Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword

by Andrew Bamford

  As a result, many battalions embarked for Walcheren in July with a sizeable proportion of their men only just returned from hospital, and therefore likely not yet fully returned to fitness. Others were forced to make up the numbers by recruiting and drafts from the Militia; the 1/38th received 221 draftees during April and May 1809, and the 1/4th received 359 in April alone.16 Others required the influx of large drafts from their second battalions to get them back to strength, as with the 1/26th, which received 210 men in June.17 Given the limited time available, it is unlikely that these drafts would have been fully integrated into their units, and in any case had seen only home service and were not acclimatized to campaigning. Whilst most of the battalions that came back from Spain went on to Walcheren, three did not; these were the first battalions of the 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry and 95th Rifles, which instead returned to Portugal whilst the second battalions of the same regiments were brigaded together under Major General William Stewart as part of Chatham’s command. However, before departing for Portugal, the three first battalions offloaded their ineffectives onto the junior battalions of their respective regiments. This was acceptable for the 95th, which used its new third battalion as a depository for the sick from the two senior battalions, but left the 2/43rd and 2/52nd, both under orders for Walcheren, with large numbers of unhealthy men.18

  As a result of this combination of factors, a significant proportion of the Walcheren expedition comprised men who were either recent draftees not yet acclimatized to active service, or else veterans still not fully fit after Corunna.19 With such widespread vulnerability, the onset of the fever, within days of the troops first landing, was sudden and in many cases overwhelming. Benjamin Harris of the 95th observed “whole parties of our Riflemen in the street shaking with a sort of ague, to such a degree that they could hardly walk; strong and fine young men who had been but a short time in the service suddenly seemed reduced to the state of infants, unable to stand upright—so great a shaking had seized upon their whole bodies from head to heel.”20 At length, by the time orders came to re-embark, only three men in Harris’s company remained fit including Harris himself, but he too then succumbed to the fever during the voyage home and found himself in the hospital in Hythe along with the survivors of the other Light Brigade battalions. Having saved a substantial sum from his work as a battalion cobbler, Harris was able to purchase additional food and wine that he shared with his comrades, to which he attributed his eventual return to health—although, as it would transpire, his ordeal was not yet over.21 Harris was at least fortunate not to have contracted the fever until already on his way back to England, where medical provision was readily available. Those who fell ill in the early stages of the campaign, however, had a hard time of it as Chatham’s medical staff in the field were rapidly overwhelmed by the volume of cases. One such was John Green of the 68th, who was “amongst the first that were attacked by this disease, and laid some days in a barn, without partaking of any food whatever, and was brought so exceedingly low, that I was almost insensible to any thing that was going on amongst my comrades.”22 Green was treated in a series of barns, and then in the general hospital at Veere, but it was not until he reached the latter place that he could be provided with a decent bed and food. Eventually taken back to England, Green required a whole year to recover his health.23

  Harris, on the other hand, initially believed that he had beaten the fever, but, like many of its victims, his troubles were just starting. Seemingly fit, he was selected to form part of a detachment from the 2/95th being prepared to go out to Cadiz, but a single day’s marching on the way to embark at Portsmouth was enough to bring on a relapse, and he found himself back in hospital at Hilsea Barracks, where he was lucky enough to defeat the fever for a second time.24 Even those of Harris’s comrades who were fit enough to embark were by no means clear of the fever, since Cadiz garrison records report that on April 19, 1810, “The two companies of the 2nd battn. of the 95th Rifle Regt. marched from the Telegraph Heights to the barracks at Cadiz on account of the men suffering from a complaint[,] the remains of the Walcheren fever.”25 Harris, meanwhile, spent a further year’s convalescence, the bulk of it with his family, before eventually rejoining his regiment. Being still unfit for active duty on account of the state in which the fever had left him, he was eventually posted to a veteran battalion, where he finished the war and obtained his discharge following the peace of 1814. Recalled to serve again in the Hundred Days, a recurrence of the fever meant that he was unable to do so, as a result of which he found his pension forfeit. Even thirty years later, when Harris dictated his memoirs, the fever had not entirely left him, and he still felt “the remains of it in damp weather.”26

  The long-term effects of the Walcheren campaign therefore have to be understood on two levels. The first is the number of men who were permanently rendered unfit for service, and who had either to be discharged or transferred to veteran or garrison units. The experiences of Benjamin Harris demonstrate how long and drawn-out the suffering of such men could be. This suffering not only was a personal tragedy for the individuals concerned but also cost the British Army considerable numbers of trained men, whose absence would be felt later in the war. Harris’s experiences also exemplify the other problem, namely the episodic or intermittent nature of the fever, which rendered its victims liable to relapse.27 When we look at their service over the period as a whole, we find that units that served on Walcheren have an average sickness ratio of 23 percent, as opposed to the average of 17 percent across the full range of units sampled. Death rates are also worse: thirteen per thousand for Walcheren regiments, but only ten per thousand as an overall average. When all the units sampled are ranked by sickness rate, four of the worst five, and seven of the worst ten, are units that had served on Walcheren—the worst of all being the 68th Light Infantry with an average ratio of just under 42 percent sick over three years’ worth of data. Understandably, the units that suffered the most were those—including the 68th—that remained with the occupation force through the autumn. Those that left when the main force was withdrawn at the beginning of September tend to have better long-term sickness rates, having had less exposure to the fever.

