Can No One Win Battles if I'm Not There

by Geoffrey Watson

That such blood might have been acquired out of wedlock was suggested by the fact that he had not enlisted in the army until Marshal Beresford had completed his reforms and then only as a common soldier. No family influence was used to start him off with a commission, but his education and ability quickly steered him into the newly formed Portuguese Rifles as a sergeant under the then Lieutenant Fernando Gonçalves.

  There was a certain inevitability about his career after that. Gonçalves now commanded his own company of Hornets and faced a desperate shortage of suitable officers. He had approached Oliveiro to offer him a place on the training course with a guarantee of a sergeant’s rank in the Vespãos if he made the grade.

  As with Lieutenant Pom, he had shown a natural talent in training and Colonel Bailey himself had recommended that he be made acting lieutenant for the new 6 Platoon.

  Gonçalves made sure that he robbed Lieutenant Dodds of Santos, the senior sergeant of the company and gave Oliveiro additionally, two good corporals and eight veteran Vespãos to shepherd the twenty new Vespas (Wasps) that came down from Oporto with him.

  The other ten Vespas went into the platoons that had supplied 6 Platoon’s veterans and the wagoners remained attached to those platoons that they had joined on a temporary basis.

  Much effort was going into teaching Sergeant Major Vidal all the basics required to hold a commission. Gonçalves had a beady eye on Sergeant Santos as his natural replacement as sergeant major and was watching carefully to see how many of the wagoners were good enough to be advanced to Wasps, to make up a seventh platoon.

  He settled them all down to combine training with patrolling for the next week and then Lieutenant Pom Bal Li and the missing 5 Platoon suddenly arrived on the southern bank opposite Coimbra and was quickly ferried over with his men.

  It was now Hagen’s turn to be amazed. Pom had spent the last few weeks with his platoon attached to the Hornissen battalion in Lisbon at the suggestion of Lord Wellington. A natural linguist, he was there to learn german as an addition to all his other tongues. He now stunned Hagen by conversing with him in his own language, even to the extent of a pronounced Hanoverian accent.

  More important, the news he brought; confirmed by the twenty French prisoners he had caught foraging on his way north; was that Masséna was on the move at last. The whole French army was retreating slowly on Coimbra. Sometime in the next two days they could be contesting the line of the Mondego.

  In fact, it was much longer than that. Pom had reported them on the move when his platoon was passing Santarém, but that was seventy-five miles away from Coimbra and Masséna had to stir a starving army into motion from a position to which they had become rooted over the last five months.

  It was estimated that fifty to sixty thousand Frenchmen had finally settled into winter quarters. Another eight thousand had joined them a couple of months ago.

  Thousands of them had deserted over the winter. Uncounted thousands had perished from illness and starvation, but if their numbers had been reduced to only forty thousand and if they were determined to cross the Mondego, Trant could not stop them. All he could reasonably hope to do was hold them on the far bank by contesting the crossing, until Lord Wellington could bring his army up from Lisbon to take them in the rear.

  The first cavalry units appeared after four days and spread out to the east and the west, looking for a place to cross. Those that went east soon returned. The confluence of the Ceira and the Mondego was only a mile to the southeast and both rivers were in flood. There really was no practical crossing of the Ceira for several miles and then they still had to get over the Mondego.

  Five or six hundred horsemen explored west toward the Atlantic, taking their time and examining the widening and narrowing of the waters as the tide ebbed and flowed.

  Two attempts were made on horseback to pick a way through the flooded meadows to areas of higher ground; small islands that became uncovered as the tide went out. Both these eyots were approachable from the south bank of the main river current and both were attainable along sunken causeways, nowhere more than two feet deep at low tide.

  At two hundred and fifty yards from the north bank, the French horsemen that reached them were confident that nothing but a small cannon could give them cause for concern. About a dozen of them gathered on each eyot to view with dismay the now slow-moving, but deep and wide main river and the impossibility of going any farther without some sort of bridge.

  They were unfortunate that it was the Portuguese Vespãos patrolling the northern bank. The English or the German Hornets would most probably have ignored them and let them return to report that there was no way across.

  Gonçalves’s men had seen at first hand, the incredible atrocities that had been visited upon their own people. They were disciplined enough to treat any prisoners with respect, but would much prefer to shoot them before they had chance to surrender.

  It was offensive to them even to see French soldiers standing on the soil of their homeland and it just so happened that the Vespãos opposite the eyots were carrying modified Baker rifles with a killing range far greater than the distance across the water to the chasseurs.

  The cavalrymen had no chance and the Vespãos were in need of extra horses just now. They had discovered an abandoned ferryman’s boat on the north bank and rowed across to collect the beasts and swim them back across the river to safety. All the chasseurs on the eyots were dead and the flowing tide would dispose of the bodies within the next hour or so.

  There were no more attempts to cross the Mondego west of Coimbra and it was a gathering of several highly decorative uniforms on the bank opposite the town that was recognised for what it was; senior engineers and bridge-building experts.

  Trant took a gamble and restrained his gunners from blasting them with grapeshot. He wanted them to report to Masséna on how long it should take for a pontoon bridge to be thrown across the river.

