by Peter Snow
Tomkinson was one of nearly a hundred British casualties that day; the French lost 250 and withdrew across the river. Wellesley was thankful for something else too: his Portuguese troops had fought well. He was to draw great satisfaction over the next year or two from the speed with which his Portuguese allies developed their forces under British guidance. The new battalions of Portuguese light troops, the Caçadores, in particular would soon be recognised as some of the most impressive fighters in Europe. But acclaim wasn’t universal. The normally generous Ned Costello, who fought beside them in many battles, said the Portuguese were ‘the dirtiest and noisiest brutes I ever came across … during the whole of the Peninsular War, or at least the time they were with us, I never knew them to perform a gallant act’. George Simmons began with a low opinion of Portugal. Its people were ‘dirty in the extreme … their houses … stink worse than an English pigsty’. And ‘their dancing was too indelicate to give pleasure … I blessed my stars I was an Englishman.’ But Simmons was soon impressed by the increasing confidence of the Portuguese soldiers and within two years he described them as ‘fighting like lions’.
With all his troops now back on the north side of the Douro, Marshal Soult had the bridge of boats, the only remaining link between the two banks, blown up. All ferries and other boats of any size were under guard on the north bank. He reckoned he was now so strongly placed in Oporto that he could afford to relax. He thought Wellesley was sure to try to cross the Douro near its mouth, where the banks were low. The French marshal, who lived in a fine villa facing west towards the sea, was confident that he would spot any boats Wellesley brought in from the sea, so he glanced only cursorily at the much more difficult stretches of river upstream: Wellesley would be unlikely to try crossing up there; besides it would take him some days to prepare a crossing and French patrols would be sure to spot him. At nightfall on 11 May, as Soult looked through his window to the west, he could see no sign of British activity. He spent the night working on his despatches and then went to bed, leaving his staff to enjoy a leisurely breakfast.
The Battle of Oporto
Soult had spectacularly underestimated his adversary. Wellesley was up early, telescope in hand, climbing a hill on the south side of the river. The garden of a convent commanded a superb view of the upper reach of the river. His troops had advanced during the night and were now all concealed behind the brow of the hill he was standing on. They were minutes away from the river, but they couldn’t be seen by the French on the other side.
Wellesley scanned the opposite bank and noticed little sign of activity. The further he looked upstream the more deserted it looked. One of his scouts, Colonel Waters, reported that a Portuguese sympathiser, who was a barber in Oporto, had crossed the river in a small skiff to tell the British that there was a way they could cross. He pointed out four barges, which normally carried local wine across the river, tucked under the northern bank and apparently unguarded. The barber also told Waters that a French patrol passed the barges every half-hour. So the colonel invited a small group of local peasants to join him in the skiff, waited for one of those thirty-minute windows and crossed to the other side. Between them they then ferried the barges across without being seen by the French.
Wellesley, whose keen eye had spotted a walled seminary on the other side seemingly unmanned, was delighted when he heard about the boats. ‘Well, let the men cross,’ he said. And, loaded with thirty men each, first one boat and then a second slipped unobserved across the river. At the same time Wellesley moved three batteries of artillery, eighteen guns, to the top of the hill he was standing on so that they could target the expected French attack on the seminary opposite. For a full hour while Wellesley and his staff stood anxiously watching, the troops crossed the river, climbed to the seminary and secured it. Then the French attacked. Thomas Bunbury was a young British officer with a Portuguese unit that occupied the seminary. ‘The advancing French made a great noise when marching – every party having a drummer thumping away with all his might and against these poor devils of drummers our fire was principally directed. We shot several and our opponents did not seem to get on well without them.’ It was Bunbury’s first time under fire. ‘Being a giddy harebrained fellow, I do not suppose that I reflected at all upon the matter. It seemed to me capital fun.’
