Swallowing Portugal Will Settle My Spanish Bellyache

by Geoffrey Watson

  Most obviously they didn’t believe it, as a succession of bugle calls sent the voltigeurs sprinting to spread out across the whole of the front. The two guns galloped forward and unlimbered close to the road, well out of range of any muskets. They obviously intended to spray grapeshot at the powder smoke on the knoll.

  That really had to be discouraged. It would be like a shotgun fired into the middle of a flock of birds. Some of them were sure to be killed. MacKay used his loudest voice. “Number One Platoon! Kill me those gunners! Two Platoon, take the skirmishers!”

  Twenty Fergusons started to search out the gunners. The range was three hundred yards, but Sergeant Major Thuner had twenty of the veteran Hornets under his command. The gunners were moving about around the guns, doing what gunners do, loading and aiming and it is possible that all of them might not have been killed. Every one of them was seriously wounded though and was out of action within thirty seconds. Neither of the guns had been loaded and one of them was not even pointing at the knoll. Thuner’s men then also turned their attention to the skirmishers.

  Lieutenant Sinclair’s platoon had now become accustomed to their new, modified, breech-loading Baker rifles and were looking down from the knoll on the nearest company of voltigeurs, skirmishing on the left of the French line.

  These men were dividing their attention between the knoll and the powder smoke in front of them. They were moving forward in drill book style, one man firing while his partner dashed forward to a new position behind whatever cover they could find; mainly bushes or tufts of grass.

  It was effective in so far as the Hornets on the plain only had a target when the voltigeurs were running forward or struggling to reload. Fifty feet up on the knoll they could be seen quite clearly, whether lying or standing. Even those voltigeurs attacking the knoll head on had no cover from men shooting down on them. Their enthusiasm withered away as they saw their partners being killed before they could get close enough to do any damage at all.

  Away from the knoll, out on the plain, Captain Addenbrooke’s B Company was mostly waiting and keeping its head down. Even the Fergusons and the Bakers waited for the skirmishers to come within the two hundred yards killing zone before they started shooting. They had fought voltigeurs before, although never on such level terms as this. Here, they were both on a relatively flat plain with a scarcity of good cover, but the voltigeurs were attacking and the Hornets were lying flat and largely unseen. In numbers, the odds were two to one in favour of the voltigeurs, but every Hornet knew that they had an overwhelming advantage. Their weapons were superior and more accurate. They hardly had to move when reloading and if they could find no cover at all, their heads, wearing a flat brown bonnet was all that could be seen.

  The unfortunate voltigeurs, on the other hand, wore a very visible dark green uniform and a large black shako that might have been designed as a target. Few of them seemed to have had adequate training as marksmen, possibly because their muskets were so inaccurate, even at fifty yards. The contortions they went through with their ramrods when trying to reload without showing themselves would have given any of the new breed of comedy actors an instant success on the stage in London.

  On this field, the final nail in their coffin was provided by the water-filled ditch. It was a hundred yards; point blank range; from the Hornets. The French could leap across if they were agile and be shot in mid-air as they did so. Alternatively, they could wade across, get thoroughly soaked and get shot as they scrambled out over the far bank.

  The lines of piled corpses, both in and out of the ditch, convinced the voltigeurs that their part in this unpleasant exercise was over. Those that were still alive lay flat and hoped that no one would notice. It was now up to the infantry of the line to do their part.

  Because most of the Hornets on the plain had waited for the voltigeurs to reach the ditch before starting a general engagement, the line companies had been in two minds about who and where they were attacking and whether or not they should plunge on through a seemingly empty landscape, following in the wake of the voltigeurs.

  The only threat they could see was from the men on the knoll and two companies formed into a short column, ten men across at the front. They marched directly for the knoll behind the screen of voltigeurs in the gallant manner that the French had perfected and which had carried them to victory time after time.

  Drilled by Welbeloved, the Hornets had little time for unthinking gallantry. Methodically, they wiped out the screen of skirmishers and then slaughtered each marching file in the column in quick succession until the rear half had only corpses in front of them and fled in terror.

  Out in the plain, two more columns marched on doggedly. They were well drilled but by now were very aware that their screen of voltigeurs no longer existed and that their flank column near the knoll was running away.

  Then they came to the brimming stream with its shocking lines of piled bodies and the hail of fire coming from somewhere in front, that had lots of smoke but no solid sign of an enemy.

  Most of their officers were dead by now. They were always the first targets for the Hornets. They just lost all interest in the contest. They didn’t break. After all they were French Imperial Soldiers. They just turned and hurried away in quite an orderly way, carrying their weapons.

  The Hornets stopped firing. They had no taste for shooting men in the back.

  Captain Percy Tonks and D Company were not as kindly disposed. They had seen off the chasseurs on the other two roads and in accordance with MacKay’s expressed wishes had come across to lend a hand.

  Tonks had never actually led a cavalry charge before. The Hornets had all been trained in cavalry tactics, but it really wasn’t their style. They left such things to those excitable creatures in pretty uniforms.

