Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  Starting shortly before dawn in a thick mist and preceded by a cloud of tirailleurs, Reynier's two divisions started up the hillside at high speed. But the precipitous gradient and indented, rocky ground quickly broke them up into small breathless crowds climbing diagonally and straggling. Merle's division on the right took the lead, driving in the British skirmishers by its numbers and infiltrating in the mist nearer and nearer to the crest. Then suddenly the swirling vapour lifted and the voltigeurs, "with all the characteristic activity, alacrity, firmness and incessant progress of a French attack," could be seen in the bright sunshine swarming up the rocks and loading and firing their muskets as they advanced.1 To the right the British artillery, quickly opening up, drove lanes of shot through the struggling masses of Heudelet's division and, supported by the fire of a mixed British and Portuguese brigade, brought it quickly to a halt. But farther to the north Merle's division, 6500 strong, struggled to the top, more by accident than design at a point in the long drawn-out British line where there was a gap of nearly three-quarters of a mile between two battalions of Major-General Picton's 3rd Division.

  The one weakness in Wellington's position was its extent; with the limited fire-power of the time a front of nine miles was too much for 52,000 men to hold easily. But the gaps were more apparent than real, for from their commanding height the defenders had ample time to foresee where an attack was impending, while behind their lines a lateral track, running just below the skyline out of sight of the enemy, made it easy to transfer troops quickly to any threatened point. Only the morning mist had enabled Merle to reach the summit before the British' could arrive to repel him. Already the 45th and 88th Foot and two Portuguese battalions were hurrying from different directions to the spot. As the French were reforming on the little plateau and recovering their breath, the 88th suddenly appeared on their right advancing towards them in column, supported by four companies of the 45th.

  The 88th were a tough crowd from the bogs of western Ireland with a bad reputation for filching Portuguese chickens and goats. But they were born fighters and their Scottish colonel—Alexander Wallace—had made them one of the crack regiments of the army. Looking them full in the face with his steady, cheerful countenance, he addressed them as they stood to their arms before forming column: "Now Connaught Rangers, mind what you are going to do; pay attention to what I have so often told you, and, when I bring you face to face with those French rascals, drive them down the hill—don't give the false touch but push home to the muzzle! I have nothing more to say, and if I had it would be of no use, for in a minute or two there'll be such an infernal noise about your ears that you won't be able to hear yourselves." As the Rangers bore down with the bayonet, and Wallace, throwing himself from his horse, placed himself at their head, the enemy hastily opened fire. " All," wrote an officer, " was confusion and uproar, smoke, fire and bullets, officers and soldiers, French drummers and French drums knocked down in every direction, British, French and Portuguese mixed

  1Leith .iv, 1, 236.

  together, while in the midst of all was to be seen Wallace fighting— like his ancestor of old—at the head of his devoted followers and calling out to his soldiers to press forward."1

  Had the French been allowed longer to recover their ranks, they might have established themselves on the summit in the centre of the British line. But Wallace's promptitude and the fiery valour of his men saved the situation. Within a few minutes, aided by the fire of a Portuguese battalion and two guns which Wellington had galloped up from the left, eleven French battalions, including one of Napoleon's favourite regiments, were being bundled down the hillside. They left behind them nearly 2000 dead and wounded. At that moment of triumph Charles Napier, riding among Wellington's Staff, was struck by a musket ball on the jaw and thrown to the ground. Borne in agony past the Commander-in-Chief, he waved his hat and cried out, "I could not die at a better moment!"

  Half an hour later, though the bulk of Heudelet's division remained halted among the heather by the fire of the British and Portuguese above, a single brigade under General Foy, serpentining through the rocks, reached the summit at the same spot. The scene was thereupon repeated! This time it was not Picton's division that cleared the ridge but Leith's, moving along the lateral track from the right to strengthen the threatened centre and left. Scrambling up the crest, the 9th or East Norfolks, supported by the 38th and the Royals, appeared on the ridge in front of the French, and, deploying, opened a terrible fire from a hundred yards. Then, with General Leith riding beside waving his plumed hat, the regiment bore down with fixed bayonets. Sooner than await that avalanche of steel, the enemy turned about and raced for the slope and, tumbling headlong down the hill, left it strewn with blue-clad bodies.

