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

the glories of a military career found themselves interred in unmarked graves in the dusty soil of Alemtejo. In Guildford or Dublin, mothers received an official notification of death, often with a promissory note for a few shillings of back pay, a last reminder of a rifleman son they would never see again.
    The 95th would have many days on the road before it reached its destination on the northern Portuguese frontier of the Baixa Beira. The weather was turning, with increasingly heavy rains. Snows dusted the peaks of the sierras. At least the cooler temperatures made the marching easier, as did the knowledge that they were quitting that damnable Guadiana plain – and heading, perhaps, for the trial with the French for which so many of them yearned.

FOUR
     
Barba del Puerco
     
January–July 1810
     
    On 6 January, the Rifles crossed the River Coa, on Portugal’s northern border. It was their first glimpse of the deeply incised gorge, its fast-flowing torrent, and the ancient arched bridge that crossed it, leading to the fortress of Almeida guarding the gateway to the north of the country. The barrier of the Coa, with its few crossing points, and the poor peasant villages of the mountain country around it were destined to be the setting for many of the 95th’s exploits in the coming years.
    The journey north from Campo Maior had taken the Rifles three hundred miles through the dramatic peaks of the Sierra d’Estrella and up onto the barren plateau of the frontier. There, great lumps of rock littered the ground like giants’ playthings and the few, poverty-stricken inhabitants lived in hovels with earthen floors and smoking chimneys. The driving rain and the covering of heather and ferns, as well as the frosts, reminded many riflemen of western Ireland or the Yorkshire moors.
    As the battalion tramped away from the infernal Guadiana, many of the soldiers had come to appreciate the pleasures of life in the field. Each day as they marched up through the mountains, some ravishing new prospect greeted them – they experienced a host of sensations that the boyhood playmates they had left behind in Yorkshire or Chester would never know. One novice marching with the battalion wrote of the scenery, ‘It was beyond anything I could have conceived, and it has highly compensated me for my labour.’
    Craufurd pushed his troops beyond the Coa, closer to Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortified town on the Spanish side of the uplands. There they would take up a line of observation posts along another river, the Agueda, which ran parallel to the Coa and like it flowed down into theDouro, the great river of northern Portugal. For the most part, this upland landscape consisted of open plains or rolling groves of black oaks and other trees. In places, though, the underlying rock burst through this covering, providing vantage points, and where the Agueda cut its way down to meet the Douro, a deep gorge many miles long presented itself.
    The Light Brigade had been posted to this remote corner of Portugal to guard Wellington’s army against the possibility of surprise. It was well known that tens of thousands of French troops lurked not far away in Spain, and everybody predicted it would not be long before these corps d’armée marched into Portugal to throw out the British. Brigadier Craufurd convinced his leader that posting a chain of lookouts on the peaks of this highland would provide warning of any hostile movement, allowing the rest of the army to train and rest in comfort many miles to the rear. One of Craufurd’s staff noted, ‘This extraordinary undertaking was in a great measure one of his own bringing about. He almost led the Commander in Chief into it by the enthusiastic zeal with which he carried it through.’
    There were great dangers to occupying scattered posts so far ahead of friendly lines. The principal one was that enemy cavalry might pass the Agueda by some ford and cut off Craufurd’s parties: then they would not only