Swallowing Portugal Will Settle My Spanish Bellyache

by Geoffrey Watson

  Swallowing Portugal Will Settle My Spanish Bellyache

  Geoffrey Watson

  Napoleon’s Spanish Ulcer

  Book 4

  Copyright © 2012 Geoffrey Watson

  All Rights Reserved.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  PROLOGUE

  Autumn in Portugal, within the living memory of all who lived there, was the time when the harvests had been gathered in and when the peasants settled down to try and make their food last until the Spring.

  This had all changed in the autumn of 1810. The Regency Council in Lisbon had decreed that in the region from the Spanish frontier, through the mountains to the central plains by Coimbra and south to Lisbon, all the peasants should leave their homes and travel into the safe and fortified area within the newly constructed Lines of Torres Vedras.

  They were instructed to take all their food and animals with them and destroy all they could not carry. Mills and anything of value to the invading French were to be rendered useless. Nothing was to be left that could support Marshal André Masséna and his Army of Portugal.

  As was the practice of French armies, they had brought little food with them, intending to live well on the supplies they were certain to find in the fertile area around Lisbon, once they had beaten the English Leopards and their pitiful Portuguese allies.

  Unfortunately for Masséna, the English Leopards and the pitiful Portuguese were being less than co-operative. They had tempted him to attack them up the bloody slopes of Buçaco ridge.

  It had cost him five thousand casualties because he could not regard his opponents as serious challengers and had tried to smash his way through by brute force.

  Buçaco was a formidable defensive obstacle, but Lord Wellington had slipped away after the battle and marched his army behind an even more formidable barrier. He had spent over a year preparing an impenetrable line of forts and strong points in the hills stretching across the peninsular north of Lisbon, between the River Tagus and the Atlantic Ocean.

  Masséna, meanwhile, had lost another five thousand men. He had left his sick and injured in the hospital in the sacked town of Coimbra. A force of Portuguese militia had found them there and had been less sympathetic to their condition than they might have been. The survivors were marched north into captivity.

  Fortune though, was not entirely unfavourable to Masséna. The peasants in the mountains had dutifully destroyed their mills and surplus food before retiring with their animals in front of the French.

  The inhabitants of the fertile plains were less willing to abandon the fruits of a year’s labour. Most of them hoped that the French would be stopped in the mountains. Many of them were accustomed to hiding much of their produce away from the prying eyes of the government tax officers and thought that they could fool the French in the same way.

  They were wrong! The French were the acknowledged masters of Europe at finding concealed caches in houses and even in flooding patches of land to discover where the water drained away quickly over recently buried stores of grain.

  Any peasant that remained on his land was tortured as a matter of course. The French reasoned that he would not have remained if he expected to starve, therefore he would be made to reveal to them where he had hidden his food.

  Those Portuguese that escaped, joined marauding bands of desperate guerrilleros and those that had seen their families massacred, took every opportunity of extracting a sadistic revenge on any French deserter or forager that fell into their hands.

  There was no doubt that the French had practically exhausted their food supplies by the time they came out of the mountains. They sacked the old university town of Coimbra and managed to find enough supplies to feed their entire army for three or four days.

  Lord Wellington had hoped that they would be starving within a week of being halted at Torres Vedras. It was not to be. Several ‘wrecked’ mills were working again by then and large stores of hidden grain had been discovered. A daily, if barely adequate ration of bread was being baked from the flour that was milled and large foraging parties were spreading farther and farther afield in search of anything that could be discovered or extorted in the scattered towns and villages of the region.

  It was said that the French Army of Portugal was a hundred thousand strong when it left Salamanca. It had left substantial garrisons in Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida and had lost men to harassment nearly every step of the way through the mountains. Its numbers were reduced still further by the disasters at Buçaco and Coimbra.

  There were now rather more than sixty thousand hungry Frenchmen waiting outside the defences of Lisbon, praying that Lord Wellington would emerge to give battle.

  Wellington was waiting for the Portuguese winter and lack of food to reduce the numbers of the enemy by sickness and desertion. He had twenty-five thousand British veterans and the same number of Portuguese, who had been blooded for the first time at Buçaco.

  There were also several thousand Spanish soldiers of unknown quality that he dare not risk in battle against the French veterans; at least until the French veterans were so weak from sickness and hunger that they were shadows of their former selves.

  The French Emperor Napoleon had ordered Marshal André Masséna, the Prince of Essling, to destroy the Anglo-Portuguese army and occupy Portugal. Even after his bloody repulse at Buçaco, Masséna was still confident that he could do so. Then he saw the defences that Wellington had built and began to realise that he was in a scrape.

  However much food he found, it would not be enough to feed sixty thousand men for more than a week or so and his communications with France and Spain had been cut by militia units and Ordenança; the Portuguese official home guard or guerrilla forces.

