The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Masséna decided to call the attack off with the loss of more than 4,000 men to some 1,200 on the Anglo-Portuguese side. He had found a trail over to the coastal plain which would bypass the British position, but Wellington had no intention of being outflanked. He ordered a retreat to the first Line of Torres Vedras seventy miles away, to the consternation of Portuguese civilians, who had to abandon their belongings and join in a chaotic refugee column. Trant and his Portuguese forces briefly recaptured Coimbra behind French lines and took 4,500 French wounded and the small garrison there prisoner.

  The characteristic rains of October burst upon the two armies. Masséna, closing in for the kill, ordered a general surge forward. At last the British army reached the awesome fortified lines – earthworks interrupted by forts with the ground cleared in front of them, interspersed by cliffs blown by the British out of solid rock. On the coastal side there was a huge artificial marsh created by diverting streams. The British and the Portuguese armies were safe: most of these troops had no idea of the extent or even existence of these fortifications. ‘The devil cannot surely have built these mountains,’ was Masséna’s dismayed reaction as he came up against them. He staged one botched attack near Sobral, then realized his men would be massacred if he proceeded.

  For five weeks his troops were camped miserably in front of the Lines as their supplies dwindled and Portuguese partisans attacked in the rear. The British soldiers tossed them biscuits out of sympathy. Finally the French erected straw dummies at night and pulled back to some thirty miles further north. There they camped and starved through that wretched winter. The British held off attacking, Wellington remarking with his usual detachment that there was no need to sacrifice his men: Masséna’s men would sooner or later have to retreat in full winter over the mountain passes to Spain.

  Masséna was well entrenched in the hills around Santarém and there he waited for a diversionary attack to be mounted by Soult with his army from Seville. In October, as Soult’s forces approached, Major Harvey was despatched to take command of the Ordeneza, the Portuguese guerrilla Army of the South, to prevent the French crossing the Tagus. These Portuguese brigands traditionally would not obey British orders and he had no supporting British troops. Nevertheless he succeeded in patrolling the west bank of the river. When the French tried to seize sixty boats to carry their forces over the river at Chumusca, they were supported by six cannon, but intense fire from the Portuguese partisans under Harvey’s command drove them back and he succeeded in scuttling the boats.

  On 30 December Soult set out with 20,000 men north-west into Estremadura, taking two weeks to reach Olivenza, where he captured or killed the 4,000 Spanish soldiers defending the garrison. At the end of January 1812 it was the turn of the massive castle of Badajoz, which lay on the road to Portugal: outside its walls a Spanish army was again trounced. Wellington could spare no men himself to relieve it.

  However General Thomas Graham, commanding the British forces in Cadiz, decided to stage a diversionary attack by landing from the sea behind the lines besieging that city. In late February some 10,000 Spaniards and 5,000 British soldiers sailed from Cadiz to Algeciras to attack the French army from the rear. Their commander, however, was the notoriously highly strung General Manuel (Dona Manuela to his soldiers) La Peña.

  On arrival opposite the French besieging army under General Victor, La Peña attempted to bypass this and link up with the forces inside Cadiz. This exposed him to being cut down by the French cavalry on his flank: Graham led a force of just 470 men up the hill against vastly superior French forces: some 200 were killed in the first French volley alone. But this onslaught gave time for reinforcements to be brought up, and the French were routed, losing 2,000 of their 7,000 men. Some 600 British soldiers were lost altogether, along with twenty-five officers, around a third of the total.

  The Spanish army was thus saved; but, exhausted by La Peña’s forced marching, it did nothing. Wellington remarked:

  They march the troops night and day without provisions or rest, abusing everybody who proposes a moment’s delay to afford either to the famished and fatigued soldiers. They reach the enemy in such a state as to be unable to make any exertion or to execute any plan, even if any plan had been formed; and, when the moment of action arrives, they are totally incapable of movement, and they stand by to see their allies destroyed, and afterwards abuse them because they do not continue, unsupported, exertions to which human nature is not equal.

  The two forces were compelled to return to the safety of Cadiz more or less intact, but having accomplished little. However they had dealt a psychological blow. Soult to the north, learning of Graham’s diversionary attack, felt his rear to be threatened. Although he had captured Badajoz, he hastily returned southwards.

  Masséna now was on his own again in Portugal. At long last his starving army began to retreat: it had been reduced by around 30,000 men to just 44,000. Behind them they left a wasteland strewn with the corpses of their own starved men, the Portuguese they had massacred and raped and a countryside stripped of all sustenance.

  Wellington moved into close pursuit across this desolate countryside to prevent Masséna turning north to establish a new base in Portugal. He marched to the valley of the Ceira where he attacked Ney’s forces as they tried to cross the river, killing some 400. After chasing the French a hundred miles across valleys and mountains in torrential rains, Wellington called a halt to resupply. Masséna promptly attempted to turn south and march across the 4,000-foot-high central massif of Portugal to stage a new thrust against Lisbon from the Tagus valley. In the wake of the French myriad horrors occurred. As a British soldier wrote: ‘This retreat brought to my mind the Corunna race. We could not advance a hundred yards without seeing dead soldiers of the enemy . . . The retreat resembled more that of famished wolves than men. Murder and devastation marked their way; every house was a sepulchre, a cabin of horrors!’

