Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  features frozen in death. The route their comrades had taken was marked by straggling wretches with pallid, swollen faces which they turned with inexpressible pathos on their pursuers. The Rifles in the British van threw them their biscuits in pity as they passed.

  But their pity turned to anger as they saw what they had done. For everywhere were burning and ravaged houses, mutilated peasants with slit throats and gouged-out eyes, polluted churches and rifled graves. The whole countryside had been transformed into a waste fit only for wolves and vultures. The few surviving inhabitants looked like skeletons risen from the tomb. Gaunt and ghastly figures fed off the grass in the fields or scoured the woods for acorns and rotten olives. Violated women lay bleeding in charred and unroofed houses, the streets were strewn with putrid carcasses, children with bones sticking through their skin clung to the bodies of dead parents. Searching for a stream on the first night of the British advance, Rifleman Costello stumbled on a fountain into whose waters the brains of three peasants were oozing, while all that had possessed fife in the village "lay quivering in the last agony of slaughter and awful vengeance."1 Here a Cacadore found the mangled bodies of his father and mother lying across the threshold of his home, while within his only sister was stretched dying on the floor. Staring wildly around him, the unhappy man rushed out and flung himself on a passing batch of prisoners, killing one and wounding another before he was pulled off by the guards. Another spectre stole towards a group of cadaverous Frenchmen and then suddenly, spitting on his hands, pulled out a club from under his cloak and beat out their brains.

  Under the shock of defeat Massena's army had reverted to type. From the shambles of the Terror a whole generation had gone out to wage war and carry the Revolution into the lands of their neighbours. Since 1792 the French had been a nation in arms.2 Welded by enthusiasm and fear into a single instrument of force, these active, handy little fellows with their broad shoulders and spreading shakos, their short-waisted, roomy, swallow-tailed coats and large, baggy trousers, had terrorised the world. Nothing seemed able to tire or deter them; they would swarm up the steepest hill under the deadliest fire with such fury that their foes were paralysed before they arrived. Matchless in elan on the field, they were equally brilliant on the march or in the bivouac; there was scarcely a man

  1 Costello, 58-60, 69; Anderson, 62-4; Schaumann, 274-6; Kincaid, 40-1; Simmons, 138-9, 151-2; Donaldson, 165-6.

  2 When Haydon visited Paris in 1814 he found scarcely a driver of a fiacre, a waiter at a cafe or a man in middle life who had not served in a campaign or been wounded.

  of them who could not cook his savoury potage and make himself comfortable in the most inhospitable conditions. They had elevated plunder into a military science and could support themselves in a wilderness: they would nose the last sack of peasant's corn or potatoes from the bottom of a well or the back of a bricked-up chimney and return next day with a shrewdly pointed bayonet for more. And like their Emperor and his Marshals, they generally contrived to take something home to France with them. "A French soldier, ever with something valuable about him," wrote Grattan, "was quite a prize to one of our fellows."

  Cocksure and arrogant even in adversity—Wellington complained that after Vimiero Junot insisted on walking in to dinner in front of him1—the conquerors of Europe possessed a certain charm. They were so gay, so ready to forget their hardships and make the best of the world which was their prey. They could be cheerful in the most unlikely places. George Napier described how after Sahagun he found a packet of famished prisoners in a cellar and ordered them bread and wine. "This being done," he wrote, "the poor fellows were as merry as possible and began dancing and singing; and one of them took a little fiddle from his pocket and commenced playing quadrilles with as much energy and life as though he were playing, to a parcel of ladies."2 At their happiest there was something infectiously good-natured about them. " Prenez tout, mes enfants" cried the Imperial grenadiers to the peasants around the Prussian baggage-train after Jena, "excepte seulement le vin et l’argent’ Little, swarthy Frenchmen in front of the British lines would stick pieces of bacon on their bayonets or hoist up their canteens with cheerful shouts of "I say, come here—here is ver good rosbif!—here is ver good brandy!"4 Wellington was perpetually having to take measures to stop fraternisation between the outposts; French officers were always inviting their British counterparts to plays and concerts and attending in turn their horse-races, -football-matches and dog-hunts. " Capering, scraping and bowing," as Midshipman Coleridge described the genus, every Frenchman, however humble his origin, seemed to have a genius for la politesse.

