Could You Survive as a Sharpshooter of the Napoleonic Wars?

as the British tried desperately to stop Napoleon's France Conquering the whole of Europe they decided to throw a new experimental unit into front line [Music] action inspired by the success of Sharpshooters during the Revolutionary War in America these new green jacketed Riflemen we need to conceal themselves from the enemy pick their target and take their chance many have become familiar with their story through the exploits of the fictional Richard Sharp but the real accounts of the rifles are every bit as gripping fighting on farflung battlefields from buen aeres to the Baltic on the decks of Nelson's battleships to the precipitous Heights of the Pyrenees they certainly experienced Adventure for the ordinary Rifleman however these foreign campaigns were characterized by extremes of hardship and hunger with a rare chance of plunder one of the few things that made the enormous risks worthwhile in this episode I've joined up with the 95th rifles at the Chilton open air museum to find out what it really took to survive in this legendary unit using contemporary accounts and a little hands-on experience we'll try to piece together their perspective on the wars against Napoleon I'll discover how the tactics and weapon used by The Rifleman put Terror into their opponents as an officer if you see the rifles in front of you you got to be thinking there's one main target here how life on the March might be just as hard as being in the line of fire if nature called they had to request a ticket get out to do their business and then try and make it back as quickly as possible and just How likely it was that you'd make it out [Music] alive when the Napoleonic Wars began to consume Europe at the turn of the 19th century light infantry tactics weren't new the value of soldiers moving in loose formation acting as scouts or skirmishers and picking off enemy troops at long range had been recognized for centuries even while the main bulk of European armies continued to fight in massed columns and lines the British had tended to use limited numbers of skilled Mercenaries such as the German and Austrian joers to fill these specialist roles but fighting in the forests and swampland of North America in the 1770s British commanders had been shocked by the devastating effect of hidden Sharpshooters targeting their officers and disrupting the chain of command defeat in the Revolutionary War was a wakeup call and in 1800 the British formed their own experimental core of rifles soon to become the 95th Regiment of foot still not everyone was convinced one conservative General referred to them as an amusing play thing who would have no chance of standing up to the French While others questioned the innate ability of British soldiers as marksmen after undergoing training at their base in Shan Cliffe Kent they set out for the continent to prove their doubters wrong if you're enjoying this episode then please consider subscribing to the channel and leaving us a comment and if you want to really support us in making more of these videos then you can buy us a coffee the link is on the screen now it really helps me and the rest of the team keep going thank you very much the origins of the rifle's distinctive green uniform probably had as much to do with the Georgian Army sense of fashion as it did with camouflage but there was some precedent for light infantry units wearing darker colors than their line counterparts and there's no doubt it would have helped with concealment the color of their jackets and their apparent ability to spring up from nowhere in front of their enemy earn them the not so terrifying nickname of grasshoppers so Richard turned up here with the 95th rifles were going through some Maneuvers that the regiment would have gone through it doesn't work like a like a regular infantry uh unit does it they're they're they're spread out it's more of a skirmish formation how does it work exactly we had to be proficient in um line tactics and Maneuvers um but the main bread and butter of the rifles was to be a skirmishing uh a skirmishing unit so in Landscapes such as this a wooded area um we would be scouting um in front of the main body of the British army um up to a mile a mile and a half potentially in in in front of that Army to scout the ground ahead um and and spot where the enemy were whether we engaged or not would depend on our orders um it may be purely a fact finding scouting Mission or it could be to engage um enemy that we found um usually usually it would be the French equivalent to us so their volgar um would would also be skirmishing in front of of their Army split up um making a wide Frontage um working in pairs with your file partner um and um and moving forward through the terrain taking cover where you can uh you can find cover um so uh the the main difference between rifles and line infantry is that is is is that ability to be able to um use a tree use a Ditch use a bush um take the cover when you can so in that sense using their own brains they're not just following orders they are kind of scouting the terrain in front of very very much a thinking uh a thinking man and you're not waiting for an order necessary to to fire Rifleman fire when the opportunity presents itself um to a degree I mean I mean you you would have you would you would still have an officer who would be giving your main orders um through through the line now bearing in mind you know we're praying a fraction of a of of a company of um of of Riflemen in in size so we could we could be spread out over over hundreds and hundreds of meters um width you know every Whip and trip there'd be an NCO um uh or a chosen man um and and actually one of the main reasons the rifles um had had a chosen man the only regiment that had that that um appointment um wasn't necessarily a rank at the time it would later become uh um a lance corporal but that rank did not