To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

Wellesley was still only thirty-nine, but he had come a long way from the diffident little boy with the violin. He was a slim, wiry man with sharp blue eyes and a pronounced nose. He had a habit of looking down it at people he despised. He radiated not warmth but confidence and command. He abhorred ostentation, dressing more often than not in smart but simple civilian clothes. He had no time for fools, and even with those he trusted he was reluctant to delegate authority. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do: going off to fight the French. Typically, he believed he was the obvious man for the job. If anyone could beat Napoleon and his marshals, he could. He told a friend: ‘I am not afraid of them [the French] as everyone else seems to be.’

  A month earlier Wellesley’s boss, Lord Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for War, had given him command of an army with a challenging new mission. Napoleon, now master of Europe, who had seized Spain and Portugal the previous year, was subjecting the two countries to a cruel and ruthless occupation. He sat his own brother Joseph, a deeply inadequate and unappealing man, on the Spanish throne and imposed a repressive military rule on Portugal. Both nations rose in popular revolt against France. But if the rebels were to do any significant damage to Napoleon, they would need outside support. They soon found an ally in Britain, whose Royal Navy had been using Portuguese ports in its blockade of the French Empire but had now lost access to them. With Portugal in French hands only Swedish ports remained open to British ships. There was a compelling case for Britain to take the war with Napoleon to the Iberian Peninsula. On 30 June 1808 Castlereagh told Wellesley he would be given 14,000 troops ‘to be deployed under your orders in counteracting the designs of the enemy and in affording to the Spanish and Portuguese nations every possible aid to throwing off the yoke of France’. It was a major opportunity for Wellesley. He believed that British troops, well led, could be more than a match for the French. But it was a formidable challenge. Few of the men he commanded had fought with him before. The officers and ordinary soldiers he would mould into his formidable Peninsular Army were no band of brothers – yet. He had only a few trusted friends with him from the beginning.

  One was his old comrade Rowland Hill, a major general, a dependable soldier and a kind and generous leader. The men he commanded affectionately called him ‘Daddy’. George Bell, one of Hill’s junior officers, referred to him as ‘our kind, good and amiable soldier-in-chief … with his honest, benevolent face’. Wellesley, who had got to know Hill in the Netherlands campaign, wrote: ‘I rejoice extremely at the prospect before me of serving again with you.’ Another early member of what would become a close-knit team was Lord James Henry Fitzroy Somerset, a bright but still largely untried youth of nineteen. He had been strongly recommended to Wellesley as ‘an active and intelligent fellow’ by his friend the Duke of Richmond. Fitzroy Somerset would be Wellesley’s chief aide de camp from that day on the deck of the Donegal to Waterloo seven years later.

  But Wellesley’s hopes were to suffer one early setback. The government in London began to contemplate the implications of landing a force on the continent to capture Lisbon, and decided that to dislodge Napoleon’s General Junot and his army a larger force would be needed. And that called for a more senior commander than Wellesley, who was still a very junior lieutenant general. Wellesley sailed south, unaware that a hot debate raged in London between his supporters, Castlereagh and the Foreign Secretary George Canning, and the Duke of York, the Army Commander in Chief (and second son of King George III), who favoured other generals such as Sir John Moore. Moore was senior to Wellesley and had also enjoyed a distinguished military career. He was respected for his sponsorship and training of the rifle regiments which were fast being recognised as the elite units in the British army.

  Two days after he set foot on the beach at Mondego Bay, Arthur Wellesley was seen by one of his staff heading south on horseback looking very crestfallen. It was not surprising. He had just received another despatch from Castlereagh, which had him struggling to swallow his resentment. It informed him that far from commanding the army to be landed in the Peninsula, he would be number three in the pecking order. ‘His Majesty has been pleased to entrust the command of his troops serving on the coast of Spain and Portugal to Lt Gen Sir Hew Dalrymple with Lt Gen Sir Harry Burrard second in command.’ Castlereagh, no doubt guessing that Wellesley would be deeply upset, went on to urge his protégé to make the most of his command ‘with every expedition that circumstances will permit’ without awaiting the arrival of the more senior generals. Wellesley was dismayed by the prospect of no longer being in charge. His view, as he explained to his subordinates, was ‘I didn’t know what the words “second in command” meant … I alone commanded the army.’ And yet here he was being instructed to take orders from at least two generals, Dalrymple and Burrard, with singularly undistinguished military careers. He wrote a private letter to his friend the Duke of Richmond expressing his strong sense of injured pride. ‘I hope I shall have beaten Junot before they arrive, and then they can do as they please with me.’

