Flashman in the Peninsula

by Robert Brightwell

  Winter would soon be coming and the word was that the British would retreat back into Portugal and leave the Spanish to face the French on their own. When I heard that I could not help but remember my conversation with Cuesta in his carriage months ago, when he complained that the British forces had run away last winter while his ragamuffin army fought on. ‘Show me your army in the spring,’ he had said when I had looked down at the state of his forces. Well, it looked as if history was repeating itself as the redcoats were leaving the Spanish to fight on alone, while they went into safer winter quarters. I could understand Wellesley not wanting to throw his army away in pointless battles and knew that supplies of food were not coming to him in Spain. All the same, the British half of me felt a twinge of shame. I was glad Cuesta had been retired as I did not think I could look him in the eye.

  The French war with Austria had recently come to an end. Once a treaty had been agreed, everyone expected Napoleon to send yet more of his trained veterans to complete the subjugation of Spain and Portugal. If the British and Spanish armies could not be organised to fight them together, then surely it would be easier for the French to take on their enemies one at a time. The French would crush the Spanish first as they were nearer, but come the next summer when food was more plentiful, huge French armies would sweep into Portugal and I could not see how the British could withstand them. As it turned out I was both right and wrong, for the big French army did come; but as I was having these thoughts, Wellesley was devising plans of his own.

  ‘Why don’t you take me to meet Lord Wellington,’ suggested Maria, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I would love to meet him.’

  ‘Who the blazes is Lord Wellington?’ I replied grumpily.

  ‘Why, don’t you know?’ asked Maria, knowing full well that I didn’t, as she was waving in her hand a local news sheet that had only just arrived. ‘Your Arthur Wellesley has just been made Lord Wellington in honour of his victory at Talavera. He is a lord now like his brother, and he is now my equal in social standing,’ she added, raising an arch eyebrow.

  I laughed. ‘Well, if you are thinking of him as a cortejo, you should not have much trouble. He is a randy bastard as I discovered in India.’ Of course then she wanted to know all about him. In truth, he is probably what women would call good looking, although he could be a cold fish and damned haughty when it served him.

  While Maria denied that she had any designs on Wellington, as we must now call him, as a cortejo, she did not take long to sort out her affairs in Seville and within three days we were heading out of the city on the road northwest. We travelled in comfort in Maria’s carriage, which was just as well as British redcoats were unpopular now amongst the Spanish as news of our refusal to fight in Spain spread. I was spat at twice and took to wearing a civilian coat and talking in Spanish as we stopped at places along the way.

  Badajoz when we reached it was a huge fortress town, near the Portuguese border on the river Guadiana. It looked impregnable and, as I was to discover two years later, it damn nearly was. The British army was camped in and around the town, and already plans were being made to move further west. But of Wellington there was no sign. He had left some weeks before and no one knew where he had gone, or if they did they were sworn to secrecy. Maria found rooms in the city and I returned to my old friends in the officer’s mess. I visited Maria regularly over the coming weeks but I came at night to her maid Consuella more frequently. She was a pretty piece and as I had suspected, she was keen on me. She was an enthusiastic lover too and I often needed a good siesta to recover from a night spent in her small room down the corridor from her mistress.

  I was not the only one looking for female company however, for Boney seemed to have become obsessed with a bitch owned by one of the other officers and he could not have made a worse choice. Lots of officers had dogs with them on campaign; Wellington had a whole pack of hunting hounds which he rode with as often as he could, but of course Boney was not interested in any of them. No, he had set his sights on a huge dog owned by a Captain Avery. It was a black and brown monster – I think Avery called it a Rotthound or something similar – he had bought from an officer in the King’s German Legion.

  Avery called it Brunhilde and claimed it was a killer dog. He planned to release it against the French at the next battle. It was certainly a vicious brute, snapping and snarling at anyone who got within reach. Avery admitted that it had bitten him twice. Many of the officers thought that releasing a dog against the French was against the code of war and quite a few were prepared to shoot the animal before that happened. I agreed with them, not through any scruples of warfare, but because its snapping jaws seemed unlikely to distinguish between British and French. When released it would probably go for the first human it could find, which was likely to be wearing a red coat. Brunhilde gave no quarter to her own species either and when Boney tried to express an interest she flew at him, snarling. Only his speed saved him and still he got a nasty bite on the rump. But if anything this only made him keener, and he could often be found placidly watching her, while she growled back at the end of her leash.

  Wellington reappeared in October, but gave away nothing about where he had been, even to his senior officers. ‘A tour of inspection’ was all he would say, but he seemed in remarkably good spirits given a dire military situation and a disastrous political one back home. He had brought news that the British Foreign Secretary Canning had been shot in a duel by Castlereagh, the Secretary of War and my old patron. Both had survived the encounter. Their dispute was over troops that should have been sent to us as reinforcements. Instead they were sent to the Netherlands on a disastrous expedition that left most of the survivors suffering from dysentery and certainly in no state to be sent on to Portugal. We would be left to fight on without reinforcements but Wellington seemed to have not a care. When I finally introduced him to Maria he greeted her warmly with that familiar leery glint in his eye. I was not surprised when we were both invited to join him and some other officers hunting with his hounds. I was mildly put out to learn that Maria had been invited a few days after the first hunt to join another one without me. Through Consuella I discovered that subsequently Wellington had taken to inviting my cousin on rides with just the two of them alone, and that Maria had returned looking ‘flushed and satisfied’, as her servant put it.

