Flashman in the Peninsula

by Robert Brightwell

  Chapter 3

  April 1809

  When the first expedition had been sent to Portugal a year before, dozens of men had drowned while being landed in boats through the thunderous surf. Waves roll in on that coast as tall as houses and I had no wish to take my chances with the strong currents, waves and rocks. I made sure then that I took my passage with Wellesley himself in the Surveillante, which was bound to dock more safely in Lisbon harbour, while most of the army landed up the coast near Coimbra. Such is my luck that the army landed safely without loss, while the Surveillante was caught up in a massive storm on its first day out and was nearly dashed on the rocks off the English coast.

  I had joined Wellesley and some of his staff in a game of cards that night to try and pass the time while the storm threw us about. At one point the ship’s captain sent down a message to Wellesley that he should ‘put on his boots and come on deck’ as the end was near. Wellesley coolly replied that he could swim better without his boots and would stay where he was.

  The remark was typical of Wellesley; in a time when sang froid was greatly admired, his coolness under fire was legendary. The term sang froid literally translates to cold blood, and his must have been positively arctic at times, but then others around him were the same. There was the famous incident at Waterloo when Uxbridge lost his leg. He just looked down at the bloody wreckage of his limb and exclaimed to Wellesley, ‘By God sir, I have lost my leg’, to which Wellesley replied, ‘By God sir, so you have’. Of course we did not have Uxbridge with us in Spain, or Henry Paget as he was known then. He was Britain’s best cavalry commander and sorely missed, but just weeks before we embarked he had eloped with the wife of Wellesley’s brother Henry, proving that the sang was not always froid.

  You may be wondering how your correspondent was feeling when news of our imminent nautical disaster was announced to the group. Well, surprisingly calm is the answer. A short while before, I had taken a turn on deck and spoken to the sailing master. Whenever I am on a naval ship I always let slip that I was with Cochrane when he took the Gamo, and that guarantees me a permanent invitation to the wardroom and respect from the officers. The sailing master, a wizened old creature who had forgotten more than the rest of the quarter deck would ever learn, had confidently told me that the wind was shifting and we would comfortably clear the rocks, then just a few miles off our bow. He also described the captain as a frightened old woman, who was terrified of Wellesley coming to harm on his ship. Thus, when the news of impending doom was announced I was able to sit back, looking cool as be-damned, and made a tidy sum gambling with my more distracted brother officers.

  My calm dissipated somewhat over the coming days, however, as I learned more about the situation we were to face in Portugal and Spain. It did not seem a whit better than that which had forced Sir John Moore’s desperate evacuation just a few months before. When we had embarked, the press and all the society talk had been of a spring campaign against overstretched French forces that would see victories and us in Madrid by the summer. But now as I spoke to veterans of that horrendous winter retreat which had led to their evacuation from Corunna just three months earlier, I realised that these plans were hopelessly optimistic. While Napoleon had returned to France, four of his marshals, each with armies of veteran troops, remained in the peninsula. Marshall Soult with twenty thousand men was the only one in Portugal. He dominated the north of the country from the city of Oporto, which he had captured the previous month. In the centre of Spain were Marshals Jourdan and Victor, with nearly forty thousand men between them; while to the north of Spain was Marshal Ney with seventeen thousand men. Against them Wellesley had just twenty-five thousand, mostly inexperienced British troops, plus another sixteen thousand Portuguese troops still needing to be trained. I remember expressing my concerns to John Downie, one of the commissary officers, but he brushed aside my worries.

  ‘You are forgetting about the Spanish, Thomas,’ he told me. ‘Their guerrilla forces are continually attacking French supply columns forcing the French to use thousands of men to guard them. The Spanish have a new centralised government now, the Central Junta based in Seville, which governs the part of the country not ruled by the French from Madrid. General Cuesta commands a Spanish army of over twenty thousand men in central Spain. He can block any move by the French on Seville and can also attack any army that heads to Lisbon from central Spain.’

  ‘But I thought that the French were beating every Spanish army that tried to stand against them?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Downie. ‘The Spanish held out at Zaragoza for months against a prolonged French attack.’ That sounded more like a delayed defeat rather than a victory to me, but I did not say anything as clearly Downie was passionate about the Spanish cause. He must have sensed my doubt though, for after a moment he continued, ‘The Spanish armies were poor to start with, but it was all down to bad organisation. There’s no central command and a lot of the generals distrust each other. Spanish towns and cities introduced conscription, but they saw it as a means to generate revenue as much as anything. They sold exemptions to all that could afford them so only the poor were reluctantly conscripted and half of those deserted at the first opportunity. They also sold commissions in their local regiments to any that could pay for them so that most of the officers had no military experience at all. But the new Central Junta is putting these things right.’