  The landing at Mondego Bay was just about complete by the end of the first week of August. George Landmann had made it ashore, but he had been soaked to the skin when a wave broke over his boat. ‘Fortunately we did not capsize, and … a vast concourse of the people who had been watching our movements with great anxiety rushed into the sea and seizing our boat by the gunwales on each side dragged it … high and dry.’ Norbert Landsheit, a German cavalryman in British service, was a sergeant in the small cavalry detachment of 200 light dragoons Wellesley had brought with him. He had a nervous time landing his horses: ‘One punt capsized upon the surf, but no lives were lost, because the horses, sometimes swimming, sometimes wading, carried their riders ashore.’ And there weren’t just men with their guns and horses scrambling ashore: there were women and children too. It was a tradition of the British army that a handful of wives were permitted to travel with each regiment. They helped with the washing, sewing and cooking, and in return they were allowed to sleep with their husbands. Wellesley decreed that women would get half a man’s ration each day ‘and the children a quarter: but no spirits or wine will be issued to women or children’. The wives who came counted themselves lucky: each one who travelled had to endure fierce competition at the port of departure. Those left behind knew there was a good chance they would never see their husbands again.

  Wellesley had chosen his landing spot well. He had a remarkable knack for judging the topography and the timing of any move forward – skills he was to perfect in the years that led to Waterloo. He had chosen Mondego Bay when he learned it was free of French troops. He also knew it was overlooked by a fort which some Portuguese rebels had secured and handed over to a small force of British marines. Once ashore, his men began to march. Even the rawest recruits in the army had marched before. But that was back home. Very few had marched in temperatures over 30 degrees centigrade. One of the youngest and newest was a young Scot, Thomas Todd. He had joined the army only after trying and failing to make a name for himself as an actor – he had been hissed off the stage at his first performance in Edinburgh. He and his comrades in the Highland Light Infantry, the 71st Regiment of Foot, marched for twelve miles ‘up to the knees in sand which caused us to suffer much from thirst. We lost four men of our regiment who died from thirst. We buried them where they fell.’ Todd later discovered a remedy for thirst. ‘I put a small pebble into my mouth and sucked it.’ It was no mean feat to tramp down that coast in the searing heat. Jonathan Leach said the sand was ‘hot enough almost to have dressed a beefsteak’. Each man had a big load to carry, a rucksack and seventy rounds of shot as well as the heavy firearm itself. Many were soon floundering. And it didn’t take long for the bright uniforms, red for the infantry, dark green for the riflemen and mainly blue for the small force of cavalry, to be caked in dust. The proud regiments rapidly became almost indistinguishable. George Landmann found himself riding beside one senior officer whose red coat looked no different in all the dust from his
own bright-blue one.

  The sandy terrain was part of the penalty Wellesley had to pay for keeping his men close to the shore: he had decided, wisely, to stay within reach of his fleet so that further reinforcements could join him easily. He had been reinforced by a brigade under General Spencer on 6 August, and was now marching on Lisbon. He had some 14,000 men – enough, he reckoned, to defeat Junot in battle whether the French commander chose to wait for the British near Lisbon or race north to meet them. The sooner the battle took place the better. Wellesley was determined to strike before he was superseded.