  As I was getting regularly ‘flushed and satisfied’ as well I supposed I could not complain, and a short while later the whole British camp moved west to Celerico in Portugal. I will not dwell too long on the winter and first half of 1810, for in truth not a lot happened. The British remained in relatively comfortable quarters throughout, well fed and without sight of a single Frenchman. The same could not be said for elsewhere in the peninsula, as the Spanish faced one disaster after another.

  Abandoned by their ally and with nearly a hundred and forty thousand fresh veteran French troops pouring over the border, the Spanish insanely decided that this was the moment to liberate Madrid. They sent two armies towards the capital in a pincer movement with entirely predictable results. Initially they caught some French forces by surprise and pushed them back, but then a large Spanish army of fifty-five thousand men met a French army of thirty-four thousand men at a place called Ocana. The Spanish general left his flank completely exposed on a flat plain, and as a result his demoralised troops faced French infantry to their front and rampaging French cavalry in their rear. Spanish losses, including those captured, amounted to over a third of the army while another ten thousand deserted. The Spanish also lost nearly all their cannon and supplies. Against this French casualties amounted to just a few hundred men. The second, smaller Spanish army of thirty-two thousand men was beaten a week later by a French force half its size. Again divisions were routed and huge numbers of men deserted. The surviving army units fled to the nearby mountains where thousands died over the winter from disease and starvation.

  The whole campaign had been a reckless gamble and it left southern Spain virtually defen
celess. To make matters worse, the city of Gerona finally fell to the French after a six month siege that had killed two-thirds of the garrison and half the citizens of the town. In response the Central Junta abolished all exemptions from military service and desperately tried to raise new armies. But the people were now on the verge of revolution, and even if the men had come forward there were no arms to equip them.

  The French had the Spanish at their mercy, only the guerrillas now offered them any resistance. In January the French swept through Jaen, Cordoba and Granada and by the end of January they were at the gates of Seville, which fell without a fight. Maria had stayed with the British throughout the Spanish collapse as it seemed the safest place. Word came through that the marquis had survived and reached Cadiz; the coastal fortress which was now the only city in the south to hold out against the French.

  With Spain subdued it seemed certain that the French would turn their huge army on the British next and the croaking amongst our officers increased. During the march down to Talavera the previous year spirits had been high and many had expected to end the campaign capturing Madrid themselves. Now we seemed to face inevitable defeat and ignominy. Some were pressing for leave and others writing tales to the government of what they perceived as mismanagement and incompetence by Wellington. Well, I had started to croak too as I could not see how we would beat a French army three times our size, but Maria had stopped me.

  ‘He has a plan,’ she had told me of Wellington one evening when we were alone.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘Yes, but he has sworn me to secrecy. It will work Thomas, trust me. The French will not be able to push the British out of Portugal.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I protested, ‘I am your cousin, we are of the same blood, surely you can tell me.’

  ‘I have given my word,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I will tell you this: he will use what the French perceive as their strengths against them.’

  She was right, Wellington definitely had a plan, but if other officers knew about it then they weren’t talking. Even senior officers grumbled that they were being asked to put their trust in unknown phantoms of his imagination. But despite all the griping and groaning and letters from politicians and articles in the press, Wellington remained close lipped and resolute. The only time I heard him refer to the matter at all was when one exasperated officer shouted at him that the French could bring a hundred and fifty thousand men against our force in the next few months.

  ‘The more men they bring the better,’ he replied with an enigmatic smile, and then he walked away before the man could ask another question. Whatever he had in mind it was clear that we would be relying on his brain beating French brawn in the months ahead. Having seen the luck he had ridden during the Indian campaign I was not sure if I found that comforting or not, but a strange event a few days later seemed almost a good omen.

  With other officers I was staying in a large requisitioned house, which according to rumour was built on an old roman villa. Certainly there was the stump of a roman pillar in the centre of the courtyard that all the rooms faced on to. As Avery was also sharing the building, a ring bolt on this pillar became the mooring point for Brunhilde. The damned creature snarled and lunged at the end of a long rope tied to the pillar, at everyone who entered through the gateway, forcing us all to move around the edge of the courtyard to get to our rooms. One evening I returned to my chamber up on the first floor to find Boney sitting by the window. As usual, he was staring at his heart’s desire as she paced around the column outside. He had spent hours intently watching the slobbering bitch prowl about on her rope, but every time we walked past her together she would fling herself at Boney with jaws snapping.