exist um in our period The Chosen men would be interpers through the line um and they were the ones who were probably seen to be the next potential cor or you know NCO um should those positions come vacant due to uh to to death and illness as was probably you know quite uh quite regularly happening at the time it's not surprising that gaps regularly appeared in the unit's roster the dangerous missions assigned to Riflemen weren't limited to skirmishing in rugged Countryside they were also tasked with storming enemy fortifications making River Crossings and getting close enough to enemy artillery to pick off the Gunners our orders today for instance could be seek out the French find the French small Eng engagement Fire and Fire and retire away from the French back towards your own Army drawing the French on so so so one one of the tactics of the rifles was to actually draw the French into the path of the Red Coats who would be advancing hundreds of meters half a mile a mile behind us because essentially your your fire with the the baker rifle has got has got a much greater range than the uh the French charville or the or the brown best so abely so they are not going to be able to engage you at the range that you're going to start firing they're going to be irked into into coming forward that's that that that is true um so yes I mean the the the effective range of of of the muskets really somewhere around 100 MERS um two you know at least two to three times that with the rifle um so you know certainly 200 M um the French aren't going to hit us at that range but we can hit them the tool of the rifleman's trade was was to be trained to be accurate with a more accurate weapon designed by the London gunsmith Ezekiel Baker this rifle was slower to reload than a smooth bom musket averaging one shot per minute but its range and accuracy were unmatched by other firearms on the Napoleonic Battlefield lightweight durable and fitted with a front and rear sight soldiers in other British Army regiments marveled at it potential eight out of 10 soldiers in our regular regiments will aim in the same manner at an object at the distance of 300 yards as at one only 50 it must hence be evident that the greater part of those shots are lost or expended in vain indeed the calculation has been made that only one shot out of 200 fired from muskets in the field takes effect while only one out of 20 from the rifles is the average you want that in half [ __ ] which is back to the first click yeah that's in half [ __ ] now if you if you squeeze the trigger now that shouldn't move yeah that's fine yeah so bite the top of the cartridge off not too not too far down cuz you got a mouth full of powder yep spit it out pour an amount of powder into the pan not overdo it so just level with the top of the pan yeah that's it yeah that'll do close close your um frizen um now bring bring about so so the that the ram Rod's facing you yeah um but between your um between your heels and uh that the idea is now that's you you got two hands free that isn't going anywhere yep then pour your powder and obviously a ball would be included in that y um push it down all the way in and then Ram it got it so this pulls out and you flip this round right yeah I mean you can probably use the other end I I flip it around because this my Ram Rod's got very narrow end and it pulls the paper back out got it um it Spears it so in the reason the baker rifle was slower to reload was CU this was a harder process to to Ram it is that one of the reasons cuz it was such a tight Barrel that is exactly it yeah yeah so the rifled barrel of the British infantry rifle meant that it was very a very tight fit so in the early prototypes of the uh of the what we're now calling the baker rifle um the uh they were issued with hammer to hammer the ram rod down that was that was that was quickly withdrawn because um the Hammers broke they got lost um all sorts of reasons why that wasn't a good idea but but the fact is it was thought to be necessary at all shows you you know it's quite a difficult thing that tightness um is one of the facets that of of the of the rifle that give you a more accurate um shop well we've got some some features up ahead a bit of a farmhouse let's move forward and and uh you can show us how exactly they would have worked in pairs and and worked forward to to flush out some French absolutely let's do that rifles well fire and AD cocer loading [Music] [Music] [Music] loaded [Music] now if you reckon you could survive as a wartime Naval Commander you need to play World of Warships leg the sponsor of this episode you can take charge of more than 400 ships from 11 Nations recreated an incredible detail once you've picked your warship it's time to test yourself against a massive player base on one of the historical Maps sure you might want to go for a battleship with massive Firepower like the Iowa or bismar but success here is determined by brains more than Brawn so don't forget to include some lighter Cruisers and destroyers in your fleets for launching those sneaky surprise attacks not only is this game free to play it's just launched on mobile so you can get the same Full Throttle Naval Warfare experience on Android and iOS as you do on Xbox and Playstation it's really easy to use the touchscreen controls in your phone to join your first battles but there's also plenty of room to hone your skills and if you've not played before you can download the game using the link in the description to get all of the bonuses on screen right now including the premium ship vond tan Happy [Music] Hunting I'd come through my first Skirmish unscathed but the real recruits of the 95th would have felt much better prepared for action than me entry into the rifles was actually no more selective than for other regiments with plenty of volunteers coming from the county militias but training was certainly thorough with plenty of time spent honing the men's