2 Grattan, 21. See also idem 87,123-5, 128, 136-8; Blakeney, 18-19,105; Schaumann, 23, 202; Leslie, 97.
Provost Marshal, "may he niver see home till the vultures pick his eyes out, the born varmint!" Bestriding the rocky hill-tracks on her celebrated donkey, "the Queen of Spain," the little, squat, turtle-backed woman, with her uncontrollable tongue and invincible courage, was the type of all her. ragged race. She and her sisters were always ready to risk their lives to be in at the bivouac before their husbands and "have the fire and a dhrip of tay ready for the poor craythers after their load and labour."
For fighting's sake these "Teagues" would endure without complaining an almost Roundhead discipline. In the whole army no corps was so severely drilled as the Connaught Rangers, the celebrated 88 th—a regiment, as one of its veterans wrote, whose spirit it was impossible to break. If a man coughed in the ranks, if the sling of his firelock left his shoulder when it should not, if he moved his knapsack when standing at ease, he was punished. "Yet, if it came to a hard tug and we had neither rations nor shoes," wrote Captain Grattan, "then indeed the Rangers would be in their element and outmarch any battalion in the Service! Without shoes they fancied themselves at home, without food they were nearly at home." An officer of another regiment has left us a picture of them as they passed him in a moment of crisis, merry as larks, singing and cracking their jokes, with bronzed faces and frames hard as nails, and as eager for the fight as for a ration of rum. Danger seemed to inspire them; George Napier recorded how one worthless, drunken dog ran up to a thirteen-inch shell which had dropped into a crowded trench and, knocking off its spluttering fuse, presented it to him with a "By Jasus, your honour, she'll do you no harm, since I knocked the life out of the cratur!"
With its "hard cases," inveterate drunkards, and gaolbirds—one colonel reckoned the criminal element at from fifty to a hundred men in every battalion—the British Army was no school for saints. The recruiting sergeant took what he could get. Yet nearly all were game-cocks in a fight; as one of their officers said, there never was such an army. And many of these rough men displayed at times a touching affection and kindness. George Napier, when wounded, was visited by an Irish private of his company who, after having his arm amputated, walked seven miles to assure himself of his captain's safety. His brother, William Napier, related how John Henessy of the 50th, a drunken, thieving brute, several times flogged for his evil ways, who was captured with him at Corunna, tramped two hundred miles on his return home in order to deliver to Napier's sister a silver spur entrusted to his charge.
The British soldier's incurable vice was drink. An old woman of Pontalegre, after four years' acquaintanceship with Wellington's army, always assumed, when an Englishman asked a question, that he was after wine. To obtain it, he would commit every species of depredation; rob a house, plunder a church, steal from his comrade and strip his own dead officer after death. Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th, who wrote an account of life in the ranks, thought that the craving for liquor was often pathological—the result of harsh usage and brutal punishment. Soldiers had to endure so much and had so few normal pleasures that they turned automatically to drink when they relaxed. Men who could take three or four hundred lashings without a groan, chewing a musket ball or a bit of leather to keep themselves from crying out while the blood ran down their backs, were scarcely likely to restrain themselves when they got into a wine vault.
Yet Wellington's remark that the bulk of his men enlisted for drink concealed the representative character of his army. Though poverty was its recruiting ground, many of its soldiers were thoughtful and serious men of refinement and education. One Scottish private related how he found a comrade on guard reading Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song; another how the eyes of himself and his comrades filled with tears as they sang the songs of their native land before a battle.1 And running through the tough fibre of the rank and file was a strain of chivalry. Foul-mouthed, obscene, irreligious, they would yet give their last bit of biscuit to a starving Portuguese peasant or shoulder the burden of a woman or child. When he was sober and his blood not roused, the British soldier, so fierce and implacable in battle, could show an almost childlike tenderness towards an enemy: would tear the shirt off his own back to bind his wounds, carry him to safety or share the contents of his flask. Having never known invasion at home, he seldom evinced the revengeful spirit of his German and Iberian allies. A Scottish sergeant who was shot at by a wounded Frenchman for whom he had gone to fetch a drink, after a moment's reflection with raised firelock, quietly went on with his mission of mercy. A private of the same
1 Donaldson, 180; Journal of a Soldier, 115-16.
race, finding a Portuguese muleteer robbing a peasant girl, faced his knife with his bare fists and knocked him down.
