Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword

by Andrew Bamford

  One is inclined to suspect, with the example of Lt. General Sir John Whitelocke at Buenos Aires still recent, that Dalrymple now preferred to secure Wellesley’s victory by opening negotiations rather than risk it all, and his career with it, by further fighting. The infamous Convention of Cintra was accordingly concluded on September 30, by which Junot’s troops were to be evacuated to France, in British ships, with their arms, baggage, and personal effects: this latter category being flexibly interpreted by the French to include the loot of their occupation.51 Once the news of Cintra was out, both Dalrymple and Wellesley found themselves rapidly recalled, with Burrard soon to follow, thus leaving Moore in command with the unenviable task of cooperating with the armies of the Spanish insurgent juntas. In order to compensate for the garrison to be left in Portugal, Moore was to be reinforced with a corps of 12,000 men under Lt. General Sir David Baird, which was shipped to Corunna before marching overland to rendezvous with the main body. This gave Moore a field army exceeding 30,000 men, but this counted little against the 244,000 that Napoleon was leading into Spain.52 Moore was able to distract the French for a time by his operations in the north of Spain, with his cavalry doing well in two minor actions, but retreat became an inevitability if the army was to be saved, and only Moore’s posthumous battlefield victory before the walls of Corunna restored some luster to an otherwise failed campaign.53

  The initial reports reaching Britain concerning Moore’s progress were largely positive; indeed, in its overenthusiasm, the Times at first credited Lord Paget’s cavalry with the capture of a French marshal.54 Once the news of the retreat was out, however, the tone changed, and the ragged state of many of the survivors as they came ashore in Britain did not help matters. Parliamentary questions were asked concerning the number of casualties, although Castlereagh’s brother, Brigadier General Charles Stewart, was quickly on his feet to stifle rumors that over 8,000 men had been lost since the army entered Spain.55 Moore’s troops had also returned without much of their equipment and supplies, abandoned during the retreat or destroyed at Corunna, and this loss too became subject to parliamentary investigation. Amongst other equipment losses, the commissary in chief had to report the loss of 248,523 pounds of salt meat, 192,191 pounds of biscuit, 5,387 1/2 gallons of rum, 8,872 blankets, and 4,382 pairs of shoes, all of which would need replacing before a new campaign.56

  As a result of the return of Moore’s army to Britain, a sizeable disposable force was again available for service for the campaigning season of 1809. With Austria again preparing for war, two strategic options were now open: either a return to the peninsula to support the continuing Spanish resistance, or a new campaign in northern Europe where Britain could potentially further its own designs in the Low Countries whilst providing a diversion in favor of Austria. Although attempts were still being made to persuade the Spanish to admit a British garrison to Cadiz, Moore’s campaign had drawn the bulk of French forces into the north and west of Spain, and under these circumstances the reorganized Spaniards were able for the time being to secure Andalusia unaided. Therefore, British operations would have to be based on Lisbon, where the garrison under Lt. General Sir John Cradock could form the nucleus for a new army. However, Cradock had less than 10,000 men, largely units that had been deemed too sickly or inefficient to march into Spain with Moore.57 Before his death, Moore had claimed that Portugal could not be held, but Wellesley, with his Indian experience of sustained operations in conjunction with indigenous forces, had the foresight to see that, assuming the cooperation of a remodeled Portuguese army, Britain could feasibly maintain its presence in the country and ultimately use it as a base for further operations.58 With his reappointment to the peninsular command, which he would hold for the rest of the war, Wellesley won the argument. However, for 1809 the peninsula was not to be Britain’s main theater of operations. Instead, the lure of objectives closer to home spawned the “Grand Expedition” to the Low Countries under the military command of Lt. General the Earl of Chatham, which, though successful in capturing Flushing, was unable to push on to the main objective of Antwerp; all this did nothing to help the Austrians who were already defeated by the time the expedition sailed. Meanwhile, the British troops were stricken with fever in the swamps of Walcheren Island, and suffered considerable losses before the last of them were finally withdrawn in December.59

  Although they ultimately achieved little, the 39,000 men who sailed to Walcheren in July 1809 represented the largest single expeditionary force that Britain sent overseas during the whole of the conflict. Its assembly, however, was achieved only after a rigorous scouring of the British Isles for available troops, since it had also been necessary to send reinforcements out with Wellesley when he returned to Portugal in April. Even though the peninsula was a secondary priority for 1809, the total number of British troops serving under Wellesley had risen to some 26,000 men by the time that the Walcheren expedition sailed, with a further 9,000 on their way as reinforcements.60 This commitment of such significant forces in two different theaters placed a considerable strain on the British Army—quite simply, to attempt a maximum effort at this stage in the war was asking too much too soon and led to the first of two periods of strategic overstretch.