  Not that he was an expert in such things himself, or didn’t believe it was possible. He knew it was possible, even against stiff opposition, but he also knew it would take a long time when all the boats had been cleared from the south bank for miles in each direction.

  He gambled on the hope that Wellington would be in hot pursuit by this time and on the near certainty that Masséna couldn’t get a bridge across in less than a week. He really did want the French to stop and try and build a bridge. He only had three thousand second rate militia and four hundred Hornets with which to stop them, but with two hundred yards of deep, swiftly flowing river between them, he was prepared to stake his reputation and his future career on being able to hold them for at least a week.

  In the end, it was all academic. By the end of the day, the French had reached the same conclusion and were in full retreat eastward along the river, quite abandoning any thought of taking Coimbra again and using it to make a stand of their own.

  The total contribution of the four hundred Hornets on this occasion had been the discouragement of the chasseurs by the elimination of two of their troops by the Baker rifles of Gonçalves’s two platoons. The blooding of the new Wasps from Oporto; both English and Portuguese had never happened, but there were sure to be other opportunities in the very near future.

  The newly trained Royal Marines would return to Oporto to pick up a wagon train to escort to Santiago del Valle. With the whole of the surviving troops of the Armée de Portugal retreating across their route, it could well prove an interesting journey.

  Neither Hagen nor Gonçalves was concerned about them. Hagen would take his squadron across the river to join the rest of the German battalion coming up from Lisbon. Gonçalves wanted to get back into the mountains to continue the harassment of the retreating French and to absorb as many of his new Wasps and wagoners as he could decently justify.

  Before they parted, they came to an agreement between themselves. Lieutenant Pom and his platoon had been attached to the German battalion for some weeks now. Not only was he becoming fluent in the language, his platoon w
as also becoming proficient in the cavalry role favoured by the Germans. It was decided that they should continue under Major Hagen while his men absorbed some of the skirmishing skills of the Vespãos.

  In return, Lieutenant Richter and One Troop of D Squadron would join Gonçalves and teach his men how the Germans regarded their own particular cavalry tactics.

  It was thought that the secondment would only last for a few weeks, but the way that the Brigade was developing, it already seemed likely that the Portuguese company or companies would gravitate toward the German battalion. The new Spanish companies at Santiago were already closer to the British battalion.

  The Spaniards and the Portuguese might well be close enough to be cousins, but they had been fighting each other for centuries and there was little love lost between them. They would both be happier fighting alongside their allies than each other.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hanover; from where most of the German Hornets had come; like the rest of the German states, was a country of small towns and villages and an economy that was largely agricultural.

  Hagen’s troopers were mostly country boys of peasant stock, with few feelings of sentiment for the animals that they had husbanded. Animals were for working, eating and supplying milk, leather, wool and transport.

  They had nevertheless developed a serious relationship with their horses that might be regarded as sentimental, once they had trained them to perfection. The Germans were, though, a very serious minded people and to a man, would regard any such suggestion as entirely frivolous.

  Perhaps then, it was the gratuitous waste of healthy animals that raised such feelings of fury in the men when they came upon the scene of carnage left by the fleeing French, only a day after they had abandoned any attempt to assail Coimbra.

  Fleeing was surely what the French were now doing; abandoning wagons, stores (but not food), equipment and nearly all their draught animals.

  One could have respected their wish to make sure that their enemies could not use the animals themselves and it was normal practice to slaughter those that they could not take with them.

  These unfortunate beasts had not been slaughtered though. In a sadistic orgy, they had been disabled and left to suffer. Hamstringing, throats half cut, partial disembowelling; there seemed to be no end to the ingenious ways they had found to render them useless while prolonging their agonies until their pursuers found them.

  They had already taken a terrible vengeance on any of the local population that they had captured and the path of their retreat was marked by ruined and burning towns for miles on either side.

  There were also bodies of French soldiers scattered among the abandoned equipment and indeed scattered along the whole route that the army had used.

  Skeletal and diseased bodies, not all of them dead; they had marched until they could march no more, falling farther and farther behind until, if they were lucky, they died at the side of the road or were trampled to death by comrades too weak to move them out of the way.

  If they were unlucky they were found by the ordenança or vengeful peasants, seeking sadistic revenge for all the atrocities committed since the invasion began six months ago.

  D Squadron gave up serious pursuit at this point. The French could not afford to stop until they reached Celorico or Guarda. The only food they had was in their knapsacks or their stomachs; little or nothing in either case. They had seventy miles to march in terrible conditions through still wintry mountains before they could get any more food and in most cases their feet were wrapped in rags because their shoes had fallen to pieces.

  Many hundreds did not get there at all and every scrap of food and equipment stocked at Celorico and Guarda would not be enough to enable them to give battle properly if Wellington caught up with them.

  The Hornets spent the rest of the day slaughtering the disabled animals and recovering whatever meat they could. Evidence was all around them that the French had carried off as much as they could in the time they had. Perhaps the flesh from the hundreds of carcasses would keep them going for another two or three days.