target shooting alongside the usual parade Square drills they were also taught to read and write something which conservative army officers including the Duke of Wellington found highly suspect recruiting posters played on the idea that Riflemen Were A Cut Above the average red coat helping to create the enduring impression of an elite and exclusive unit unlike in regular army units the greater freedom of movement for the rifles meant they could really stand out to their officers by showing good judgment and initiative English no over [Music] there the officers of the new rifle core were aware of the need to both protect and enhance the reputation of the 95th especially given the number of detractors in the Army hierarchy for the men this meant that bad behavior was more likely to be dealt with internally and with greater discretion it also meant that notable acts of courage and audacity were trumpeted far and wide to provide inspirational models to new recruits and thrill the British public now one private soldier who seemed determined to test the limits of the baker rifle was a man called Tom plunet a larger than life character and in 1807 when the 95th were fighting the Spanish and Buenos seres Argentina he apparently shot 20 enemy soldiers from the roof of a Convent then in 1809 at the Battle of kabellos in Spain he ran forward some distance from his own lines laid down in the snow in what was called the Supine position and shot the French General at a range of more than 200 M he reloaded and shot the French generals Aid de comp just to prove it wasn't a fluke and he got away just in time to avoid the French Cavalry recent studies of the landscape where this famous shot took place have concluded that it could have been up to 600 M an incredible feat for the time but despite his Marksmanship Tom plunket never quite got to grips with another reality of life in the 95th tough Army discipline after getting violently drunk at a training camp in Portugal the Irishman barricaded himself in a hut and threatened to shoot the first officer who came to arrest him he could easily have been hanged but perhaps due to his status as something of a poster boy was flogged instead with his sergeant stripes removed Plunkett's offense wasn't exactly subtle but the rules and regulations imposed on all men of the light division during the peninsula War fought in Spain and Portugal between 1808 and 1814 were notoriously pedantic almost everything they did was subject to scrutiny if I ever have any occasion to observe Any Man of the bade P his road and and go around a pool of water instead of marching through it I am fully determined to bring the officer commanding his company to a court marshall I will insist on every Soldier marching through water and I will flog any man attempting to avoid it in one recorded case two or three men of the 95th broke off momentarily from their march to drink some water from a Ford understandable given the baking heat of the Portuguese summer but the Unlucky soldiers were caught in the act the whole Brigade was ordered to Halt and form a hollow square around the men who were stripped and flogged you could get away with going to the toilet but only just so there was a wickedly clever way of making sure troops didn't Dole or loot if nature called they had to request a ticket K from their officer hand their rifle over and their pack get out to do their business and then try and make it back as quickly as possible before they incurred their comrades displeasure it was the job of lower ranking officers to enforce these rules even the ones they disagreed with without eroding the independence which made The Riflemen so effective for captains and lieutenants the middle management figures of the Army structure it was a tricky balance to [Music] achieve so Tim the rifle core in the British army is relatively new at this stage but the discipline within that core is still good old British fashioned right well not quite the original concept of the British Rifleman was that he not an automatan like the red coat was this was going to a different regimen to be a Rifleman and to have the tactics that without an officer and an NCO standing over every single file of soldiers they needed to be self-reliant self disciplined and trusted and that was the big difference really but when you come to it discipline is always a part of it uh there was a resistance for to flogging in the rifles but it did happen uh and but much less than in the rest of the the the the Army okay but the there was certainly one commander who is remembered as a a disciplinarian if not a tyrant right that was Black Bob yes Brigadier General Robert Crawford uh a brilliant Soldier a flawed Soldier and slightly a controversial character he was slightly old for his rank uh and he needed he wanted to get on he wanted to get promotion and that one of his driving factors but most recently he had suffered a setback uh with the surrender of the army at buari under General white loock and that was a bit of a black under him but when he got to uh the peninsula on the corana campaign Wellington obviously trusted him and gave him command of one of the flank brigades A Light Brigade uh and he commanded that uh with distinction during the uh Retreat to to vgo returning to Spain and Portugal uh for the taliva campaign uh while they were marching across Portugal to Spain Crawford wrote his Infamous standing orders nothing new or unusual about standing orders every unit and formation had them but what was pretty much unique about uh Crawford's was the detail the utter detail and the way he actually enforced that detail as well on the March for instance it does rain in Spain and Portugal uh and you could have U very large puddles muddy stretches of Road churned up by horses and wagons and the orders were straight through it don't break stride don't go around it and you know the Brigadier might be waiting behind a house and upgrading