  The primary symptom of this overstretch was the commitment to active service of infantry battalions that would not, under ordinary circumstances, have been earmarked for this role. During 1808 the infantry serving in the peninsula eventually amounted to forty-nine battalions. Thirteen of these had remained in Portugal, and thirty-six had returned from Corunna in varying states of disorganization. The bulk of those that returned became the nucleus for the Walcheren expedition; only the first battalions of the 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry and 95th Rifles were exempt, instead forming a light brigade under Brigadier General Robert Craufurd to join Wellesley in Portugal. Whilst there were still some sixty-three battalions of the line remaining in Britain in January 1809 that had not taken part in the previous year’s campaigning, the greater part of these were weak and fit only for home service. Nevertheless, ten of these—including two excellent battalions of Foot Guards but otherwise mostly second battalions of line regiments—would ultimately go to Portugal during the course of the year, and a further ten would go to Walcheren. The situation regarding mounted troops was rather better, since fewer regiments had been engaged in 1808 and additional horsemen had been readied for service as a potential reinforcement for Moore. The year 1809 saw seven cavalry regiments go out to the peninsula whilst a further five were earmarked for the Walcheren expedition although not all sailed.61

  Although Wellesley did not receive priority so far as reinforcements from home were concerned, he was able to obtain some additional troops from the Mediterranean garrisons and also benefited from the belated arrival of some units that had initially been intended to reinforce Moore. With these forces, he was able to clear Portugal of the French for a second time, launching a devastating surprise attack on Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult at Oporto on May 12 and then harrying the retreating French through the mountains of the Trás-os-Montes.62 Scarcely had the victors recovered from the rigors of the pursuit than they were on the move again, returning to the valley of the Tagus and then heading east into Spain where they were to cooperate with the Spanish in a combined offensive designed to liberate Madrid. Poor interallied cooperation thwarted this goal, and although the fighting around Talavera on the 27th and 28th of June represented a tactical success, the action was by no means free from error. Furthermore, many troops began the battle on empty stomachs as the commissary system began to fail under the strain. Continuing supply shortages, and the massing of French reinforcements against his lines of communication, forced Wellesley—created Lord Wellington after Talavera—to abandon the campaign and order a withdrawal that took the army first to the unhealthy Guadiana and then back to Portugal.63

  Although 1809 had represented a huge effort by the British Army, the year had been a strategic failure, with Austria’s defeat ending any hope
s of maintaining the Fourth Coalition against France. In the peninsula, too, the year had ended in disaster for the allies as the French drove south into Andalusia and laid siege to Cadiz. Although some help was sent to the Spanish, Britain’s priorities for the next two years were focused on the defense of Portugal. Financial support, and the endeavors of Lt. General Sir William Beresford and his team of seconded British officers, ensured that the Portuguese armed forces would function under British command, and from 1810 onward Wellington would command a unified Anglo-Portuguese field army. In effect, therefore, the events of 1809 forced a return to a more traditional grand strategy, whereby British gold took much of the strain away from British manpower.64 The active campaigning of 1810 was dominated by the defense of Portugal against Marshal André Masséna’s 65,000-strong French Armée de Portugal. By bringing the Portuguese into the field, Wellington was able to double the size of his regular forces, but this still only gave a field army of 52,000. However, by combining delaying actions with a scorched earth policy, Wellington hoped to wear the French down and thus negate Masséna’s numerical advantage.65 Having captured the border fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, Masséna finally advanced into Portugal during September 1810, meeting Wellington in battle for the first time on the Serra do Busaço on the 27th. Although tactically victorious, the allies continued to fall back toward Lisbon and on October 10th entered the newly completed Lines of Torres Vedras. The secrecy with which these fortifications had been constructed led to their existence being a complete surprise to the French, but the repulse of several probing attacks soon made it clear that they could not be taken by force. After six weeks, Masséna accepted the inevitable and ordered a withdrawal to Santarém on the Tagus.66

  Meanwhile, Wellington had been receiving a steady trickle of reinforcements as the survivors of the Walcheren campaign began to become available for a return to service. Along with units reassigned from overseas garrisons, these new arrivals saw Wellington commanding some 48,000 British troops, once the last major reinforcements had arrived in mid-March, along with half that number of Portuguese.67 Although this gave Wellington an edge over Masséna, the French capture of Badajoz forced the dispatch of troops to the southern theater of war, leading to a division both of focus and of force that would continue throughout 1811 and 1812.68 Wellington was able to harry Masséna’s forces out of Portugal, but supply problems prevented a further advance, and the detachment of Beresford with three divisions to the southern theater left Wellington at a disadvantage when the French commander regrouped and launched a counterattack.69 The resulting Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, fought between the 3rd and 5th of May 1811, was the narrowest and least creditable of Wellington’s victories, forcing the admission that “If Boney had been there, we should have been beaten.”70 Further embarrassment would follow, when a series of blunders allowed the French garrison of Almeida to effect its escape and reach Masséna’s lines, an incident that revealed a startling lack of professionalism amongst certain of the senior officers involved.71

