The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  While his officers ate their lunch in a farmyard, Wellington observed the French through his telescope marching across his new front, in contravention of the most basic rules of warfare. He could see that the French, hurrying forward, were strung out along a vast extended line, widely dispersed, and would not be able to concentrate in time to repel a concentrated British attack at a single point. Famously, he threw the chicken leg he had been eating over his shoulder, exclaiming, ‘By God, that will do!’ ‘Marmont,’ he added, ‘is lost.’

  He ordered Ned Pakenham, his brother-in-law, to attack the French left, the vanguard of their moving line. Pakenham led his men in column against the vulnerable and exposed French line in a frontal charge across the plain where the startled French vanguard was advancing. A British officer described the scene:

  We were going up an ascent on whose crest masses of the enemy were stationed. Their fire seemed capable of sweeping all before it . . . Truth compels me to say . . . that we retired before this overwhelming fire, but . . . General Pakenham approached and very good natured said, ‘Reform,’ and in . . . a moment, ‘Advance . . . There they are, my lads; just let them feel the temper of your bayonets.’ We advanced, everyone making up his mind for mischief. At last . . . the bugles along the line sounded the charge. Forward we rushed . . . and awful was the retribution we exacted for our former repulse.

  Having destroyed this division, Pakenham raced westwards down the line to attack the next part of the dispersed French column. They were already under attack from another column of British infantry and cavalry combined and were caught in the act of forming squares: they were soon overwhelmed. The units immediately behind simply broke and fled with the rest of the routed French. In just an hour the French advance had been smashed and 2,500 prisoners and twelve guns taken.

  ‘By God, Cotton,’ Wellington said to his cavalry commander General Sir Stephen Cotton, who was beside him with Harvey, as his cavalry charged. ‘I never saw anything more beautiful in my life. The day is yours.’ However Wellington’s depleted forces on the left fared less well attacking the French right, its rearguard, and were forced back. Seeking to follow up this advantage, the French commander General Clausel – Marmont having been wounded – launched an attack with two fresh divisions against the British centre. Wellington immediately ordered his skilfully hidden reserves behind the ridge forward to reinforce his centre; these included the Portuguese brigade. Beresford, commanding it, was wounded in the chest. Wellington himself was grazed by a bullet in the thigh.

  The British attacked again, reversing the French charge and the French centre crumbled. As night began to fall the entire French army fled in headlong and disorganized retreat: some 13,000 French soldiers had been killed or taken prisoner, along with fifteen guns. In the darkness the British were unable to pursue, and the following morning the German auxiliary dragoons supporting the British inflicted another huge blow by breaking up a massed infantry square at the village of Garcia Hernandez. But the British decided not to over-extend themselves by pressing forward, and the French rallied at Valladolid and then Burgos.

  It had been a superb triumph, the greatest of Wellington’s career so far, an offensive action of brilliant improvisation and skilled manoeuvre that exceeded even those of Napoleon. Though on a smaller scale, it was comparable to Austerlitz as a perfectly executed victory. The French General Foy remarked of his adversary: ‘Hitherto we have been aware of his prudence, his eye for choosing a position, and his skill in utilising it. At Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manoeuvres. He kept his dispositions concealed for almost the whole day: he waited till we were committed to our movements before he developed his own: he played a safe game: he fought in the oblique order – it was a battle in the style of Frederick the Great.’

  Wellington was now faced with the difficult choice of pursuing and attempting to destroy the retreating Army of the North which could be quickly reinforced by other French armies, or staging a largely symbolic blow by liberating Madrid, which was poorly defended. He chose the latter course, which many believe to have been a mistake, for he could probably have destroyed the fleeing army. A part of his calculation was that after his great victory at Salamanca, the Spanish might at last have united their vast shambolic armies in a great drive to liberate Spain from the French. Occupying Madrid would provide a favourable position for this.

