Salamanca, 1812

by Rory Muir

  Quite a few of the soldiers whose accounts of the fighting have been quoted in earlier chapters were wounded, and often they give graphic descriptions of their experiences. There are too many to quote them all here, but three British accounts give a representative sample. First, Captain Harry Ross-Lewin of the 32nd Foot in Hinde's brigade of the Sixth Division, who suffered a serious wound in his left arm, just under the shoulder, in the attack on El Sierro:

  I had nearly reached the French position when a musket ball struck me, and, from the loss of blood, I soon found it requisite to go to the rear for surgical assistance; but, as it was already dusk, I wandered about, ignorant whether I was or was not taking the right direction for a village. I had walked for some time in this state of perplexity, when I suddenly heard the trampling of horses, and, on calling out to know who went there, I found, to my great satisfaction, that the party belonged to my own regiment, and that my batman was one of their number. They conducted me to the village of Arapiles, where we found the men breaking open the houses for the admittance of wounded officers, seven of whom were of my regiment. All the habitations and outhouses, even to the very pigsties, were speedily filled with wounded men, whose cries to have the dead taken away from them were incessant throughout the whole night.13

  This suggests some of the confusion which must have existed behind the fighting line as night was falling and wounded men sought aid and shelter.

  The second account, by Charles Synge, Pack's aide-de-camp, gives an idea of the suffering of an immobilized soldier who remained near the front. He fell just below the summit of the Greater Arapile with a broken thigh, and the French soldiers stripped him:

  I could not perceive that any near me were alive. It was some time too before I could realise the particulars of my own situation. I was a prisoner. I was wounded. I was naked. An open artery was bleeding fast. I was dying. Could this be death? There could be no doubt about it, and in a few moments I should be dead. Having come to that conclusion I lay down to die, and, having said my prayers, waited with composure for the last struggle. After lying some little time expecting faintness and some of the usual symptoms of death, my attention was attracted by some cannon shot. The balls were literally ploughing the ground all about me. They were from our own Artillery, who were in reserve on the other hill of the Arapiles, and who had opened their guns on those with whom my body lay. I thought it probable that one of those balls must hit me, and I am afraid I must acknowledge that I sat up and stretched my head as high as I could in the hope of a friendly ball ending my misery. But it was not to be. God in His mercy willed it otherwise. I began to think that I should be a long time dying, for, though I had lost much blood, I still felt no faintness. Then, for the first time, it came into my head that somehow I might have ‘a chance’, and I have often since thought of that ‘trying to put my head in the way of a friendly ball.’14

  Finally, there is the anonymous private soldier in the 1/38th in Leith's division, who was wounded in the right foot in the attack on Maucune:

  I felt quite in a composed state of mind until after I received my wound. But I lay in the Field 4 or 5 hours after I was wounded before I was taken away, and while I lay my spirits failed me so that I was filled with doubts and fear and began to think I should be separated from my few pious comrades, and I should not have one pious friend to converse with.15

  Fortunately, in hospital he found a religious man from the 5th Foot whom he had met previously in Ireland, and whose presence and conversation proved a comfort.

  The medical services were not highly developed and after a battle were placed under enormous pressure by the sheer number of wounded. Surgeons operated in the most primitive conditions, sometimes in the open air on a table made from a door. They worked until their instruments were blunt and their arms powerless from fatigue; and they had no anaesthetics or antiseptics. The surgeon who operated on Marshal Beresford found him

