had formed up, ready to cover them. But with little more than a hundred yards to go, O’Hare’s men lost their unequal contest with horses. The hussars were among them.
    A slashing of cavalry sabres had begun, the crunch of metal on bone making itself heard above the general shouting, shooting and jingle of saddlery. ‘A fellow brandished his sword in the air, and was about to bring it down upon my head,’ Simmons wrote. ‘I dropped mine seeing it was useless to make resistance. He saw I was an officer and did not cut me.’ O’Hare’s men were starting to surrender.
    The officer commanding the three companies of the 43rd, watching all this, knew he could not easily order a volley. That might kill as many British as it would the enemy hussars. But he decided, after a moment’s agony, that there was nothing to be lost. His men fired – not a bludgeon volley like some line fellows might, but a discharge in which his soldiers tried to put their training to good use and aim carefully at a target.
    With balls flying into the mêlée, the hussars were momentarilystunned. Captain Vogt, one of their squadron commanders, fell dead from the saddle. Should they attempt a charge on the 43rd or fall back? Simmons and some of the other riflemen decided they had not surrendered after all, and taking advantage of the confusion, ran for the 43rd’s line. The volley had not altogether discriminated between friend and foe – Private Charity, for example, somehow made it back with Simmons despite two fearsome sabre wounds and one of the 43rd’s balls rattling around