Can No One Win Battles if I'm Not There

by Geoffrey Watson

  “Yes, My Lord. I have seen the prisoners. I regret that I am not able to match Dodds’ achievement. We only encountered half a squadron of dragoons and it is unfortunate that three or four of them got away. There are nevertheless thirty or forty prisoners, including a couple of officers that you might care to question.”

  Wellington raised his eyebrows in resignation. “Thankyou Captain Gonçalves. It was thoughtful of you to leave one or two of the officers alive. Sir Joshua usually shoots them all at the start of an action. Is it a change of policy perhaps?”

  Ignoring the irony, Roffhack interposed quickly. “Not at all, My Lord. It is only a relaxation of the rules, as we tend to agree that most of Masséna’s men would rather not fight at all. Even the generals want to cry enough and go back to Spain.

  Captain Gonçalves and his men have effectively destroyed three squadrons today. The horses they captured were all that were left to mount three full squadrons. I doubt that the Armée de Portugal still has three thousand usable mounts and the ones that were captured shall need rest and feed for at least two months before we can use them.

  If I may venture an opinion, My Lord, based on what I have learned from many of the prisoners we have taken?” Wellington nodded. “I don’t believe their army is fit to stand against you, no matter how good a defensive position they take. It is only Masséna trying to save his reputation. His generals are on the verge of mutiny and his men are still half starved.”

  Wellington heard him out, then came back to the business in hand. “I agree with you Colonel. If it is possible to starve a Frenchman, then they are half starved, but so are we. Our army has just marched a hundred and fifty arduous miles through a foodless desert and our supply wagons are only now catching up.

  I need two or three days before I can be confident that my army shall have its belly half full. Lord George has ensured that the Hornets have their own supplies, independent of the quartermaster general. You are therefore the only unit at this time that I can consider fully operational.

  I should like Captain Gonçalves to continue with his reconnaissance, as aggressively as is necessary, and I want you to take both of your squadrons and explore in the rear of the enemy. I need to be told immediately if he receives any supplies or reinforcements. I shall seek to confront him in four or five days from now.”

  CHAPTER 4

  While the River Guadiana was not actually in flood as it washed the walls of Badajoz, it was certainly swollen and not to be crossed in the face of any sort of opposition.

  Vere thought hard about his options. He didn’t really want to have a great deal to do with the activities of Marshal Beresford after his lack of decision had allowed the French to withdraw relatively unhindered back to Badajoz from Campo Maior.

  He was still required to supply him with as much intelligence as he could, so he took his two squadrons downstream, looking for a suitable crossing point. He had to travel thirty miles before he was able to find any way across. If Marshal Beresford was intending to lay siege to Badajoz, he would have to wait for the river to subside or build himself a bridge.

  Until such time, Vere was alone on the eastern bank of a swollen river, in the middle of a French army that had just routed a larger Spanish army and captured four walled towns with negligible loss to itself.

  That lightening campaign had ended three weeks ago with the abject surrender of Badajoz and Vere needed to know what had been happening since. He also needed to discover it urgently, because if Soult and his entire army were still here, Beresford would be facing equal numbers. He would never be capable of crossing the river against such opposition.

  A cynic might argue that it was more likely that Soult would cross the river and attack Beresford, but Vere knew that Soult’s ‘kingdom’ had been under threat recently by an attack near Cadiz. He was having to fight fires in every direction; raids from Cadiz and Gibraltar, sudden forays by small Spanish armies from Cartagena and the Sierra Moreno.

  Far more likely was that he had left a sizeable garrison in the captured towns and had taken the rest to safeguard his ‘realm’.

  He sent A Squadron under Captain Weiss to make a thorough reconnaissance of the area east of Olivenza and took Captain Fischer and B Squadron around to the west. They settled on a rendezvous for the next day and both squadrons set off to look for foragers.

  Foragers would give them information and, if they were lucky, would be under the command of a lieutenant who was likely to know more about manning levels than a sergeant could pick up through the standard rumour network that operated in all armies everywhere.

  Foraging around Olivenza was not a priority for the French at the present. There was a great deal of activity in the town, much of it to do with strengthening the walls and improving the defences generally.

  As a stronghold it had been in existence for hundreds of years and was probably still capable of withstanding a siege for a couple of weeks, provided that the besiegers used nothing more modern than bows and arrows.

  Vere and Fischer studied it from a distance, more from academic curiosity than any other motive. However much the French strengthened it, it was hardly an obstacle that would hold up a modern army for more than a day. They moved on towards Badajoz, idly speculating on the various ways that the Hornets might attempt an assault.

  The night was spent camped above a village within sight of the town. None of the villagers had returned as yet and the French would have been certain to have foraged most thoroughly in this area.

  Their bivouac offered a good view of the village and much of the surrounding country and their reward was a small, mule-drawn wagon and a platoon of voltigeurs, early in the morning, moving south in the direction of Olivenza.

  In the circumstances, the French were quite sensible and did what they could. The young lieutenant had time to get his platoon with their backs to the wagon and muskets facing outwards, tipped with gleaming bayonets.