  It was as though a plague of locusts had ravished the land. Arthur Bryant vividly described the devastation:

  The road was covered with dead soldiers and abandoned carriages; the houses filled with sick and dying in the last loathsome stages of disease. Many lay on the floor in full uniform, their arms still grasped in their hands as if asleep, or sat in chairs, stiff and upright, with shakos on and pinched features frozen in death. The route their comrades had taken was marked by straggling wretches with pallid, swollen faces which they turned with inexpressible pathos on their pursuers. The Rifles in the British van threw them their biscuits in pity as they passed. But their pity turned to anger as they saw what they had done. For everywhere were burning and ravaged houses, mutilated peasants with slit throats and gouged-out eyes, polluted churches and rifled graves. The whole countryside had been transformed into a waste fit only for wolves and vultures. The few surviving inhabitants looked like skeletons risen from the tomb. Gaunt and ghastly figures fed off the grass in the fields or scoured the woods for acorns and rotten olives. Violated women lay bleeding in charred and unroofed houses, the streets were strewn with putrid carcasses, children with bones sticking through their skin clung to the bodies of dead parents. Searching for a stream on the first night of the British advance, Rifleman Costello stumbled on a fountain into whose waters the brains of three peasants were oozing, while all that had possessed life in the village ‘lay quivering in the last agony of slaughter and awful vengeance’.

  The atrocities had been a deliberate policy to crush the resistance of the local population. Wellington relayed the horrors to London, to force the British government to continue its support of the Peninsular War.

  Masséna’s counterattack fizzled out. First Ney, then Reynier and Junot refused to obey the suicidal orders from the grim old general. On 5 April the exhausted, demoralized and defeated French army recrossed the Spanish border. The chase had lasted 300 miles. The French had been ignominiously ejected from Portugal. It had been the greatest setback for Napoleon’s invincible armies yet.

  Chapter
69

  INTO SPAIN

  Wellington, camped along the Spanish frontier, was himself in a dilemma. He could not risk striking deep into Spain without dangerously over-extending his lines, especially as the French controlled the key fortresses of Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz on both his flanks. He set out to win back control. He rode down furiously to Badajoz to give orders to Beresford for taking the fortress, which the French had enormously reinforced; he was nearly captured on the way. He rode equally swiftly back north on learning that in three weeks Masséna had regrouped to stage an offensive to relieve the British siege of Almeida with an army of nearly 50,000.

  Wellington, with only 21,000 British soldiers and some 10,000 Portuguese, needed to take Almeida to hold his position along the Spanish frontier, and so had no choice but to fight to prevent Masséna’s army relieving the fortress. He deployed his exhausted army in woods and hills five miles from Almeida. The French army marched from the south from Ciudad Rodrigo to channel their forces into a hammer-blow of three forces against Wellington’s weakest point, his right flank at the village of Fuentes de Onoro. The French succeeded in gaining control of most of the streets in the village before Wellington ordered a counter-attack. This drove them out of most of the village in brutal hand-to-hand fighting

  Thus blocked, Masséna went probing to the north-west in search of a way around the British position, while Wellington sought to counter this by sending 1,000 British and nearly 4,000 Portuguese in the same direction, at the cost of weakening his centre. On the morning of 3 May Masséna sent some 17,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry to attack the British right, while simultaneously ordering a fresh attack against the weakened British centre at Fuentes de Onoro again. It was a desperate moment for the heavily outnumbered British. Wellington decided to risk the centre and throw more of his sparse forces in to counter the threat on his right. However there was a danger that a division would be cut off by the reinforced French attack in the centre. The division withdrew in good order under repeated attack from heavily superior French forces. The British soldiers fought in squares in a beautifully executed and difficult movement across three miles of open plain, where they were at their most exposed, to the safety of rocky hillocks.

  The French with 50,000 men launched their main attack against the British centre at Fuentes de Onoro. They drove back the 71st and 79th Highlanders, who fought with desperate bravery down the bloodied streets of the village again against hugely superior odds as far as the church and graveyard. But the British were able to bring forward new reserves to relieve the Highlanders and drive the French out. Both attacks had failed, at a cost of more than 2,000 French casualties to the British total of 1,400. The French withdrew southwards to Salamanca, claiming they had won a victory by driving the British back some three miles. But the siege of Almeida was resumed, and the town fell to the British, although most of the garrison escaped at night. It had been Wellington’s narrowest victory in the whole campaign, and his costliest one yet. Still, he could now concentrate his forces on Badajoz.

