Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  In the end Strachan became so exasperated at the General's dilatoriness that he sent ten frigates under the walls of Flushing to force the Wielingen—an operation performed in high style and with only trifling loss. But this was not till August 11th, a fortnight after the Fleet arrived off the coast. Owing to adverse winds it was only on the evening of the 13th that Chatham's batteries and the frigates' guns opened on the town. They were reinforced on the morrow by the broadsides of all seven ships of the line. For two nights and days, till the whole horizon was an arch of fire, a continuous hail of shells and rockets poured into Flushing from sea and land—enough, a French officer remarked afterwards, to have ruined a poor nation.3 On the night of the 15th, after every house had been hit, half the town burnt and six hundred civilians killed, the Governor surrendered. With Chatham's help he managed to spin out negotiations for a further two days, so that it was not till August 18th that the British entered the fortress and the 6000 French laid down their arms.

  The Wielingen Channel was now clear for navigation and the scene set for the advance against the outer Antwerp forts. Even

  1 For an interesting and favourable account of him by an Army officer, see Gomm, 131. See also Burne, 337; Creevey, I, 133; Naval Miscellany, II, 39.

  2 Naval Miscellany, II, 390-1; Plumer Ward, 276; Barrow, 306; Fremantle, II, 287-8.

  Gomm, 135. "The faint tracks of the bombs and luminous train of the rockets, darting towards and falling into the flames, conveyed an idea to my mind so appalling that I turned away and shuddered."—Journal of a Soldier, 81-3. See also Dyott, I, 281.

  before Flushing fell the indefatigable Home Popham had started laboriously warping transports into the river above the port through the narrow channel between Walcheren and South Beverland. During the next few days a continuous stream of boats moved up the winding stream to Batz where the army was at last assembling. "Our force is a strong one," wrote an anxious lady in England, " would to God that it had gone sooner."1

  Up to this time the British had only suffered just over seven hundred casualties, or less than a tenth of the total of prisoners taken —a striking illustration of the advantage of sea-power in the early stages of amphibious operations. But during the days of waiting in the trenches round Flushing a new enemy appeared. The weather had been unusually wet and stormy, checkered by moist, oppressive heat. The island soil was rich and highly cultivated, with numerous dykes and drains—an agriculturist's paradise but also a mosquito's. During the siege the French opened the sluices and let in the sea, which not only flooded the trenches but caused the water to rise in the ditches all over Walcheren, sending up a dense, evil-smelling mist from the decayed vegetable matter in the soil. Miasmatic fever at once broke out among the troops; a man would go on guard to all appearance strong and hearty, feel a sudden shivering and sense of suffocation and be found next morning in a burning fever. This malarial visitation, which was accompanied by dysentery and aggravated by too much salt meat, tank water and fruit, degenerated into typhoid and typhus and within a few days put whole units out of action. Parties of soldiers could be seen shaking from head to foot; others lay in rows on the floors of barns amidst their own excrement and the black bread they were too weak to eat. By the 20th the pestilence had spread to South Beverland.2

  Such was the state of affairs when on August 24th, four weeks after leaving England and more than a week after the fall of Flushing, Chatham joined Hope at Batz. It was too late. On August 12th Louis Bonaparte, the puppet King of Holland, had reached Antwerp with 12,000 regulars. He was followed four days later by Bernadotte. The latter, now convinced that his master's star was still in the ascendant, unloosed a torrent of revolutionary energy through-a lethargic countryside. The flats to the north of the city were flooded, naval guns were mounted in the forts, and a steady stream of fresh troops brought up. By the 25th, 26,000 were in position to resist a British landing.

  1 Two Duchesses, 333; Naval Miscellany, II, 389; Fortescue, VTI, 81; Gomra, 136.

  2 Fortescue, VII, 78, 81-2, 91-2; Castlereagh, VI, 338-9; Dyott, I, 281-4; Kincaid, 3, 37; Gomm, 126, 129; Harris, 173-4; Journal of a Soldier, 81/83-4.

  All this was known in Chatham's camp at Batz, where watchers could see the French digging in on the other side of the water, the chain and boom across the river above Fort Lillo, and beyond the masts of the coveted battleships which Admiral Missiessy had hurried up to Antwerp for safety in the first days of the campaign. With a fifth of the British force in hospital and more sickening every hour a landing in the face of such strength seemed out of the question. On August 27th, after three days' consultation Chatham decided to consolidate the secondary objectives already gained and return to England.

