by David Rooney
A hard-fought action near the small town of Vera – about 10 miles from the French border and halfway between Pamplona and San Sebastian – highlighted the increasing French resistance and Skerrett’s incompetence. Skerrett had orders to cut off the retreat of a French division at a bridge over a deep gorge. Harry, usually in the front line of swiftly moving action in order to make sound reconnaissances and tactical assessments, had always found that Vandeleur welcomed his advice. Near the bridge over the swollen river was a group of houses held by a company of the Rifles commanded by Harry’s colleague, Daniel Cadoux. Harry realized that the French were about to attack. He rushed up to Skerrett and suggested, urgently, that another battalion be sent to support Cadoux. Skerrett replied haughtily, ‘Is that your opinion?’ and refused to give the order. Increasing French attacks quickly captured the houses and the bridge, and inflicted heavy casualties on the defenders. However, it was impossible for the French to hold the position unless they counter-attacked the British overlooking the houses. Characteristically, Harry said to Skerrett, ‘You see now what you have permitted, General, and we must retake these houses, which we ought never to have lost.’ He accepted this and said, ‘I believe you are right.’ Harry could take it no longer and galloped up to Colonel Colborne, in command of the 52nd, who was as angry as Harry. ‘Oh, sir, it is melancholy to see this. General Skerrett will do nothing; we must retake those houses. I told him what would happen.’ ‘I am glad of it, for I was [as] angry [as] you.’ The houses were relatively easily retaken when the enemy realized that in the face of determined assaults, they were unable to maintain their defensive position which was overlooked from the high ground. Although Harry was pretty scathing about him, interestingly, Colonel Bunbury in Reminiscences of a Veteran, writes: ‘Skerrett as an individual was brave to rashness; but I should have doubted it had I not so frequently witnessed proofs of his cool intrepidity and contempt of danger. At the head of troops, he was the most undecided, timid, and vacillating creature I ever met with.’
The river was now very swollen after torrential rain, making it unfordable anywhere else, and the guarding of the bridge therefore even more vital. Harry suggested the whole of the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade should be positioned in the houses, the bridge should be barricaded and the 52nd should be in close support. Skerrett laughed and, ordering the whole Battalion into position, said, ‘You may leave a picquet of one officer and thirty men at the bridge.’ Harry had a little memo pad in his pocket and took it out, for the first time ever, to note the General’s orders. He read what he had written and asked if that was his order. Skerret said, ‘Yes, I have already told you so.’ Harry, somewhat insolently replied, ‘We shall repent this before daylight.’ But the General was impervious to reason. Upon which Harry galloped down to the houses, ordered the Battalion to retire and told his brother Tom, the Adjutant, to assemble a force of an officer and thirty men to defend the bridge. They all thought he was mad. Tom said, ‘Cadoux’s company is for picquet.’ Cadoux rode up and could scarcely believe what he heard, then began to criticize Harry for not supporting them in the morning. Harry replied, ‘Scold away, all true; but no fault of mine. But come, no time for jaw, the picquet!’ Cadoux said, ‘My company is so reduced this morning, I will stay with it if I may. There are about fifty men.’ Harry promptly agreed, for he had much time for Cadoux’s ability and courage, and told him he was likely to be attacked an hour or two before daylight. Cadoux agreed, ‘Most certainly I shall, and I will now strengthen myself, and block up the bridge as well as I can, and I will, if possible, hold the bridge until supported; so, when the attack commences, instantly send the whole Battalion to me, and, please God, I will keep the bridge.’ As darkness fell, Harry rode as fast as he could to tell Colborne, in whom he had complete faith and confidence. Having read Harry’s memo he agreed that, as soon as the attack commenced, his Battalion should move down the heights on the flank of the 2nd Battalion of the 95th, which would advance to support Cadoux. They parted with Harry in deep foreboding as to what was going to happen.