  The triumph of Salamanca reverberated around the Peninsula. On 12 April Soult’s besieging forces outside Cadiz learnt of Wellington’s great victory. He immediately raised the siege and also abandoned Seville, marching to the safety of the more defensible Valencia in the east. A Spanish eyewitness described the scenes of joy in the long-besieged port:

  The day this happened was one of unequalled joy. The people rushed to embark in boats to visit the abandoned French encampment . . . There was a great desire to walk on the earth of the continent, to breath in fresh air . . . I went with the officials of the Ministry [of State] . . . Accompanied by a numerous crowd we went round . . . the batteries which had contained the mortars whose effects we had been experiencing for such a long time. On the way back . . . all the boats carried a bunch of grass at their mastheads as a way of showing that they had completed a return trip that had been denied to the inhabitants . . . for more than thirty consecutive months.

  Meanwhile King Joseph and his chief general, Junot, with only 22,000 troops, mostly ill-equipped and untried, set off in early April from Madrid with 15,000 refugees and 2,000 wagons on the long trek through the heat of the Spanish summer to Valencia. Most of southern, eastern and western Spain – Extremadura, Andalucia and now Castile – had been liberated, well over half the country. It was a heady moment of glory for the unflappable British commander. It seemed only a matter of time before the French were chased from their remaining strongholds across the Pyrenees.

  Wellington arrived in the capital to a rapturous reception on 12 August. A Spanish officer wrote:

  When the bells began to announce the entrance of our troops at about ten o’clock, it was wonderful to see the people rushing to . . . the Portillo de San Vicente, which was the one through which they were said to be coming. A new town council was formed, and this immediately set forth to greet . . . the immortal Wellington . . . To the accompaniment of a crescendo of bells, the people massed in ever greater numbers round the Plaza de la Villa. When a portrait of our Don Fernando [Fernando VIII] was placed in the window of the town hall, they simply went mad. The cheering was incessant; hats and caps were thrown in the air; on all sides people were giving thanks to God; and everyone was filled with the greatest joy and happiness. Another of the incidents that made the day shine out was the behaviour of the women and children of the poorer quarters. Joseph . . . had made a new avenue from the palace to the Casa de Campo [the royal hunting park] . . . This had been lined with fruit trees . . . but the crowd . . . fell upon them . . . and ripped them up . . . When Lord Wellington arrived, many of the people who greeted him were therefore carrying branches and sprigs of greenery which they waved in time with their cheers and happy shouts of greeting. In this manner he was accompanied to the town hall. When he got there the cheering redoubled . . . Amidst thunderous applause, everyone flung their arms around one another, and gave themselves over to congratulating their neighbours in the most unreserved fashion.

  As so often, however, triumph was to be followed by disappointment and a reversal of fortune.

  Chapter 72

  NEMESIS IN MADRID

  In taking Madrid, Wellington had secured a huge propaganda victory. But by advancing into the Spanish heartland he had dangerously lengthened his own lines of communication with Portugal; moreover the French had been boxed up into a region from which they could stage a united counter-offensive, while the expected junction of the Spanish armies and general uprising did not take place.

  As that glorious August of 1812 mellowed into autumn Wellington showed signs of becoming almost deranged with impatience and frustrat
ion with his allies. Always a man who considered himself indispensable, reluctant to delegate to his subordinates and obsessed with detail, his celebrated laconic sang-froid and carefully chosen phrases now gave way to outbursts of blind anger. His portrait painted by Goya at this time gives him a hunted, harassed look, unlike the cool self-confidence he preferred to project.

  To his chief medical officer, James McGrigor, who had the temerity to differ with him on an issue he snapped: ‘I shall be glad to know who is to command the army, you or I?’ However, he asked the good doctor to sit next to him that evening by way of atonement. Meanwhile he railed against the Spanish for their incompetence, and McGrigor kept a record of his outbursts. ‘I do not expect much from the exertions of the Spaniards . . . They cry “viva” and are very fond of us . . . but they are in general the most incapable of all the nations that I have known, the most vain, and at the same time the most ignorant . . . I am afraid that the utmost we can hope for is to teach them how to avoid being beat.’