At 11.30 a.m. after two and a half hours’ sleep Soult was awakened by an ADC bursting into his villa shouting that the British had crossed the river. It had taken sixty minutes for the French to spot them. One story has it that the redcoated soldiers in the boats were taken for Swiss infantrymen in the French army on their way to take a swim. By the time Soult had dressed and leaped on his horse issuing a flurry of orders, a big battle was under way. French guns were pounding the 600 British troops who had managed to cross the Douro and secure the seminary. French units attacking it were immediately targeted with shrapnel shells from Wellesley’s guns across the river. The French counter-attack faltered and Soult decided to reinforce the assault with troops who had been guarding the foreshore and harbour in Oporto itself. No sooner were the quays clear of French troops than crowds of Portuguese raced out of their houses waving and cheering and a fleet of boats set out for the south bank to pick up Wellesley’s main force which had gathered there. It wasn’t long before British troops were pouring across and into the city: the French were now under attack from the front and from behind.
Soult’s position was hopeless. He had no choice but to follow his men as they fled the way they had come only six weeks earlier. British troops swept through the city as women waved white handkerchiefs from the balconies. There were cheers and shouts of ‘Viva Ingleses!’ and local people started stripping the French dead and wounded. Charles Leslie watched the ‘splendid view’ of the French fleeing. ‘They made no fight – every man seemed to be running for his life – and threw away their knapsacks and arms, so that we had only the trouble of making prisoners every instant, all begging for quarter and surrendering with great good humour.’ By teatime Wellesley was in Soult’s villa tucking into the lunch the French marshal had left uneaten. He then wrote an account of his successful day, telling Castlereagh that the French ‘retired in the utmost confusion … leaving behind them five pieces of cannon, eight tumbrils of ammunition and many prisoners’. Wellesley’s masterly surprise attack had cost him only twenty-three soldiers killed. He was disappointed that in the five days in which his men chased Soult’s army to the Spanish frontier they failed to surround and destroy it altogether. But when Soult finally dragged himself into Galicia, he had lost around 4,000 men, scores of them at the hands of Portuguese peasants. The ever observant commissary August Schaumann watched what he called the ‘indescribable cruelties’ inflicted on ‘the French soldiers who fell into their clutches … In addition to nailing them up alive on barn doors, they had also stripped many of them, emasculated them, and then placed their amputated members in their mouths – a ghastly sight!’
Within weeks of arriving in Portugal Wellesley’s young soldiers were experiencing the full horror of war. In their own fighting with the French they had escaped with light casualties. But for many it was their first sight of the hideous wounds inflicted by musket, sabre and roundshot and their first encounter with the crudeness of the army’s medical resources. Tomkinson was one of the luckier ones. He had only a button embedded in his arm. If he had had a musket ball lodged there the army surgeon might well have urged amputation as the surest way of avoiding infection and death. Tomkinson later remarked that British surgeons were more likely to amputate than the French were. The French, he reckoned, ‘run great risks with a man’s life in hopes of saving a limb, from knowing that a soldier without a leg or an arm is incapable of service and probably a burthen on the state’. There were cases of soldiers who rejected advice to have a limb removed and survived. Amputation without anaesthetic caused agony unimaginable today. For some it was bearable only after a large draught of alcohol, usually rum. Sergeant Thomas Jackson drank almost a
pint of rum before having his leg amputated later in the war: ‘In an instant it raised up my spirits to an invincible courage.’ He still found the tightness of the tourniquet and the sawing of the bone almost unbearable. Instruments became progressively blunter during a busy day. Opium was available but was of little use in reducing pain during an operation. In extreme cold pain might be deadened, and fainting in the middle of an operation was often a blessed relief. But usually the best that surgeons could do was to give the patient something to bite on as well as a good drink. It was to be another forty years before chloroform became the first primitive anaesthetic.
Wellesley did what he could to alleviate the pain of the wounded. He would visit them and talk to them in hospital: he recognised the importance of ensuring that the surgeons had the best means of doing their job. He appreciated that medical care was an important service that his men had a right to expect, just as he believed that an army that was poorly fed and watered would not perform at its best. His despatches are full of demands of his own commissary staff and his allies for a constant supply of food for his soldiers and forage for his horses. All supplies from local people should be properly accounted and paid for, he said. He abhorred the fact that so many of his men stooped to plundering farmers and householders for their needs.