  Wellesley may have been confident of his own leadership and even of the ability of his largely untried army, but he was fast becoming disillusioned by his new Spanish and Portuguese allies. The Spanish had promised to send a force to support him. There was no sign of it. He was promised 5,000 Portuguese troops but he told London the Portuguese were ‘afraid of the French’ and were unable to feed their own troops – let alone keep their promise to feed the British army and its horses. And as if this wasn’t enough Wellesley railed at his own British supply line, run by the so-called Commissary General. Wellesley had become obsessive about supply in India: his painstaking orchestration of his army’s logistics there had been an essential element of his success. ‘If I had rice and bullocks [for transport],’ he told a friend, ‘I had men, and if I had men I knew I could beat the enemy.’ He now made typically detailed demands of those who ran his supply line, the commissariat: ‘a quantity equal to three days’ consumption for 10,000 men must be carried if possible on the backs of mules … viz two bags or 224lbs on each mule; this will require 130 mules.’ But a few days later he was complaining to London that ‘I have had the greatest difficulty in organising my commissariat for the march, and that department is very incompetent. The existence of the army depends upon it, and yet the people who manage it are incapable of managing anything out of a counting house.’

  As they marched south, the British soldiers had their first taste of how the French treated the Portuguese. Junot’s invasion of Portugal had been barbaric. French troops had barnstormed their way through the countryside with no regard for the inhabitants. The scale of the destruction was shocking. Houses were stripped, furniture burned, food looted. In one abandoned village, plundered by the French, there ‘were a great many wine stores that had been broken open … In a large wine cask we found a French soldier, drowned …’ The looting, slaughter and burning provoked bitter resentment. Hatred of the French in Portugal and Spain became so intense that few Frenchmen were safe if they were caught alone away from their units. Wellesley was determined his army should not fall into the same trap. In his view Junot’s treatment of the population was not just brutal and dishonourable: it was foolish. Wellesley knew that his army’s success would depend on local goodwill. In contrast to the French, he imposed a ruthless regime of punishment for those who failed to respect local property. A good lashing was the usual punishment, but the worst offenders were hanged. This didn’t endear him to his soldiers, whose first impression of their new leader was that he was devoid of warmth and humanity.

  The men marched on, struggling with the heat and discomfort. Only the small force of cavalry – the 20th Light Dragoons – were all on horseback, though some infantry officers had their own mounts, anything from spirited stallions to stubborn mules. Buying a horse, if you could afford one, was seen as the only sure way to survive a gruelling campaign. The trouble was you could end up with a dud. George Landmann thought he had a good deal when he bought a pony off a brother officer, but it turned out to be hopelessly lethargic: much of the time he had to walk in front of it, dragging it along by the bridle. The horses could be a menace if the men were sleeping among them at night in the open: occasionally they would break their tethers and go charging around out of control. If you wanted to avoid being trampled, the best place to sleep was under a wagon.

  Even so, several times horses came so near the wagon Landmann was sleeping under that he had to jump up ‘throwing my arms about and shaking my blanket in their faces’. And at night there was the cold to contend with. Landmann soon realised his mistake in leaving his greatcoat on the ship. He couldn’t sleep. He wrote in his journal that the ground was so wet with dew that ‘I remained shivering until the bugle sounded the hour for morning parade about three o’clock.’

  Wellesley was now hastening south, and his fast-developing intelligence network of scouts and local Portuguese spies told him that Junot’s army was split. When the French general heard of the landing, he urgently recalled a brigade – around 3,000 men – under General Loison which he had sent off to eastern Portugal. He directed it north to join another force under General Delaborde about thirty miles north of Lisbon. The two of them were ordered to try and block Wellesley’s advance on the Portuguese capital. With Loison still hours away, Delaborde had just 4,000 troops facing Wellesley’s approaching army of some 14,000. He was heavily outnumbered. But Delaborde had a good eye for the ground and he selected a position in and behind the village of Roliça. It was to be the scene of the first battle between Britain and France in the Peninsular War.

  Wellesley and his generals could see Roliça three miles away at the far end of a valley. The village was on the valley floor, and behind it the land rose very sharply with deep ravines offering tortuous access to a plateau at the top. Delaborde’s plan – a brave one – was to make a show of defending the village, then to withdraw to the powerful hilltop position behind it and some 500 feet above it. Wellesley knew that, although he had the advantage of numbers, the terrain was against him, and he did not know yet how well his men would fight. Nor, to be fair, did his men know just how good Wellesley would be at conducting the battle. ‘Many of us,’ wrote Landmann later, ‘totally ignorant of our commander’s military skill, advanced towards the enemy anxiously looking for a sign’ of his competence. They did not have long to wait.