  Other officers were more doubtful about the assistance we could expect from the Spanish. Campbell, another staff officer and an old friend from India, was on the first expedition and he gave me more insight. The real problem, he told me, was that before the French invasion all power was held through three institutions: the court with the nobility, the army and the church. The court was now in exile and most nobles driven off their lands and deprived of their income. The army had been routinely thrashed by the French and had little influence. Only the church still provided leadership at a local level and they had every reason to be hostile to the officially atheist French republicans. Some of the clergy had tried to fill the power vacuum with a bloodlust that made Caligula look like a choirboy. Campbell told me of one Catholic friar called Baltasar Calvo who led a gang of assassins which had killed three and hundred and thirty men, women and children, mostly French civilians. Personally I blame the vow of chastity for these excesses; all that abstinence must build up terrible passions. Mind you, the French did their best to ease those pressures, by raping their way through every convent they found.

  For all Downie’s assurances, few shared his confidence and the Spanish army seemed so damned amateur. One officer told me a tale of a Frenchman called Rigney. He had been sent to Santander the previous year to arrest a British officer who was reported to be moving into the vicinity. He had only just arrived when the rebellion broke out, making it very dangerous to be a Frenchman in the town. This cool character then masqueraded as the British officer he had been sent to find. He was wined and dined by all the local dignitaries and army officers, who freely shared their plans and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. After a week of this he asked to be taken to see the French lines and then persuaded his Spanish escort to take him even closer at night. You can imagine the Spaniards’ surprise when he spurred his horse and charged right into the French encampment, shouting at his compatriots not to shoot. They were probably less surprised when they next saw him riding alongside a French marshal who annihilated the Spanish forces, exploiting every one of their weaknesses.

  All this talk shook me up a bit I can tell you. Before we had left I had begun to believe the tales about a resurgent Spanish resistance and over stretched French forces. That was why I had thought I could safely tool around the country as a staff officer. Now it looked as if it might be hot work just to stay in the peninsula at all. I did not want to be seen as croaking, but on the last night aboard as we sat around the big wardroom table with Wellesley at the head I asked, ‘Sir Arthur, what do you think will make the difference between this campaign and
the one before.’ It sounded as if I was toadying and giving him the chance to say ‘my command’, for the previous expedition had gone down-hill as soon as he was relieved of its control. But I knew my man better than that, for he would have spent months preparing for the opportunity to go back. I noticed other conversation around the table stilled and all looked at him expectantly. I was clearly not the only one seeking confidence in our mission. None of us expected the response we got.

  ‘Hanging some British soldiers,’ he barked and glared around the room as though daring anyone to challenge him.

  There was a stunned and puzzled silence for a moment until the padre hesitantly spoke up, ‘Surely you mean French soldiers, Sir Arthur?’

  ‘No,’ he stated firmly. ‘When the British army retreated to Corunna, units got separated from the main force and even on the edges of the main company they looted, murdered and raped with the same enthusiasm as the French. That cannot be allowed to happen again and I will hang every last one of them if I have to.’

  ‘But sir,’ exclaimed one of the colonels who had been at Corunna, ‘the veterans from the last expedition are our most experienced troops.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ snapped Wellesley. ‘Don’t you see; the French are under massive pressure because the Portuguese and Spanish people hate them for their brutality and kill the French every chance that they get. There is no central government in either country worth a damn,’ he added, glancing at Downie who had evidently been trying to persuade him otherwise. ‘It is the people’s views that count and if we go around behaving like the French then they will hate us too. The very people we are here to liberate will make our position untenable. On the other hand if we show that we are better, pay for supplies instead of stealing them, if women and property are safe where we dominate, they will support us and redouble their efforts to throw out the French.’

  ‘But our men are the scrapings of jails, poorhouses and the desperate,’ protested another officer. ‘You cannot expect them to behave like gentlemen.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Wellesley firmly. ‘I know that they are the scum of the earth but discipline, supported by hangings and floggings as necessary, must make sure that they behave better than the French. And I look to all of you,’ and here his gaze swept around the table looking us each in the eye, ‘to make sure that this is what happens.’

  At the time I admit that I thought he was mad if he thought he could stop an army looting a captured city. I had been with him at Gawilghur in India when British and Indian troops had sacked the place. The rape and slaughter there had made a Viking raid look like a Baptist tea dance. I was right about that too for at Spanish cities like Badajoz, when the British and Portuguese army stormed into the streets, they behaved like animals. But I could also see that having the populace on our side would be worth a hundred thousand men. At the end of the day we did not need to behave perfectly, just better than the French, whose army supply system was largely based on plunder. Mind you, it still sounded a tall order; after all, taking myself as an example, even some of the ‘gentlemen’ did not always behave as such.

  Chapter 4

  Lisbon, when we finally arrived, looked a bright colourful place from a mile or two out to sea with its red tiled roofs and whitewashed walls. But as we got closer to the harbour the poverty, dirt and then the smell became all too apparent. It was a strange place, the capital of large and once powerful country, but now empty of most of the people of influence. Just two years before, as the French first arrived, all the wealthy merchants, the court and most of the government had sailed to Brazil, a Portuguese dominion. The people who were left were generally those too poor to purchase their passage to the New World, and others who had moved to the city after being made destitute from the French pillaging of the countryside. We sailed into the mouth of the river Tagus and past the Tower of Belém to dock by the Black Horse Square. The citizens were gathered in crowds to welcome the return of their British allies, doubtless wondering if our army would cut and run when the French attacked like we had the previous year.