Among the officers this chivalrous sense of honour was more than an instinct; it was a code. They were almost too ready to take on a bully or punish a cheat; Charles Napier flattered himself that his leg was as straight a one as ever bore up the body of a gentleman or kicked a blackguard. He regarded the treatment of women as the measure of civilisation; tenderness towards the helpless and adherence to one's word constituted for him the tests of a gentleman. A man who broke his parole was beneath contempt; George Napier held it up to his children as the unforgivable offence—that and cowardice. One rode straight, spoke the truth and never showed fear. There was little outward religion in Wellington's officers; skylarking and often uproariously noisy, they were like a pack of schoolboys. Yet under the surface was a deep fund of Christian feeling; their beau idéal was a man like John Colborne of the 52nd— upright, fearless and gentle—or John Vandeleur, whom his friends never heard speak harshly of any man. "The British Army is what it is," Wellington said long afterwards, "because it is officered by gentlemen; men who would scorn to do a dishonourable thing and who have something more at stake than a reputation for military smartness."1
It was this that kept them so staunch at the testing time. They fought, not for public applause, but for an inward satisfaction that each man bore in his soul. "I should never have shown my face again," wrote one of them of a bout of fever, "had I applied for sick leave." They took their knocks as they came, believing that nothing mattered so long as they were true to code and comrade. "How did you sleep?" asked a young officer of a newcomer after a night in the clouds on the march to Arroyo-Molinos. "Slept like a fish," came the reply, "I believe they sleep very well in water." "Bravo," said he, "you'll do!" "Begin to like my trade," wrote the same apt novice a few weeks later, "seeing all my comrades as jolly and fearless as if they were fox-hunters."2
The Prussian rigidity, which the Horse Guards with pipeclay and
1 Fraser, 207; Charles Napier, I, 316; Gomm, 375; George Napier, 55, 76, 174-S, 218, 221; Grattan, 57, 229, 303; Kincaid, Random Shots, 288; Tomkinson, 222: Blakeney, 178, 281-2; Leslie, 193-4. 198; Bessborough, 231; Oman, V. 453; Anderson, 14; Journal of a Soldier, 106; Boothby, 159; Costello, 74; Donaldson, 200; Bell, I, 42, 83-4; Smith, I, 46-7.
2 Bell, I, 13-14. 22. See also Simmons, 193; Tomkinson, 22. "I knew no happier times, and they were their own reward." Kincaid, Random Shots, 252.
lash had imposed on the eighteenth-century Army, had long been shed. Wellington's force was as knowing, adaptable and individualistic as a field of fox-hunters. After four years' campaigning in the toughest country in western Europe, it could, he claimed, go anywhere and do anything. Its courage was the cool, resourceful kind of men with complete confidence in their own skill. "Now, my lads," said Colonel Colborne, "we'll just charge up to the edge of the ditch, and, if we can't get it, we'll stand and fire in their faces."1 Alert and wiry veterans as the French were, they had met their match. "Their soldiers got them into scrapes," Wellington replied when asked to explain his success, "mine always got me out." They were up to every trick of the game and, like their hardy adversaries, able to make themselves comfortable anywhere. Captain Leslie of the 29th and Kincaid of the Rifles have each de
scribed the scene at their nightly bivouac: the rough sedge-mats spread under a tree, the accoutrements hanging on the branches, the parallel trenches dug on festive occasions to form a table with candles stuck in the sockets of upturned bayonets, the soup made from stewed ration-beef and vegetables; the partridges and hares roasting on a turning thread suspended from a tripod of ramrods; the rough wine of the country cooled under moist cloths in canteens hung from the trees. Then with a bundle of fine branches to lie on and a green sod or saddle for pillow, the young victors would sleep in their cloaks till reveille. "The bugles sounded," wrote Ensign Bell, "I rolled my blanket, strapped it on my back and waited for the assembly call."