  As the experiences of Harris and Green exemplify, it took months, if not years, to fully shake off the Walcheren fever, and as late as February 1810 over a third of the expedition’s survivors were still hospitalized.28 Nevertheless, most of the units that served with Chatham’s ill-fated army did ultimately return to active service. Of the fifty-one units, including detachments, that served in the Walcheren expedition, thirty-seven were subsequently redeployed to the peninsula, joining Wellington’s command between 1810 and 1814, but their effectiveness continued to be undermined by their earlier service. The 1/26th was eventually sent away as being irredeemably sickly, whilst the 77th spent much of the war in garrison for the same reason. In the case of the 1/26th, the battalion seemed at first to have recovered itself after a period of duty on Jersey, but rapidly became sickly on being posted to the peninsula. Since Harris found that even a route-march in England brought about a relapse, it is scarcely to be wondered that the altogether more arduous circumstances of active service had the same results for the men of the 1/26th. The battalion was eventually transferred to Gibraltar, but as late as 1813 was still not entirely recovered, as repeated inspection reports testify.29 Major General David Widdrington spoke extremely scathingly of the drafting of unfit men to the unit, who then readily succumbed to disease.30 Losses due to the fever could also have an adverse effect on the internal economy of a unit, reducing its effectiveness even if the men were physically fit. Major General Robert Long believed that, at least in part, the poor state of the 9th Light Dragoons in early 1813 was due to “the loss sustained by the Regt. in [NCOs], as well as in some of its best men in the Walcheren expedition”31—a telling indictment, considering that Long was writing over three years after the end of Chatham’s campaign.

  Even those Walcheren regiments that wer
e fit enough to serve with the main army in the field still required special measures to keep them in a fit state. Although a significant reinforcement joined Wellington in time for Salamanca, largely composed of battalions that had previously served on Walcheren, it proved necessary to leave the new units behind when the army pushed on to Burgos, lest the continued exertion ruin them completely.32 Over and above the growing awareness that the army as a whole required more effective medical provision, particularly close attention had to be paid to the standard of care available in these units, forcing McGrigor to intervene in the organization of at least one of the battalions in question. Writing in April 1813, McGrigor was keen to show Wellington that he was aware of, and was dealing with, the lingering effects of the Walcheren fever in the 1/5th, which had joined as part of the 1812 reinforcement:

  In January last finding that from the age and infirmity of Surgeon Lease he was unequal to the charge of a sickly Regiment I forwarded thru’ your Lordship a recommendation for his being transferred to the 13th R. Veteran Battalion, and that an active & able surgeon should be appointed to the 5th Regt. in consequence that Mr Carter is appointed to that corps. But in order that the Regiment should not suffer in the mean time I directed one of the best and most active Surgeons in the Army to take charge of the medical concerns of the 5th Regiment, and Staff Surgeon Arthur remained with that Regt. and did the duty of Surgeon during the most sickly period of the Corps.33

  More than three years after the failure of the Grand Expedition, its aftereffects were still causing concerns for the chief medical expert with the main British Army in the field. As such, however, they cease to become an independent issue and instead become intertwined with the wider problems surrounding the health of the peninsular army, and need to be addressed as part of that analysis.

  Up to a point, it is relatively easy to assess the medical situation in the peninsula in an informed manner thanks to the analysis provided by McGrigor. However, that officer only arrived in Portugal in December 1811, meaning that detailed information on the earlier years is less readily available, although it is possible to a degree to identify common factors between earlier events and those from later in the war. Through McGrigor’s analysis, it is possible to appreciate the seasonal nature of many of the illnesses affecting the troops, and this can then be more widely applied to aid understanding of comparable circumstances in other theaters. Many of these seasonal trends are logical when considered in relation to the weather conditions, as with the prevalence of rheumatic and respiratory problems in the cold and wet weather, which McGrigor particularly noted during the 1812 operations against Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz.34 Winter conditions also contributed to incidence of typhus and typhoid fevers, as climatic conditions forced troops to spend long periods of time in overcrowded and potentially insanitary winter quarters.

  McGrigor divided his service into four periods, each representing different sets of circumstances, and this approach can also be extended to earlier periods. Figure 8 superimposes this division onto a graph plotting sickness and death rates; in order to avoid undue distortion of the figures by losses attributable to combat, the data has been averaged out on a quarterly basis. This creates a total of eight phases—those identified by McGrigor are numbered one though four, in order to correspond with his own designations, whilst those for the first half of the period are designated A through D.

