by Peter Snow
Once they were on the move Leach’s roving eye was soon active. He and his friends chatted up some young women behind the iron gratings of a convent. All they could see was that the nuns were blessed with ‘sparkling black eyes … the rest was left to the imagination’. After a while they managed to do a sort of trade. The women smuggled preserved fruits and other delicacies out of the convent, and in return ‘little notes and love letters, written in villainously bad Portuguese, were transmitted … to them … Two of them who were heartily tired of their unnatural prison declared to myself and brother-officer, that they were ready to make their escape … and to share our fortunes …’ Leach reflected that the young nuns must have been heroines to take the risk of being ‘buried alive’ or ‘broiled on a gridiron’ if they were discovered.
Although these valuable troops were still well over 150 miles’ march away, Wellesley had one other major reinforcement to count on. He had a new ally, Gregorio García de la Cuesta, who commanded a force of some 20,000 just inside Spain. It was part of the new Spanish army still struggling to reorganise itself under a chaotic revolutionary Spanish government, which had broken away from its old alliance with France. The army was to prove no match for Napoleonic France in nearly every engagement it entered into. Wellesley had every hope that, provided that he and Cuesta could meet up and fight together, they would be more than a match for any army that marched against them. Napoleon’s brother Joseph, the nominal King of Spain, had a large force around Madrid, and another army under Marshal Claude Perrin Victor was heading west with only 22,000 men. Wellesley believed that if he and Cuesta could catch Victor on his own, they would score a major victory.
Cuesta was nearly seventy years old, stubborn and highly impatient. He had lost 10,000 men in an earlier battle with Victor (at Medellín), where he himself had been trampled underfoot by his own retreating cavalry. He now wanted to get his revenge on Victor on his own. Wellesley sent Cuesta several messages urging him to wait for the British army to join him, but received no reply. ‘I can only say the obstinacy of this old gentleman is throwing out of our hands the finest game that any armies ever had, and that we shall repent that we did not cut off Victor …’ Finally on 10 July Wellesley managed to catch up with Cuesta. The meeting was not successful, partly because Wellesley arrived very late thanks to a forty-five-mile ride on horseback with poor guides. Even so, he wrote afterwards, ‘the General received me well, and was very attentive to me, but I had no conversation with him as he declined to speak French and I cannot talk Spanish’. However Wellesley did manage through an interpreter to persuade Cuesta to agree to unite the two armies at a spot on the Tagus a few miles west of Talavera, a large Spanish town strategically placed on the main road between Madrid and Portugal. If the British and Spanish could scatter the French here, they would be only 120 miles from Madrid.
Wellesley was deeply unimpressed by his new Spanish ally. Cuesta’s command post, in which he trundled around issuing orders, was a huge coach drawn by nine mules, and to mount his own horse he needed four large men to hoist him into the saddle. Wellesley would no doubt have ignored such eccentricities had he been able to count on Cuesta as he was able to count on another elderly general, Marshal Blücher, at Waterloo six years later. But Cuesta was no Blücher. He was very reluctant to engage in any joint action with the British. Only after persistent pressure from Wellesley was he persuaded to agree to a co-ordinated assault on Victor’s approaching army on the morning of 23 July. They would both attack the French from different directions at the same time.
But when the British moved into position and stood poised for the big attack, there was no sign of the Spanish. Charles Leslie and thousands of other infantrymen were under arms before 3 a.m. but they ‘moved forward only a short distance when we were halted, and the men kept standing under arms … we were kept for hours in a miserable state of suspense, all being hungry, and no one having anything to eat’. Victor was able to retire safely and wait for more French forces to move up to join him. The opportunity had been lost.