  On another occasion: ‘Lord Wellington declares that he has not yet met with any Spanish officer who can be made to comprehend the nature of a military operation. If the Spanish officers had knowledge and vanity like the French, or ignorance without vanity as our allies in India, something might be done with them. But they unite the greatest ignorance with the most insolent and intractable vanity. They can therefore be neither persuaded, nor instructed, nor forced to do their duty.’

  Wellington was acutely aware that he was over-exposed to a major French offensive against Madrid once their armies united. He abandoned his usual prudence in an attempt to regain the initiative. He decided to do what he should have done while his enemy was on the run after Salamanca and go in pursuit of the Army of Portugal which had regrouped and launched a minor counter-offensive in the north. It was a disastrous miscalculation. As he approached the French retreated, leaving a garrison of veterans in the formidable castle of Burgos, capital of Castile.

  Wellington, never one to leave a castle behind his lines if he could help it, felt he had no alternative but to besiege it. But he had only three cannon, picturesquely dubbed Thunder, Lightning and Nelson. It was a hopeless task. Burgos was to be no Badajoz. Displaying again that ruthless disregard for his own men’s lives that now characterized his sieges, he stormed the outer redoubt. A British officer present wrote:

  The Forty-Second, as the strongest regiment in the division, was selected for the purpose, supported by the light companies of the Highland brigade and General Pack’s Portuguese brigade. At eight o’clock they advanced . . . but the Portuguese, who thought to raise their spirits by it, began to shout . . . and thereby drew the enemy’s fire upon them. The Forty-Second advanced gallantly and planted their ladders which proved to be too short, and after persisting for some time they were beat back. They returned again, and with Major Cocks and his light . . . companies got in . . . scrambling over without ladders.

  Then they attacked the main defences:

  During the whole of this time [the French] kept up a constant fire from the top of the wall and threw down bags of gunpowder and large stones. At last, having been twenty-five minutes in the ditch and not seeing anything of the other parties, [our men] retired, having lost half their numbers in killed and wounded . . . Thus ended the attack, which was almost madness to attempt.

  The British attempted to mine the walls, with mixed results, although a breach of sorts was made at last. Meanwhile the French staged repeated sorties from the fortress, which took dozens of lives. A further attempt to storm the walls was made on 18 October:

  Our party was to escalade the wall in front. Burgess ran forward with thirty men, [and] Walpole and myself followed with fifty each . . . A most tremendous fire opened upon us from every part which took us in front and rear. They poured down fresh men, and ours kept falling down into the ditch, dragging and knocking down others. We were so close that they fairly put their muskets into our faces, and we pulled one of their men through an embrasure. Burgess was killed and Walpole severely wounded. We had hardly any men left on the top, and at last we gave way. How we got over the palisades I know not . . . the fire was tremendous: shot, shell, grape, musketry, large stones, hand grenades and every missile weapon were used against us.

  In the attack Wellington’s closest military protégé, Major Edward Somers Cocks, was killed. Wellington was rendered speechless by the news and was bent over with grief at his burial. Some 2,000 British soldiers had been lost to 600 Frenchmen.

  Wellington had placed himself in serious danger. In the north the French general Clausel had been reinforced by the French army in the Basque region to some 80,000 in total, compared to Wellington’s 25,000; the rest of his army had remained behind in Madrid. To the south, Joseph and Soult had joined up and were moving on Madrid with 60,000 men. Wellington believed that the autumn rains he was experiencing in Burgos would prevent such an advance: but near Madrid the rains had been light.

  The downpour in the north had rendered the roads there virtually impassable. If he stayed where he was he risked being crushed by his far more numerous opponents, trapped by the rains and mud, his garrison in Madrid overwhelmed and annihilated by the approaching pincers of two colossal French armies.

  He had blundered into a trap. His decision to divide his army as a superior force approached and threatened his lines of communication had been utterly out of character for this meticulous military planner. It can only be explained by his misplaced confidence that the French were virtually beaten in Spain after Salamanca – and the need to go on notching up victories, not to be seen in England to falter. In this, his behaviour was uncharacteristically similar to that of Napoleon.

