British

The 95th Rifles were an elite unit of hard marching, sharp shooting light infantry that served in many bloody battles of the Napoleonic Wars. Unusually they did not wear the classic red coat of the British army, but instead a dark bottle green uniform which gave them their nickname of the ‘Sweeps’ or the ‘Grasshoppers’ by their French foes. They were equipped with the Baker rifle – a supremely acc…

With the return of the French tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte from his exile on the island of Elba, Britain and her allies of the 7th Alliance once again prepared to face the might of the French Army in what would be known as the Hundred Days Campaign. The rain-lashed weekend of 17th and 18th June 1815 saw the Allied forces end twenty years of continuous warfare – warfare that spanned the globe – in a s…

The Portuguese have never been fond of their Spanish neighbours. This was doubly so when in 1807 Napoleon sent a large French and Spanish army across the border to crush Portugal and take its fleet to continue their war against the detested British. Great Britain and Portugal, however, had been old allies for countless years, and before long a largely untried British general called Wellesley was s…