Swallowing Portugal Will Settle My Spanish Bellyache

by Geoffrey Watson

  The thought of five hundred highly trained, well-armed and deadly Hornets, pitted against Soult’s ‘invincible’ veterans made him forget the lost opportunities against the besiegers of the captured town.

  Not that Major Jameson and Sergeant O’Malley thought of them as lost opportunities. Jameson treated O’Malley as his Second-in-Command, in spite of the fact that he had two captains and eight lieutenants reporting to him.

  Strangely enough, none of the officers resented this in the least. They had all seen the Hornets in action and also as instructors to their men. Most of them would have given their eye teeth to be able to command a platoon as professional as Sergeant Green and his twenty Hornets.

  Green’s platoon held some of the original band formed by General Welbeloved and every one of them had killed more men in battle than had whole platoons of the marines that the officers commanded.

  Amazingly, none of them seemed to consider this in any way exceptional. In their eyes, it was something that anyone could be trained to do if they were given the proper weapons; like the breech-loading rifles they each used so effectively.

  Moreover, they were all so very respectful of rank, acting as if they would jump to obey any order given to them and calling the officers Sir, even when bawling them out for making a mess of some particular piece of military exotica that they were instructing them in at the time.

  Not that any of the officers present would presume to order them to do anything. They were all so competent that even Major Jameson had the strange feeling that on anything to do with fighting the French, the Hornets were the ones who should be giving the orders.

  That was the other thing that was so unusual. They all seemed to have so much respect for each other that their officers rarely gave orders as Major Jameson understood them. He always heard them come out as requests or suggestions, as if it were up to the man to approve it before carrying it out. In any situation, apparently they expected the men to think and act as they would themselves. If all their officers were killed in some action, Jameson had no doubt that the Hornets would continue to fight with hardly any loss of effectiveness.

  He could easily imagine the Hornets as a unit with no private soldiers. All the men acted with the authority of sergeants at the very least.

  This siege business was regarded by them, almost as a holiday; a relaxing time when they could settle down and impart some of their skills to Jameson’s men. The relaxation came because they were not riding all over Spain and risking their lives every day in actions against the enemy.

  They might have been bored if it wasn’t for their competition with the French gunners. It was a small fort and the Hornets had captured it by scaling the walls at night. The French infantry felt that they could do the same, day or night, using ladders.

  The Hornets let the men they had trained do all the work during the day and the attack was shot to pieces by the marine marksmen they had created. By contrast, they positively revelled in dropping burning carcasses and almost the entire stock of the Condesa’s grenades on the attack that was made at night. They were very effective and they could enjoy cocking and dropping them without risking a premature explosion by lobbing them too enthusiastically.

  Their main interest was in combating the guns though, when the French decided that they must use them to make a breech in the walls before delivering any more attacks. They had no siege train, but they did have half a battery of twelve pounders; three guns that had to be emplaced to concentrate on particular sections of the wall.

  The gunners knew their job, but they were field gunners and had little experience of siege operations, nor were they able to call specialist sappers and miners to construct ideal emplacements. In any case, putting redoubts closer to the fort would entail blasting them out of solid rock within range of the guns in the fort and the proven deadly accurate musket fire of the defenders.

  They started the contest by knocking holes in the walls of a couple of buildings closest to the castle walls and poking the muzzles of their guns through to fire them. It must have seemed a good idea as the walls were three feet thick and the work was done at night, so that the first the fort knew about it was when they opened fire shortly after dawn.

  The old walls of the fort didn’t like it. They had been built long before gunpowder was any real menace to fortifications. On the other hand, the walls of the houses were thick, but made of sun dried mud and even the small bore guns in the fort were able to turn them to dust very quickly.

  In addition, the marines put their newly expert marksmen at every loophole in the castle and they enjoyed improving their marksmanship by aiming at the embrasure of each cannon. With fifty men and a four-pound cannon targeting each embrasure, the French gunners rapidly reconsidered their options.

  The next of these was to use the stone-built houses that were slightly farther away and also, to O’Malley’s delight, men were lowered down the cliff on the other side of the fort, to investigate the ledge on which he and his men had invested so much time.

  He forbade anyone to molest the explorers. That would come later if they decided to use it as a gun platform for the third gun in the half-battery.

  They did! The besieged watched with fascination while the emplacement grew over the next three nights. The wide ledge contracted as large stones were built into a protective wall. As the ledge was halfway down a second, smaller spur, projecting towards the sea, the French could lower the building materials out of sight of the fort and used the hours of darkness to build a one gun castle of their own.

  In the town, meanwhile, two of the solid, stone-built houses were converted and strengthened with sloping piles of stones leading up to the embrasures for each of the guns.

  It was a good idea. The four-pound shot from the fort lost all its energy in the stones and gravel of these slopes and only a direct hit through the narrow embrasure could affect the efficiency of the enemy gun crew.

  The marine marksmen continued to target the embrasure every time the cannon poked their noses out, but after each discharge the gun recoiled and the gap was instantly filled with bags of sand while the gun was reloaded.