  He must have felt terribly isolated, standing with his men and watching four times his own strength of strange cavalrymen sitting before and behind him, chatting to each other as if he was too unimportant to be of interest.

  Fischer spoke good french from his time in the Hanoverian Legion and walked his horse forward, waving a white kerchief and touching his helmet in salute.

  “Bonjour, Lieutenant. I am sure you must agree with me that laying down your arms is to be preferred to an unnecessary and untimely death?”

  “Bonjour, Captain. I am French and yes, we are a logical people, but I should point out that we are voltigeurs and know how to kill with our muskets. If your men charge us, I know we are dead for sure, but so are twenty or thirty of your strange dragoons. Would it not be simpler if we both considered that this encounter never took place?”

  “That is a most interesting proposal, Monsieur, but it assumes that we should want to charge against you. Why should you imagine that we should go to so much trouble when it is so much simpler to shoot all of you from where my men are sitting now, well out of range of your weapons?

  You must be aware that we are les Frelons and if you have come here from Seville, you must be aware how much damage our English comrades have done to your garrisons there.”

  There was no doubt from his expression that the lieutenant had heard of the Hornets. His voice became uncertain. “Shall you please throw your riding cloak back, Monsieur le Capitaine?”

  Fischer smiled and removed it completely, showing his dull uniform. The lieutenant regarded it with distaste. “That is indeed how the Frelons are said to dress, Monsieur. It is also said that your weapons are very superior, but the one you carry looks like one of our own carbines and they are not even as accurate as the muskets we use.”

  Fischer was losing patience, but was prepared for this. “I don’t know why I stay here talking, Monsieur, when to take you all prisoner would be an embarrassment to us at this time. However, I do understand that it is necessary to convince your men that what I have said is true. They would probabl
y not obey you if they thought you were being cowardly. Perhaps you could persuade one of them to lend me his shako? It shall be better if it has seen a great deal of service.”

  In spite of their dire situation, the men were obviously enjoying the verbal exchange. A battered shako was handed out to Fischer, who dismounted to receive it. It was his turn to look at it distastefully and he looked for the donor. “Have you been using this for your merde, Voltigeur?”

  His comrades were still ribbing him when Fischer stepped well away from them and held it out at the end of his outstretched arm.

  Everyone watched as Vere dismounted and loaded his Ferguson. From a kneeling position and as casually as he was able, he aimed and fired.

  The shako was whipped out of Fischer’s hand. He walked over, picked it up and returned it to the owner. “I regret, Voltigeur, that this is no longer any use as a pisspot.” The ball had ripped the regimental plate away and carried it through the back of the shako, leaving a large ragged hole back and front.

  The Platoon was still indulging itself at the expense of the unfortunate Jules, who was now wearing the shako defiantly with the top half of his head visible through a hole that might have been made by a small cannon ball.

  On command, they all stepped forward and threw their muskets, belts and bayonets onto a pile and Fischer waved the Hornets across.

  The voltigeurs hardly considered themselves prisoners, greeting their captors almost as old comrades, which in a sense they were, most of them having served in the Hanoverian Legion.

  Vere called a break. French and Germans together pillaged the mule-drawn wagon of supplies intended for Olivenza and fires were quickly on the go. Everyone tucked into an impromptu meal.

  Lieutenant Duchamps ate with the officers and was intensely curious about the Hornets and the new type of warfare that they had introduced. Vere and Fischer told him most of what they wanted him to know and at the same time milked him of all the details that they needed to know, to bring themselves up to date.

  The young man was not giving away any secrets, just telling them what was common knowledge, without considering that it might not have been common to his opponents.

  Soult, apparently, had taken half his army and gone back to Seville to help Marshal Victor, recently beaten in a battle near to Cadiz. This had encouraged the Spanish General Ballasteros to threaten Seville. It was just another of the fire-fighting duties that were becoming normal for the French throughout Spain, with guerrilleros and remnants of Spanish armies tying down French troops and nullifying the advantages of their massive superiority of numbers.

  Soult had left about eleven thousand men to guard Badajoz and Olivenza and these were under the command of General Latour-Maubourg, who in the last few days had replaced General Mortier and was busy repairing all the damage to the two fortresses before the British army could cross the Guadiana.

  Latour-Maubourg, incidentally, was the general who had already clashed with the British, having withdrawn his detachment from Campo Maior a few days ago.

  There was little else that Lieutenant Duchamps could tell them, not because he was unwilling; after all, he was only discussing matters known to all; but because he had run out of anything worth talking about.

  The first consideration for Vere was to get all this information back to Beresford. Now that it was known that he outnumbered the French, he would doubtless wish to force a confrontation on this side of the Guadiana as quickly as possible, before putting Badajoz under siege.

  He astounded the French platoon by explaining that circumstances dictated that he was unable to detain his guests, but that rather than sending them back in breeches and shoes as was customary for the Hornets, he was releasing them with everything save their weapons and the wagon.

  He hoped that Lieutenant Duchamps, who was allowed to retain his sword, would give his parole not to continue actively in combat until an allied officer could be exchanged. He doubted that his superiors would allow it although he had heard of one or two cases where it had happened before.