  He was ready to accept responsibility: ‘I see that a disposition already exists to blame the government for the failure of the siege. The government had nothing to say in the siege. It was entirely my own act.’ One of his officers was less kind: ‘I have not been in the habit much of questioning the conduct of our chief, even when it differed from what I expected, but . . . it appears in this instance to be extremely impolitic, not to say most wantonly reprehensible.’

  After three days’ further futile siege he ordered his angry men to retreat to save his endangered army. Even so, Wellington would have been overwhelmed by the advancing French forces but for the reconquest of the Basque capital of Bilbao by a Spanish force, which compelled the French to pause and detach part of their army to the city. The Spaniards Wellington so often railed against had saved him.

  Wellington ordered his army in Madrid similarly to save itself and abandon the city. They blew up the powder depots and the fortifications of the capital as they withdrew. A British officer recalled: ‘I never recollect on any occasion . . . being more melancholy and depressed than in passing by the Puente de Toledo, and giving up Madrid to the plunder and wanton cruelty of the enemy. I would willingly have lost a limb in battle to have saved it, and I know every man felt the same sentiments.’ Napoleon was to undergo a similar experience in Moscow soon afterwards: the allure of capital cities was often deceptive.

  Hill led the army out of Madrid and they marched at some speed to catch up with Wellington’s army before reaching Salamanca, in mid-November. The retreat was marked by atrocities comparable to those of the French, carried out by sullen and disappointed men. One officer remarked that ‘many peasants lay dead by the roadside, murdered. The old trade was going on, killing and slaughtering while capturing our daily bread.’

  They consoled themselves with the abundant wines of the region. An officer observed: ‘I remember seeing a soldier fully accoutred with his knapsack on in a large tank; he had either fell in or been pushed in by his comrades, there he lay dead. I saw a dragoon fire his pistol into a large vat containing several thousands of gallons, in a few minutes we were up to our knees in wine fighting like tigers for it.’

  Reaching Salamanca again a witness remarked that Wellington reviewed his troops in clothes ‘unaccompanied by any mark of distinction or s
plendour. His long brown cloak concealed his undergarments; his cocked hat, soaked and disfigured under the rain.’ Another commented that ‘he looked extremely ill’. He was also bad-tempered and issued a general censure of his men for their looting and ill-behaviour which caused resentment.

  The largest French army was approaching Salamanca from the south, and Wellington had no option but to resume the retreat knee-deep in mud to the safety of Ciudad Rodrigo. Corpses and dead horses lined the route as disease took its toll. The nightmare of eating beef was captured by one officer:

  Each man received his portion of the quivering flesh, but, before any fires could be relighted, the order for march arrived, and the . . . soldiers were obliged either to throw away the meat or put it with their biscuit into their haversacks . . . In a short time the wet meat completely destroyed the bread, which became perfect paste, and the blood which oozed from the undressed beef . . . gave so bad a taste to the bread that many could not eat it. Those who did were in general attacked with violent pains in their bowels, and the want of salt brought on dysentery.

  By the time they reached Ciudad Rodrigo, after the French had given up the chase, some 6,000 had been lost.

  Wellington was back at last on the Portuguese border, his old fastness. Now at least his men could rest. They were desperately disappointed. Two large British armies had previously penetrated deep into Spain – the army of Sir John Moore and Wellington’s own at Talavera – and twice they had been driven out. This seemed a third re-run. It had been demonstrated yet again that the French could not advance into Portugal without endangering themselves, and that the British could not do so into Spain and hold their ground. It appeared to be stalemate.

  In fact, the British had made significant progress. The French had been driven from Andalucia, Extremadura and Asturias and the British remained in possession of the frontier fortresses at Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. Wellington assuaged his wounded vanity by riding down to liberated Cadiz, where the provisional Spanish government was sitting. There the provisional government had given him titular control of all Spanish forces, as well as British ones. But to his fury he discovered that in practice this amounted to little: the Spanish generals simply ignored his directives, Spanish armies remained as disorganized as before and some commanders were deeply offended by the decree. One, General Ballesteros, came out in open revolt against the British ‘oppressors’.