It could not last. Although Massena was reinforced by some 11,000 men under D’Erlon late in December, he was never strong enough to attack the lines, and sickness, hunger and attacks by Portuguese irregulars were costing him 500 men a week. In March 1811, he slid away to the north-west, abandoning most of his vehicles and hamstringing all surplus animals. There was a sharp little action on the River Coa on 3 April, and Massena reached Almeida on the 11th, after a campaign lasting eleven months that had cost him perhaps 30,000 men.
The next phase of the war centred upon the frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo in the north, and Badajoz further south. The latter had been taken by Soult, thrusting up from Andalusia, in March, and Wellington entrusted Beresford with the task of besieging it while he concentrated on Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo. Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo were three days apart for Wellington at his hard-riding best. That spring Wellington was responsible for a force at Cádiz under the reliable Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham, who had just beaten the French at Barossa; Beresford’s allied army in Extremadura; and his own force in Old Castile. Each faced an enemy who was potentially stronger, and both Wellington and Beresford relied on lines of communication running back to Lisbon.
There were two major battles at this juncture, both of them hard-won allied victories, as the French sought to raise the sieges of Badajoz and Almeida. On 3 May 1811, Massena attacked Wellington at Fuentes de Oñoro, south of Almeida, and renewed his efforts on the 5th. This was not a carefully stage-managed defensive battle like Busaco, and there were some very dangerous moments. One of them came when the inexperienced 7th Division was caught out in the open by a superior French force. But Robert Craufurd of the Light Division rose brilliantly to the occasion, rescued the 7th, and then extricated his own troops in a remarkable display of disciplined minor tactics.
The battle ended with a bloody fight for Fuentes itself. Private Thomas Pococke of the 71st, an actor who had enlisted after falling victim to stage-fright, described what happened in his own part of the field:
A bayonet went through between my side and my clothes, to my knapsack, which stopped its progress. The Frenchman to whom the bayonet belonged fell, pierced by a ball from my rear-rank man. While freeing myself from the bayonet, a ball took off part of my right shoulder wing, and killed my rear rank man, who fell upon me.
He fired 107 rounds that day, and his shoulder was ‘as black as coal’ from his musket’s recoil. The Connaught Rangers played a distinguished part in capturing the village, and Pococke saw them lying ‘two and three deep of dead and wounded’.25 The 79th was also badly cut up in Fuentes, and despite his manifold cares Wellington found time to write to their colonel, whose son had been mortally wounded commanding it.
You will always regret and lament his loss, I am convinced; but I hope you will derive some consolation from the reflection that he fell in the performance of his duty, at the head of your brave regiment, loved and respected by all who knew him, in an action in which, if possible, British troops surpassed every thing they had ever done before, and of which the result was most creditable to His Majesty’s arms.26
Having failed in his attempt to relieve Almeida, Massena sent word to the city’s governor, ordering him to blow up the magazine and escape. Three French soldiers set off with messages, disguised as peasants; two were caught and shot as spies, but the third succeeded. The resourceful governor, Major General Brennier, fired a pre-arranged signal, three salvoes at five-minute intervals, to tell Massena that the order had been received, and led his men to safety on a dark night, crossing an unguarded bridge at Barba del Puerco. Wellington was furious, calling failure to intercept the French ‘the most disgraceful military event that has yet occurred to us’. He told Liverpool that he might have prevented it had he been on the spot, but having deployed two divisions and a brigade to prevent the escape of 1,400 men, he was confident that all was well. Then he returned to a familiar theme. ‘I am obliged to be every where,’ he grumbled, ‘and if absent from any operation, something goes wrong.’27
He blamed Lieutenant Colonel Bevan of the 4th Regiment, who had been ordered to the bridge. In fact the order had been written out by the notoriously incompetent Lieutenant General Sir William Erskine, who had stuffed it into his pocket with his snuff box and forgot about it. By the time Bevan received the order, it was midnight. Had he broken camp and marched immediately, he could have reached the bridge on time, but he waited till dawn, and it was too late: Brennier was across. Erskine told Wellington that the 4th had got lost – which is what Wellington reported in his dispatch to Liverpool. Bevan begged for an enquiry, but Wellington decided to court-martial him instead. Although a trial might have brought out some of the case in Bevan’s failure, he did not wait for it, and blew his brains out. Wellington was widely blamed for Bevan’s suicide, but if he sensed the climate, he paid no attention to it. He wrote sharply to Major General Alexander Campbell, a close friend of the Prince Regent’s, warning him that the army was full of ‘the desire to be forward in engaging the enemy’; but he would do better to show ‘a cool, discriminating judgement in action’.28 He was even more frank when writing to his brother William Wellesley-Pole that: ‘there is nothing so stupid as a gallant officer’.29
