Flashman in the Peninsula

by Robert Brightwell

  ‘Mercifully no he didn’t,’ Wellesley grinned wryly. ‘He had recovered his normal demeanour by the time I saw him.’

  ‘But he was still grateful for the victory, surely?’

  ‘Oh he was grateful; his men were full of your death or glory charge for their guns, some of the few we captured. I suspect that by the time Cuesta’s despatches reach Seville it will be his victory rather than mine. That is why I sent for you, Thomas. I would be obliged if you would ride to Seville and take my account of the battle to the Central Junta. Be a first-hand witness as to what actually happened. I am content for the Spanish to take some credit, but if our part is not recognised, the Spanish may think we do not merit further supplies.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I agreed, and my heart soared. We were not out of the woods yet, Soult was closing on our rear and there was still a sizeable French force to our front. Now I would be spared the next engagements and instead was ordered to spend time in the salons of Seville countering misleading gossip.

  An environment where a cake fork was the most dangerous implement of war sounded just the right place for me and I was certainly not going to be in any hurry to rush back. ‘Surely after his previous defeats,’ I continued, ‘no one in Seville will believe that he beat a French army twice the size of the Spanish one without our help?’

  ‘Oh, he is back to his old irrational self. He will probably claim it was an act of God. I spent most of my time with him trying to deter him from shooting people.’

  ‘Who did he want to shoot?’

  ‘There were his two hundred prisoners; I persuaded him to reduce the executions to forty. He agreed to that readily enough. But then one of our picket officers arrived in his camp to complain that Spanish soldiers were roaming the battlefield shooting French prisoners and wounded.’

  I was genuinely shocked. There was, and as far as I am aware still is, an unwritten code for warfare. At that time it was probably at its zenith. The earlier British meeting with the French over the Portina turned out to be not unusual for that campaign. Captured officers would normally give their parole, a promise not to escape, and then be held in loose confinement until an exchange could be made. It was not unheard of for officers to be invited to dine at an enemy mess. I have seen a blind drunk artillery major carried back to our lines by four French gunners after he had overindulged on French hospitality. There were even understandings amongst common soldiers, for example when opposing forces were camped close together. Sentries standing guard between two armies would not be shot at. I have heard tales that they would even share duties so that they could take turns having a sleep, waking each other up when officers inspected.

  In all cases, prisoners were treated fairly and wounded treated as far as medical provisions allowed. Both the French and the British soldiers saw each other as professionals. It was not simple charity; given the randomness of war, you never knew when you might need such courtesy yourself. ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I told him it had to cease at once, of course. But as a precaution I have sent three companies of guards to the southern end of the battlefield to protect the wounded. Cuesta tried to justify his men’s actions by saying that the French shoot Spanish brigands and guerrillas on sight.’

  ‘But Cuesta is a professional soldier, surely he knows better.’ I was starting to feel slightly ashamed of the Spanish half of my ancestry.

  ‘Yes, but in the winter a lot of Cuesta’s men go up into the mountains where they can more easily defend food supplies from the French. A lot of them live amongst the brigands and have seen the massacres. But don’t worry, I have been very clear that I will not see this victory dishonoured.’

  He ran his hands through his hair and he suddenly looked very tired. He had not slept for two days. He had marshalled his forces to fight a prolonged battle, placated allies and now instead of resting, his mind was already turning to the challenges ahead. ‘Sit down, Thomas,’ he gestured to a campaign chair near the door of his tent and turned around. I heard the clink of glass and a few moments later he sat down beside me and passed me a glass of brown liquid. ‘Try this, it is a local brew, but very pleasant.’

  I sipped; it was the jerez drink that I had first tasted in the mountains a few months ago with Downie. For a moment we sat in silence staring at the unlit brazier outside the tent and feeling the warming effects of the spirit.