  However, his men were all in the saddle and had arrived on the scene just as the French infantry was walking away in disgust. Now they found out how exhilarating it was to hurl themselves into a mass of foot soldiers and turn a retreat into a rout, with men throwing away their weapons and begging to be allowed to surrender.

  It was the final humiliation for the French. MacKay would have let the survivors withdraw, having lost half their force. The last minute intervention by Tonks turned a rebuff into a disaster. Less than two hundred men, mostly chasseurs together with a mixture of voltigeurs and line infantry stumbled back to Seville to create both a panic and a siege mentality.

  The Hornets were embarrassed by nearly four hundred prisoners that needed to be marched south to Gibraltar, together with two cannon and over a hundred horses. It was fortunate that twenty-five wagons and fifty men of their wagon train had arrived from Santiago del Valle with supplies and another thirty converted Baker rifles. One of the companies and the wagoners ought to be able to get the prisoners safely into captivity.

  The disappointment was that the Hornets had taken casualties, all occurring during the charge of D Company, when furious voltigeurs had been loth to surrender and had caused one death and three wounds among 2 and 3 Platoons.

  What the navy called the butcher’s bill was something that the Hornets had managed generally to avoid and these casualties affected them disproportionately.

  Welbeloved joined them next day and was disappointed but much more pragmatic. He pointed out that they were fighting a war and that the Naval Brigade would need to lose a hundred and fifty men for the losses to be as serious as those suffered by the founding platoon, three years ago.

  He decided that they had achieved more than they had hoped for. Soult would inevitably be obliged to detach much of his force to come running back to rescue Seville from the swarms of guerrilleros and small army units that had descended from the hills to take advantage of the chaos that the Hornets had caused.

  Wellington was understood to be encouraging Romana and his army to advance in support of the garrison of Badajoz. That town held the key to any French attempt on Southern Portugal. Its garrison, together with Romana’s army from Lisbon ought to
be more than a match for Soult’s weakened force, given the strength of the town’s walls.

  CHAPTER 20

  Major Hagen had been as good as his word, carrying Gonçalves’s report to Colonel Vere in Lisbon and endorsing F Company’s actions against General Gardanne’s convoy in the highest terms.

  Such was Vere’s standing with Lord Wellington that Gonçalves now treasured a hand written note from the Commander-in-Chief himself, commending his initiative and the bravery of his company.

  Promotions in the Naval Brigade were not within Wellington’s gift, but he personally endorsed Pom’s rise to lieutenant and the Admiralty was unlikely to go against his wishes.

  What he had been able to do was instruct Vere officially to designate the whole of F Company as Hornets. They had all performed up to veteran standards and deserved the recognition.

  The men celebrated their new elite status in their own way. That evening was devoted to the most mournful sounding rejoicing that Dodds had ever heard, playing bulbous, twelve-stringed instruments and singing soul-searching Moorish sounding songs that they called fado. Even the peasant dances that they all joined in, though lively, were essentially quite decorous and of course there were no women.

  Most armies campaigned with large trains of camp followers, who might or might not be married to the men they followed. It was the constantly mobile life that made it impossible for the Hornets to have permanent liaisons. Women could only keep up with them if they rode their own horses and turned themselves into female Wasps, as had the rescued Spanish girls who were still known as MacKay’s harem.

  There were only four of them still riding with A Company. The rest, like Juanita, Hamish MacKay’s wife, had married Hornets and were living with the Condesa at Santiago del Valle with the children they had given; or were about to give birth to.

  Having seen off the massive convoy, Gonçalves was hoping to have a more relaxing time leading up to Christmas and the New Year. Such were the reports coming in with the supply trains from Oporto that he would have given good odds on seeing the starving French slinking back to Spain long before then. The fact that they had stayed on the defensive in Santarém for so long, said much for their tenacity and their ingenuity in finding supplies of food that peasants had hidden, in preference to destroying it as the government had ordered.

  It was not to be Masséna’s retreat that spoiled F Company’s Christmas, or even another attempt to get a convoy of supplies through.

  By the middle of December, Gonçalves was getting reports from the ordenança of a build-up of forces at Almeida. Then just before Christmas Day, ten thousand men marched on Celorico and reinforced the garrison with an additional thousand men.

  They hardly paused before heading out on the road to Coimbra. Gonçalves learned later that Napoleon himself had ordered General Drouet with a division of IX Corps, to reopen communications with Masséna and take General Gardanne and his convoy with him.

  F Company abandoned São Martinho and faded into the hills. Welbeloved had always stressed that the Hornets could harass and engage up to ten times their own numbers at the right time and in the right place. One hundred and fifty men together with the irregular ordenança were well outmatched by ten thousand Frenchmen. They could still deliver pinpricks but there were so many French that no pin had yet been made that would even attract their attention.

  Pom took 5 Platoon and went to Coimbra to warn any ordenança and militia about what was coming. General Trant was occupying Coimbra with a battalion or more of militia and would be grateful for the warning. He was busy building defences along the Mondego against any of Masséna’s men trying to get back into Coimbra, but he had no means of stopping a division coming from the north. He would just have to hope that they all went through the town and south to join Masséna, so that he could stop them coming back the same way.