Wellington’s conviction that things inevitably went wrong if he was not present was reinforced by events further south. On his orders, Beresford had begun to besiege the powerful fortress of Badajoz on 5 May 1811. His efforts were not simply hampered by the great strength of the place, but by the fact that he was pitifully short of heavy guns, and had to rely on elderly pieces borrowed from Elvas. Beresford soon heard that Soult was on his way to relieve Badajoz, and so he temporarily abandoned the siege and marched out to meet him. The local Spanish army commanders, Blake and Castaños, agreed to fight under Beresford’s command, and on 16 May he faced the French on a low ridge near the village of Albuera. Soult pinned Beresford to his position by a frontal feint, and then threw his whole weight against the allied right. Although British sources are often disdainful of Spanish battlefield performance, there is no doubt that the dogged courage of Zaya’s division, on Beresford’s right, checked the initial French assault, allowing time for Stewart’s division to come up.
Stewart’s leading brigade arrived just in time to be greeted by a sudden rainstorm, which made many of its muskets useless, and by a determined cavalry charge, which took advantage of the fact: three of its four battalions were cut to pieces, one of them, the Buffs, losing over 80 per cent of its strength. At this point Beresford seems to have lost his presence of mind, and Lowry Cole, prompted by a bright, young staff officer, Henry Hardinge, brought his 4th Division up without orders. There followed one of the most prodigious firefights of the entire period, with Cole’s brigades steadily making their way forward, men loading and firing as if in a dream, closing to the centre as musketry and grapeshot winnowed their ranks, and realising that they were making progress because the nationality of the dead on whom they trampled changed from allied to French. It was there that the 57th Regiment earned its own niche in the military pantheon, with its commanding officer, hard hit, shouting: ‘Die hard, 57th, die hard.’ Sir William Napier, Peninsula infantry officer and one of the campaign’s most notable historians, has subjective views on the conduct of the battle and a low regard for Beresford, but his prose rises to meet the high drama of the occasion:
… then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights … Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm, weakened the stability of their order, their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns to their front, their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd … the mighty mass gave way and like a loosened cliff went headlong down the steep. The rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men,
the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on that fatal hill!30
Beresford had lost 6,000 men (two thirds of them from his British infantry) and Soult 8,000. His dispatch to Wellington paid handsome tribute to ‘the distinguished gallantry of the troops’, and he reported that ‘our dead, particularly the 57th Regiment, were lying as they had fought in ranks, and every wound was in front’.31
Beresford had written to Wellington the moment Soult appeared, and Wellington, mistrustful as ever, hurtled southwards, riding so hard that two of his horses died. But he was too late: Beresford had fought at Albuera before he arrived. Wellington, seeing that Beresford was downcast at his losses, did his best to console him by saying: ‘You could not be successful in such an action without a large loss. We must make up our minds to affairs of this kind sometimes, or give up the game.’32 But he was harsher when writing to his brother, Henry, a few days later. The Spanish, although capable of great bravery, were inflexible, and the British had ‘suffered accordingly’ in assisting them. ‘I am not very easy about the results of another action,’ he continued, ‘should we be obliged to fight one.’33 At Fuentes, Wellington had faced a superior force marching to relieve Almeida and beaten it, losing less than 2,000 men; Beresford, in spite of a numerical advantage, had lost far more heavily. Wellington visited a hospital near the field, and found it full of wounded of the 29th Regiment. ‘Men of the 29th, I am sorry to see so many of you here,’ he said. ‘If you had commanded us, My Lord,’ replied a sergeant, ‘there wouldn’t be so many of us here.’34 A Geordie private in 7th Fusiliers had made the same point to his mate George Spencer Cooper on the morning of the battle. ‘Whore’s ar Arthur?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know, I don’t see him,’ replied Cooper. ‘Aw wish he wor here,’ said the man. ‘And so,’ mused Cooper, ‘did I.’35