It was not the French now who hunted the British, but the British the French—"to pot them, kill them and cook them in their own fashion." "Damn my eyes," the men shouted to one another when on short rations, "we must either fall in with the French or the Commissary to-day; I don't care which!" "It was like deer-stalking," wrote another, "a glorious thing to whack in amongst a lively party with their flesh-pots on the fire of well-seasoned wood, a chest of drawers, perhaps, or the mahogany of some hidalgo in the middle of the street blazing away and the crappos calling out, 'Bonne soupe, bonne soupe!" Officers and men were always thinking out new ways of surprising and harrying the enemy; Captain Irvine of the 28th taught himself to sling stones with such accuracy that, if he
1 Random Shots, 273. "I am confident if Colborne was suddenly woken out of his sleep and told he was surrounded by treble his numbers, it would only have had the effect of making him, if possible, still more calm and collected." George Napier, 220-1.
encountered two or three Frenchmen, he would bowl one over with a well-placed rock, flatten another with his firelock, and petrify a third with a shout, tripping him up or, if he bolted, pelting him with pebbles—a spectacle which never failed to delight his men.1
It was this offensive spirit—itself the outcome of perfect training, fitness and teamwork—that made Wellington's army so formidable. It was always on its toes; healthy, collected, well-provisioned, wary, impudent and out to make trouble. Apart from the old Scots champion, Sir Thomas Graham, and Picton, who was fifty-three, the average age of its divisional commanders in the spring of 1812 was slightly under forty. Stapleton Cotton, who commanded the cavalry, was thirty-eight; Alexander Dickson of the Artillery, thirty-four; George Murray, the Quartermaster-General and Chief-of-Staff, forty.
Of those they led, the crown and exemplar was still the Light Division—capable, as Harry Smith claimed, of turning the tide of victory any day. "There perhaps never was, nor ever again will be," wrote Kincaid, "such a war brigade as that which was composed of the 43rd, 52nd and the Rifles/' Its officers, who took a pride in being gay of heart, were always ready to enter into whatever amusement was going—a practical joke, a hare or fox-hunt, an impromptu donkey-race, a day after the partridges, a dance with guitar, cakes and lemonade in some draughty, candlelit barn where the raven-haired, garlic-scented village senoritas, screeching with excitement, pinned up their dresses for bolero and fandango. At the head of this famous Division went the green-jacketed Rifles—"the most celebrated old fighting corps in the Army"—who in the whole war never lost a piquet. And the scarlet-coated 43rd and 52nd—that beloved corps of George Napier's, "where every officer was a high-minded gentleman and every private a gallant and well-conducted soldier"—were their equals. "We had only to look behind," wrote Kincaid, "to see a line in which we might place a degree of confidence equal to our hopes in Heaven; nor were we ever disappointed." Grattan of the 88th—though a member of the rival 3 rd Division— acknowledged the 43rd to be the best regiment in the Army.2
There were many competitors: the peerless Fusilier regiments
1 Bell, I, 163. See idem, I, 24, 64, 81-2; Grattan, 176; Johnny Newcome, 170; Tomkinson, 137; Kincaid, 33, 42-8, 60, 211; Random Shots, 87-90; Leslie, 83-5; Donaldson, 206-7; Tomkirison, 37; Simmons, 15-16, 57.
8 Grattan, 120; Bell, I, 12, 37, 54-5, 156; George Napier, 207-8; Kincaid, 96, 153-4, 179*. Random Shots, 16; Simmons, XXI, 279; Smith, I, 185, 190; Schaumann, 339; Larpent, I, 89, 102; Costello, 148; Cooke, 71-2.
which snatched victory out of defeat at Albuera; the Guards with their grace and nonchalance and unbreakable discipline; the fiery Highlanders; the great, undemonstrative regiments of the Line—the 5th, the 28th, the 29th, the 45th, the 48th, the 57th. On their capacity to rise, when called upon, to the highest capacity of human endurance and valour, their commander, though he seldom misused it, knew he could rely. "Ah," he said during a near-run fight to an officer who informed him that he had placed the Royal Welch in a dangerous gap, "that is the very thing!"
Pride in the continuing regiment—the personal individual loyalty which each private felt towards his corps—gave to the British soldier a moral strength which the student and administrator ought never to under-estimate. It enabled him to stand firm and fight forward when men without it, however brave, would have failed. To let down the regiment, to be unworthy of the men of old who had marched under the same colours, to be untrue to the comrades who had shared the same loyalties, hardships and perils were things that the least-tutored, humblest soldier would not do. Through the dusty, tattered ranks the spirit of companionship ran like a golden thread. "Years of hard fighting, fatigues and privations that we now wonder at," wrote Grattan, "had a charm that in one way or another bound us all together; and, all things considered, I am of opinion that our days in the Peninsula were amongst the happiest of our lives." "You may laugh at me," wrote George Napier after leading a storming party, "but it made me cry with pleasure and joy to find myself among the men and to see their rough weather-beaten countenances look at me with every expression of kindly feeling."