  In triumph, towards an adversary they respected like the British, die French could be astonishingly chivalrous. "Gentlemen," cried General Laborde to his captives after Rolica, "now that you are

  1 "Although I was the stranger and although of the two I was certainly the victorious general."—Stanhope, Conversations, 247. See Simmons, 132; Haydon, I, 259.

  2 George Napier, I, 51; Leslie, 52. See also the delightful description of French gaiety by that unrelenting Gallophobe, Haydon. Haydon, I, 247-8.

  3 Broughton, I, 44-5.

  4 Adventures in the Peninsula. 332-3.

  my prisoners, we are no longer enemies."1 Ncy, told that Charles Napier, captured at Corunna, had an aged and widowed mother, sent him home by the first ship without waiting for an exchange. After Talavera a wounded captain of the 87th was sent into the British lines under a flag of truce so that he might breathe his last among his countrymen. "Ours, indeed, was a noble enemy," wrote Rifleman Costello, "they never permitted us to flag for want of stimuli, but kept us for ever on the qui vive. We anticipated little terror from capture." For the French soldiers' attitude towards the British was purely professional: they regarded them as fellow craftsmen worthy of their steel: as pupils who had made good. " Eh bien, e'est egal," cried the captured moustache to the Rifles standing around him, "Les ecoliers sont digues de leurs maitres. The French have taught you some terrible lessons, and you understand, at length, the art of making war as it should be."2

  In this lay the moral weakness of the French; they had learnt to glorify war for its own sake. Strength they valued above all other virtues. They literally believed in violence. "A Frenchman," wrote Haydon, "can never think he is treated with civility from any motive but fear." They took brutality, death and destruction as matters of course; they were still the children of the guillotine. The packed theatres during the Terror; the crowd laughing at the bear, Martin, who ate the moustache in the Jardin des Plantes; the soldiers gambling on the bodies of their dead comrades in the hospital at Minsk while propped-up corpses with painted faces and masquerade dress were ranged along the blood-stained walls,3 were all symptoms of an acceptance of brute force and horror as part of the nature of things. Behind the gaiety of desperation and the conqueror's resplendent mask peeped the crazed eyes of the savage. The Grand Nation was still in the grip of a terrible fever.

  To such a people there was nothing fundamentally wrong in murder, plunder and rape, for these in their view were the inescapable lot of the conquered. The French atrocities at Santarem were not only the result of individual misery and desperation: they were the corporate Revolutionary reaction to opposition. They were like the September massacres. For months organised parties of soldiers had gone from village to village and farm to farm using torture as a military art in their efforts to extract the last crumb from the starving peasant.4 During the retreat mass murder and arson were pursued as part of a deliberate policy, just as in Spain a few months before Suchet had ordered the entire population of Lerida to be driven into the castle yard and sprayed with grape-shot until the

  1 Leslie, 59. 2 Costello, 125. 8 Festing, 198-9. 4 George Napier, 170-2.

  Governor surrendered. Because the Portuguese had chosen to waste their countryside at Wellington's orders, they had now to learn what it was to thwart the will of the French. Towns were systematically fired, and historic monasteries like Alco
baca—the pride of Portugal— were burnt to the ground on Massdna's orders. An orderly-book found near the Convent of Batalha gave the number of soldiers daily employed in the destruction of villages and houses;1 peasants pressed as guides were automatically shot at the day's end to prevent their providing information to the British. In some places unexploded bombs and shells were even hidden in chimneys so that returning inhabitants should be blown to pieces when they attempted to light a fire. The line of retreat resembled the trail of a horde of barbarians rather than a European army. "Within a very few years," wrote Captain Gomm, "the French people seem to have traced back every step that nations make towards civilisation; and they who a short time back were the fine spirits and cavaliers of the age will have degenerated by the close of this campaign in Portugal into something worse than Huns."