Despite allied victories at Fuentes de Oñoro and Albuera, the French still held Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, and could use them as stepping-stones for another invasion of Portugal. That summer Wellington renewed the siege of Badajoz, but made poor progress, and an attempt to storm Fort San Cristobal, an outwork on the northern side of the Guadiana, was bloodily repulsed. William Wheeler survived the assault, and commented on the state of Ensign Dyas – ‘a young officer of great promise, of a most excellent disposition, and beloved by every man in the Corps’ – and the other survivors. Dyas,
was without cap, his sword was shot off close to the handle, the sword scabbard was gone, and the laps of his frock coat were perforated with balls. Indeed everyone who returned bore evident marks of where they had been. Their caps, firelocks, belts etc were more or less damaged. I had three shots pass through my cap, one of which carried away the rosehead and tuft, my firelock was damaged near the lock, and a ball had gone through the butt.36
Wellington recognised that he could not take the place with strong French field armies hovering nearby, and he moved north to peck at Ciudad Rodrigo, but the problem was the same: strong French forces were too close to enable him to mount a siege with any real prospect of success. It was not until the end of the year that the tide began to turn in his favour as some of Marmont’s troops from Old Castile were sent off to help Marshal Suchet against the Spanish in Valencia. ‘Daddy’ Hill brought substantial reinforcements from Portugal, demolishing a French force at Arroyos Molinos on his way forwards, and the siege train, with its heavy guns, was not far behind him. On 8 January 1812, the allied army began to besiege Ciudad Rodrigo, in weather so cold that as John Mills of the Coldstream Guards told his mother, ‘the water froze in the mens’ canteens’.37
The attractive town of Ciudad Rodrigo, with its high walls and old Moorish castle, still dominates the surrounding countryside. Its lofty position, once a source of strength, was a weakness in the artillery age, and its walls were far less robust than those of Badajoz. The French had repaired the damage they had done in taking the town in 1810, and built a redoubt on top of the Greater Teson, a hill which dominated the northern defences. The Light Division took it on the night of 8 January, and the allies immediately began working on trenches, establishing batteries of heavy guns which began firing on the 13th. Six days later, there were two breaches in the walls, the greater opposite the Teson hills and the lower slightly to its east. Wellington ordered an assault that night, with Sir Thomas Picton’s 3rd Division attacking the greater breach and Craufurd’s Light Division the lesser. There were to be subsidiary attacks elsewhere.
The assault began at about 7pm on 19 January. The French defended both breaches stubbornly, and exploded a mine under the greater breach just as the Light Division’s leading brigade took it, causing casualties to both sides. But both assaulting divisions, led with selfless determination, were making good progress into the town, and the subsidiary attacks had also entered the place. By now the French garrison was well aware that sustained resistance was not only fruitless, but likely to inflame the attackers, who were not obliged to give quarter to a garrison which had fought on after a practicable breach had been established. John Mills entered the town after the storm and found a scene of things which ‘can be neither described nor imagined’. Lieutenant John Kincaid of the 95th had been in the Light Division’s storming party, and describes how:
A town taken by storm presents a frightful scene of outrage. The soldiers no sooner obtain possession of it, than they think themselves at liberty to do what they please … without considering that the poor inhabitants may nevertheless be friends and allies … and nothing but the most extraordinary exertions on the part of the officers can bring them back to a sense of duty.38
Picton did his best to restore order, swearing like a trooper and belabouring drunken men with a broken musket-barrel, but it was only exhaustion that stopped the pillage. When Wellington rode into the town next morning he saw a bizarre sight as men stumbled past, ‘some of them dressed in Frenchmens’ coats, some in white breeches and huge jack-boots, some with cocked hats and queues; most of their swords were fixed on their rifles, and stuck full of hams, tongues and loaves of bread, and not a few were carrying bird cages’. ‘Who the devil are those fellows?’ he asked, and was told that it was the 95th.39 On this occasion ‘no Spanish civilians were killed and only a few molested,’ but the portents were not good.
