by Gale, Iain
‘Talavera, sir.’
‘Talavera, yes. And after Talavera there will be much for you to do.’
Keane nodded. He knew too that when the time came, when Victor and Sebastiani and Jerome and Ney had been driven back beyond Madrid, there would be more to do, much more, before they would find the way forward.
And he knew too, only too well, that after they had fought this battle, and settled the business with Pritchard, he would take his men out again, would see the French and would give his reports. And then he would have done all that an exploring officer could do, and perhaps a good deal more. And then it would be the job of the general to finish the business.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Wellesley’s opening campaign on his return to Portugal was one of the most masterly of his career, culminating in the major victory over the French at the battle of Talavera.
Twenty days after being given command of the army in Portugal, on 22 April 1809 Wellesley disembarked at Lisbon. The Portuguese army was demoralized and disorganized and the French had a strong foothold in the country. In late March the French under Marshal Soult had seized Oporto (today named Porto) and sacked the city slaughtering thousands of the inhabitants. In fact by April Soult was ready to retire to Spain. He had almost lost contact with the army of Marshal Ney in Galicia and felt insecure and isolated.
Wellesley resolved to push Soult out and moved his force to Coimbra, sending Beresford and the Portuguese to block Soult’s escape eastwards from Oporto.
The truth of the battle is not dissimilar to Keane’s account.
On the morning of 12 May, a Colonel Waters was reconnoitring the river Douro at the east end of Oporto when he was approached by a Portuguese barber who led him to a hidden skiff. There he also found the prior of the Serra convent and a handful of peasants. Ordered by the prior, they took the British officer across the river, and returned with four wine barges.
Wellesley then ordered the army across. First over was a company of the 3rd Foot (the Buffs) who occupied a walled seminary to the east of the city. Soon they had been followed by the rest of the battalion.
Soult was unaware of any of this but General Foy, realizing what was happening, led three battalions of the 17th Light Infantry against the seminary at around 11:30 a.m. and was beaten back. The French attacked again in greater force. But the British too had been reinforced and beat them off.
Soult now withdrew his troops guarding the boats on the river to reinforce Foy’s attack on the seminary and immediately the French left the riverside, the people of Porto began to ferry more British troops over further downstream. The French, who had planned to retreat in good order, were forced to flee.
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The British lost 125 men. Wellesley’s second-in-command, General Paget, lost his arm. The French suffered 1,800 casualties. Soult was forced to abandon all his equipment and retreat through the hills to the north. The British advanced to Braga, forcing Soult to retreat further north-east. During the disastrous retreat, Soult’s corps lost 4,500 men, its entire military chest filled with thousands of silver crowns and all its guns and baggage.
Wellesley now considered his strategy. With his 20,000 men he advanced into Spain to join 33,000 Spanish under General Cuesta. Together they marched up the river Tagus to Talavera, 120 km to the south west of Madrid.
Here on the two days of 27 and 28 July 1809, Wellesley confronted a third French army under Victor and Sebastiani and Napoleon’s brother Joseph and won the first great victory of his peninsular career, as a consequence of which he was created Viscount Wellington.
It is fair to say however, that things might have been very different had it not been for the efforts of his intelligencers and exploring officers.
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In 1809 the army intelligence service, of which Keane’s command becomes a component, was in its infancy. With the growing threat from France after 1805, General Brownrigg, the Quartermaster-General of the British Army, had approached the Commander in Chief, the Duke of York, with a proposal for a Depot of Military Intelligence on the model of Napoleon’s notorious Bureau d’Intelligence.
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Wellington, taking his cue from Brownrigg and realizing the value of intelligence in the Peninsula, organized his own corps of ‘exploring officers’, recruiting men who were fine horsemen, linguists, and able to write and draw. They worked hand in hand with George Scovell’s Corps of Guides who performed recce, courier and espionage duties.
Both Brownrigg and Wellington had a hard time however recruiting competent officers who might win easier promotion on the battlefield. There were few willing ‘James Bonds’ at the time. Almost every capable officer posted to the Depot soon had himself posted elsewhere. It was thought beneath the dignity of an officer to dabble in the business of spying, which was tainted with the whiff of treachery and dishonour and Keane, already perceived as a maverick, instantly finds himself further shunned by many of his fellow officers.
Men like Keane, whom we would today see as heroes, were damned for shirking the ‘real’ fighting. And so he always does what he can to ensure that, apart from doing his best for Wellington and of course himself, he and his men are always seen to be somewhere in the thick of it in the major battles.
One of the duties of Wellington’s exploring officers, when the fighting was scarce, was to map the Portuguese and Spanish countryside. Also, under the command of George Scovell, Colquhoun Grant and others, they liaised with the guerrillas to obtain information from French prisoners, and leaders such as the real characters of Morillo and Cuevillas were renowned for their ruthlessness and cruelty. Needless to say in the course of the war most of the ‘exploring officers’ were captured or killed. They have never been given the full credit they deserve in Wellington’s victory.
The exploring officers built their own networks of spies and spymasters, armed with money from Wellington and Grant. The guerrillas made a point of intercepting French dispatch riders but the dispatches were in code. George Scovell was the most famous cryptologist in Wellington’s army, helping to break the Great Paris Cipher, the Napoleonic equivalent of the WWII ‘Enigma’ story.
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In the course of the war, most of the exploring officers were either captured or killed. It was without doubt one of the most dangerous jobs in Wellington’s army and the time has come for these unsung heroes to at last enjoy their fair share of glory.
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James Keane will advance through the bloodbath of Talavera and go on to explore again with his band of talented jailbirds in the service of the newly created Viscount Wellington.
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There is a wealth of non-fiction writing on the war in English, Spanish and French.
Napier’s six-volume masterwork has been the benchmark for British readers for almost two hundred years and its maps remain exceptional. For colour, Ian Fletchers’s Wellington’s Battlefields Revisited is as evocative as it gets. One of the best recent complete accounts is the history of the war by Charles Esdaile, whose Fighting Napoleon is also the most comprehensive narritive to date of the guerrilla war.
Julia Page’s Intelligence Officer in the Peninsula, a life of Edward Charles Cocks, is invaluable on the exploring officers, and Jock Haswell’s classic 1969 biography of Colquhoun Grant is a good read, if you can get it.
Mark Urban’s peninsular scholarship is again in evidence in the searching biography of George Scovell: The man who broke Napoleon’s Code.
* About £1.7m today.