  General Craddock, the commander of the small British force that had remained from the previous expedition, welcomed Wellesley and his officers onto the quay. We were ushered into a nearby palatial building and provided with refreshment, while Wellesley and Craddock retired to the next room to discuss matters in private. Soon afterwards I saw several grim faced officers of the local garrison being ushered into their room and a few of us newcomers began to deduce that all was not well. Eventually the doors of the inner sanctum were thrown open and Wellesley himself invited us in with the words,

  ‘Gentlemen, you had better hear this for yourselves.’ We trooped in with a feeling of foreboding and gathered around a large table covered with maps in the middle of the room. ‘It seems our Spanish allies have suffered something of a setback,’ Wellesley coldly continued after we were all settled. ‘Colonel D’Urban, you were there, perhaps you would be so kind as to give my officers a first-hand account.’

  ‘Certainly sir,’ replied D’Urban, moving forward to the table and re-arranging the maps. It was the first time I had met Ben D’Urban and I got to know him quite well while in Spain. He was a capable soldier and later administrator, especially in South Africa where they have named a town after him. Now, he briskly directed our attention to a large map showing the fork of two rivers near a town called Medallin. To cut a detailed briefing short, the Spanish under Cuesta thought they could trap and attack Marshal Victor’s forces. Cuesta had the advantage of total numbers with twenty-three thousand men against Victor’s seventeen and a half thousand, although Victor had slightly more guns and cavalry. The French were trapped in the fork of the two rivers while Cuesta arrayed his army in an arc of four ranks of infantry between the riverbanks, with cavalry on either flank. The plan was to simply march them towards the French.

  ‘What reserves did Cuesta have?’ interrupted Wellesley.

  ‘None sir,’ said D’Urban awkwardly. ‘He thought that as he advanced and the rivers got closer together, his ranks would thicken as his men had a shorter distance to cover.’

  Wellesley gave a snort of disgust and continued his interrogation, ‘How was he expecting the French to react to his attack? Did you not suggest keeping some force in reserve to address any French response?’

  ‘To be honest sir, I am not sure he had thought that far ahead, and General Cuesta is a very difficult man to give advice to, sir.’

  ‘Dear God,’ groaned Wellesley, ‘What an ally he is likely to be. Go on then, tell us the worst.’

  ‘Well sir, to start with things seemed to go well with the forward French positions retreating towards their main force and the Spanish advancing steadily. Then one of the French cavalry regiments seemed a bit slow to retreat, and the Spanish cavalry on the left flank advanced to speed them along. The French, who had started to ride away, suddenly turned in the smartest manner and charged at the leading Spanish regiment of horsemen... who seemed to get startled,’ he added lamely.

  ‘What do you mean, startled?’ demanded Wellesley.

  ‘Well sir, it seemed that some had not faced a charge before and instead of meeting it they turned and tried to retreat through the other Spanish squadrons of horsemen behind them causing confusion.’

  ‘Christ,’ exclaimed one of our cavalry commanders as he imagined the resulting chaos.

  ‘So,’ continued D’Urban ‘one French cavalry regiment succeeded in routing all three Spanish cavalry regiments on that side of the battlefield, and the other French cavalry nearby charged in to support.’

  ‘What did Cuesta do in response?’ asked Wellesley.

  ‘He galloped in front of the retreating cavalry to try and get them to rally, but they just rode him down. He was knocked from his horse and trampled by his own side and then by the pursuing French.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked Wellesley with what seemed a note of hope in his voice.

  ‘No sir, I took a spare horse to him with a couple of his co
usins and we managed to get him from the battlefield. He had taken several kicks, but was only badly bruised.’

  ‘So I am guessing that the infantry formed squares against the horsemen and fought their way out?’ asked a Scottish infantry colonel.

  D’Urban looked exquisitely embarrassed and I guessed we had still not heard the worst. ‘Err, no sir. Most of the infantry officers were on horseback and when the Spanish cavalry fled the infantry officers joined them, leaving their men to fight for themselves. The Spanish infantry ran in all directions, with the French cavalry riding among them slaughtering until they were too tired to raise their bloodied swords.’

  There was a stunned silence for a moment as we all struggled to take this in. I may be a lily livered coward but I don’t think even I would have run in those circumstances. Oh, don’t get me wrong – this would not be due to any sense of honour, but sheer practicality. A well organised infantry square is a much safer place to be with rampant enemy cavalry about, than fleeing with a pack of witless fools. You could retain most of your men and your reputation with a fighting retreat. Thinking back to my time with the remnants of the 74th Highlanders in India, I could not imagine running out on them like that; not least because Sergeant Fergusson would have tracked me down and gutted me with his spontoon if I had.

  In the British army such brazen cowardice would leave a man ruined. Take it from an expert in these situations; you have to be a bit more creative. Helping a wounded soldier to the rear always looks noble, unless you are the commanding officer. Rushing from the command post pretending you have an important message gets you away quickly, or if things are really desperate – hiding under the corpses and hoping to be left for dead. As I was to discover in later years this last course is not recommended when the enemy are Iroquois warriors with a penchant for scalping, or a certain African tribe who take the wedding tackle from the dead and dying for trophies.