In the course of the night, intelligence was received that the enemy were attempting to withdraw over the swollen river. It was therefore highly likely that they would try to capture the bridge before daylight. As Skerret and Harry were discussing it, noise of the attack began with shouts of ‘En avant, en avant! L’Empereur récompensera le premier qu’avancera’, and Cadoux’s retaliatory fire could be heard. The only hope was that Cadoux could hold the bridge until reinforced. The fire of the enemy was extreme as they put in desperate and determined assaults. On three successive occasions, with half his intrepid force, Cadoux charged and drove the enemy back over the bridge, the other half remaining in the houses to give supporting fire. His hope and confidence that he would be reinforced sustained him until he was eventually shot in the head. At this critical moment his Company was driven back; the French column and rearguard crossed and, by keeping near the bed of the river, succeeded in escaping, although the riflemen came to the support of Cadoux’s men with as much speed as distance allowed, and by daylight, Colborne was where he promised.
Harry was soon at the bridge. It was a scene of indescribable carnage. The bridge was almost choked with the dead; the enemy’s losses were enormous, many of their men having drowned, and all their guns were left in the river a mile or two below the bridge. The number of dead was so great that the bodies were thrown into the river in the hope that the current would carry them downstream, but the many rocks impeded them and when the river subsided soon after, the stench was terrible.
Cadoux, whom Harry respected as a brave and able officer, lay dead among the corpses of his riflemen. After a bitter and angry exchange, Skerrett admitted his mistake, but Harry never forgave him for his arrogant stubbornness which caused the debacle and the unnecessary loss of life. He added, ‘our gallant fellows were knocked over by a stupidity heretofore not exemplified.’
Although Harry spent his career campaigning, and took part in many hard-fought and bloody actions, the loss of Cadoux affected him deeply. He wrote at length, explaining that at first he did not like Cadoux who appeared to be snooty and aloof, but after taking part in several actions together, gained a deep respect for his bravery and professionalism. Harry wrote in his autobiography: ‘I wept over his gallant remains with a bursting heart.’
Wellington felt extremely annoyed at the failure to cut off the French division at the bridge but ‘as was his rule he never said anything when disaster could not be amended’. He kept tight control over the brisk actions and rapid marches along the front between San Sebastian, where supplies and reinforcements for the Allies were unloaded, and the pass of Roncevalles through the Pyrenees. In his description of these actions, which included grim marches up precipitous mountain slopes, and men were lost over vertical cliffs, Harry still seemed obsessed with his loathing of Skerrett. With obvious glee, he told the story of how Skerrett, already notorious for his meanness, decided to give a dinner, and asked Harry if he could obtain wine and mutton. Through his ever-ready contacts Harry acquired eight sheep and a dozen bottles of claret, and was dumbfounded when Skerrett replied that he only wanted one sheep and two bottles of wine. Harry then told the story how the wine ran out before the meal had started and Skerrett became a laughing stock. The story quickly circulated through the Brigade.
To Harry’s delight, Skerrett was soon replaced by Colonel Colborne, an officer brought up in the best tradition of the Light Infantry, with links to Sir John Moore himself, and who was to become a life-long friend. The Light Division had complete confidence in Colborne as an able and conscientious leader, who had a good eye for ground, anticipated the enemy’s moves, and was cool and collected under fire. In October 1813, the Division, with Harry’s unit in the lead, advanced towards the pass of Vera. Still a Captain, Harry went with Colborne to reconnoitre the French defences on the heights. Colborne said that if they took the French position, ‘If you are not knocked over you shall be a brevet-major in the morning.�
�� The proposal to promote Harry over the heads of more senior captains in the Brigade was controversial and had to be resolved by Wellington himself. He agreed to Harry’s promotion, on condition he went to another brigade, but Harry remained loyal to his Brigade, and especially to Colborne whom he admired, so he refused the promotion. In another hard-fought action, when Juana was sheltering in a cottage near the front line, she saw a horse similar to Harry’s gallop past, dragging a lifeless body in the stirrup. Frantic with fear, she rushed after the horse and when she saw it was not Harry’s she collapsed in a wave of emotion and relief. Harry, as usual, was unharmed.
Brisk actions continued in the hills and ravines of the Pyrenees. In a situation of rapid movement, Colborne and Harry, aware of the need for accurate reconnaissance, sometimes found themselves ahead of their own troops. On one occasion, they suddenly confronted a French column in a ravine. Colborne, alert to their danger and ‘with the bearing of a man supported by 10,000’, rushed up to the French officer and said, ‘You are cut off. Lay down your arms.’ The officer accepted Colborne’s threat, ordered his men to lay down their arms, and presented his sword to Colborne, who quickly ordered the French to turn left and march away from their weapons. He turned to Harry and grinned, whispering to him to gather some men as swiftly as possible in case the French realized they had been duped. Colborne and Harry, with less than fifty men, had captured a French unit of twenty officers and 400 men. Illustrating the chivalry of the time, Colborne later returned the sword to the French officer, saying he could wear it with pride.