um individual soldiers and young officers for not uh uh not not sticking to his his his standing orders and the reason for this was to keep up to speed and so if they knew the distance they could calculate how long it takes to get from A to B because that means you know when your troops are going to arrive at a certain point or arrive on the battlefield and he was quite quite sort of direct about it uh and of course the likes of the 95th rifles who are used to using their own initiative and being given broad orders and going off and doing them they hated this prescription and the diarist all rail against him but fair enough uh years later when he died they all sort of yep he was the making of us so a combination of the rifles flare and the and and the uh professionalism of the rest of the Light Brigade light division um and Crawford standing orders really did the job Crawford might have driven the men mad but there was no questioning his courage he was killed in action while commanding his men outside the walls of CAD Rodrigo a fortified Town taken by the British and their allies in one of the bloodiest actions of the war in fact it was generally assumed that officers would hold themselves towards danger when defenses had to be taken by storm young gentlemen looking for promotion joined the foror hope the name given to the often doomed raiding party that was first into the breach most officers of the 95th earned their stripes through experience and demonstrations of Bravery such as these rather than purchasing commissions as was common in the British army but was it really any more meritocratic than other [Music] regiments they could only give posts internally and even then only if the military secretary said so so so that's a yes and no answer really but in one respect there was more opportunity because even though the uniform the officer's uniform cross belt you know frog uniform you know basically like Cavalry uniform in green rather than blue designed to attract the right kind of chap to your regiment but actually a lot of the right kinds of chap didn't actually like the harshness and for instance in the winter of 1809 1810 uh on the borders of uh Spain and Portugal the rifles and the rest of the Light Brigade were marching around in a pouring rain uh living in uh HS while the rest of the army was back in Portugal in uh in in Winter quarters and so you know a lot of these right sort of chaps uh ended up uh skullking away off to the staff or to a a cushier regiment uh and that in turn gave opportunity for likely people within the ranks and for instance uh Peter O'Hare uh he he rose uh in the in the ranks on on promotion without purchase through sheer uh ability and he was from pretty humble background as were a lot of uh of rifles officers actually and is it true that officers in the 95th uh might actually carry the rifle they were slightly different to other officers who just preferred the the gentleman sword well well yet the answer again is yes or no uh during training rifles officers were expected to be as good a marksman as their soldiers as good at skill at Arms so in that respect they did but on campaign their job isn't to shoot the enemy their job is pretty much as officers today is to control the fire look out what what's happening so he doesn't have time to fire um he's much there in a command role but he would uh have had as much training in the weapon as a soldier the high standards for both officers and men were expected to help them withstand the harshest conditions of life on the March for starters soldiers would quickly have to get used to the burden of full regulation equipment we each had to carry a great weight during this long and harassing March there was a napsack and straps two shirts two pair of stockings one pair of shoes ditto souls and heels three brushes a box of blacking razor Soap Box strap and also at the time an extra pair of trousers there was a mes tin Center tin and lid uh hav sack and canteen great coat and blanket a powder flask filled uh a ball bag containing 30 loose balls belt and pouch the latter containing 50 rounds of ammunition sword belt and rifle thus we were equipped with from 70 to 80 lbs of weight in the melting month of July and that was hardly the end of their discomfort one brutal reality for men in the light division was that after a March of anything from 12 to 18 mil even the most basic shelter was far from guaranteed Rifleman rare had the luxury of spending the night indoors or even in a tent on campaign they'd spend weeks sleeping outside with nothing but a tree a hedge R and their own great coat for shelter they'd wake up wet through and shivering with cold and it was their tobacco that they relied on to get them moving in the [Music] morning on several occasions the regiment awoke to the news that no rations could be provided during the winter of 1812 on the retreat from Madrid back to Portugal it was such an announcement that caused a young aristocratic officer to burst into tears in front of the men their only option was to grill acorns that lay on the forest floor for breakfast the regiment went 72 hours without real food before reaching safety many of them marching Barefoot through soulless boots pursued by a vengeful friendship Army it's little wonder that some resigned themselves to meet their maker some men from the privations they endured wished to be shot and Expos themselves in action for that purpose unsurprisingly only a tiny number of veterans came through their term of service with a clean bill of health of the 10,095 men of the first Battalion who set out for the Peninsula Campaign only a third were on the ship home at its conclusion there were a few desertions to be sure but many had succumbed to illnesses like the so-called guadiana fever probably typhus and an even greater proportion had been badly injured or killed in action now the system of care for wounded soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars was notoriously Bad and The Rifleman record some horrifying experiences if you were injured in battle you'd be piled onto a farm cart like this one for transfer away from the frontier you'd be put on there with other dead and dying men and you'd be driven along the bumpy roads by locals hired locals who really had no interest in whether you survived the journey or not if you made it to a British Army Field Hospital the worst was probably still ahead if a bullet wound was untreatable and most were amputation of whatever limb was affected was the common course of action one soldier who peered inside a makeshift treatment center on the Portuguese Frontier described it as the most shocking spectacle I ever beheld the surgeons had neither the time nor the opportunity to look after us as a consequence of this neglect maggots were engendered in the SS and the bandages when withdrawn brought away with them lumps of putrid flesh and maggots survival rates in such facilities were low and typically British euphemisms for death became part of everyday conversation soldiers would speak of their friends going across the sticks biting the dust or becoming acquainted with a grand Secret brutalized by their experiences and inured to the misery around them The Riflemen had little compassion for the French Ranken file indeed their personal accounts suggest that dehumanizing enemy soldiers was a common coping mechanism but whatever the psychology behind it their methods when facing French forces was ruthlessly effective as many of Napoleon's officers witnessed firsthand the men are selected for their Marksmanship they perform duties of Scouts and in action are expressly ordered to pick off officers especially field and general officers this mode of making war and injuring the enemy is very detrimental to us our casualties in officers are so great that after a couple of actions the whole number are usually disabled in the ratio of one officer to eight [Music] men we've been joined by members of the French 45th Regiment of foot Keen to test themselves against the Green [Music] Jacket so Duncan I've risked speaking to a French officer here just to to find out really um why French officers were so vulnerable to British Riflemen what was it about the way that they conducted themselves that made them targets the fundamental unit within the French army uh control unit was the company or the Pelon within that it was heavily regulated by a captain left tenants and various ncos so all the cohesion of the unit uh in terms of maneuvering in terms of control in terms of discipline uh was integral to that structure you take out kind of key proponents of that in terms of the command structure and you start to lose the Integrity of that fundamental building block within the French army uh as soon as you lost the control you've your maneuverings broken up you've lost the rigidity of the ranks uh people are less confident because you know there's gaps in the ranks uh morale starts to break so it's an integral way of remove the officers you remove the Integrity of the unit I see so tactically it makes sense for the for the rifles to to take them out and they were they were quite effective at doing it and the French officers themselves I mean the general attitude of the French it wasn't hide uh hide at the back was it the French officers were there at the front swords drawn to some extent there was a fair bit of a land in the French army uh but again the structure within the Army most of the the officers would be either you know you'd have one at the front on the right hand side of a company but all the rest of the officers were in the Super num rank so you've got at least three ranks of soldiers in front of them but there still you know key targets so if you took out ncos again you start to lose that kind of Integrity as an officer if you see the rifles in front of you uh you got to be thinking there's one main target here and you're more likely to hit with a rifle than you are with a a smooth ball musket but uh it's a chance that you take put arm it turned out that the odds for French officers weren't great at all of the five French Colonels who led their regiments forward against the light division at the Battle of sabugal in 1811 two were killed and two seriously wounded it all begs the question why didn't Napoleon's Army have its own rifle regiment you hear a lot about the rifles as if that was kind of a flavor of the month sort of thing uh the French had a lot of skirmishes uh lime battalions could send out line infantry to Skirmish uh you would have in addition to the fuselier companies you have a grand company but a specific voler company which would be a company of skirmishers that would go ahead of the the column or or whatever and perform exactly the same sort of function as the rifles major difference being that they had a smooth or musket rather than a rifled uh weapon I see so so perhaps the uh the Green Jackets did have that Advantage with with range and and accuracy over abut over the French yeah the French did toy uh with the idea of rifles but it was perceived at a very early stage during the Napoleonic Wars it was uh the rate of fire and that additional range wouldn't make a particular or give the the the rifles a particular Advantage so uh the French had the option and chose not to to use it and just like in the British army it was extremely rare that French officers would carry firearms themselves it was their job to be Fearless in the face of the enemy without even being able to fire back most of the time uh if you had to you know Marshall nay famously carrying a musket uh on the retreat from Moscow so you know right up to the very top of the command uh I'm guess guessing if we were attacked and I had to and we had to defend then you might well pick up a musket but by and large your function is control over the men discipline within the ranks and you know giving out