  During the first week in September South Beverland was evacuated. A garrison of 18,000 was left at Walcheren, but within a few days half its strength was down with the fever. In the 2nd battalion of the 23rd—the Royal Welch Fusiliers—not a single man was left fit for duty. The emergency hospitals—"miserable, stinking holes," according to General Dyott—were so crowded that the men were forced to lie on top of one another on unboarded, steaming floors. The overworked surgeons did their best, but the orderlies hired by a miserly Treasury were utterly unfitted for their duties: foul-mouthed and callous brutes who fought one another for the clothes of the dead and drowned the groans and prayers of the dying with their curses. " Something must be done," wrote Sir Eyre Coote, who had been left in charge, "or the British nation will lose the British Army—far more valuable than the island of Walcheren."1

  " Now my dear Augustus," wrote an English lady on August 16th, 1809, when Flushing was about to fall and the Tower guns were firing for the victory of Talavera, " walk about the streets of Stockholm with looks of pride and exultation, bear high your head and glory in being a Briton!" The charge of the 23rd Dragoons at the crisis of the battle had caught the imagination of the country.2 A few weeks later all was in the dust; Austria had made peace, the expedition on which such hopes had been built had failed and the Kentish ports were filled with militiamen bearing pale-faced ghosts from the transports to hastily improvised reception centres. At

  1 Fortescue, VII, 89. The favourable official Report of the Assistant Surgeon-General to the Forces on the state of the hospitals (Castlereagh, VI, 337-46) is not borne out by the eyewitness accounts of either generals or privates. See Dyott, I, 285-8; Journal of a Soldier, 82.

  2 Sec De Quincey, Works (ed. Masson, 1890), XII, 299. Frederick Ponsonby, who was in the charge, took a less romantic view of it. "We had the pleasing amusement of charging five solid squares with a ditch in the front," he wrote to his sister-in-law. "After losing 180 men and 222 horses we found it was not so agreeable and that Frenchmen don't always run away when they see British cavalry, so off we set and my horse never went so fast in his life."—Bessborough, 188-9.

  Hythe, Sir John Moore's camp became a hospital, and the cemetery was piled high with the graves of the riflemen he had trained.1 Such, in Rowlandson's scathing phrase, was General Chatham's marvellous return from his exhibition of fireworks.

  Twice in eight months had a British army come home in such a plight. It was enough, as a sea captain said, to make John Bull shake his head.2 "Everything goes so ill," wrote the lady who had bidden her son to rejoice at Talavera,"that I have no courage to write: I don't know what we are to look for or hope for." For even the battle which, in their exultation at their soldiers' courage, the people of England had hailed as the successor of Agincourt and Cressy had proved Pyrrhic and fruitless. The British army was starving and in retreat, its wounded—deserted by the degenerate Spaniards —had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and the dashing Wellesley, instead of marching into Madrid, was in danger of encirclement. Far from proving the second Marlborough that some had predicted, he had ruined everything by his recklessness. Hitherto one of the luckiest men in military history, Captain Gomm, the future Field Marshal, assured his aunt, he seemed likely to set the whole country in mourning. "We have defeat and mi
scarriage everywhere," wrote Windham.3

  The aftermath of Talavera had been an unhappy one. A sickening stench hung over the battlefield, and, though the exhausted troops tried to bury the swollen corpses, the task was beyond their powers and they were reduced to burning them in piles. Thousands of wounded, driven almost frantic by the flies and heat, had to be rescued from Spanish plunderers, who swarmed everywhere stripping their allies and murdering their foes. In Talavera all the churches and convents were turned into hospitals, but the authorities were unable to cope with the demand. Cries for help, and above all for water, sounded from every side; one passer-by saw hundreds of amputated legs and arms being flung out of the windows of the town.1

  Pursuit for the moment was out of the question. Of the four British divisions that had taken part in the battle, only the smallest —Campbell's—was in a state to fight again without rest and regrouping. Hill's had lost a quarter of its strength, Mackenzie's a third and Sherbrooke's nearly two-fifths. Rations, cut down by half

  1 The second battalions of the 43rd, 52nd and 95 th went to Walcheren while the first went to Spain.

  2 Naval Miscellany, II, 390-1.

  3 Windham, II, 354-5; Gomm, 137; Granville, n, 345; Marlay Letters, 126. ♦Schaumann, 193-4; Leith Hay, I, 166-7; Smith, I, 19; Simmons, 32.

  on the army's arrival arrival at Talavera, were now reduced to a third. To crown all, - the Spanish Commander-in-Chief's jealousy of Wellesley had become ungovernable. " I should get the better of everything," the latter wrote to Castlereagh, "if I could manage General Cuesta, but his temper and disposition are so bad that this is impossible."