  He couldn’t attack. His orders forbade him to retreat. He couldn’t get supplies or reinforcements from Spain. He couldn’t even take his army across the Tagus because the Royal Navy had gunboats on the river, ready to destroy any bridge he built or ferryboats his engineers could construct.

  The longer he waited, the worse the predicament became.

  CHAPTER 1

  Autumn in Portugal was when the rains came. Most of the rainfall for the whole country fell in the six autumn and winter months. The Lord of Storms was normally most generous with what would be the lifeblood of the country in the coming year.

  In this particular autumn however, the rains started as the British and Portuguese armies filed into the Lines early in October and took up their defensive positions.

  Thereafter, perhaps it was the posturing of all those brightly coloured soldiers that distracted the weatherman and made him forget to turn off the tap, but the downpour hardly stopped at all for the remainder of the month.

  There hadn’t been rain as heavy and persistent as this for decades and the bivouacs of the opposing armies rapidly became saturated and remained so, with no chance of drying out. Even the fortunate souls who took possession of undamaged buildings, found that
the stone or mud floors and flimsy roofs, that were so cool and delightful in the searing heat of summer, offered little protection against the constant deluge.

  The pleasant, dry plains of summer, turned into vast areas of muddy swamp and bog; a breeding ground for fevers and disease, encouraged by the insanitary conditions that the floods produced, the large numbers of troops crowded into the area and the weakened, ravenous state of the men; half starved before they left Spain, many weeks before.

  Colonel Lord George Vere had come to accept his soggy clothing as a fact of life that wouldn’t change until the rains stopped and that didn’t seem likely this side of the new year.

  At least he and his men were well fed from the convoys of supplies that came south from Oporto on mules and light wagons. The rapid growth from the original small band of Hornets into the Naval Brigade of over seven hundred men had required the supporting wagon train to be formed. The drivers were recruited from men who had been trained as Hornets but had not quite made the grade as fully-fledged members of the Brigade.

  They were, nevertheless, armed with Roberto the smith’s modified, breech-loading carbines and were quite capable of seeing off more than their own number of attackers without difficulty.

  The men that this particular section of the wagon train was keeping supplied were mostly King George’s other subjects in his role as Elector of Hanover. Napoleon had conquered Hanover and demanded that men be supplied for service with his Imperial Army.

  Less than a year ago, most of the men now under Vere’s command had been part of the Légion Hanovrienne, waiting to join Masséna’s Army of Portugal, ready for service under the French Tricolore.

  Welbeloved and his wife the Condesa had managed to persuade a battalion of five hundred men to return to the service of their ruler. Over two hundred of them, after intensive training, were now amalgamated with the original German platoon of the Hornets.

  It had been an opportunity to experiment. Half the Hanoverians had been cavalrymen whereas Welbeloved’s original Hornets had been specially trained infantry attached to the Royal Marines, who had captured French horses for greater mobility during an expedition to Spain.

  Colonel Vere and Major Roffhack were presently commanding a squadron of cavalry, every man of which was more skilled at skirmishing than the French specialist tirailleurs. Their sister company of mounted skirmishers was trained as Hornets, but in the words of that veteran Hornet, Sergeant Major Dai Evans, they were better cavalrymen than most in the British army as well as the most disciplined.

  This acquisition by each discipline of the skills and expertise of the other, gave these Hornets a new and unique menace to the soldiers of the French Emperor. Vere had two hundred and fifty horsemen who could outmatch more than their own numbers of both infantry and cavalry. By agreement and encouragement of Lord Wellington, they operated; as did the rest of the Naval Brigade; away from the restrictions of his army as a type of organized and deadly guerrilla force.

  The only obvious difference between them was that the cavalrymen wore canvas-covered dragoon helmets when mounted and only changed to the Hornet bonnet when skirmishing.

  The additional advantage of this, at the present time, was that the men were all wearing riding cloaks that had been captured from the French. Moving about, as they were, in the middle of an area dominated by the French Army of Portugal, they looked so much like a squadron of French dragoons, that so far no one had challenged their right to be there.

  Not that any right minded French soldier, enduring the miseries of this never-ending deluge, was interested in anything other than finding something to eat and somewhere to rest that was a little less wet than elsewhere. Dry and snug was not an option.

  Both groups of Hornissen, the Hanoverian Hornets, were moving eastwards from their bases on the coast. The rest of their comrades were either recruiting and training Spanish and Portuguese companies for the Naval Brigade or sitting in the mountains between Coimbra and the Spanish frontier, attempting to prevent the French from having any contact at all with their forces in Spain.

  The Hanoverians were intent on causing trouble to the invaders. Nothing specific, although Brigadier General Sir Joshua Welbeloved, their commanding officer had suggested that war upon foragers was a good thing and the presence of several battalions of possibly unwilling Hanoverian conscripts was another reason for them to keep a sharp lookout.