  The British soldiers—rough and brutalised though many of them were—were horrified at what they saw. They refused to accept such ruin and misery as a natural outcome of war. They distributed their own rations—already grown meagre with the pace of the advance— among the pallid children by the wayside, and compared the scenes before them with the gentle, ordered land they had left behind. "These were sights," wrote the dashing, gay-hearted Johnny Kincaid, "which no Briton could behold without raising his voice in thanksgiving to the author of all good that the home of his childhood had been preserved from such visitations."2 The same thought passed through the mind of his Commander-in-Chief when he replied—a little petulantly—to a letter from Lord Liverpool complaining of the rising expense of the campaign. " I have no doubt that if the British army were for any reason to withdraw from the Peninsula," he wrote, " and the French Government were relieved from the pressure of military operations on the Continent, they would incur all risks to land an army in His Majesty's dominions. Then indeed would commence an expensive contest; then would His Majesty's subjects

  1 Wellington to Liverpool, 14th March, 1811. Gurwood; Tomkinson, 80. See also Gomm, 204, 206, 209; Picton, I, 385; Charles Napier, I, 160; Grattan, 56; Anderson, 61-2; Schaumann, 284-5; Burgoyne, I, 124; Donaldson, 164; George Napier, 188.

  2 Kincaid, Random Shots, 131. See also Gomm, 206; Charles Napier, I, 165; George Naprcr, 174-5; Donaldson, 166. "Soup kitchens were established by subscription among the officers. . . . The soldiers evinced the same spirit of humanity and in many instance?, when reduced themselves to short allowance from having outmarched their supplies, they shared their pittance with the starving inhabitants."—Walter Scott, The Vision of Don Roderick. Note XV.

  discover what are the miseries of war, of which, by the blessing of God, they have hitherto had no knowledge; and the cultivation, the beauty and prosperity of the country and the virtue and happiness of its inhabitants would be destroyed, whatever might be the result of the military operations. God forbid that I should be a witness, much less an actor, in the scene."1

  The enemy's retreat increased Wellington's difficulties. Hitherto close to his base in the Tagus, it had been comparatively easy to feed his army; now, with forward magazines to be established in a wasted wilderness, his problems grew with every mile. At any moment his adversary—a master of defensive warfare—might turn and overwhelm his vanguard before the main body could come up. Even with its full strength deployed, his army was still no bigger than Massena's, for a considerable part of it was beyond the Tagus marching to relieve Badajoz. And while the French could ultimately replace their losses by new conscriptions, with Wellington the loss of every man told; he had in his keeping England's only army and was responsible for its safety to a jealous and critical public assembly.2 Unless he reached the Spanish frontier with it intact, all he had achieved in Portugal would be in vain.

  Yet Wellington could not afford to allow his foes a moment to recover so long as they stood on Portuguese soil. Unless he could prevent them from crossing the Mondego, they would be free to consolidate behind it and turn the still unwasted provinces of northern Portugal into a base for new operations against Lisbon. The river ahead was held by a few thousand Portuguese irregulars under Colonels Trant and Wilson; no resistance they could make could be prolonged. The only hope of saving northern Beira and Oporto from the same fate as Santarem was to press Massena so hard that, not daring to force the river with the British army at his back, he would turn eastwards into the mountains. For this reason Wellington clung to his rear like a terrier behind a bull. Whenever his quarry halted he attacked.

  He was careful to do so—and this was the beauty of his tactics— with the minimum of risk. The hilly and wooded terrain through which he had to advance was perfectly adapted for the defensive; a strong country like Portugal, he observed, afforded equally good positions to both sides. Flis method was to use the Light Division, with its superbly trained skirmishers and marksmen, to distract the enemy with sham frontal attacks, while Lowry Cole's 4th

  1 To Lord Liverpool, 23rd March, 1811. Gurwood.

  2"I knew that if I lost 500 men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees t^ the bar of the House of Commons."

  Division, Thomas Picton's 3rd and Brigadier Pack's Portuguese edged at high speed round their flanks. This happened when the French rearguard under Marshal Ney tried to stand on March nth at Pombal, twenty miles south of the Mondego, and again next day at Redinha, half a dozen miles on. On each occasion Ney, sooner than risk encirclement, withdrew from a strong position after a few hours' skirmishing. British casualties in the two engagements were small—14 officers and 228 men killed and wounded. They would have been smaller still but for the stupidity of Major-General Erskine, the cavalry officer who was commanding the Light Division in Craufurd's absence in England. For this gallant but bull-headed soldier was apt to become so heated in battle as to forget his orders, and attacked everything he saw. By doing so he threw away some valuable lives.