  lying on his back dressed in a blue frock coat with a white waistcoat. Just below the left breast was a star of blood, bright and defined as a star of knighthood. It was about the size of that chivalrous decoration, and occupied the exact spot where it is usually fixed. There was a small rent in its centre, black and round. The eyes were half closed; the countenance in perfect repose, perhaps a little paler than when I had last seen it. In an instant the marshal's dress was torn open, and my forefinger, that best of probes, was deep in his side. Not a muscle moved, not a sound was uttered. I felt the rib, smooth and resisting below, while the track of the bullet led downward and backwards, round the cavity of his ample chest. I now spoke for the first time, and said, ‘General, your wound is not mortal.’ This observation of mine seemed to have been heard with perfect indifference; for without taking the slightest notice, he looked up and asked, ‘How does the day go?’ ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘the enemy has begun to give way.’ ‘Hah!’ rejoined the marshal, ‘it has been a bloody day.’ I proceeded to cut out the bullet. My knife was already buried deep in the flesh, its point grating against the lead, when the marshal, feeling I had ceased to cut, and calculating, perhaps, that my steadiness as an operator might be influenced by the rank of my patient, again turned round and with as much sang-froid as if he had been merely a spectator, said in an encouraging tone, ‘Cut boldly, doctor; I never fainted in my life’: almost at the same moment I placed the bullet in his hand.16

  Crude as the surgery was, it was surprisingly effective. There are no figures for the recovery rates after Salamanca, but after Waterloo two-thirds of the British and King's German Legion wounded had rejoined their units within ten months, while only 11 per cent had died. Amputations were unexpectedly rare: only 3 per cent, although this would not include those who died before the return was prepared.17 These figures are all the more remarkable as conditions in the improvised hospitals were usually far from ideal. Edward Costello's memoirs give a vivid impression, although as usual his touch is light:

  There we were, French and English, laid up together; and there, I must say, I saw sufficient practice daily in the use of the surgeon's knife to become perfectly familiar with every form attendant upon amputation. While lying in hospital, at all times a wretched place, from the groans of the numerous sufferers, I was here placed under the immediate attendance of Sergeant Michael Connelly, in charge of our ward, who being sufficiently recovered from a slight wound, was appointed sergeant to the hospital. He was one of the most singular characters I ever met … Mike was exceedingly attentive to the sick, and particularly anxious that the British soldier, when dying, should hold out a pattern of firmness to the Frenchmen, who lay intermixed with us in the same wards.

  ‘Hould your tongue, ye blathering devil,’ he would say, in a low tone, ‘and don't be after disgracing your country in the teeth of these ere furriners, by dying hard. Ye'll have the company at your burial, won't you? Ye'll have the drums beating and the guns firing over ye, won't you? Marciful God! what more do you want? ye are not at Elvas, to be thrown into a hole like a dog – ye'll be buried in a shroud and coffin, won't you? For God's sake, die like a man before these ere Frenchers.’18

  When Costello adds that Mike ‘drank like a whale’ and did not scruple to consume the wine rations of his dead and dying patients, we can form some idea of the quality of post-operative care he provided. Nor is there any reason to believe that this was below the usual standard of military hospitals in the Peninsula, so that the recovery of the majority of the patients must be attributed to their youth and strength.

  Costello mentions that French and allied soldiers were mixed together in the wards, and the account of Alphonse d'Hautpoul of the 59th Ligne in Clausel's division confirms this, while adding other details of hospital life, some of which might have been experienced by any wounded soldier, while others were limited to men from the defeated army. D'Hautpoul had been wounded by a musketball in the hip and a bayonet wound in the right arm, and spent the night on the battlefield without receiving any help. The following morning he was stripped n
aked by some Spanish guerrillas and was fortunate that they did not further abuse him, especially as he kicked one of them – who was pulling his boots off – in the stomach. It was dreadfully hot, and the full July sun burnt him. He lay in a field where the wheat had recently been cut, and he pulled up some stubble and loose soil to cover his head and give him some protection against heat-stroke, but nonetheless developed a fever. Nearby a fellow officer raged against his fate until he died in the middle of the afternoon. A little later a Spanish youth, fifteen or sixteen years old, and armed with an ancient musket, cursed him for having no plunder and threatened him, but did not fire – from humanity, or perhaps the musket was unloaded.

  About 7 o'clock that evening some English soldiers found him and piled him onto a waggon with other wounded men and carried him into Salamanca. They left him in a cattle yard where there were already a number of French officers – some wounded, some not – who managed to find a few clothes to cover him. He does not complain of his treatment: ‘It was natural that the English surgeons dealt first with their own wounded in the hospitals and houses of Salamanca. My wounds were not dressed until 10 or 11 in the evening of the 23rd, twenty-nine hours after I had been wounded.’ As this was only a few hours since he had been brought in from the battlefield, it does not seem that he had been much neglected.