The siege had cost Wellington 568 casualties and the French about the same, though the whole garrison of almost 2,000 was captured. Robert Craufurd was amongst the wounded. His spine had been smashed by a musket ball, and he lingered on in agony for a week, always asking after George Napier, who had commanded his division’s storming party and lost his arm. Craufurd was a strict disciplinarian and inspired tactician, but had been one of the many ‘croakers’ who had complained to their friends in England that Wellington was too cautious. He apologised before he died, and Wellington reflected that ‘he talked to me as they do in a novel’. The Light Division buried him in the lesser breach. He had always insisted that the division should never deviate from its line of march, and on the way back from the funeral the leading files found a long marshy pool in their way. They marched straight through the icy, thigh-deep water, and every officer and man followed them in silence. Kincaid recalled how unpopular Craufurd had once been, ‘and it was not until a short time before he was lost to us for ever that we were capable of appreciating his merits…’
On 29 January 1812 Wellington told Liverpool that he proposed to attack Badajoz as soon as he could, once Rodrigo and Almeida were properly repaired and garrisoned. He was at Elvas in mid-March, writing sharply to General Don Carlos de España, who had asked him for fifteen or twenty artificers, that he was at a loss to see how such men could not be found in Spain: it was a ‘melancholy reflection’ the state of an alliance in which ‘every thing … must be performed by British soldiers.’40 But it was not all gloom: the Spanish Cortes created him Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo and a Grandee of Spain, and his own government raised him from viscount to earl. As one Wellesley rose, another fell. Richard, whose scandalous love life ar
oused great criticism, relinquished the foreign office, telling Wellington that Spencer Perceval’s ‘republic of a Cabinet’ was ‘but little suited to any man of taste or of large views’. But he botched an opportunity to bring down the government and perhaps emerge as prime minister. When Perceval was assassinated by a merchant ruined by the war shortly afterwards, there was no job for Richard. Liverpool became prime minister, with Castlereagh remaining at the foreign office, and Lord Bathurst taking over as war minister. William might have held office but declined to, arguing that it would damage relations between him and Richard. The outcome might have been worse, with the opposition in power and peace with Napoleon, but Wellington felt that the government was now likely to be less resolute in its prosecution of the war, and perhaps more vulnerable to bad news from the front.
In mid-March 1812, Wellington’s thoughts turned more to fortifications than to politics. It was always clear that Badajoz would prove harder to take than Ciudad Rodrigo. The town was protected on one side by the Guadiana and on the other by the flooded Rivillas brook, and its fortifications were powerful squat modern bastions, with only the old Moorish castle at the north-east corner offering an easy target to artillery – though the flooded brook prevented guns from getting to close range. The governor, Major General Armand Phillipon, was experienced and determined, and his garrison of 4,000 men was actively supported by many townspeople. At dusk on 17 March, in filthy weather, Wellington’s working parties began their trenches opposite the south-east front of Badajoz, but French artillery did serious damage to the trenches the next day. That night the French mounted a determined sortie which did more damage and wounded Colonel Fletcher, Wellington’s chief engineer. The outlying Fort Picurina was stormed on the 24th, enabling breaching batteries to get in close and batter the bastions of Santa Maria and Trinidad, and on 6 April, Wellington was told that three practicable breaches had been made. He would have liked more time to widen them further, but although Sir Thomas Graham seemed able to contain Soult in the south, in the north Marmont was on the move again, and Wellington feared for the safety of Ciudad Rodrigo. He ordered an assault that very night.
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