  Meanwhile, events in the south had led to another general action, even bloodier than Fuentes de Oñoro. This took place at Albuera on May 16, where a multinational army under Beresford—commanding by virtue of his commission as marshal of Portugal—attempted to defeat Soult’s attempt to relieve the French garrison in Badajoz. Soult managed to turn the allied right flank, and the battle degenerated into a series of fierce combats as successive allied formations moved up to stem the French tide. During the early stages of the action, Lt. Colonel John Colborne’s brigade was caught in line by French cavalry and suffered severe casualties, and it was only after a prolonged infantry firefight that the French were finally driven back. The number of British casualties—4,156—made Albuera Britain’s bloodiest peninsular battle; coming on top of the 1,493 casualties at Fuentes de Oñoro, this represented a sizable reduction of British effective strength in the theater, and necessitated a wholesale reorganization to rebuild the battered Second and Fourth Divisions.72

  The bulk of the next twelve months saw a concentration on warfare by maneuver, with Wellington seeking to obtain an advantageous position that would allow him to successfully besiege either Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz. In the face of three separate French armies, this was a hard task, since although he possessed an individual advantage over Soult’s Armée du Midi, covering Badajoz, or Général de Division Jean Dorsenne’s Armée du Nord covering Ciudad Rodrigo, either force could potentially be reinforced by the Armée de Portugal, which was now under the command of Marshal Auguste Marmont and based around Salamanca. Obtaining a local advantage necessitated the rapid movement of substantial forces, but with each north-south movement representing 150 miles over indifferent roads, this inevitably had a deleterious effect on sick lists that were already swollen by the wounded from May’s battles. Throughout 1811 Wellington found his moves thwarted, and it was only in the January of 1812, after a surprise winter campaign, that he was able to capture Ciudad Rodrigo, albeit at the cost of 1,111 casualties.73

  Although the defense of Portugal had been the primary focus of Britain’s commitment to the peninsula during 1810 and 1811, there had also been an increase in activity along the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The French advance into Andalusia during 1809 finally persuaded the Spanish to accept British aid in defending Cadiz, which in February 1810 welcomed a British brigade as reinforcement for its garrison. Thereafter, the British presence was rapidly built up to a peak of 7,070 rank and file, plus a further 1,259 Portuguese under British command, in July of that year. A reduction in French pressure once it became apparent that Cadiz could not be captured by assault, combined with a growing need for reinforcements in Portugal, saw the British contingent reduced to the region of 4,000 to 5,000 men, plus another thousand or so Portuguese, at which level it remained until 1812.74 From March 1810 command was invested in Lt. General Sir Thomas Graham, who later led an Anglo-Portuguese division in the operations of March 1811 that culminated in the Battle of Barrosa.75 As well as troops from Cadiz, this campaign drew on troops from the Gibraltar garrison, which had previously also contributed forces to an ill-advised and ill-fated amphibious descent on Fuengirola in October 1810.76 More successful was the occupation of Tarifa, held by a British garrison from September 1810 onward, which withstood a French siege between December 1811 and January 1812.77 In British hands, the fortress provided a useful sally point for operations in the interior, including those leading to Barrosa. Although relatively small in scale, representing a return to the old strategy of using the British Army as a means of extending the reach of the Royal Navy, these operations did help keep substantial numbers of Soult’s forces tied down in the south of Spain, and this would be of great utility to Wellington as he began planning for the campaign of 1812.

  Even in 1811, the dispersal of Soult’s Armée du Midi had allowed Lt. General Rowland Hill, commanding the Anglo-Portuguese forces in the southern theater, to launch a surprise attack against one of Soult’s divisions at Arroyomolinos on October 28 and inflict one of the most one-sided defeats suffered by the French in the peninsula.78 Now, when Wellington moved south in force during March 1812 to take Badajoz, Soult was unable to muster a creditable relief force. Nevertheless, the possibility that Marmont might yet reinforce Soult led to the siege operations being rushed, leading to heavy casualties during the successful storm of April 5, 1812. Allied casualties totaled 4,670 for the siege as a whole, which, combined with the losses at Ciudad Rodrigo, left the army appreciably weakened even before the main business of the year’s campaigning could begin.79

  By the time Badajoz fell, Wellington’s forces had been engaged in active warfare for well over a year, with little respite. Exertion and combat had depleted the ranks to a considerable degree, and a similar depletion, through death and wounds as well as illness, had removed a substantial number of Wellington’s key subordinates. Sizeable reinforcements came out during late 1811 and early 1812, amounting to some 8,000 men including two full brigades of heav
y cavalry, but many of the infantry battalions that came out during this period were those that had taken part in the Walcheren expedition and still had the aftereffects of its fevers running through their ranks. Nevertheless, the new arrivals made up for the Badajoz losses in quantity if not quality, whilst the French armies in the peninsula were now weaker thanks to the drafting off of regiments for participation in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Wellington was therefore able “to move forward into Castille, and to endeavour to bring Marmont to a general action.”80 On July 22, outside Salamanca, he did just that and won the greatest battlefield victory of his career, albeit at a cost of a further 3,129 British casualties.81