There was little outward pageantry now about Wellington's army —little except the bronzed faces, the level eyes, the indefinable air of resolution and alertness. The dandified uniforms of peace-time England, the powder, pipeclay, brilliant colours, shining brass-work, had become things of the past. Wellington cared little for these; provided his men brought their weapons into the field in good order and sixty sound rounds of ammunition, he never asked whether their trousers were blue, black or grey.1 Their jackets were faded and ragged, their breeches patched with old blankets, their shakos
1 Grattan, 50. "There is no subject of which I understand so little.... I think it indifferent how a soldier is clothed provided it is in a uniform manner, and that he is forced to keep himself clean and smart as a soldier ought to be." Wellington, Supplementary Dispatches, VII, 245. See Oman, Wellington's Army, 296; Kincaid, 203-4.
bleached by sun and twisted into fantastic shapes. When an officer, returning wounded from Portugal, saw the Portsmouth garrison in their smart white small clothes and black gaiters, they seemed to him like the troops of another nation. And the Life Guards, arriving in Spain from England, mistook the Rifles from their dark clothing and sunburnt visages for Portuguese. The slouching gait, the motley wear, the alert, roving gaze of the Peninsular men were as far removed from the Prussian gait of the barrack square as was the fustian of Cromwell's Ironsides. Only their firelocks were always bright and clean.
Yet as they assembled in the March of 1812 before Badajoz, there was no mistaking their power. On the 17th—the day after the city was invested—they paraded before Wellington, their bullet-ridden colours, bare and faded, floating in the wind and the band of each regiment breaking into the march, "St. Patrick's Day." That night the work of entrenching began under heavy fire from the fortress and in icy rain. The men had to dig up to their knees in slime under continuous bombardment; for the next week, while the rest of the army covered the siege, they spent sixteen out of every twenty-four hours in the trenches. At one moment floods swept away the pontoon bridge that linked them with headquarters at Elvas. Every morning of that anxious week as Wellington waited for news of Soult's army beyond the Sierra Morena, the Portuguese Governor of Elvas and his Staff in full uniform solemnly waited on him to ask
, with a wealth of old-world compliment, how he had passed the night.1
On the afternoon of March 24th the weather cleared. Next night five hundred volunteers of the Light and 3 rd Divisions stormed Fort Picurina, an outlying bastion on the south-east of the town. As the last stroke of the cathedral bell tolled eight, the storming detachments rose from the trenches and raced towards the glacis. Two hundred fell, but, before the enemy could recover, they were swarming up the ladders, the men of the 3 rd Division crying out to their old rivals: "Stand out of the way!" to which the latter, shoving fiercely by, shouted back, "Damn your eyes, do you think we Light Division fetch ladders for such chaps as you to climb up!"2
1 Stanhope, 327.
2 Smith, I, 62. See also Grattan, 188; Bell, I, 28; Tomkinson, 143; Blakeney, 261: Fortescue, VIII, 286; Oman, V, 239-40.
The capture of Picurina enabled the breaching batteries to begin the bombardment of the south-eastern corner of the city wall which the engineers had selected as its weakest point. It was now a race between the British guns and Souk's troops. Fortunately, Marmont, who in the previous summer had successfully marched to the relief of Badajoz, had been expressly commanded by Napoleon to invade Portugal in Wellington's absence—a futile demonstration as he knew, since, not only did Ciudad Rodrigo bar the road to Lisbon, but he had no means of supporting his army in the Portuguese hinterland.
By April 4th, the day Soult emerged from the Sierra Morena, two breaches had been made. Next day, every gun was directed to making a third in the curtain wall between. By the rules of siegecraft, no assault should have been made until the batteries had blown in the counterscarp. But as this was beyond Wellington's power, an un-military Parliament and parsimonious Treasury having failed to provide him with trained sappers, he had to use his infantry to do the work of mine and shell.
The Age of Elegance Page 3