  The sun was now climbing high in the heavens, and, though a further attack was developing on the left, a feeling of exaltation prevailed in the allied lines.2 On either side of the steep chaussee which wound up the hillside to the convent Ney's two divisions were struggling through the gorse and heather. The going was even harder than in the centre, and the riflemen of the Light Division and the shrapnel of Captain Ross's troop of Horse Artillery did much execution in the toiling ranks. But the French continued to press on with great gallantty. A little to the right of Craufurd's men, who were holding the ravine up which the highroad ran, Wellington calmly reconnoitred the advancing foe through his field-glass regardless of the bullets spattering around him.

  1Grattan, 33.

  2 Leith Hay, I, 237.

  A few hundred yards to the left Craufurd was standing at the edge of the hill watching the Rifles and the Portuguese contesting every foot of ground with Loison's column. Yet it was not on the skirmishers of the 95th and the ist Cacadores among the heathery boulders below that Craufurd was relying. Drawn up in the sunken roadway behind him, out of sight of the enemy, were the eighteen hundred bayonets of the 43rd and 52nd. Just as the French drums were beating for the final charge and their officers, capering up and down like madmen, were waving their hats on their swords and urging their men to rush the last twenty yards and seize Ross's guns on the skyline, Craufurd turned to the two famous regiments lying behind him and shouted, in a high, screaming voice that cleft the uproar, "Now 52nd, revenge the death of Sir John Moore!" With a great cheer the men rushed forward and poured such a fire from the crest into the astonished French that the whole six thousand were dashed in a few minutes to the bottom.

  Though firing continued for the rest of the day Massena made no further attempt on that high, defiant ridge. Of the 40,000 infantry he had thrown into the attack more than a tenth had fallen or been taken prisoner in two hours, including five general officers. The British and Portuguese who, with 33,000 fresh troops still unengaged, had suffered only a quarter of the French casualties, remained complete masters of the field. Twenty-four battalions had repelled and put to flight forty-five. And of the allied units engaged nearly half had been Portuguese. The latter were naturally immensely elated; they had proved themselves men on the open field and taken heavy toll of the hated invaders. "It has given them," wrote the Commander-in-Chief, " a taste for an amusement to which they were little accustomed."

  The objects for which Wellington had given battle had been achieved. His allies had learnt their strength and his countrymen had been heartened. But neither he nor Massena were men to be deceived for a moment as to the true situation by a single inconclusive engagement, however exhilarating or depressing. Both were cool, experienced hands in the bloody business of war. Almost before the battle was over the French commander had begun to seek a way round the British position; he realised that he had underestimated his enemy and must be more patient. Moving into the mountains of the Serra de Caramula early on the 28th, his cavalry patrols found a rough track leading to the coastal plain some thirteen miles to the north of Coimbra. Wellington, who knew of the road's existence, had ordered Trant to try and hold it with his militiamen, but the latter, handicapped by their lack of discipline,

 
was unable to reach it in time. Sooner than run any risk of being cut off from the crossing of the Mondego at Coimbra or of being being hustled in his retreat to his chosen position before Lisbon, Wellington gave the order to retire. "When we do go," he.had written of his plans for evacuation, "I feel a little anxiety to go like gentlemen out of the hall door, particularly after the preparations · I have made to enable us to do so, and not out of the back door or by the area."

