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

fail to give warning, but fall into the French bag to boot. For this reason, the forward line of outposts was to be occupied by Allied cavalry, two squadrons of the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion, who might make good their escape just as quickly as any enemy tried to move on them. In one place, though, Craufurd posted infantry: he sent four companies of the 95th to the Agueda gorge and a small Spanish village called Barba del Puerco. Here the terrain was so rocky that enemy cavalry could not approach the little bridge across the river and Craufurd considered that if the Rifles were sufficiently hard-pressed, they could defend the pass for long enough for him to bring reserves up to cover their withdrawal.
    In late January 1810, Craufurd started posting his observation parties. Most of them consisted of a few hussars. In key places, a British officer was attached. These groups could alert the reserves some miles behind them by lighting beacons or firing off their guns. Craufurd instructed these mustachioed veterans of the German Legion in great detail and in their own language. He told them how to conduct themselves and how to take daily measurements of the Agueda, so that hecould reassure himself that the river remained high enough to protect his posts against surprise. ‘General Craufurd in fact worked out the most difficult part of the oupost duty with them,’ wrote James Shaw Kennedy, a staff officer who was one of the brigadier’s few real admirers in the Army at the time. ‘They knew his plan for each space they covered, but not his general plan; and each worked out his part most admirably. The General communicated with them direct. He had the advantage of possessing, with great abilities and activity and energy, uncommon bodily strength, so that he could be on horseback almost any length of time.’
    Craufurd was skilled at working out complex problems of time and distance. When he applied this to his brigade’s marching, and how small deviations might hold up the whole, he drove many of his officers to distraction. But in his appraisal of the time it would take the French to move on his people, and then how long his reserves of the 43rd and 52nd would need to extricate the forward parties, his ideas were perfectly sound. They would allow the Light Brigade to fulfil its warning role for the army as a whole without endangering itself unduly. Shaw Kennedy summed up the scheme and the 95th’s role within it: ‘He kept his infantry back entirely with the exception of the infantry post of four companies of the Rifles at Barba del Puerco, upon the calculation of the time that would be required to retire the infantry to the Coa … the calculation , as above stated, must never be lost sight of; for it was upon that calculation that he acted all along [emphasis in original].’
    Lord Wellington wanted his outposts to frustrate French reconnaissance of his deployments, as well as warning of any large-scale attack. The scheme worked out by him and Craufurd thus threw a chain of light or Rifle companies across the front of his army – in much the same way as he screened the battalions of his army in battle, by using lines of individual skirmishers and undulations of the ground. Wellington was evidently very impressed with the way Craufurd supervised his observing parties, although in time he would become anxious for the safety of his forward scouts.
    This use of Craufurd’s troops in this way was novel in its scale, and Wellington was quite open to new ideas on how a Rifle regiment might act on the battlefield. There had been Rifles under his direct command in Denmark three years earlier, and his first battle against the French in Portugal during the brief 1808 campaign had been touched off ‘by theover-eagerness of the riflemen’. Wellington did not resent them for this wild spirit – on the contrary, he had already come to value the 95th as soldiers. They in turn thought highly of him. Although