Soon after the Allies crossed the border into France, a minor incident illustrated Wellington’s total control. He met a subaltern from Colborne’s brigade escorting some prisoners. The young officer said he knew they were in France because they had got hold of pigs and poultry, which they could not get in Spain. Wellington’s rule, established during his campaigns in India, was at all costs not to antagonize the local population. He therefore summoned Colborne, gave him a mild rebuke and added, ‘Stop it in future, Colborne.’
Having captured the heights of Vera, the Light Division established their general hospital nearby. As Harry was going to the hospital to visit the wounded, he passed a desperately wounded French soldier, who cried out for help. Harry went off and arranged for a stretcher party to fetch the poor man and take him to hospital. Some weeks later, when he was involved in a parley and the exchange of prisoners, a voluble French prisoner shouted out that Harry had saved his life. Harry wrote: ‘I never saw gratitude so forcibly expressed in my life.’
Soult’s effective leadership meant that the Light Division faced stiff resistance as they grimly pressed forward through the Pyrenees and into the plains of south-west France. In one brilliant and successful action against the French, Harry’s horse was shot and before he could jump clear it rolled on him and covered him in blood. When she saw him Juana was horrified, but once again, her worst fears were not realized. She had clearly won the affection of both officers and men in the Division and on one occasion Colonel Gilmour, who commanded a battalion of the
Rifles, offered her the comfort of a hut, made largely of mud, which had been built for him, but which he was leaving. When Harry returned, all was warm and snug, and a meal prepared. Soon after they ‘had retired to our nuptial couch’, a violent storm of rain blew up, the roof collapsed and left both covered in black mud. Juana ‘laughed herself warm’.
During the late summer and autumn of 1813, although there were fierce clashes, with both sides sustaining casualties, there was little animosity between the British and French armies outside of battle, and often picquets were placed by mutual agreement. Because Spain had suffered appalling atrocities at the hands of the French occupiers, the same could not be said of the Spanish as they advanced into France. Wellington kept very tight control over Spanish units, knowing they might seek revenge, and he was determined that the local French people should not be antagonized. He dealt severely with cases of theft, even hanging some thieves as an example. Napoleon wanted the people to rise up against the invaders, but Wellington effectively made sure that this did not happen.
When the Light Division was leading the advance, Wellington would often be in their Headquarters, discussing tactics, both for the Division and down to battalion level. He took part in a discussion about a Light Division attack on La Petite Rhune, in which both Colborne and Harry were involved. They led a secret night advance and then made a dawn attack which took the French completely by surprise. Harry described the attack, which is mentioned in Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, as ‘the most beautiful attack ever made’. Despite this success they suffered further casualties as they advanced. Kincaid described how Colonel Colborne was shot through the lungs, but was saved by prompt medical attention.
By the end of November 1813, the Allies were firmly established in France, and were fighting in the area between Nivelle and Bayonne on the French Atlantic coast. During some desultory skirmishing and in a dispute over the position of some French picquets, Harry ordered his men to fire a few rounds over the heads of the French defences. He commented that he was reluctant to shoot any man in a cold-blooded manner – as if war was some macabre game to be played according to strict rules of decency and etiquette.
Early in December, at a time when Harry was physically exhausted, he had a vivid and disturbing dream that the enemy were attacking his father’s house in Whittlesey, and his mother was in danger. He woke suddenly from the dream and shouted, ‘Stand to your arms.’ This woke Colborne who was sleeping nearby and Harry apologized, explaining that he had just had a nightmare. He was deeply upset over this dream and noted the exact time in his diary. Some days later, he received a letter from his father saying his mother had died at the very time of his dream – the letter and the diary entry still exist. In his autobiography, he then indulges in a highly emotional and sentimental tribute to his mother, recalling the moving moment when he first went off to the war. His ten siblings were weeping as his mother embraced him saying, ‘Remember you are born a true Englishman.’ During a long period of depression which Harry suffered after the loss of his mother, Juana helped to restore his spirits, and reminded him that she had lost all her family and her home. She said tenderly, ‘I live alone for you – my all, my home, my kindred.’