  So it came about that on the night of September 28th, 1810, the British marched down from the cold, misty mountain and vanished into the south. The troops, in high spirits after their victory, were naturally surprised at the withdrawal. To the Portuguese, rejoicing at their unexpected reprieve, it seemed utterly unaccountable. They now became sure that Wellington meant to abandon them. The earlier scenes of mass evacuation were now repeated; at a few hours' notice the inhabitants of Coimbra were hustled out on to the highroad with their goods piled on the few carts the army had left unrequisitioned and bearing pitiful bundles on their heads and in their hands. Within a day the pleasant old university town became a solitude. "Plow would you like," wrote Colonel Colborne to his sister, " to see your piano, writing tables, chairs and things heaped together at the south end of Sloane Street to impede the enemy?" The road was thronged with thousands of helpless creatures, many of them bare-footed and in rags, trudging between the retreating columns or trailing disconsolately across the adjoining fields. The sight put an officer with classical memories in mind of the flight from Troy.1

  Yet neither the wailing of old women calling on the saints in wayside oratories nor the frantic expostulations of the Portuguese Government could make any impression on Wellington. " I should forget my duty to my Sovereign, to the Prince Regent and to the cause in general," he informed the War Minister at Lisbon, "if I should permit public clamour or panic to induce me to change in the smallest degree the system and plan of operations which I have adopted after mature consideration."2 As there was no position south of the Mondego on which he could stand until he reached his prepared lines, a further seventy miles of country had to be wasted. Meanwhile the Light Division and the cavalry of Anson's brigade, retiring at their own pace, kept the French at a safe distance. Not till October ist did the last British troops march out of Coimbra. As

  1 Gomm, 185; Seaton, 146; Anderson, 41, 44-5; Tomkinson, 50; Buigoyne, L 121; Leslie, 211; Schaumann, 261; Leith Hay, I, 242-3.

  2 To Dom Miguel Forjaz, 6th Sept., 1810. Gurwood.

  they passed through the deserted city, now blazing in many places, the Rifles were stopped by the agonised cries of the criminals and lunatics left behind in the town gaol. Within a few minutes the poor creatures, hastily set at liberty, were leaping and howling in a delirium of joy along the bridge over the Mondego, with the wide world before them and the French dragoons at their heels.1

  As the retreat continued along the road up which Wellington had advanced on Lisbon two years before, British discipline, admirable at first, began to grow a little ragged. In Condeixa, where the commissariat was destroying stores, the streets were ankle deep in rum into which passing soldiers dipped their caps as they marched; others helped themselves to shoes and shirts which the harassed commissaries handed out to all and sundry.2 At Leiria an olive tree beside the road was hung by orders of the Commander-in-Chief with the corpses of two soldiers caught in the act of plundering a church. Uninhabited but furnished buildings with open doors were too tempting for light-fingered gentry who had enlisted to escape the constable and who reflected that what they did not help themselves to to-day the enemy would take to-morrow. Others plundered out of high spirits: at the deserted Convent of Batalha, where the hallowed body of John of Portugal was preserved, a finger of the warrior King mysteriously found its way into the regimental baggage of the 95 th.

  On the last night of the retreat—October 7th—the equinoctial rains, which had hitherto held off, set in with full fury. Next day the line of march presented a terrible spectacle. Along roads littered with smashed cases and broken wagons, dead horses and exhausted men, moved a dense mass of misery—mothers carrying children on their backs, fine ladies wading in torn silk and bedraggled lace knee-deep in mud, nuns beside themselves with fear at their expulsion from familiar convents or, grown bold from necessity, with arms linked with those of friendly British soldiers.3 Mingled with them were herds of starving bullocks, sheep, donkeys and mules. Behind, led by the Provost Marshal's guard with the Bussaco prisoners, tramped the British regiments. Here, too, depression had set in after the high hopes of the battle. With grim faces and tattered uniforms dripping from torrential rain, the men marched the last stage of the three hundred-mile retreat from Almeida imagining that the best before them was a shameful evacuation. During the

  1 Kincaid, 17; George Napier, 149.

  2 Kincaid, 18. Years later, when half the recipients had fallen in battle, the authorities called on officers of the 95th for a return of the property issued on this occasion with a view to payment. The}' were told, one is glad to learn, to go to the Devil.