  Fortunately the French, after their unwonted mauling, assumed the British to be stronger than they were and continued to withdraw eastwards. A curious game of shadows ensued, both sides misconceiving the other's position. Joseph was principally concerned for his capital: troops of Venegas's army had at last appeared before Toledo, occupied Aranjuez and pushed northwards along the main Andalusian road to within twenty miles of Madrid. He naturally assumed that they were acting in conjunction with Wellesley and Cuesta and that a joint advance on the city was imminent. Sending his brother (of whom, like all his Marshals, he was terrified) a cock-and-bull report about having overwhelmed the English before breaking off the fight to repel Venegas, he left Victor with 18,000 men behind the Alberche to watch the Allies and hurried eastwards to Illescas to save his capital. No sooner had he gone than Victor became equally alarmed at a threat from the north-west, where Sir Robert Wilson, pushing on with his ragged Lusitanian Legion beyond the head waters of the Tietar, had reached Escalona on the upper Alberche. Fearful of being cut off from Madrid, the Marshal hastily withdrew to Santa Cruz, where his retreat on the capital was only stopped by Joseph's imperative orders.

  Meanwhile Wellesley and Cuesta were equally in the dark, though their misapprehension took the form not so much of mistaking shadows for dangers as of assuming dangers to be shadows. In the hope that the elusive Venegas had at last drawn off part of Joseph's army, they proposed to move forward at the beginning of August. The British Commander, however, made two reservations: that the carts and wagons promised him should arrive first, and that no serious attack should develop from the north against his communications with Portugal. Up to the middle of July he had'had little fear of Soult, whom he supposed to have been too badly mauled at Oporto for further fighting. At Talavera, however, he learnt that the French 5th and 6th Corps under Mortier and Ney had been withdrawn from the northern coastal provinces and had appeared in the valley of the upper Douro. Yet as late as July 30th he refused to believe that the three French Marshals could together muster more than 20,000 men for a drive on Plasencia.

  But on the evening of August 1st, while still waiting for transport and supplies, Wellesley received alarming tidings. A strong French force had entered Bejar, fifty miles north-east of Plasencia, and had driven back the Spaniards from the Pass of Banos. It then transpired that, despite Cuesta's assurances, the force detailed to hold the pass was less than three thousand. With Plasencia on the main road to Portugal thus open to the enemy and several hundred British lying wounded in the town, Wellesley had no choice but to turn back and deal with the intruder before more serious damage was done. After a stormy conference with Cuesta in which he refused to divide his army, he set off at dawn on August 3rd, leaving the Spaniards to guard his 4000 wounded at Talavera.-His effectives, including the Light Brigade, now numbered 18,000.

  When that afternoon he reached Oropesa he learnt from a captured dispatch, hastily forwarded by Cuesta, that Soult was advancing across his rear, not with 15,000 troops as he had supposed, but with nearly 50,000. Driving south from Salamanca with three corps d'armee, the Marshal had entered Plasencia on August 2nd and was now hastening eastwards to seize the vital Tagus crossings at Almaraz and Arzobispo. Already he was too near the former for Wellesley to have any hope of reaching its northern bank without fighting on the way. Indeed, that very evening British and French cavalry patrols were in action at Naval Moral, twenty miles west of Oropesa.

  There was only one thing to do: to cross to the south bank of the Tagus by the bridge of Arzobispo and march with all speed over the mountains to secure the far side of the broken bridge and ford at Almaraz while there was still time, leaving Cuesta to follow as best he could. Already on receipt of the news the old gentleman had started for Oropesa, a crossing at Talavera being out of the question since the roads south of it were impassable for artillery. Early next day the Spaniards poured into the little town to the fury of the British, who, ignorant of the reason for their retreat, imagined that they had abandoned their wounded comrades at Talavera out of cowardice. Many of these came limping after the flying Spanish army in every state of misery: the rest were left to the mercy of the French or died by the wayside for want of transport.