  The number of shots fired and the accuracy of the cannon could be reduced by such sniping, but even a haphazard bombardment could be irritating and cause unwanted damage and casualties. O’Malley proposed that the Hornets should do something about it.

  Necessarily, it would have to be done at night and Jameson offered to mount an attack in support. “It’s very good of you to suggest it, Sor, so it is, but it would have the Frogs swarmin’ loike an overturned beehive. They would know what we were about almost as soon as we did. If it is to be done, it is to be done sneakily and your brave fellows can’t be sneaky, wearin’ those beautiful white trousers and cross belts.

  Now, my lads shall not be noticed in the dark and are used to creepin’ about without being seen. We do not want the Frogs to be getting excited until after we’ve been and gone. Thankee most kindly, though for being so helpful.”

  Two squads of ten men left the fort, led by O’Malley and Sergeant Green. All bare skin was smothered in burnt cork, applied with olive oil. They chose to ghost across the open ground at the time when the sentries were first changed for the evening’s vigil, hoping that the changeover would occupy their attention more than fleeting shadows, drifting out of the loom of the castle walls.

  These shadows were all so skilled that even an undisturbed sentry would have noticed nothing amiss, but the movements of guards taking up and leaving positions ensured that nothing unusual was seen. It also ensured that the attackers had all the time they needed between the spells of guard duty.

  Every vedette was dealt with by specialists. All the Hornets were capable, but as with most things, some were better assassins than others. At a couple of the more prominent posts, Hornets donned the shako of a dead sentry and continued standing on watch.

  Half an hour later, both squads had discovered that the two houses were separate from any others and th
at the gunners were relying on the infantry sentries for their security. Standard military practice kept one man in the building awake near each gun, but they were comfortably seated in both cases and the other seven members of the crews were sprawled asleep wherever it appeared most comfortable to them. The officers were each enjoying the comfort of beds left by long since departed owners.

  If necessary, the Hornets could have killed them all quite silently, but it wasn’t required. Gunners were not to be described as face to face warriors and submitted quietly to being awakened and trussed and gagged by the fearsome, black-faced savages that had burst in on them.

  The hole knocked in the wall that had admitted the cannon, now allowed the ammunition caisson to be pulled in alongside it, displacing the bound and gagged gunners. They were carried outside and laid in the open.

  Other than spiking; a temporary inconvenience; there was little that could be done to the inanimate mass of metal that was a twelve pounder cannon. A slow match set burning for twenty minutes in the caisson however, would destroy the caisson, the carriage and wheels of the gun. With no wheels and carriage, it would be weeks, not days before it could be used again.

  The Hornets were back inside the fort when the two caissons exploded, doing all the damage necessary and burying them in the rubble of the houses for good measure.

  The amount of damage done to the castle walls was insufficient to hold out any hope of success for a storming party and the defenders waited to see whether the French would continue with their efforts to get the third gun onto the ledge.

  Morning confirmed that they had been working all night and that there was a very respectable redoubt in place, half way up the cliff and a hundred and fifty yards from the walls. It had a protective wall and a sloping pile of rubble to absorb the shot from the fort. The range was too great for the muskets of the marines and even the Fergusons would only be effective against the occasional head that they would see when the gun was being run up.

  All that day, activity could be seen behind the barricade. The two four-pounders were kept in steady action, if only to let the French know that they had managed to capture the attention of the besieged.

  The glow of lanterns indicated that the work carried on all night and the first ranging shot thumped into the walls as soon as it was light enough to see.

  So much effort really did deserve some sort of reward, but it was difficult to blame the defenders for not holding that opinion. Everyone of the garrison had been aware of the work that O’Malley and his gang had been doing on that ledge. Speculation was rife but he was still keeping them in suspense. He stood watching unconcernedly while his best marksmen tried their hand at discouraging the gunners by shooting at any part of any Frenchman that occasionally showed itself.

  The gunners were not slow to learn. A couple of casualties taught them not to expose anything, even at that range and the gun was getting warmed up and regular in its discharges.

  The time had come. An amused glint was visible in O’Malley’s eyes as he approached Major Jameson and saluted smartly. “Permission to leave the fort for fifteen minutes, if you please, Sor.”

  Jameson smiled and returned the salute by removing his bicorn completely. “Am I permitted to ask why, Sergeant Major?”

  O’Malley’s face did not move a muscle. “But of course you are, Sor, to be sure you are.”

  He offered nothing more and Jameson realised that he was going to have to ask formally if he wanted to know. He took the hint and indulged him. “Permission granted, Mr. O’Malley.”

  They watched him walk nonchalantly across to the spur that supported the cannon. The Hornets had their rifles trained on the emplacement, in case any Frenchman presumed to take a shot at him, but it was doubtful if they even realised he was there.

  He climbed easily up the foot of the cliff, directly below the gun. They could see him reach inside a thin, vertical fissure on the rock face and pull on something. Then he walked back to the fort at the same even pace and reached the battlements, not even out of breath, in time to see three separate explosions send most of the ledge, together with the gun and its crew, tumbling down the cliff almost into the sea.