  3 Schaumann, 261, 263; George Napier, 149; Leslie, 210-11; Gomm, 184, 187.

  rapid marches of the past week "rations had started to run short; a draft of red-cheeked, chubby youths from England, who had just joined the 95th, recalled with ravenous longing, as they trudged their twenty miles a day, the ship's dumplings they had left behind.1 Alternately deploying and marching the weary rearguard still kept the French at bay, though the latter, sensing victory, were growing bolder every hour. Already their cavalry were pressing ahead, as Massena, snatching at the glittering prize of Lisbon, began to close in for the kill. "We saw the indefatigable rascals on the mountain opposite," wrote Johnny Kincaid, "just beginning to wind round us, the wind blowing strongly and the long tail of each horse stuck stiffly out in the face of the one behind."

  Then, as pursued and pursuers approached Torres Vedras, the lines rose out of the mountains to greet them. Scarcely any one even in the British army had any idea of their existence. Scores of guns disposed in elaborate redoubts and earthworks looked down from every height. Trenches had been dug, parapets raised, palisades, abatis, chevaux de frise and trous-de-loup made, forests, orchards, mounds and houses levelled to the ground, every hollow and ditch that could give cover against the terrible cross-fire of the guns filled in, and every hillside turned into a vast, exposed, featureless glacis. In other places streams had been dammed to form impassable marshes and defiles blasted into precipices. Wellington's engineers had used the respite Napoleon had given them to good advantage. For nearly a year thousands of Portuguese labourers had been working to turn a broken range of hills into an impregnable barrier. Every pass had been barred, every roadway transformed into a deathtrap. Behind, echeloned in immense depth, were other forts and redoubts whose guns covered every way to Lisbon. And on either flank of the twenty-nine miles of mountain wall the British Navy was on guard. Already, as the enemy's left moved along the Tagus highway, the gunboats of the river flotilla went into action. '

  The French were dumbfounded. Massena had had no idea that any serious obstacle lay in his path. The Portuguese traitors at his headquarters Had told him that the approach to Lisbon from the Mondego was through open, uneventful country. "Que diable!" he exclaimed when they laid the blame on those who had failed to discover what Wellington had been doing to their familiar hills, "il n'a pas construit ces montagnes!" In his haste to destroy the British before they could reach their boats, the Marshal had concentrated his entire force in a single great surge and left his communications to look after themselves. He had even exposed his hospitals at

  1 Kincaid, 11-12.

  Coimbra to Tram's wild militiamen with the result that the latter, overwhelming the inadequate guard, had seized the town on October 6th and borne off 4500 French wounded to Oporto. And now he found his way barred by what he saw at once was an impregnable barrier.

  The more he looked at it, the less he liked it. After a half-hearted attack in the rain
on October 14th against an outlying mound near Sobral—from which the British withdrew to their main lines after inflicting heavy losses on his men—Massena decided that any attempt to storm the heights would end in a massacre. So strong were the British works that they could be held by artillerymen and second-line troops alone, while the main army remained in the field to strike down any attackers who succeeded in scaling their slopes and penetrating through the cross-fire of their guns. And behind them, as Massena soon learnt, lay other and still stronger lines.

  For the British had fallen back to their ultimate base—the sea. The French with their strung-out land communications had advanced far from theirs and were—as they had been under Junot two and a half years before—at their very weakest. Around them was a wasted wilderness. Behind them the Portuguese guerrillas were closing in on every road. Within a fortnight Massena, wishing to send a letter to Napoleon, was forced to detach half a brigade under General Foy to carry it back to Spain. Only the fact that Wellington's orders to destroy all crops and food had here and there been disobeyed, and the ability of the hardy French to live on next to nothing, enabled the Army of Portugal to retain its position at all.

  But though Massena could not go forward, he would not go back. Neither he nor his master had given up hope of driving the British army from the Peninsula. Though it could be provisioned from the sea, its impregnable stronghold around Lisbon could only be held permanently if the British Government and people were prepared to go on maintaining it. And the tone of the Opposition in Parliament and the country and the almost pitiful weakness of the Perceval Administration gave Napoleon cause for hope. It was worth letting Massena's army die of starvation in front of Wellington's lines if by doing so it could wear down the patience of Britain.