Rifleman Dodd

A company of soldiers in Napoleon’s army contains roughly 140 soldiers. (By long tradition, this number is similar in most nations’ armies then and now.) Sergeant Godinot and his squad serve in one of the six companies that march upriver along the Tagus, where, in Chapters 9 and 10, they skirmish in the hills with Dodd’s group of Portuguese irregulars. Godinot’s company, when on the march, walks at the back as the rear guard of its regiment.

A dragoon is a mounted infantryman who uses a horse to reach a field of battle quickly—surprising the enemy, moving quickly to a weak spot on the front—but then usually dismounts and fights on foot. Dragoons sometimes fight from the saddle, depending on the situation; in that respect, they are similar to cavalrymen, whose main purpose is to attack while mounted. 

A guerrilla originally was a Spanish patriot who fought against Napoleon’s invading French armies by using harassment tactics—sabotage or sudden attack-and-retreat—against the much larger forces. Guerrilla means “little war,” and these small skirmishes lived up to the name. Dodd works with Portuguese guerrillas, fighting alongside them against the French invaders. As a trained rifleman, Dodd knows how to generate similar tactical effects, and he does so to slow down and tire out the enemy. The Peninsular War in which Dodd fights is the first war of national liberation; its guerrilla tactics are still used by outmanned resistance movements worldwide. 

An irregular soldier is one who wages war outside the rank-and-file command of a regular army. Often allied with a main army, irregulars usually are few in number, and they tend to specialize in irregular warfare, typically hit-and-run tactics. The Portuguese irregulars of the Peninsular War do just that, and they become known as guerrillas. (See “Guerrilla,” above.) Dodd works closely with Portuguese irregulars; together, they harass and damage French forces, distracting and slowing them. 

A musket is an early form of gun carried by soldiers; it fires small lead balls down a long barrel. The weapon’s rear end is pressed against the shooter’s shoulder; one hand lifts the barrel end and aims it toward a target; the other hand holds the weapon near its midpoint and pulls on a trigger that snaps a piece of quartz against a piece of steel above a pan filled with gunpowder, and the resulting spark ignites this powder, called “primer,” which sets off more powder inside the barrel; the resulting explosion propels the metal ball out of the gun.

A musket is reloaded by pouring more powder down the barrel, dropping in a piece of wadding to hold the powder in place, and dropping a fresh ball on top of the rest. A pole inserted into the barrel shoves the ball against the wadding, seating all the materials properly. 

Muskets are inaccurate; a line of musketeers would fire together at the enemy in hopes that a few balls would strike the opponents. A newer version, the rifle musket, was harder to load but much more accurate; Dodd carries one of these. (See Rifle Musket, below.) 

Lured by Napoleon into dreams of greatness, Spain joins forces with his French army and attacks Portugal in 1807. The following year, Napoleon turns on his ally and occupies Spain. The Britain help Portugal push out the French, then they help Spain harass the French until Napoleon’s defeat by a European coalition in 1814 ends the war. Rifleman Dodd’s adventure takes place in Portugal in late 1810 and early 1811 during the Peninsular War. 

A pontoon boat of the Napoleonic Era is a simple hull, like a giant, flat rowboat, connected to other pontoon boats in two lines across a river. The boats support a plank road over which an army can cross a waterway. The French Army’s pontoon boats, intended for a bridge across the Tagus river, are cobbled together out of spare materials taken from the walls and roofs of a captured town. In modern times, pontoon boats are made of flat surfaces atop long, buoyant tubes that serve as the hulls of ferries, houseboats, and catamarans.

A pontoon bridge is a road strung across supporting boats on a river or other body of water. Such a bridge can be floated across a river to permit temporary use, as when an army needs to make a crossing. Pontoon bridges must be sturdy because the current puts pressure on one side of the structure; a break can cause the bridge to come apart, with sections sometimes floating away downstream. The French pontoon bridge across the Tagus river is made of materials cadged together from the remains of an abandoned town; thus, none of the construction is of high quality, and the risk of structural failure is great. 

A rifleman in early-1800s Europe was a specialist who used a rifle, a weapon more accurate and far-reaching than a musket, to harass enemy troops. Rifleman Dodd serves as a forward observer when he becomes trapped behind the enemy French lines, and he must fight his way back to his comrades. Riflemen were carefully trained, as precision was vital in their work. Their duties sometimes required them to infiltrate the opposing line to learn what they can; they were skilled in techniques that today are used by special-forces commandos. 

A rifle musket is a long gun, shoulder-fired like a standard musket (see “Musket,” above), whose barrel contains rifling, or spiral grooves, on the inside surface that cause balls or bullets to spin properly through the air and reach targets more accurately than earlier guns. Like standard muskets, they’re reloaded by dropping powder, wadding, and a ball down the barrel, but the ball must be shoved down against the tight rifling with a ramrod. Dodd strikes a mallet on the end of the ramrod: “The blows of the mallet drove the bullet down the rifling until at last it rested safely on top of the wadding” (16). This process takes longer than with a standard musket, but the payoff is much greater accuracy and range. Only specially trained sharpshooters used the rifle musket. (See “Rifleman,” above.)

In the mid-1800s, a new version was introduced that used cartridges—a shaped bullet, powder, and an explosive “percussion” cap—loaded into the rear of the gun, and the trigger snaps a hammer against the percussion cap, which ignites the powder that propels the bullet. This fast-loading weapon became standard issue for soldiers, and the term “musket” was dropped, so that today they are simply called rifles. Today, nearly all handguns and rifles use the cartridge system. 

The longest river in the Iberian Peninsula, the Tagus, flows across Spain and Portugal to empty into the Atlantic Ocean at Lisbon. Dodd follows it downstream, hoping to reach Lisbon and reunite with his regiment, but the French blockade his progress. Much of the action in Rifleman Dodd takes place on or near the banks of the Tagus River, which the Portuguese refer to as the Tejo. The river serves as a blockade, trapping the French and giving them nowhere to go but retreat.