  Now that I knew I would not be required for the next battle I felt able to view the situation more objectively. I wondered if this was actually a victory at all. I already knew that British casualties, dead and wounded, were around five thousand men which was a quarter of our force. The French had lost a similar number but they still had around forty thousand men left to our fifteen. The Spanish had lost around a thousand and so had over a thirty thousand men left, but they would not withstand a full French onslaught on their own.

  ‘Was it a true victory or a pyrrhic one?’ I asked quietly.

  Wellesley considered the question seriously for nearly a minute before he replied. ‘Well, we will certainly present it as a true victory to Parliament. I need victories to keep them funding the campaign. The Spanish will proclaim it as such as well; they have had little to celebrate recently. But the French will not retreat far. They will want to hold our attention while Soult closes in on our rear. Then they will have us trapped.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I need to give the men a day to rest, and tomorrow I am expecting three thousand men from the Light Division as reinforcements. Then Cuesta will stay here to deceive the French into thinking the whole army is still resting. He can look after our wounded too. But I will take the British and we will try to beat Soult at his own game. He only had around fifteen thousand men when we threw him out of Oporto. If he still has that number then we should be able to beat him, especially if we can catch him off guard.’

  ‘You will lose more men fighting Soult. How many more battles can you afford to win and stay in the field?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he sighed. ‘Right now I am forced to fight to survive. Despite what Cuesta thinks, we are in no state to attempt to drive the French out of Spain. We will need to pull back into Portugal or south of the Tagus to allow our wounded to recover and more reinforcements to arrive.’

  Even that downbeat assessment turned out to be optimistic, but we were not to discover that for a few days. In the meantime the battlefield of Talavera had one more horror in store.

  After sharing half a bottle of jerez I made my excuses and left. I was dog tired, it had been a long and exhausting two days. The sun was still up, it was late afternoon but I was ready for a siesta. I found my tent and must have fallen asleep as soon as my head hit the bag of spare clothes that served as a pillow. I was soon in a fitful doze. Of all things I dreamt of Christmas, the smell of roasting pork, the crackle of flames in the hearth and the excited squeals of those playing games. That was until I was rudely awakened.

  ‘Thomas,’ Campbell was urgently shaking my shoulder. ‘Come on, the battlefield is on fire! The wounded are being burned alive.’ Wearily I swung my feet to the ground as those facts sank in. There was still a smell of smoke and roasting pork in the air but with revulsion I realised that it was the smell of roasting human flesh, and the excited squeals in my dream had been the screams of dying men. You could not see the battlefield from the camp which was behind the hill the British had defended, but plumes of smoke rose into the air from its southern end. One look at the horses tethered in lines by the side of the camp told us it would be better to go on foot. They were already being made uneasy by the smell of smoke and were pulling anxiously at their traces. We would struggle to ride them towards the flames and then find a secure place to tether them. Campbell and I followed a trail of other officers and men running around the edge of the hill to see how bad it was. I was puffing to keep up but the sight that met me as we rounded the bottom of the hill left me gasping for breath in shock.

  You may have seen paintings of hell in a gall
ery, but I think in that moment I looked directly upon it. The shallow valley in which the battle had been fought had originally been covered in waist high grass. It was bone dry as it had not rained in weeks, and while swathes had been trampled flat by the movement of horses and columns of men earlier in the day, the majority was still upright. Many of the wounded had already been moved, particularly those in the flattened areas that had been easy to find, but many others remained. These had either been wounded during the routing of advances where the fighting spread over a wider area or, in the case of some French wounded, they had crawled into the long grass to escape vengeful Spanish infantrymen after the battle.

  A cinder from a campfire must have been carried by the freshening wind into the grass. That same breeze had fanned the flames so that they covered the southern end of the battlefield, and were advancing like an army of demons northwards. Figures could be seen silhouetted against the blaze, some darting forwards looking for the wounded and others helping to carry them out of the path of the inferno. The screaming and wailing from those still trapped in the path of the blaze was pitiable. Smoke was drifting up the valley too but it was not too thick and it did not block out the awful sight of one poor devil staggering in front of the flames with his clothes ablaze.