  Coimbra is one of the oldest university towns in Europe. In military terms it is something of an enigma. It is built on a steep hill or hills and with the Mondego flowing around it to the south it is potentially a serious obstacle to any army coming from that direction, especially when the river runs deep in the winter and the bridges are down.

  Coming from the north, it could still have been an obstacle, but not enough of one to tempt Wellington to fight during the retreat in September, when he was expecting to trap Masséna in front of Lisbon, a hundred miles to the south.

  It was certainly not going to stop the approaching French division and Pom’s only desire at the moment was to warn General Trant so that he could decide what he would do. Frankly, the only sensible thing to do was to evacuate the town and return when the French had left or then try to retake it from any garrison they may have left. It was not up to Pom however, a very junior officer, to offer even the most tentative suggestion to a general.

  That was certainly how a major of militia saw it when the Hornets of 5 Platoon approached the guard post he was controlling on the road leading up to the looted university in the north of the town.

  Pom was very familiar with the area, having been a student there only six months before. He reined his platoon in before the barrier and politely asked the guard if he would be good enough to direct him to General Trant’s headquarters.

  The guard looked at the drab uniforms of the mounted men. He would have dismissed them as a gang of semi-legalised bandits, but there was an air of menace that made him uncomfortable. In the circumstances he did what all sentries would do. He called out his sergeant to take the responsibility.

  The sergeant was slightly more presentable, but still looked like a peasant unwillingly playing soldiers. He called out the guard and sent for an officer.

  The officer had been disturbed at his meal and appeared, buttoning up his tunic on a uniform that looked as though he had designed it himself, which quite probably he had. He was wearing the insignia of a major and Pom politely doffed his bonnet.

  “Lieutenant Pom Bal Li at your service, Major. To whom have I the honour of speaking?”

  The major quickly revised his first impression on hearing such a cultured voice and address from a strange, foreign boy, apparently leading this gang of drably dressed peasants.

  Nevertheless, it was only a child talking and the peasants were riding some rather fine horses that they had more than likely stolen. They would make a great addition to the status and comfort of the officers of his battalion.

  “It is of no importance who I am. You will order your men to dismount and you will stand in line before me so that I can inspect you.”

  Pom’s eyes widened in amazement. His gaze flicked briefly over the poorly dressed line of militiamen that had turned out in answer to the sergeant’s summons. They were standing in a ragged line with muskets at rest. There were twelve of them and although he couldn’t be certain, their muskets looked to be still uncharged.

  Although few in his platoon understood any english, they did know the english drill commands used in all their exercises for obvious reasons. He gave simple commands to his sergeant in english. “Form the men in line, Sergeant, facing the front. Load rifles and do not dismount.”

  He walked his horse closer to the major and looked down at him. “I see by your insignia, Senhor, that you hold the rank of major of militia. You are therefore senior to me in rank.” He was speaking loudly and clearly so that he could be heard by the men standing in line.

  “That entitles you to the respect of a salute, which I have just given to you, without acknowledgement. Instead, in return you have given me what sounded like an order and not even Lord Wellington gives orders to the Vespãos. We generally do as he wishes when he makes a request to our general.”

  While he was talking, his men were guiding their horses into a long line. It took no more than fifteen seconds, but by the time they were settled, every man was cradling his loaded Baker, with the lock at half-cock, in the crook of his left arm.

  The magic word ‘Vespãos’ had finally penetrated into the consciousness of the major, alth
ough he still found it difficult to understand how an elite unit like the Hornets could be under the command of a child.

  Then he looked into Pom’s slanting eyes and suddenly had no doubt that his own fine uniform and the shouting of orders at militiamen was not soldiering at all. In the last four months, Pom had grown up. He had faced death and he had killed men. There was a cold lack of sympathy, even of humanity in those dark oriental eyes and the major hurriedly called the sergeant over and ordered him to take these terrifying horsemen to find General Trant as quickly as he could. Then he dismissed the guard and retired as rapidly as his legs would carry him.

  Pom made the sergeant cling onto his saddle harness for support as they trotted down the long avenue from the university to the centre of the town and out onto the river bank to find the general, who was supervising the construction of river defences against attack from the south.

  General Trant was proud of what had been done with his militia command, but had no illusions about their abilities to stand against veteran French soldiers. Pom brought him news he did not want to hear, but he was grateful for the advance warning, that would enable him to organise token resistance before clearing out and hoping that the French would pass through the town quickly.

  Only then could he consider how to deal with any garrison they might leave so that he could start again to build defences on the north bank against Masséna’s inevitable retreat.

  5 Platoon was ferried over the Mondego and the ferry was then abandoned to the French on the principal that the sooner their army crossed to join Masséna, the sooner Trant could fight any garrison and re-establish his defensive line against the trapped army around Santarém. Going south was not that difficult. Escaping north with a weakened, starving army would not be impossible, but would drain its strength and make it easier for Wellington’s well-fed troops to overcome it.