  Vere and Captain Hagen were leading half the Hornets; two platoons of skirmishers and two troops of cavalry; against any target that was of greatest inconvenience to the enemy. Presently, they were investigating a report from their Portuguese friends the Ordenança that a mill had been seen working some twenty miles north of Torres Vedras. It is possible that it had been wrecked by the Portuguese before they withdrew, but the French military engineers were highly skilled in all aspects of their profession and could probably have built a new one from mere scraps of timber.

  What was really unforgivable was the stores of grain they must have discovered to make it worth while repairing the mill at all.

  It was late afternoon when they sighted the moving sails on top of a gentle slope. As hills go in Portugal, this was modest, but rose from the centre of a wide valley in the shape of a matron’s generous breast with the mill occupying the position of the nipple.

  In order to qualify as a bosom, there had to be a companion, which was about half a mile away and somewhat mismatched, being only half the size.

  Around the main hill were the encampments of several regiments that recognized a source of food when they saw one and had cannily placed themselves so as to be at the head of any queue for flour.

  Vere halted the men and had a long conversation with Captain Hagen, whose period of service in the Légion had given him a working knowledge of french. He still retained his dragoon helmet. Thus when he led Lieutenant Weiss and Number One Troop towards the mill, the French would not know that it was not a detachment from the Légion Hanovrienne looking for their share of freshly baked bread, or at least the flour to bake their own.

  Vere and the rest of the men made their way to the slopes of the adjacent, smaller breast. It was sufficiently distant not to have attracted the infantry regiments around the mill, who were quite happy to camp where the only hill they had to walk up and down was the one supplying regular rations of bread and flour.

  They put their bivouac on the side of the hill, far from, but in full view of the troops around the mill. French soldiers would have little curiosity about a squadron of German auxiliaries who were being so open about their activities.

  Additionally and to their advantage, the incessant rains were feeding a small torrent of fresh water on the slope and the meadowed lower stretches had enough late grass growing to keep all the horses content.

  Everyone settled down to try and become less damp and to wait for their captain to come back and report.

  Hagen was enjoying himself. He had been forced to serve Napoleon, but had never been able to make himself like or admire his masters. Yes, they were good soldiers. That had been proved often enough. They just didn’t seem serious soldiers in the way he understood it as a good professional German soldier. Having conquered Hanover, they were also very condescending and that he could not tolerate.

  He was now delighted to find that the captain in charge of the mill and the bakery didn’t like anyone who was not French and was certainly not going to supply flour or bread to foreigners without direct orders from his general and even then, most unwillingly.

  Both men thoroughly enjoyed being politely objectionable to each other and were even happier when they felt no further need to be polite. Hagen was told to go away and get authorization from someone of at least general’s rank and in reply he promised to be back in the morning with enough armed men to provide all the authority that was needed.

  While all this was going on, his men were quietly making themselves familiar with the area around the mill and the bakeries, so that when they finally rode off to jo
in their comrades, most of them could have found their way around equally as well as the men working there.

  Back on the minor mound, Vere listened intently as Hagen described how the mill was easily accessible from three sides, with tracks leading up to it, all occupied by troops from the infantry regiments and their bivouacs.

  He hesitated to claim that these regiments were guarding the approaches. It was more like an arrangement with the millers to deter the more desperate of the foragers, who hadn’t been included on the list entitling them to a daily ration. The mill commander had made it plain to Hagen that the regiments around the hill did not like foreigners any more than he did and would be quick to react to any of them poking their noses where they were not wanted.

  The far side of the hill was steeper than the others, which was why there was no track leading up that was suitable for horses and wagons. The only troops on that side were members of two batteries of artillery; six pounders by the look of them and split into units of four guns each.

  It meant that they had to clamber up the slope to collect their bread, but even this was better than being stationed miles away, allowing the nearer men to get the pick of the supplies.

  The mention of the batteries encamped under the steep slope leading up to the mill, started the same train of thought at the same time in the minds of both men. Vere merely smiled as he recognized the way Hagen’s eyes widened. He said “Send for Grau!”

  Sergeant Major Grau had been the platoon sergeant of the original Hornet platoon formed from volunteers from the King’s German Legion under Lieutenant Günter Roffhack. He appeared out of the dusk and huddled under the canvas shelter they had erected.

  Vere tried his anglo-german, with Hagen standing by ready to correct him. “I remember you spent some time with Thuner and the Gräfin, learning how to blow things to pieces, Sergeant Major. Shall you be able to destroy that mill when we capture it tonight?”

  Grau considered the question gravely and seriously, as he did with nearly all questions put to him. “Ja, Herr Colonel. I know all the weak places in a building, but we do not the proper amount of powder have. For such a big mill, a much greater amount we must use.”