  ‘Come on Flash, let’s help get them out,’ Campbell was already darting forward. As you know, I am not one to willingly leap into danger, but we were well in advance of the fire and the cries of those in its path appealed to anyone with an ounce of humanity. I followed him in and in a few moments we had found a British infantryman dragging himself along with a broken leg. We had him up between us in a trice and soon had him deposited in the relative safety of the rocky ground at the bottom of the hill where other wounded were being gathered.

  Back we went, but the smoke was getting thicker now, and we both paused to tie neckerchiefs around our faces. I thought we had time to save one more person and we both scanned the ground as we spread out to find one. Voices were calling out in all directions, some for help, and others guiding the rescuers. I heard one voice nearby and thought I had spotted its owner but a gust of smoke obscured him. I pushed forward blindly towards him but fell over a body instead. The voice was still calling, ‘Help me, help me, I am over here.’ It was tantalisingly close and I pressed on this time on my hands and knees so that I could see. I had lost track of Campbell but now I heard his voice.

  ‘Here you are laddie, I’ve got you.’ Then he called out to me. ‘Flashman, where are you? I have found one, see if you can get another and let’s get back.’

  ‘I’m here,’ I shouted back. I stood and headed blindly in the direction I had heard his voice. I stumbled ten yards and then twenty before I realised that I must somehow have walked past him. It was getting uncomfortably hot now. My eyes were streaming with the smoke and it was starting to burn in my throat. ‘To hell with this,’ I muttered to myself as I decided it was time to get out of there, with or without a wounded person. I had lost my bearings blundering about but I would let the heat guide me. It now seemed strongest on my left side, the flames had been moving from south to north, so if I kept them on my left then I should come out roughly where I went in. I staggered forward, half running, to get away from the smoke which came and went in sudden gusts. Suddenly I saw a flicker of flame ahead of me and now I realised that there was as much heat coming from in front as from my left. I was starting panic. The fire seemed to be on at least two sides, but I had the presence of mind to drop to the ground where the smoke was thinner to try and get my bearings again. On my hands and knees I took big gulps of the cleaner but still hot air as I stared ahead. There was a roaring wall of flame ahead and looking to my left I could see the dull glow of yet more flames. I took a deep breath, turned to my right and ran as fast as I could.

  I must have run twenty or thirty yards in that sprint. I was holding my breath to avoid breathing in the thick smoke and had my eyes shut to stop them stinging; there was little I could see if I had them open. I remember my foot kicked against one body as I went, but it made no noise and I did not stop to investigate. I was just about to drop to the ground and take another gasp or two of the cleaner air when I cannoned into someone else. We both crashed down in the dry grass and from the muttered cry of ‘merde’ I gathered I had hit a Frenchman. I squinted at him through watering eyes. I thought he was an infantryman to start with as he had a musket, but then I saw the sword at his hip and the bloodstains down the lower half of one leg and realised that he had been using the longarm as a crutch. I staggered back up to my feet and looked back over my shoulder; the flames if anything seemed even closer despite my running.

  ‘Please monsieur,’ the Frenchman held up an arm in a desperate appeal for assistance. Tears were streaming down his face, more through the smoke than emotion, and he was gasping for breath. It was a sight to make your heart melt. An appeal to Flashy when he is running for his life is normally a forlorn hope. Not that I am kept awake by the grabbing hands and pleading faces I have ignored in my long and ignoble career; it would have been a lot shorter if I had heeded them.

  I remember hearing what sounded like a volley of musket fire somewhere behind and realising that it must have been a cartridge pouch on a corpse’s belt catch fire. There were still distant screams and yells for help but fewer now, unless the roar of the fire was drowning them out. No, I decided, I would pull this fellow to his feet so that he was no worse off than when I found him, but then he would have to fend for himself. I reached down, grasped his hand and pulled. As I did so I happened to glance over his shoulder and there was a sudden gap in the smoke. Through it not much more than twenty yards away, for a brief instant I could see people standing on the rocks at the bottom of the slope staring at the fire. They were hard to make out in the rippling heat haze but one seemed to see me and point.

