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

tested the limits of Colonel Beckwith’s tolerance for petty crime, there was a serious military purpose to their presence. The French had soon detected the outposts in Barba del Puerco. Across the gorge, and behind the ridge facing the 95th’s station, was San Felices, a small village where a French infantry brigade had made its headquarters.
    The French commander, General Claude-François Ferey, was one of those hard-fighting warriors who personified all that was best about the imperial officer corps. Ferey had been campaigning for most of his thirty-nine years: he had gone through the revolutionary ferment, rising from the ranks, and his service record as a brigade commanderincluded Marengo and Austerlitz, two of Napoleon’s most brilliant battles. Ferey’s pickets occupied forward positions very close to the bridge at Barba. Their reports suggested the British force was very small. He also knew that the riflemen picketed at the bridge had evolved the same cheerful modus vivendi with their French partners as had existed down at Almaraz a few months earlier.
    There was great uncertainty in the French command about whether Craufurd’s line of outposts was at all supported. For an aggressive general like Ferey, the fact that there was a small number of defenders, apparently unsupported, offered the tempting prospect of a coup de main attack to take the bridge, seize some prisoners and test the general effectiveness of the British outpost line. The friendly relations that existed between sentries would simply allow him to get his storming party close enough to pounce with virtually no warning.
    Early in the evening of 19 March, O’Hare’s company took over the task of manning the outlying picket. Two men would stand sentry just by the British-held end of the bridge. Fifty yards to their rear, sheltering among the rocks on the steep hillside, were Sergeant Tuttle Betts and a further dozen troops. The remainder of the 3rd Company, about forty men, for it was at little over half strength due to sickness, would take turns standing guard and sleeping in a little chapel a couple of hundred yards further back. If there was a real emergency, the other three companies, under Beckwith’s command, were billeted in Barba itself, about twenty or thirty minutes away to the rear. It was a system that kept most men dry and warm, but one that could only work if the company on duty at the bridge maintained its vigilance – even those who slept were fully clothed, rifles by their sides, ready to respond to any alarm.
    As O’Hare did his rounds, shortly after dusk, he was accompanied by Simmons, since it was O’Hare’s job to teach the boy something about pickets, supports and all the other arcane business of manning outposts. Such was Simmons’s desire to please his captain that he crawled across the bridge so that he could make some brief observations on the French side. With this, the young subaltern retired to a tent near the chapel at about 9 p.m. O’Hare, who had ‘been taken unwell’, retired to a bed in Barba del Puerco itself. The company’s two lieutenants, Mercer and Coane, took turns visiting the pickets.
    It was raining heavily, with gusts of icy wind causing those on duty to shiver in their greatcoats or crouch under heavy cloaks, counting theminutes until their relief by fresh sentries. But while most of O’Hare’s company slept, Ferey was leading storming parties of his men up the steep mountain paths out of San Felices and towards the bridge of Barba del Puerco.
    Ferey had picked his soldiers carefully. A storming party of about two hundred from the elite companies of several battalions would be responsible for seizing the bridge. A larger group would form up beside the bridge once the attack began, so that they could fire at any British supports that came to the assistance of the outlying picket. The general knew that his men were undertaking a difficult mission, at night, over narrow mountain paths. He