  It was an unusual experience to be cheered by an enemy platoon as the Hornets rode away.

  * * *

  Farther north, the enemy forces occupying the eastern bank of the River Côa were in no mood to cheer Captain Gonçalves and his men as they flaunted themselves by riding north along the western bank, observing the French activity on the plateau above the river.

  Just a few miles from its source in the hills close to the Spanish frontier, the winter rains had made crossing hazardous. The enemy was taking water from it, but holding to the eastern bank and generally the Hornets were out of range of all but the most speculative musket shot.

  Not wishing to encourage them to speculate, Gonçalves had his men walking their horses in platoon strength, with a sensible interval between the three platoons and Richter’s troop of Hornissen that was still riding with the Vespãos.

  Dodds, with the other three platoons, was exploring the upper reaches of the Côa a mile or so to the south, where it bent abruptly east for a dozen miles to its source.

  Gonçalves was riding with Richter and the German troop. It was probably the last time that they would ride together, as with the prospect of battle in the air, Richter and his troop would soon rejoin their squadron.

  It was as curious as it was gratifying, that Richter had been working very hard to become practised in portuguese during the few weeks they had been together. It had been noticeable that he had sought out Pom and Dodds at every opportunity in order to improve his command of the tongue: Pom because he was learning german and Dodds because he also was still learning portuguese and they could both use their common english to improve their portuguese vocabulary.

  It had only very recently occurred to Gonçalves that Richter might have his own reasons for striving so hard to master the language. As all those imagined reasons came very close to coinciding with his own ambitions, he was now chatting to him as they rode together. He was trying to make it a casual tale about the difficulties he had been having finding suitable officers for his company, with its influx of recently trained recruits packed into six swollen platoons.

  Richter had been disappointed when the Hornissen had expanded into a battalion of four squadrons and he had been the fifth choice as one of the four squadron commanders. He had spotted another possible opening as soon as his troop had been attached to the Vespãos for training purposes.

  Now he quietly rejoiced as he realised that his blatant attempts to find favour with Gonçalves and the Vespãos had not been in vain. It was obvious that he and Gonçalves both wanted the same thing.

  They had been so absorbed in their conversation that neither had noticed a horseman galloping past on the opposite bank. It really didn’t matter as the leading platoon had its mind on its job. Lieutenant da Silva responded to his scouts’ warning and several blasts on his whistle abruptly terminated his commander’s tête á tête.

  It also emptied the saddles of 3 Platoon, whose members went trotting forward on foot, ready to vanish into cover as soon as they were in sight of the battery of horse artillery that had been put on the alert by the galloping messenger.

  There were three eight-pounders waiting on a flat area just past a curve in the river. If the Vespãos had come into sight as a platoon of horsemen, they could have been obliterated by discharges of canister or grape at less than three hundred yards.

  It was not an easy approach for the skirmishers of 3 Platoon. The river had already started to cut a shallow gorge for itself and the sloping shelf rising from it had a minimum of cover that consisted of a scattering of boulders, a few hardy shrubs and small pockets of dead ground.

  Lieutenant da Silva sent all his muskets back to their horses and led out his rifles in three squads, one for each gun. His sergeant and senior corporal led the other two and each squad took their time inching forward from cover to cover. Uppermost in most of their minds was the hope that if the gunners lost patience and blasted the area with grape, they w
ould personally be behind a rock or in dead ground when it happened.

  It may have seemed like an eternity, but it was only ten minutes before they were all as close as two hundred yards upstream from the guns.

  Da Silva made sure that they were all ready; carefully selected his target, blew a loud blast on his whistle and led the fusillade that wiped out the crews of the three guns before they had a chance to open fire.

  The Hornets were on the west bank of the river, but it was as if a nest of real hornets had been disturbed on the other side.

  Swarms of infantry came rushing down towards the guns; long lines of them on the tracks winding down from the plateau. Da Silva’s squads trotted along the river bank and sought cover directly across from the guns, shooting at anyone that looked as if they were going near them.

  Gonçalves urged the rest of his command past da Silva, dismounting as they came level and letting Richter’s troop drive their horses out of danger.

  The three platoons spread back from the river along the bank and began to shoot into the mass of French soldiers rushing towards them on the other side.

  The guns were no longer a danger, pointing as they were at where the Hornets had been. A few of the muskets were able to keep everyone clear of them and the rest of the men concentrated on killing everyone that had come down from the plateau.

  The rush to get down to the river rapidly changed into a scramble to get away from it. Gonçalves blew the signal for the Vespãos to disengage and the men stood up slowly, walking casually and contemptuously to collect their horses.

  Later, comparing notes with Dodds, he was able to report personally to Lord Wellington that the French army was occupying the high ground behind the Côa, from their left flank tucked into the southern bend of the river, to their right flank, five miles north. The small town of Sabugal rested in the middle of this line, also on the far bank.

  He handed over a copy of his written report that was addressed to Roffhack as his senior officer. Wellington read the account of the action against the guns and smiled wryly at the emphasis Gonçalves had made on the fact that enemy casualties had been a conservative estimate only. The actual figure could well be half as many again.