  The following day he was carried into a church which had been converted into a hospital and laid on a bed of chopped straw. He does not mention it, but the move must have been agonizing. An English surgeon changed the dressing on his wounds every day, but gangrene soon appeared in the hip. ‘The surgeon with his scalpel cut away a lump of flesh with the musketball and filled the wound with quinine and powdered lemon juice. I suffered horribly, but the treatment saved my life. In the morning he pulled away the putrefying flesh with pincers and cut it with scissors, put in the same ingredients as on the day before and covered it with a wad of linen.’ The wound in his arm was also painful, but remained free of gangrene and healed fairly quickly.

  It was three weeks before he was clear of the fever and gangrene, and he attributes his survival in part to the treatment he received, but principally to his noble blood – which, he says, enabled him to endure his suffering and misery!

  D'Hautpoul remained in the church for two and a half months, without proper clothing and existing on a diet of broth made from salt beef from England. As he began to recover and look to the future his spirits sank:

  I would be a prisoner for a long time for the war between France and England would never end. The Emperor would not agree to a partial exchange of prisoners … There I was, twenty-three years old, without hope of regaining my liberty and my career ruined. This unhappiness was made worse by the low spirits resulting from my wound. I have a good temper, but I was near dying from my despair, sickness and the ruin of my hopes.19

  The unwounded and slightly wounded prisoners posed a problem on the night after the battle. It was too late to make arrangements to march them immediately to the rear, and there were enough of them to pose some danger. In the end most were collected in an angle of the river where the stream was deep and rapid. A few sentries were placed on the bank to prevent any trying to swim to freedom, while a Portuguese battalion supported by a few cavalry mounted guard. At first the prisoners were ‘very silent & sulky’, but gradually they relaxed and were soon ‘as merry & gay as if they had been going to a dance’. No doubt they talked over the events of the day and who was to blame for their defeat with as much animation as the men of the allied army, camped nearby. They had no food except what was in their knapsacks, but nor did most of the allied soldiers, and at least they had plenty of good water.20

  The one concern which the prisoners expressed to their captors was that they not be escorted to the rear by Spanish soldiers, ‘from whom they had everything that was cruel & inhuman to apprehend’.21 Nonetheless, three days after the battle, Colonel Waters, the acting Adjutant-General, issued orders that the prisoners be sent to the rear in relatively small parties, the officers separately, under Spanish escort. All Waters could do was to urge his representative to ‘impress on the minds of the Spanish officers the necessity of treating the prisoners with mildness’, but this was disregarded. A British officer who encountered some of the prisoners at Almeida at the end of July recorded that, ‘The Spaniards have treated them, by all accounts, with a most revolting cruelty during the march from Salamanca, and the joy of the poor fellows was unbounded when they were delivered into the custody of the Portuguese. A French officer told me, and I had it confirmed in various ways, that if any of the prisoners through fatigue lagged behind in the route, they were immediately bayoneted.’22 Moyle Sherer's Recollections includes a later glimpse of the prisoners at Abrantes, towards the end of their long march south, when the charms of their new escort had worn thin:

  They were in a very exhausted state, from the length of their march, the heat of the weather, and the want of shoes and other necessaries; and … they had neither a word or a laugh to disguise their mortification. I never saw Frenchmen more thoroughly cut down; and, what appeared not a little to increase their vexation, they were escorted by four hundred awkward-looking, ill-appointed Portuguese militia-men; whose air of pride and importance, as they regulated the motions of these ‘vainqueurs d'Austerlitz’, was truly entertaining.23

  One may wonder whether or not the prisoners would have been pleased to know that their captivity would be shorter than they expected. Within two years the war was over, Napoleon had abdicated, and they were free to go home.