the orders rather than worrying about loading firing misfires and everything else well we're about to go and defend the farm at La Sant I think the the big French columns are going to come on and and test us to our limit so uh we'll see you on the battlefield you will indeed and I won't wish you luck Cu uh maybe the French will get in this time yeah right May the best man win indeed the waterl campaign in 1815 was to be the final Act of the Napoleonic Wars but it must have come as a gut punch to the Rifleman who had already enjoyed so much the 95th had returned to England at the end of 1814 after six long years fighting on the continent believing that bonap part's Ambitions had finally been put to bed now Napoleon's escape from Exile on Elba and subsequent return to power in France must have seemed like a desperate gamble that could only result in more pointless loss of life but whatever their personal feelings when The Rifleman woke on the morning of June the 18th with the familiar feeling of being sodden and cold after a torrential downpour the previous night they were about to take part in a battle far larger than anything they'd ever [Music] experienced when the 80 guns of Napoleon's Grand battery opened up at around 1:00 p.m. the first shot reportedly took off a rifleman's head head now for most of the day they were positioned next to a farm called La Sant in the middle of the battlefield and they were taking cover in a feature called the sand pit but this was no play time there were French infantry columns skirmishers and throughout the day armored Cavalry pressing them it was a day that would test many of The Riflemen to their limit faced with a major French attack involving several thousand men the 95th fire and retired making their way back up the ridge towards their own lines inside the farm itself Were Soldiers of the king's German Legion by this time also armed with Baker rifles if Napoleon wanted to capture this strategic objective The Defenders were going to exact a heavy [Music] price [Music] [Music] I went to a loophole next to the locked Gates that face the highway here the French for so tightly peted that I often saw three or four enemies failed by a single [Music] bullet the contests in the farm had continued with undiminished violence but nothing could shake the courage of our men who following the examples of their officers laughingly defied danger nothing could Inspire more courage or confidence than such conduct these are the moments when we learn how to feel what one soldier is to another what the word comrade really means [Music] [Music] [Music] at one point The Riflemen on the ridge were caught in the open as French kassas the most impressive of Napoleon's heavy Cavalry charged them with Sabers drawn unable to reach the protection of the British squares some men panicked and ran for it but most stood firm with their sword bayonets bristling out towards the enemy Riders at this point though the tide of waterl was swinging decisively the rifles weren't part of the force that inflicted the final crushing defeat on Napoleon's Old Guard but they had certainly been in a fight in a battle that involved close to 200,000 men the part played by Riflemen was certainly small in a strategic sense nor was the open Belgian Countryside an environment where they could put their skills to best use but none could question that they had proved themselves time and again and had suffered terribly to earn their reputation any assessment of how dangerous life was for The Rifleman inevitably involves comparison with other soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars so while line infantry regiments could theoretically go through an entire campaign without even being involved in a serious firefight The Rifleman had to pluck up the courage to face the enemy sometimes on an almost daily basis and we know Wellington wrote to a young Aristocrat who was interested in joining the light division that he might be treated to a few more shots than his friends would wish but on the other hand the ability to take cover behind rocks and trees made individual battles actually relatively low risk if you were in a regular Infantry Regiment and you were at the heart of a major battle the casualties were almost inevitably appalling so at the Battle of waterl while the 95th lost just 21 Men killed the nearest Red Coat regiment lost five times that number and another 500 injured if you were standing in square being shot at by Cannons all day there was nowhere to hide the rewards for men who served in Wellington's army and lived to tell the tale were modest most soldiers gained very little financially from their years on campaign unless they'd managed to squirrel away plunder long enough to bring it home home there were no medals either for veterans of the Peninsula Campaign though there was one for those who served at watero and of course there was no system of support to help veterans adjust to life back home even if they received a small pension more than a few became alcoholics enduring lives in grinding poverty Tom plunet the crackshot and poster boy of the regiment was later seen selling matches on the Streets of London a penous Drifter he could hardly have known that people would still be fascinated with his and his regiment story over 200 years later I never saw such skirmishers as the 95th now the rifle Brigade they could do the work much better and with infinitely less loss than any other of our best light troops they possessed an individual boldness a mutual understanding and a quickness of eye in taking advantage of the ground which taken together I never saw equaled thanks again to the 95th rifles and French 45th for making this episode possible and to the Chilton open air museum for hosting us if you enjoyed the video please do consider helping us out with a coffee liking commenting and subscribing to the channel I'll just I'll just be dead candid yeah okay cool cool