His undisguised disgust at the conduct of some of his men became an obsession, prompting him to send home a rather schizophrenic message. On the one hand he praised his soldiers for their courage. Immediately after Oporto, he wrote to Castlereagh in his formal despatch: ‘I cannot say too much in favour of the officers and troops.’ And yet just two weeks later he wrote privately that his men were a ‘rabble … they plunder in all directions’. And a fortnight later: ‘it is impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed by the troops’. He gave an example of this thieving, which he said was terrible and gave him ‘the greatest concern’. He said ‘they have plundered the people of bullocks among other property’. He said he understood that they did this in order ‘to sell them to the people again’. He sent a request to the Portuguese authorities to ‘issue a proclamation forbidding the people … to purchase anything from the soldiers of the British army’.
His revulsion for plunder had already led him to order summary execution for men caught looting. Ever since Wellesley had first set foot in Portugal he had learned an essential lesson. He had seen how savagely the Spanish and Portuguese rebels treated any Frenchman they laid hands on. The British army was in the Peninsula to liberate the people from Napoleon, not to substitute British oppression for French. He was to maintain his rigid regime of outlawing plunder right through into southern France. On one occasion, convinced of the guilt of two soldiers, he told his Provost Marshal to report back to him within ten minutes that they had both been hanged.
There were small, albeit infrequent glimpses of humanity amid the ruthlessness. Three men were led before him who had been caught looting and he ordered them hanged where all the troops could see them. The next morning three bodies were seen hanging from a tree. But the Commander in Chief’s staff, in a moment of kindness, had let the three miscreants go and strung up three corpses from the hospital in their place. Wellesley found out later but, when asked if he was angry, he said he hadn’t really wished them dead and was very glad their lives had been spared.
But Wellesley’s concern went deeper than a principled disapproval of misconduct. The fact was that he had in general a pretty low opinion of his men. He may have been right about many of them, but his habit of tarring them all with the same brush was one of the least appealing features of his character. His most telling remark was one he made to friends long after he had retired from campaigning. He said his army was ‘composed of the scum of the earth – the mere scum of the earth … English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for the drink – that is the plain fact – they have all enlisted for drink.’ He then, to his credit, went on to say, ‘It is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.’ But the sweeping, all-inclusive nature of his contempt is revealing. He seemed not to acknowledge the hugely varied intake of humanity that his army represented. Of course there were crooks and villains. There were many who felt they sometimes had no alternative to stealing food in order to survive. But there were others, as countless eyewitness accounts bear out, who found the savagery of military life and the conduct of some of their comrades deeply offensive. And those of them who encountered it, mainly in the higher ranks in the army, found Wellesley’s ill-concealed contempt for his men offensive too.
Many years later Napoleon in exile remarked that English soldiers, who were as brave as any in the world, would have responded better if they had been driven by what he called ‘the stimulus of honour … instead of the lash’. He would have encouraged rivalry in the ranks and would have promoted people on merit rather than on the basis of their financial or family status. Wellesley, in contrast, particularly in this early stage of the campaign, believed in securing his men’s respect by enforced discipline as much as by inspiring leadership. And as for promoting on merit, he was hamstrung by the British tradition of denying to the commander in the field the right to appoint the best men to the top jobs. That right remained with Whitehall throughout the campaign: Wellington could attempt to influence the selection of his officers; he could not choose them himself.