  The beasts that they had had to leave would keep the Hornets fed for a year and so Hagen persevered in butchering as many as he could in the hope that the British army would be able to use it when it finally got here. They had a feast that night: as much assorted meat; ox, horse, donkey, mule as they could eat and plenty of rough peasant wine to wash it down. Broken wagons were lifted onto other wagons to make very respectable shelters and there was enough wood from the wreckage to keep an army warm.

  In the morning, Lieutenant Colonel Günther Roffhack turned up with C Squadron and the news that Wellington’s men would not arrive for another two days. They had been in hot pursuit but all their food and supplies had been quite unable to keep up and were now lagging many many miles behind them.

  Unlike the French, the British army could become positively mutinous without food and they were strictly forbidden to forage for themselves at the expense of the local peasantry. In any case, the whole region between Lisbon, Coimbra and the Spanish frontier had been stripped of anything edible in the last six months, Wellington called a halt until the supply trains could catch up.

  Roffhack heartily approved of Hagen’s housekeeping efforts. C Squadron piled in to help with the butchery and the building of shelters in which to hang the carcasses and joints. The two squadrons enjoyed their food and shelter for another night and moved off in leisurely pursuit the following morning, leaving their cache of meat in the charge of a most grateful squadron of light dragoons, who were exploring well ahead of the army.

  Vere’s wagon train had already proved its worth. C Squadron had its own supplies and had continued moving forward on reconnaissance when the army had stopped. Wellington had asked Vere to detach A and B Squadrons and take them to do what he could to help Marshal Beresford and the 4th Division. They had been sent across the Alentejo to support the Spanish at Badajoz.

  * * *

  Gonçalves and E Company plus Richter and Number One Troop of D Squadron were far ahead on the flanks of the retreating army. His main concern when he left Coimbra was to organise all the ordenança in the mountains, so that any of the peasants who had returned to their homes while the French were in Santarém, should be warned to leave again until they had passed.

  Every one of the Portuguese Hornet platoons was now acting independently and leading a band of ordenança; in all cases larger than the platoon. They hovered on the flanks of the army and killed any Frenchman who had the energy to leave the ranks in search of food or loot.

  Gonçalves kept Richter and his troop with him. The Vespãos were not taking prisoners and it was not easy explaining why to the Germans. Firstly it was because he wouldn’t know what to do with them in the present situation; secondly the ordenança and the partisans would certainly kill them sadistically and he couldn’t really blame his countrymen. If the French were given no chance to surrender, then a quick death was far preferable to the alternative agonising one.

  There were not all that many. Most of the French had become too pathetic to forage and only wanted to get back to food and safety. No doubt they could see the foragers leave and they probably heard the shots that dispatched them. When they didn’t return to the ranks it was hardly noticed and the army as a whole was not very concerned. It only wanted to get out of this god-forsaken country.

  A week later, the tattered, starving and footsore columns staggered back to Celorico and Guarda. The Portuguese and the Germans had also joined together under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Günther Roffhack and more than four hundred mixed Hornets were camped around the towns, watching and waiting until the British army could get its supply problems settled and advance to confront the enemy.

  Roffhack called a council of war with Hagen, Gonçalves and his two squadron captains, Müller and Werther. They spoke in their common language, english, with Lieutenant Pom in attendance to interpret in the event of comprehension failure.

  Ro
ffhack was determined that, in a most formal age, he was going to maintain the informal style that the Hornets took from Welbeloved. He realised that it added to the bonding and comradeship among the four different nations that made up this unique force and made even the ultra formal Germans aware that any other Hornet was his friend and comrade, no matter what his nationality or language.

  He got the meeting started by calling on Gonçalves. “Your E Company has actually been acting as escort to the French for the last week, Fernando. C and D Squadrons have merely been trailing in their wake and disposing of the corpses that they left.

  Have you been able to make some estimate of how many men got back to Celorico? Just the numbers please. We all know what sort of state they are in.”

  Gonçalves made to rise to his feet, but a gesture sat him down again. “It’s an informal meeting, Fernando. We are not on parade here.”

  He collected his thoughts. “I cannot think that there are more than forty thousand troops back in Celorico and Guarda, …er…Günther.” He struggled with the urge to say Sir.

  “It has been impossible, however, to divide them into corps or divisions or even into infantry and cavalry.

  As an example, there have to be in excess of five thousand sabres, but they now have less than three thousand horses to carry them. The others can only be on foot.

  The three established corps commanders are known to be there. Ney, Junot and Reynier have been seen, so I presume that the extra corps that broke through in December has been absorbed into the other three.” He shrugged. “This can only be a guess on my part.”

  Roffhack nodded and glanced at Hagen. “Have you any thoughts on the matter, Heinz? Do you think it likely that they can stand if Lord Wellington can bring the army up?”

  Hagen grinned and shrugged; rather a gallic gesture, Roffhack thought. “They are French, Günther. Of course they shall stand if their generals tell them to. It may not be where they are now, but there are plenty of places around here that are easy to defend, even when they are starving. I doubt there are enough rations in Celorico and Guarda combined to keep them going for a week.