Rifles: Six Years With Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters Read Online Free PDF

and rifle … thus we were equipped with from seventy to eighty pounds of weight in the melting month of July.
     
    This already difficult situation changed decisively on the morning of 28 July, when a dusty rider, carrying an express from Sir Arthur Wellesley, found Craufurd. In it, the commander of forces told Craufurd that he was in the presence of a large French army and that a general action was to be expected at any moment. Any limits that the chief of the Light Brigade had placed on his men had to be thrown to the wind.
    Craufurd did not intend to lose what might be his only chance to redeem his reputation in battle. What’s more, everyone from private soldier to the commanding officer of the 95th shared the desire to measure himself against the French. So with little delay, Craufurd’s brigade was launched into a series of crushing forced marches into the mountains of Iberia.
    They began at 2 a.m. on the 28th and stopped at 11 a.m., as usual. Now, instead of resting for the remainder of the day, they started marching again, at about 5 p.m., as the early-evening cool began. ‘Every man seemed anxious to push on, and all were in high spirits, hoping soon to be on the field of battle,’ one of the marchers wrote. They kept going until 10 p.m., when they stopped for a few hours.
     
    As the Light Brigade struggled up the mountain roads of the borderlands, Wellesley’s army was attacked by the French at Talavera de la Reyna. The British general had chosen his ground with the care that was to become one of his most celebrated trademarks. On his right was the River Tagus and the city of Talavera: these obstacles would prevent the French simply going around, or turning, this wing of the Allied Army. Spanish troops occupied that right section of the line, and at the seam where their forces met the British – the junction of two armies being often a weak point – a defensive fieldwork had been built, a small fort bristling with cannon.
    The left of Wellesley’s position was anchored on another natural obstacle, the hills of the Sierra de Segurilla. Although these were no lofty peaks, the ground itself, being strewn with huge boulders and rocky outcrops, denied any movement to formed troops.
    The French would have no choice but to attack in the centre, so thisis where Wellesley placed his most powerful formation, the four brigades of General Sherbrooke’s 1st Division. In front of them was a stream, the Portina, which ran down from the Sierra, above their left, to the Tagus down on the right. Although it wasn’t deep, its banks were difficult in places, which hopefully would break the formation of the French regiments, leaving them vulnerable to a British countercharge.
    As the Light Brigade was still marching up behind Wellesley’s main army, the battle they fought on 28 July demonstrated very well the military orthodoxies of the day – precisely those ideas that the 95th and the other Light Brigade battalions would revolutionise.
    For much of the morning of the 28th, Sherbrooke’s men were forced to stand under the fire of French cannon. Their armies, under King Joseph (Napoleon’s brother), had lined up their guns on some ground across the Portina and proceeded to batter away at the British line. In many places, particularly higher up the gradual slope to the Sierra, the nature of the ground allowed Wellesley to pull back his troops a little and get them to lie down, so that the ground protected them against the cannon balls.
    Much of Sherbrooke’s division, though, being deployed on the plain of the Tagus, had no such shelter. They had to put up with the cannonade at about six hundred yards’ distance. Fortunately for them, this was not close enough for the really murderous effects of canister or grapeshot and the French gunners were obliged to hurl standard iron cannon balls at them, knocking down the redcoats like some devilish game of skittles. For the targets, this was an unpleasant experience, but it was