But he knew how much his men mattered to him, rascals though they might be. He spent hours superintending the detail of their supply arrangements and was incensed when the essential needs of his men were not met. He didn’t often show emotion but he was ready to go to great lengths to ensure that the wounded were well cared for. After one encounter he heard that some wounded men whom he had ordered to be housed in officers’ quarters were actually having to sleep in the open air in rough conditions. He rode thirty miles to see what had happened, and found that his orders had been disobeyed. He had the men moved inside and brought all the officers before a court martial. He also reduced the hospital deductions from the men’s pay. A private soldier would now have a penny less deducted for being sick. Of his twelve-pence daily pay the stoppage would now be nine pence instead of ten.*
Strategically, Wellesley had good reason to be pleased with his progress so far. Within a month of arriving in Lisbon he had once again thrown the French out of Portugal at little cost. He had again defeated the most professional land army in Europe, humiliating another of Napoleon’s top commanders. After Wellesley’s successes in the summer of the year before, Napoleon had told his men, ‘Soldiers, I need you. The presence of the hideous leopard contaminates the country of Spain and Portugal. The leopard will flee in terror at your approach.’ The Emperor had then come to the Peninsula himself and expelled the army of Sir John Moore. But now the leopard was back in the person of Wellesley and, far from fleeing, the British commander was on the attack – swinging his army around to the east. He believed he could now afford to take the fight with Napoleon into Spain. ‘The ball is now at my foot,’ he wrote. ‘And I hope I shall have strength enough to give it a good kick.’
4
The obstinate old Gentleman
Talavera, 1809
WELLESLEY KNEW THAT an advance into Spain would prompt the various French armies Napoleon had posted there to unite against him in a force that would outnumber his. The French could put a total of 50,000 in the field, Wellesley had fewer than 20,000. But he had reinforcements on the way. A fresh regiment of badly needed cavalry, the 23rd Light Dragoons, would soon arrive in Lisbon. Major Fred Ponsonby was one of them. His mother, Harriet, Countess of Bessborough, had been ‘quite giddy’ when Fred first joined up and she worried about the danger he might face on some ‘odious expedition’. But now he was old enough to look after himself.
Wellesley wrote to Ponsonby’s commanding officer with his usual attention to detail: ‘I am particularly anxious that your horses should join the army in a condition for service.’ He instructed him to make sure he had plenty of spare sh
oes and nails for the horses; he should also carefully watch the balance of the horses’ diet so that they got used to eating more ‘barley or Indian corn or straw’, which were likely to be in better supply than oats.
When the 23rd arrived, noted Ponsonby, ‘our great anxiety was to get to the army for an action which we generally expected … In passing over the wild country near Villa Vellia, I was with the Advanced Guard and saw a wolf feeding upon the carcase of a horse in the road. I fired my pistol at him but without effect.’ When he reached the army in bivouac, Ponsonby and his commanding officer ‘dined with [Wellesley] with whom I was scarcely acquainted’. Fred rapidly formed a close relationship with Wellesley. He was rather more hot headed than his composed Commander in Chief, but both had a strong association with Ireland. Fred’s father, like Wellesley’s, was an Irish peer and both had a passion for hunting. This very British love of the chase was pursued exuberantly by Arthur Wellesley. It was his only real relaxation apart from the dinner parties he held mainly with his immediate staff. It wasn’t long before he built up a formidable pack of hounds and a stable of fine horses. Once, later in the campaign, he was preparing for a battle when ‘a brace of greyhounds in pursuit of a hare, passed close to him … the instant he observed them, he gave the “view hallo” and went after them at full speed to the utter astonishment’ of his companions.
Wellesley keenly awaited the arrival of Robert Craufurd’s riflemen, who he knew would play a key role in any early battle. But they had hit a snag. Appalling weather in the English Channel had held them up for the best part of two weeks off the Isle of Wight. Jonathan Leach, veteran of Vimeiro, who had returned to Britain after retreating with Moore to Corunna, was among them. They had a lot of time to while away and Leach remarked that he and his mates made ‘several excursions’ to places in the area. ‘We all agreed that the women of the Isle of Wight were particularly handsome.’ They finally arrived in Lisbon at the end of June and Leach and the other officers spent four days ‘purchasing horses, donkeys … cigars and various other odds and ends indispensable in campaigning’. They too found the Portuguese capital full of an ‘accumulation of disgusting filth’ and were glad to be ordered up the River Tagus in flat-bottomed boats to join Wellesley as soon as possible. After twenty-four hours spent cooped up in the boats, the men went ashore to bivouac on the river bank. ‘All the frogs in the Peninsula had assembled … to welcome us to Portugal; for such an eternal croaking I never heard before or since. It failed, however, to spoil our night’s rest, as sleep the previous night had been quite out of the question, owing to our being constrained to sit upright in the boats.’