The Light Division spent a relatively static time over Christmas 1813 in the area of Bayonne, where food and good Bordeaux wine were plentiful. When not actually fighting there was often serious professional rivalry between the divisions, and at Bayonne the powerful and aggressive Picton, commanding the 3rd Division, who had been wounded at Badajoz and who was always bitterly critical of the Light Division, had a severe clash with Colonel Barnard. The Duke, conscious of the fierce characters among his officers, soon calmed the dispute.
During the advance near Bayonne, Harry and Juana had stayed the night in the house of a poor French widow, who had shown Juana a valuable Sèvres bowl. The next day they had a very long rough ride and slept in a roadside cottage. In the morning, to their amazement, their servant brought in their goat’s milk in the Sèvres bowl. He was roundly rebuked, but explained that he thought the bowl would be ideal for serving their milk. Soon after breakfast Juana told Harry that she had to visit a wounded officer, but instead she got hold of West, their trusty groom, and galloped off to return the bowl to the widow. In the evening, having ridden over 30 miles through dangerous territory patrolled by the French, she returned, late for dinner, and explained what she had done. Colonel Barnard was delighted and said she was a true heroine.
As the fighting drew to an end, Harry reminisced about the fine characters with whom he had shared the campaign – Johnny Kincaid, Charlie Beckwith, John Colborne, later a field marshal, Bill Beresford who as a Viscount enjoyed a long and distinguished military and political career, and Edward Pakenham, Harry’s close friend who was to be killed in the attack on New Orleans. Harry’s subsequent career, always accompanied by Juana, took him to Africa and
India, and he frequently met his old friends and hardened veterans of the Peninsula. As he looked back he proudly described the excellence of ‘his Riflemen’, so well trained, such accurate shots, and so effective in skirmishing ahead of the main body of troops. After one bloody clash with the French he recorded that he never saw the dead lie so thick, except later at Waterloo. The Duke himself said, ‘I require no proof of the destructive power of your Rifles.’
By March 1814, although the campaign was nearly over, Wellington was still directing four divisions – the 3rd, the 4th, the 6th and the Light Division, and then on 10 April, the army prepared for a final showdown at Toulouse. This proved to be a grim and hard-fought battle with heavy casualties on both sides, with Wellington directing the divisions on the ground. The very next day, news came that the war was over and Napoleon had abdicated. The Allies, including the Spanish units which had fought valiantly at Toulouse, occupied the city. Harry, Juana and their friends were allocated a delightful furnished chateau complete with a French cook. ‘We were as wanton and extravagant as lawless sailors just landed from a long voyage. The feeling of no war, no picquets, no alerts, no apprehension of being turned out, was so novel after six years of perpetual and vigilant war, it is impossible to describe the sensation.’
In Toulouse, a formal funeral service took place in the Protestant church for a colonel killed in the final battle, and was attended by most of the officers including the Duke. The service made a huge impact on Harry, bringing back for him memories of all those gallant soldiers and friends left on the fields of Spain, buried with some trifling ceremony or none at all. He had witnessed, in the badly wounded, the anguish of dying alone in a foreign land.
The Royalist city of Toulouse seems to have welcomed the British divisions and the end of wartime privations. The officers enjoyed a vivacious social life of theatres, balls and fêtes with an abundance of food and drink, and ‘the indolence of repose after the excitement of a relentless and cruel war’. Harry rejoiced in the celebrations with Juana who had shared uncomplainingly all the hardships and suffering of the campaign from Badajoz onwards. He noted too that the soldiers also had a happy time because the local area, like most of France, had been denuded of men by the endless demands of Napoleon’s armies. Generous local provision was a boon for the British because officers and soldiers alike were nine months in arrears of pay. Near their billets there were some ‘Napoleonist’ units who were ‘brutally sulky and uncivil’, but Harry and Juana ignored them, revelled in the joys of peace in a lush and prosperous countryside and celebrated the first momentous year of their marriage.