  Relief surged through me. I was saved, and as I had been seen with the Frenchman I could hardly abandon my charge now. With safety in sight I helped him climb up onto my back and staggered forward to where I had seen the people. The frog was gasping his thanks in my ear but I just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other without stumbling over the rough ground. The heat down the left hand side of my body was almost unbearable now, at least the Frenchman kept the heat of my back. I could see little snakes of flame moving through the grass as though they were trying to cut me off but they were still small enough to stamp my way through. Suddenly I felt hands helping me. The Frenchman was lifted off my back and strong arms helped half carry me out of the smoke. The next thing I remember I was sitting on the rocks at the bottom of the hill with a crowd of other men and Campbell was next to me handing me his water bottle.

  ‘Good grief Flashman, I thought we had lost you there. The wind is whipping the flames up the valley and several of the rescuers have not got out. They were asking me where I had last seen you and suddenly there you are staggering out of the flames with a wounded Frenchie on your back.’ There was a wall of flame and smoke some fifty yards in front of us now; while it was giving off some heat, the wind was blowing most of it away from us towards the north.

  ‘Well, I could not come back empty handed,’ I gasped, after the cool liquid had soothed my throat. My clothes were still smouldering in some places and I patted out a trail of smoke coming from my coat hem. But while my uniform was hot I knew enough to play things cool to maximise my credit. I passed the canteen to the French officer who now lay on the rocks beside me. ‘Anyway,’ I added, gesturing to the Frenchman, ‘this chap said if I rescued him he would introduce me to his sister.’ The men around guffawed at that.

  ‘Did those French gunners offer their sisters as well?’ asked a voice in the crowd. ‘Is that why you charged their battery virtually single handed with just an old general and his aides for support?’ Men were slapping me on the back now and murmuring ‘good show’ at me and I realised that my reputation had grown more than I thought. Half the army had seen Cuesta’s mad charge and, given the reputation of
the Spanish for cowardice and mine for pluck, most seemed to have thought I was behind the move. As we had captured nearly a battery of guns this was no small feat, and now just a few hours later they had seen me stagger out of an inferno rescuing a wounded enemy officer. Even the Frenchie had no idea that I had been on the verge of abandoning him before I had seen safety through the gap in the smoke.

  ‘Alas, monsieur,’ he said to me quietly now as the others started to drift away, ‘I have no sister or I would have been happy to introduce her to such a courageous enemy.’ He reached out his hand to shake mine. ‘My name is Jean Lacodre,’ he said wincing in pain as his other hand clutched his injured leg. He then grinned as he added, ‘but my father is an organist. When he learns you have saved his son’s life if you are ever in Paris he will give you a concert, possibly in Notre Dame itself!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied, ‘but I have no plans to be in Paris any time soon.’ It is strange how fate works, the twists and turns of various threads come together when you least expect them. I had replied lightly without giving it any thought but little did I realise that three years later I would be in Paris and that brief conversation would save me from years of captivity or worse.

  Chapter 16

  The next morning after a fitful sleep the golden dawn revealed a nightmarish scene. The shallow valley that the battle had been fought over was now burned black and scattered over it were charred corpses, twisted as though they had died in agony. Some undoubtedly had, but Campbell told me that dead bodies also twist in the flames as muscles contract with the heat. He related a tale of his grandfather who had fought with the English at Culloden, sixty years before. His ancestor had helped gather the bodies of the defeated Scottish highlanders and Jacobites, many of whom he had known. They were piled together on a pyre and set alight. The body of one of the old Campbell’s neighbours had suddenly sat up in the flames and pointed at him; the old boy had nearly died of a seizure.