  “I trust you shall forgive my little conceit, Sor. The very first thing that struck me when we took the fort was how easy it would be to place a gun on that ledge, almost level with the battlements.

  I should have brought it down earlier if the Condesa hadn’t invented the percussion cap petard. I set it off by cord from the bottom of the cliff and only needed ten minutes of slow match at the top to let me get away from beneath it.

  The Frogs may just surprise us, so they may, but it shall be a miracle if they can spare any more guns, or even find any, for a side-show loike this.

  Without guns to bother them, a hundred men can hold this fort, now that we’ve taught ‘em to shoot with those bondooks they carry. I did hear that the Commodore has reduced the garrisons in the other towns to a hundred only. I confide he’ll be wantin’ to do the same here.

  Whatever your Commodore decides, my Commodore only left me here to deal with the ordnance. That done, Oi’m to take my lads and join him and the rest of the battalion. May Oi have your permission to desert you?”

  Jameson thrust his hand out. “Go with my thanks and respect for all you’ve taught us and I include in that all the lessons that the French have learned so painfully.

  Sir Charles has indeed informed me that most of my marines shall be withdrawn sometime soon, but you should also know that out of the best marksmen that you have trained here and also under Captain Cholmondeley, near a hundred have volunteered to try for selection to your brigade. We intend to transfer them to Oporto as soon as they leave here.”

  There was a slight wrinkling of O’Malley’s brow. “Foine it is to hear it, so it is, Sor. Pray do not raise their expectations too high though. Good marksmanship is only part of what the Hornets expect. Be honest with them and tell them that no more than half the volunteers pass the selection to start training. The training usually accounts for half the rest and that in the first three weeks.

  Three out of four shall be better marines, but shall never be Wasps. Those that survive the training shall be welcome, so they shall. Most of the British companies now with the Commodore are below complement, so we have to be careful not to lose men carelessly. Oi’m told that Lord Wellington has the same problem because the Frogs always have thousands more men, so they do.”

  “So they have, Mr. O’Malley, so they have, but they’ve occupied a lot of territory and they can’t have all of their men together in one place. Divide and conquer must be our dictum, Mr. O’Malley. Divide and conquer shall see us through.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The armies of King Joseph, the intrusive king, had swept into Andalucia early in 1810 and casually brushed aside all the Spanish armies that could be assembled against them.

  The only ray of hope left for the Spanish was General Albuquerque’s arrival from the north west. Seeing that all was lost, he was quick-thinking enough to reinforce the garrison at the fortress town of Badajoz and move the rest of his army into the impregnable naval base of Cadiz, leaving the French to occupy most of the rest of the province, together with the vast arsenal at Seville.

  Within weeks of the fall of Seville, most of the sixty thousand or so invading troops had vanished into garrisons all round the province, with more than a third of them, under the command of Marshal Victor, engaged in laying siege to Cadiz and Tarifa, another stronghold that the Spanish had retained.

  Marshal Soult was appointed Military Governor and based himself at Seville. He assumed the status of viceroy and dusted down and renewed his regal ambitions. These were the ambitions that he had nurtured in Northern Spain, when he had driven Sir John Moore into evacuating the British army at La Coruña. The ambitions of which Wellington had deprived him in Galicia and Northern Portugal. His soldiers were nicknaming him King Nicholas once more.

  Andalucia was subjugated, but Spanish for
ces still had to be watched in Cadiz, Tarifa and Badajoz and countered whenever they plucked up courage to attack from the province of Murcia to the east, or from the mountains in the north and south-east.

  It had been suggested that the French preoccupation with the invasion of Andalucia had delayed the start of their intended conquest of Portugal, giving Wellington six invaluable months extra to complete his defences at Torres Vedras. It was a theory, but what was fact was that Masséna was in a scrape in Portugal and that Soult was most certainly under pressure from Napoleon to give him some sort of assistance.

  The great cabin of Titan 74 was once again the scene of a dinner party. Commodore Sir Charles Cockburn was entertaining his particular friend and erstwhile First Lieutenant, Commodore, or Brigadier General Sir Joshua Welbeloved, as Wellington insisted he be called.

  Two other colleagues, also intimate friends, were present. John Guest was the Flag Captain of Cockburn’s flagship and Lieutenant Colonel MacKay was commanding the four British companies of the Naval Brigade; the Hornets; now camping in the mountains near Ronda, to the north of Gibraltar.

  Welbeloved was musing out loud. “Lord Wellington is concerned that Soult shall certainly have been told by his master to do something to help Masséna, which is why I have been asked to assemble all four companies down here to try and distract him.”

  He looked across the table. “As Hamish has discovered during yor recent joint ventures, the French don’t pay much attention to anything less than an army. Then they scrape together only enough men to thrash it before going about their business as if nothing had happened.

  I’m told that there are over twenty thousand men sitting in Cadiz and Tarifa; probably more than the total French investing them. With those numbers, they could make a most satisfactory demonstration that could not fail to catch Soult’s attention. Perhaps though, the Spanish are little interested in what is happening in Portugal? They have never been the friendliest of neighbours.”