  At this moment of crisis, possibly the gravest in Wellesley's career, Cuesta announced his intention of remaining where he was and fighting. The British Commander immediately had it out with the old man. If with a broad river and a single bridge in his rear he chose to expose the last principal army of Spain to the attack of nearly 100,000 Frenchmen—for a junction of Souk's and Joseph's forces now appeared imminent—he could not be prevented. But, whatever happened, the British were going to cross by the bridge at Arzobispo at once. Having announced his resolution, Wellesley put it into execution without losing a moment. That afternoon— August 4th—as in the insufferable heat a motley, cursing crowd of soldiers, muleteers, artillery, baggage, carts piled with wounded, mules, donkeys and screeching bullock carts poured over the bridge, a little group of field officers stood on a hill near Oropesa scanning the plain through their telescopes. Presently their leader pointed to a distant cloud of dust beginning to rise over the western hills. It was Soult's advance guard. "Mount," cried Sir Arthur Wellesley, and the cortege cantered off southwards towards the bridge to rejoin the retreating army.1

  For the next two days the British hurried westwards across the wilderness of rugged and waterless hills that lay to the south of the Tagus. The dust was suffocating and the heat beyond conception. At points the track, such as it was, ran along the side of precipices and the guns had to be dragged up by hand. Yet none were lost; the men, who were without bread, grumbled furiously, but their officers found that they had only to put on a soothing and encouraging expression to turn their miseries to jest. Food was the main difficulty: but for plundering the few living things found on the way, the whole army would have perished. The commissaries had a particularly harassing time; Schaumann was informed by Lieu-tenant-General Payne, commanding the cavalry, that a commissary who did his duty in such a country could not possibly remain alive. "Of all my commissaries," the angry old soldier shouted, "not one has yet sacrificed his life; consequently they are not doing their duty!" Most Englishmen of high position, the worthy German noted in his journal, particularly when serving in a hot climate, were always a little mad.

  By nightfall on August 7th
the main British body had reached the mountains around Deleytosa, twenty miles south of Almaraz. Here on the previous day the Marquis del Reino's troops guarding the crossing had been joined by the Light Brigade and the 87th and 88th Foot after a fifteen hours' march over waterless hills. They arrived just in time to prevent Ney forcing the river. For the next fortnight they remained guarding the solitary ford, camping by day on a wooded hill and marching down each night to bivouac by the water's edge. They lived on wild honey, which caused dysentery, and dough cakes made by pounding coarse corn from the fields between stones. Dough Boy or Doby Hill, as they called it,

  1 Schaumann, 198-9; Oman, II, 583.

  long lived in the memory of the Light Brigade as a kind of nightmare. A few remembered its picturesque beauty. but to the majority the only impression was one of aching hunger, heat, mosquitoes and noisome exhalations from the corrupting vegetation in the river flats.

  The rest of the army, camping beside the cork and oak forests at Jaraicejo a day's march away, fared little better. The drought was so intense that the men's eyelids smarted perpetually, their lips split and the skin peeled off their faces. Every few days the grass would break into flames, making enormous fires that spread for miles over the rolling terrain like gigantic serpents. The bivouacs swarmed with scorpions, snakes, mosquitoes and enormous flies, and the pools were full of leeches which clung to the-nostrils of the horses and the mouths of the men. The countryside, already plundered by Victor earlier in the year, was destitute of almost every necessity; the British stores at Plasencia had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and those at Abrantes were too far away. The men, famished and discouraged, grumbled bitterly at their officers, and the officers at their Commander. Many spoke gloomily of Verdun and a French prison; Sir Arthur, it was said, could fight but could not manoeuvre.1 He himself wrote to his brother, Lord Wellesley, who had just relieved Frere as Ambassador at Seville, that the army would have to leave Spain if its present treatment continued. "No troops can serve to any good purpose unless they are regularly fed, and it is an error to suppose that a Spaniard or a man or animal of any country can make an exertion without food." " With the army which a fortnight ago beat double their numbers," he added in a third letter written to his brother that day, " I should now hesitate to meet a French corps of half their strength."