  Phase A represents a period during which the army was inactive in Portugal, but although the sickness ratio is at its lowest point, it is by no means as low as one might expect. This can partly be attributed to wounded from Roliça and Vimeiro still in the hospitals, but a significant proportion of these casualties belonged to regiments that marched into Spain with Moore, and, after October 1808, these are no longer included in the returns from which this data is assembled. Evidently, a significant proportion of manpower was hospitalized through illness during this period, although this is in one sense unsurprising since we have already seen how high levels of sickness prevented units like the 29th and 1/40th joining Moore. Furthermore, time was needed for the men to become used to a foreign campaigning environment, and in 1808 this applied to everyone, whereas later in the war the troops going through this process represented a small proportion of the total. This acclimatization was exacerbated by the fact that, with the force as a whole being inexperienced, mistakes were made that would simply not have happened in later years. Commissary officer August Schaumann remarked of his service in Portugal at this time that the offal from the bullocks slaughtered for food built up around the camp to the detriment of health and hygiene, but it was only when this accumulation “became putrid in the great heat,” and infested with flies, that it occurred to him to bury the mass.35 This ignorance of the need for basic sanitary precautions stands as a marked contrast with the organization of a more experienced force, as evidenced in contemporary French practice.36

  Figure 8. Sickness and Death Rates in the Peninsula. Data from Monthly Returns, TNA, WO17/2464–2465, 2467–2476.

  The other factor contributing to the higher-than-expected levels of sickness during this time is the fact that several of the units concerned had come to Portugal after several months aboard transport ships, where poor conditions and lack of fresh food, sunlight, and exercise all had a deleterious effect on health.37 This factor was particularly noteworthy amongst the four battalions that had formed Spencer’s initial command in the summer of 1808, which had spent the hottest months of the year cooped up aboard transports. These units lost thirty-five dead between them whilst embarked, and all had well in excess of one hundred men each sick by October 1.38 At this same point, before Moore took the bulk of the troops into Spain, the average rate of sickness in the whole force was 10.4 percent; in contrast, Spencer’s four original battalions averaged 17.8 percent.39 The 1/40th, with the second highest sickness rate, had also spent much of its immediate prior service aboard transports during its passages to and from South America.40 The worst sickness ratio of all was in the 2/43rd, which had not previously served outside the British Isles at all, but this battalion, being particularly inexperienced, suffered heavily with dysentery—a condition which, in itself, reinforces the harm done by ignorance of camp sanitation practices.41

  The issue of acclimatization must also be seen as having a considerable part to play in the rapid rise in the sickness and death rates encountered at the outset of Phase B, which represents the Oporto and Talavera campaigns and the subsequent withdrawal, via the Guadiana, to Portugal. Troops that were not yet fully acclimatized to the theater inevitably suffered during the long and arduous marching involved in these campaigns, a trend also noted amongst those regiments that marched into Spain with Moore the previous autumn.42 The pursuit of Soult after Oporto was forced through poor terrain in bad weather, and this same combination of forced marches and shortages of supplies was also experienced in the Talavera campaign. By then, heat had replaced rain as the main climatic problem, but so far as the sickness ratio was concerned, these extremes caused a continuation of what had already been experienced in the march to Oporto and back. The Talavera campaign saw a prolonged shortage of rations, and after the battle the supply system collapsed completely, to the extent that the men’s pay stoppage for food was reduced to three pence in recognition of the fact that they had “not received their rations regularly since the 22nd July.”43

  The result of this combination of factors was that when the army, forced to remain in Spain to show continued support for Britain’s ally, went in to cantonments in the marshy Guadiana valley, many of the men were already weakened. The similarities with the ongoing ordeal of the troops on Walcheren are marked, and the results were almost as severe as men began to rapidly succumb to fevers. The subsequent epidemic was, in relative terms, the single most destructive event in the Peninsular War so far as the British Army was concerned. Total deaths in November 1809, when the fever was at its height, were comparable with the casualties at Albuera or the storm of Badajoz. Only the even m
ore virulent, but thankfully localized, epidemic that decimated the First Guards Brigade during the winter of 1812–13 led to more deaths through sickness. What was more, the death rate remained high over a period of six months; the peak came with 1,186 deaths in November, but the death rate remained continually in excess of 500 per month from September 1809 to February 1810.44 This figure does not take into account the number of men either temporarily or permanently weakened by illness, whose numbers were such that some battalions were reporting over half their strength as sick.45

  What makes understanding the Guadiana epidemic harder is the arbitrary way in which units suffered. Those battalions that had undergone the rigors of the Oporto and Talavera campaigns generally returned higher numbers of sick, although a proportion of combat casualties must be factored in. Yet the 2/39th and 2/42nd, newly out from home, both fell heavily sick whilst the 5/60th emerged largely unscathed despite considerable arduous prior service.46 To an extent, this discrepancy mirrors at a regimental level the problem seen within units during the Walcheren expedition. Some men succumbed because they were not acclimatized; others, though acclimatized, succumbed because they were worn out. However, like the Walcheren fever, the circumstances of the illness are confusing. Whilst the marshy Guadiana was notoriously malarial, the time of year makes this diagnosis problematic, and similarities with the better-documented epidemic of 1813 suggest that the 1809 epidemic was also a typhoid fever, or, at least, a combination of typhoid and malaria as may also have been the case on Walcheren.47 Whatever its cause, the contagion was certainly specific to the locality, and battalions leaving the field army, such as the 2/83rd and 2/87th, showed a marked improvement once in a healthier clime.