  I was quickly getting ready as I was expecting Consuella in a few minutes, and sure enough her arrival was soon signalled by snarling and barking outside. Boney got up on his hind legs with his front paws on the windowsill to watch. Consuella, grinning up at him, edged round in our direction, while Brunhilde ran around the column after her.

  I put my arm around the dog’s shoulders, which were now at the same height as my own. ‘I think I am going to have more fun with my girl tonight than you are with yours,’ I told him as I watched Consuella reach the bottom of the stairs that led up to my room. ‘You need to forget about that one and find a willing bitch that will not try to take a chunk out of your arse. Now get going, you know I don’t like you in here when I am entertaining.’

  The dog reluctantly dropped to the floor and padded out of the door as I opened it for Consuella, who patted him as he walked past. We shared a cup of wine and I was just getting her stripped for action when a cacophony of barking came from outside. There were the usual snarling growls from Brunhilde, but this time there were excited barks from Boney too. I tried to ignore it at first; if the daft mutt wanted to risk another mauling that was up to him. I did not see why it had to stop me. Consuella was whispering ardently in my ear and it looked as though my attentions were going to be far more welcome than Boney’s. But as I tried to concentrate on matters in hand the continual barking and snarling was a distraction, and then other officers billeted around the courtyard started shouting for me to do something.

  ‘For God’s sake Flash,’ called Avery, ‘pull your flea bitten hound away from Brunhilde’

  ‘Those bloody dogs should be shot,’ called another unknown voice.

  Reluctantly, I pulled myself away from Consuella and went to the window. I took a deep breath to bellow down for Boney to desist.

  ‘I say Flash, hold on,’ called a voice to my right. It was Campbell who was leaning out of the window of his room next door.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I bellowed back over the din.

  ‘Look at Boney, he is reeling her in.’

  ‘What?’ I shouted back.

  ‘Look at the pillar, man. He has taken her around that column four times already; I swear your hound is deliberately reeling that German brute in.’ I looked down and he was right. There were already four tight lines of rope around the pillar and Boney, darting backwards and forwards, was leading her clockwise around a fifth time. To this day I am not certain if what followed was sheer dumb luck or animal cunning, but given subsequent events I am inclined to believe the latter. Certainly there were a couple of occasions when Boney did move half a turn counter clockwise, usually to dart in and tease the German dog. He would spring back from the snapping jaws with ease and then as she strained towards him he would resume his clockwise movement. Apart from Avery and one red faced major who hurled lumps of firewood at them from the opposite side of the courtyard, most of the officers had appeared at their windows and were watching proceedings with open curiosity as it became clear what Boney was attempting.

  ‘Never seen anything like it,’ called the man who occupied the room to the left of mine. ‘Do you think he actually knows what he is doing?’

  I shrugged my shoulders in response and felt Consuella press her naked body up behind mine, so it could not be seen from outside, as she peered over my shoulder. Even she was curious to see what was happening. Avery’s plaintive appeals for me to intervene were now met with jeers as the spectators wanted to see what the outcome of this confrontation would be. Some were even wagering on it.

  Eventually as her leash shortened to just a few feet, the German dog began to sense her vulnerability. She was panting heavily and showing the whites of her eyes as she struggled against the rope trying to understand what was happening. Boney darted towards her again; she only seemed to know one response to this and lunged forward once more. A few moments later and the Teutonic hound was trapped fast against the stone column. Boney stood in front of her for a moment watching her confusion as she strained to reach him, then with a few eager steps he moved around again until he came up behind his prey. The noise Brunhilde made as Boney mounted her was one of the strangest I have ever heard from a creature. There was an initial snarl as she felt Boney behind her which changed into a yelp of surprise and then
a pitiable howl as she understood she had been mastered. The rest was drowned out by a cheer from most of the watching spectators and bellowed threats of a lawsuit from Avery if my dog had whelped a litter on his pedigree killer.

  ‘Now I want you to do that to me,’ Consuella whispered huskily in my ear before moving back to the bed.

  ‘You want me to put a rope around your neck and tie you to a pillar?’ I asked, grinning.

  ‘Well, maybe we can try that later,’ she said as she waved her ‘tail’ invitingly in my direction.

  Chapter 20

  Brain might have beaten brawn in the canine contest of wills, but for the British, as spring turned into summer, very little changed. Wellington kept disappearing for his mysterious tours of inspection and rumour had it he headed west when he did so. But while Spain collapsed under French domination the British army continued to sit quietly in its Portuguese quarters. The fighting men found it a huge frustration to do nothing while French marshals routed every Spanish force they could find. We all knew that sooner or later the French would amass their armies and head in our direction in numbers that seemed unstoppable. There had been rumours that Napoleon himself would lead this huge army but he was now distracted with his new Austrian princess bride. Instead, word was that Marshal Massena had been given the command. Son of a shopkeeper, Massena had risen through the ranks from private to become one of Napoleon’s most trusted and able marshals. Bonaparte had heaped glory and titles on him in recognition of his victories, he was now also Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, but more worrying from my perspective, he seemed to know what he was doing.