  Wellesley divided his attacking force into three. He sent one group in a great wide sweep along the ridge to the left to swoop down on the village from the east and despatched another group including some light cavalry to outflank the French on the right. He himself led the main force of infantry right up the centre of the valley. The key formation in his main force was the battalion. He had fifteen of them as well as some Portuguese troops. Each battalion had, on paper, around a thousand men, in practice much less. George Landmann watched one battalion coming up to take its place in the move forward – the lst Battalion of the 29th Regiment (1/29th for short) – with its band playing a country dance. In the British army the regiment, which could consist of one or more battalions, was the essential focus of loyalty. Each regiment was fiercely proud of its own county or regional base. The 1/29th was from Worcestershire, and its commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel George Lake was at its head on a fine charger seventeen hands high, light brown, with a very long tail. Lake was dressed in an ‘entirely new suit, his hair was powdered … his cocked hat placed on his head square to the front’. ‘Colonel,’ said Landmann, ‘you are dressed as if you were going to be received by the king.’ ‘Egad, sir,’ replied Lake, ‘if I am killed today I mean to die like a gentleman.’

  The Battle of Roliça

  Each of the battalions had small groups of skirmishers who fought ahead of them and on their flanks. Their task was to probe and harry the enemy, taking pot-shots at individual Frenchmen with their Baker rifles. Designed by Ezekiel Baker a decade earlier, the new weapon’s rifled barrel gave it longer range but made it a little slower to load than the smoothbore musket. As the army advanced on Roliça, the riflemen, like Jonathan Leach in the dark-green uniform of the 95th Regiment, were out ahead needling the French front line. The superior range of their rifles allowed them to blunt the impetus of an enemy advance by picking off men in exposed positions on the other side. They targeted French skirmishers like themselves, and attempted to disrupt the neat pattern of advancing infantry columns.

  Each rifleman darted from one bit of cover to a
nother loading his weapon just like a musket, which was what most other soldiers carried. It took him thirty seconds to grab a cartridge from his pouch, bite away the musket ball attached to the end of it and hold it in his mouth, pouring some of the powder from the ripped-open cartridge on to the pan. Then he poured the rest of the powder down the barrel, shoved the one-ounce lead ball on top of it and rammed it in with the now empty cartridge paper. When he pulled the trigger, a flint would snap forward, causing a spark as it hit the metal frizzen and igniting the powder in the tray. The flash travelled through a small hole into the breech and exploded the powder, sending the shot spinning along the rifled barrel. The ball would be propelled more than three times as far as its counterpart in the smooth-bore barrel of the ordinary infantryman’s musket. Compared to the rifle’s range of some 300 yards, a ball fired from a musket would be virtually spent after as little as eighty yards. But a musket ball striking at short range did dreadful damage to human tissue. It expanded as it entered the body and caused catastrophic wounds. Muskets were faster to load: there was no rifling to impede the ball and cartridge as they were stuffed down the barrel. A dab hand with a musket could get a shot off in twenty seconds, ten seconds faster than a rifle. But, the musket’s effective range being so short, even the deftest of soldiers would be lucky to get off more than one lethal shot at an enemy charging straight at him.

  Benjamin Harris was a Dorset shepherd who had joined the riflemen because he ‘fell so in love with their smart, dashing and devil-may-care appearance’. He was now in combat with the 95th Rifles for the first time. He was sent off with Jonathan Leach’s company to tackle the French skirmishers. ‘All was action with us Rifles … and the barrel of my piece was so hot from continual firing that I could hardly bear to touch it.’ For many soldiers in Wellesley’s army, such as Benjamin Harris and Thomas Todd, this was their first experience of battle and of the ghastly punishment dealt out by musket ball, sword and bayonet. Each of them had to confront that dreaded moment of self-doubt. Would they have the skill and the courage to tackle an enemy soldier intent on killing them? Once they were in the mêlée the doubt quickly vanished. For the first time they were fighting for their lives and that induced in almost everyone a fierce determination to kill in order to survive.