Yet Urban finds the humanity, too. After a young French prisoner nearly shot Lt. Col. Beckwith’s head off, holing his hat instead, the officer spared him: ‘Let him alone; I daresay the boy has a mother.’ In winter quarters, the troops whiled away the hours by reading novels like Don Quixote and putting on skits. On picket duty, they fraternised with their French opposite numbers.
By the end of the Peninsular War, the Rifle Regiment had proved itself one of the best in the British Army. More importantly, it influenced the future development of that army: the new drill manual of 1824, for example, put more emphasis on skirmish tactics than on linear warfare. It is disappointing that Urban does not offer a postscript in which to reflect on the role of the regiment’s descendants, the Royal Green Jackets and the Light Infantry, each of which has a battalion now assisting in the occupation of Iraq. But he concludes on the right note, highlighting the Rifles’ advanced views on soldiers and officers —soldiers who were trusted for the first time with the responsibility of choosing their targets and firing when ready, officers who used rifles and who shared the privations of their men in the field. As one rifleman wrote during the long, starving retreat to Portugal in 1812, ‘These are times when Lords find that they are men and men that they are comrades.’
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