  Unknown to him, though, events had changed rapidly. Soult’s army had marched northwards to relieve the besieged garrison against which Beresford, with his antiquated guns opposing the formidable fortifications, had made little impression. On learning that Soult was approaching with an army of 25,000, Beresford decided to move forward to meet him with his 10,000 British and 12,000 Portuguese soldiers. His aim was to rendezvous with three Spanish armies amounting to 15,000 men fighting in Extremadura under the overall command of General Castaños. This would give him numerical superiority; but it would also involve fighting in open flat country where the French had the advantage and the Spanish were traditionally bad at manoeuvre. Moreover Soult had cavalry and artillery superiority – some 8,000 horse compared with 5,000 under Beresford, only a quarter of them British, and some fifty guns compared with fewer than forty. The British were also at a tactical disadvantage: they had their backs to the Guadiana river, with only one crossing available to them.

  On 15 May Beresford’s army took up position at Albuera along a low ridge across which the main road to Badajoz passed. It was expected that the French, coming along the road, would attack frontally. Instead, on the following morning, while minor attacks were staged in the centre, the great bulk of the French marched off the highway through olive groves to attack the lightly defended allied right with the intention of encircling Beresford’s men and forcing them off the ridge to fight on the exposed plain below or lose their line of communications with Portugal. It was a brilliant French manoeuvre, carried out largely in darkness.

  They fell upon the Spanish forces defending the flank, catching them by surprise and throwing them into confusion, although most fought bravely. Beresford, equally surprised, ordered 500 British troops from the centre under General William Stewart to rush to the rescue. They moved with speed but with little order. At the same time, the Second Division also marched crack troops which had fought at Oporto and Talavera from its position in the centre. Portuguese cavalry were also deployed.

  At that moment a hailstorm obscured all visibility for more than a few yards. There was complete confusion and great carnage. The allies were reinforced by another two brigades which threw themselves into the mêlée. The British were outnumbered by some 8,000 to 3,000, exchanging fire across a shallow valley. The fighting caused appalling bloodshed on both sides with neither side yielding. After what seemed an eternity, British reinforcements arrived late to the battle under the command of General Lowry Cole, consisting of 2,000 British and 3,000 well-trained Portuguese under Harvey, now Beresford’s chief of staff and chief liaison between him and Wellington.

  Soult promptly threw in his reserves of some 10,000 men, which he had withheld, believing the battle to be his, but the Portuguese were as resolute as the British and faced down the French cavalry. Major Napier provided the finest description of that celebrated advance:

  Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke, and rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude, startled the enemy’s heavy masses, which were increasing and pressing onwards as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and then vomiting forth a storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through the British ranks. Myers was killed, Cole, the three colonels, Ellis, Blakeney, and Hawkshawe, fell wounded, and the Fusilier battalions, struck by the iron tempest, reeled, and staggered like sinking ships.

  But suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans, extricating themselves from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line.

  Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm, weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front, their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as slowly and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There, the French reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to sustain the fight, but the effort only increased the irremediable confusion, the mighty mass gave way and like a loosened cliff went headlong down the steep. The rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill.

  Soult withdrew at last to Seville, licking his wounds, declaring furiously: ‘They were
completely beaten, the day was mine and they did not know it and would not run.’ Beresford’s mistaken deployment of his troops had very nearly caused a major British defeat: he had been saved by the extraordinary resolution of his riflemen and that brave single-line attack by Cole and Harvey’s men. But it had been an appallingly costly victory – some 7,000 allied casualties of the total 35,000 involved in the fighting and no fewer than 4,400 of the actual 6,500 infantry in the thick of the fighting. The French also lost 7,000, nearly a third of their total force.

  Wellington arrived soon afterwards with reinforcements from the north, and renewed the siege of Badajoz with quixotic fury, but his guns were all but useless and two assaults resulted in half those taking part being killed. In the north Masséna had been replaced by the dashing thirty-six-year-old Marshal Marmont, one of Napoleon’s personal protégés, and he was hurrying to join up with the weakened Soult. At Merida the two armies joined up in the middle of June 1811, forming a force of some 60,000 men. This huge army promptly marched to relieve Badajoz.

  Learning of Marmont’s approach, General Sir Brent Spencer, whom Wellington had left in charge in the north, moved with equal speed to reinforce him, swelling his own army to some 54,000 men. Wellington withdrew to the Portuguese frontier across the Guadiana and then to one of his carefully chosen defensive positions along a twelve-mile line of hills stretching north from Elvas. The French wheeled about in front of this but warily refused to do battle.

  Back in Seville and Andalucia to the south, two Spanish armies had started to challenge Soult’s control of the region. Soult decided to shift the bulk of his army back to protect it, infuriating Marmont: he was left with 50,000 troops, reversing the odds against the British who were now the superior force; yet Wellington had no more intention of descending from his carefully chosen positions to fight the French on the plain than the French had of attacking him uphill. The two armies remained in stalemate opposite each other for a fortnight in the intense heat of the Spanish summer.