  The armies marched away from Salamanca in one direction, the prisoners in another, while the wounded in the hospitals slowly recovered or died. The dead remained where they had fallen on the battlefield. The local inhabitants did their best to solve the problem, but the results were not satisfactory. A British officer who visited the scene a few weeks later

  found a long line of vultures on the battle-ground; these ill-omened birds stand quite erect, and might be mistaken by a distant spectator for a regiment drawn up in a single rank. Here was a fine field for them; the bodies of men and horses, which an attempt had been made to burn, lay everywhere in heaps, only half consumed. After the action, wherever the carcase of a horse was found, such human bodies as had fallen near were collected and thrown over it, and these again were covered with branches of trees, which, being quite green, made too weak a fire to reduce them to ashes; consequently the air had become very offensive, and the whole scene was extremely revolting. A vast number of pigs, which had been driven hither by their owners, also roamed about the field, and shared the loathsome feast with the vultures.24

  Chapter Thirteen

  Consequences

  On the morning after the battle the French army continued its hasty and disordered flight east, towards Peñaranda, which it reached that evening. Clausel had left Foy's division at Alba to act as a rearguard, but, although Foy's men had seen little fighting and suffered few casualties, their confidence had been shaken by the defeat. Wellington resumed the pursuit early on the 23rd. Bock's heavy dragoons crossed the Tormes at the fords of Huerta,1 Anson's brigade at Alba, and they were closely followed by the Light and First Divisions, the rest of the army advancing more slowly in their wake.

  The value of such pursuit was demonstrated when the leading allied troops caught up with the French rearguard at Garcia Hernandez, some seven miles beyond Alba. Foy had his whole division, a brigade of Curto's cavalry and some artillery, amounting in all to more than five thousand men, under his command. Wellington at first had little more than a thousand horsemen, for both allied brigades had made many detachments and Bock's brigade was only just beginning to arrive, while the leading British infantry were still some way off. But Foy's task was to cover the retreat, not to fight, so when the allied troops appeared he began sending his regiments to the rear. Wellington appears to have seen only the French cavalry, and ordered Anson to drive it off. There followed one of the most celebrated combats of the Peninsula
r War. The French chasseurs fled before Anson who was joined by Bock at the head of his leading squadron. In their charge the Germans suffered from the fire of the French infantry, formed in square, which they had either not noticed or ignored. Seeing this, Captain von der Decken, commanding the 3rd squadron, wheeled his men and charged the infantry directly. This square was formed by a battalion of the 76th Ligne, and as it was well formed and in good order it should have been invulnerable to unsupported cavalry as long as its men held their nerve. What happened in the next minute or so must have been very confusing and obscured by smoke and dust; nonetheless, it is generally agreed that the infantry fired twice and maintained their composure. Neither fire checked the cavalry's momentum, but the second, disastrously for the infantry, brought a mortally wounded horse crashing down onto the square itself. The resulting chaos naturally led to panic and the square was broken, almost the entire battalion being taken prisoner.

  Inspired by this success, the remaining German squadrons pressed forward and a second French battalion, from 6th Léger, was also overwhelmed, although it is not clear whether this unit was in a properly formed square and the men panicked, or in a more irregular, improvised formation. Several further charges were made, and the dragoons suffered quite heavily. But while they incurred 127 casualties, the French lost about 1,100, including hundreds of unwounded prisoners.2

  After this disaster, Foy succeeded in drawing off his remaining regiments, but the morale of the defeated army had suffered another heavy blow. With fear urging them on the French made good speed. ‘I have seen a Person,’ wrote a senior British officer two days later, ‘who passed through them Yesterday, when they were still running as fast as weakness, fatigue, and hunger would allow them, not merely along the Road, but in Crowds on each side of it, and all in the greatest hurry and disorder, a very large proportion having thrown away their Arms.’3 This picture is confirmed by Clausel, who admitted that he had only 22,000 men left with the colours (although thousands more followed the army) and told the Minister for War in Paris: ‘It is usual to see armies discouraged after a reverse, but it is difficult to find one in which the discouragement is greater than in this; and I must not conceal from you that there reigns and has reigned for some time past a very bad spirit in this army; our steps in this retreat have been marked everywhere by the most revolting disorders and excesses.’ No wonder Tomkinson noted in his diary that the French ‘leave many stragglers dead in the corn by the side of the road, and any person leaving the column is killed by the peasants.’4