  At dawn on March 13th Massena, still closely pursued and finding the passage of the Mondego at Coimbra barred by Trant's militia, turned eastwards and made for the mountains. He thus gave up his last chance of revictualling his army inside Portgual. Before him lay only the barren hill track to Celorico and Almeida. In his decision he was partly influenced by the fear—a groundless one—that the British were about to land troops from the sea on his flank. The wraith of Nelson still pursued his eternal vendetta against his country's foes. " We have saved Coimbra and Upper Beira from the enemy's ravages," Wellington announced, "we have opened communications with the northern provinces and have obliged the enemy to take for their retreat the road by Ponte Murcella on which they may be annoyed by the militia acting in security upon their flank, while the allied army will press upon their rear."1

  As they turned across the line of their pursuers' advance, the French had to quicken their pace to avoid disaster. So sudden was the change of plan that at one moment, owing to the failure of a trooper to get through from Ney, Massena was nearly captured by a vedette of the King's German Legion—an accident that fanned the smouldering enmity between the two Marshals into open flame. During the 14th the British vanguard, driving from one hilltop to another, was continuously attacking, and by nightfall Massena, having retreated fourteen miles, was forced to sacrifice the bulk of his remaining baggage and wheeled transport. Five hundred horses and mules were hamstrung and left to die in torment on the outskirts, of Miranda de Corvo, where the sight of their bleeding flanks and pleading eyes further increased British resentment against the French.

  1 To Lord Liverpool, 14th March, 1811. Gurwood.

  Next day, after marching all night, Massena reached the valley of the Ceira. Here at Foz do Arouce the 3rd and Light Divisions found Ney's rearguard at four o'clock in the afternoon on the wrong side of the flooded stream. Though his main force was still far behind, Wellington at once gave orders to attack. It was the Coa in reverse, with Ney in Craufurd's shoes. A rush for the bridge by the Light Division resulted in a panic which, but for Ney's brilliant leadership, might easily have become a rout. As it was, four hundred Frenchmen were dro
wned or taken prisoner. That night the hungry Rifles feasted out of the enemy's soup-kettles round abandoned camp-fires, every man's uneaten mess of biscuit lying in the French manner in a stocking neatly by his place.

  During that day new signs of demoralisation had appeared in Massena's ranks. From precipitate his retreat was becoming disorderly. The road was strewn with gold and silver crucifixes and rich ecclesiastical vestments, trampled in the slush amidst derelict wagons and limbers and dying soldiers. The deserted bivouacs, with the bulkier articles of wasteful spoil heaped in piles outside huts made out of demolished houses, looked like the camps of predatory Tartars. The atrocities committed on the civilian population became still more pathological; mutilated corpses were propped up as though alive in chairs at cottage doors and in holes in garden walls, and entire families were found murdered in their beds as if for sport.1

  But the pace of the retreat was also becoming too rapid for the pursuers. In ten days they had advanced more than a hundred miles, constantly fighting their way over steep wooded country, intersected by gorges and swollen mountain streams, and sleeping by night on the ground in drenched clothes. Even the British regiments had far outmarched their supplies, while the Portuguese commissariat— never strong—had broken down altogether. Several Cacadores actually died of starvation on the march. On' the 16th, therefore, Wellington called a halt to reorganise his transport and magazines. He had never subscribed to the Revolutionary belief in the possibility of the impossible. Men could not, he wrote indignantly to the Regency at Lisbon, perform the labour of soldiers without food.

  At the moment that Wellington halted to preserve the tempered steel of the weapon he wielded, he learnt of the surrender of Badajoz. It was a terrible and unlooked-for blow. To eject the French before they could consolidate, he at once dispatched Lowry Cole's 4th Division to reinforce the 2nd under Beresford in Estremadura. This reduced the strength of Ins main army to 38,000. When on the 17th