Wellesley tracked down Cuesta and found him sitting on some cushions outside his carriage. He asked him what on earth was going on. The old man told him that his army was tired and that he had not reconnoitred the ground sufficiently. Somehow Wellesley managed to contain his anger, but he was never to forgive Cuesta. The rumour got around – and even reached Wellesley’s wife Kitty back home – that Cuesta had refused to move because it was a Sunday. Wellesley denied that Cuesta had ever given that excuse, but he was furious that such a chance had been missed. Long afterwards he told friends that if Cuesta ‘had fought when I wanted him at Talavera, I have no hesitation in saying that it would have been as great a battle as Waterloo and would have cleared Spain of the French’. He was, typically, overstating it – he enjoyed the occasional burst of hyperbole. But certainly, if the French and British armies had attacked before Victor could have been reinforced, Wellesley and Cuesta would have had an immense advantage in numbers. The next day Wellesley reported to London: ‘I find General Cuesta more and more impracticable [sic] every day. It is impossible to do business with him, and very uncertain that any operation will succeed in which he has any concern.’
But even worse was to come. The following day, 25 July, having tried and failed to persuade Wellesley to join him, Cuesta took his army off on his own in pursuit of Victor. The result was nearly disastrous. He ran into a newly reinforced French army: Victor had been joined by two other large forces and had 50,000 men ready to fight Cuesta’s 30,000. Cuesta turned round and retreated, smarting at Wellesley’s refusal to follow him. Finally on 27 July Cuesta returned with his army and reluctantly agreed to line up his men alongside Wellesley’s. Both armies took up battle positions facing east across the Portina brook which runs down to the River Tagus at Talavera. Wellesley would have his battle with the French, but the odds were now much less sharply tilted in his favour.
The army Wellesley drew up at Talavera was divided into four clearly defined units, a structure that would remain the pattern all the way to Waterloo: first there were divisions of some 5,000 or 6,000 men, each commanded by a general, usually a major general. Divisions, in turn, would divide up into two or three brigades of 1,500 to 2,000 men each, commanded by a brigadier or major general. Each brigade was subdivided into two, three, sometimes four battalions, of between 500 and 1,000 men each. The battalion, commanded by a lieutenant colonel, was the unit for which men’s loyalty was fiercest, with its regimental roots in a local community back home. The battalion in turn was split into around ten companies of up to a hundred men. As battles were fought and men fell, these units would sometimes shrink to frighteningly small sizes. But however battered they became, they offered a framework of command at their four different levels, from division down to company, within which the men could put their hard-learned battlefield drills into effect. And the experience of each bloody combat enhanced the mutual comradeship of the survivors and helped motivate them to outdo each other in stamina and courage.
The Battle of Talavera
Early on the 27th, as his men covered Cuesta’s retreat, Wellesley narrowly escaped being killed or captured. He was up at the top of a tower well out in front of the main British force scanning the ground ahead with his telescope – as he often did. Suddenly a group of French tirailleurs (skirmishers or sharpshooters) managed to filter through some woods and nearly reached the foot of the tower. Wellesley heard some shots as his own infantry spotted them. He raced down the stairs and out into the courtyard, where he leaped on his horse and galloped away in the nick of time – pursued by French musket fire. This was one of many occasions in Arthur Wellesley’s career when the course of British history ran the risk of being upset by a stray shot – but he always escaped unscathed.
Later that day Wellesley surveyed the landscape on which the two armies were drawn up. It was harsh and unforgiving. The Portina brook, which at the height of the searing Spanish summer was no more than a trickle of water, form
ed the front line between the British and French. It ran down from the north, first through a ravine between two hills and then across an open plain to the Tagus two miles away. Wellesley stood on one of the hills, the Cerro de Medellín, slightly higher than the one opposite, the Cerro de Cascajal, from which Marshal Victor could command the view from the other side. Between them the broken ground, dotted with olive trees, sloped down sharply on either side of the brook. The battle would be fought across this ravine and further south across the brook as it flowed through the flatter country down to the Tagus.
Wellesley suffered from one major weakness. He still didn’t have his light troops, the riflemen, with him. They were hurrying to meet him, spurred on by the impatient and irrepressible Robert Craufurd. But they would not arrive until the day after the battle. Wellesley did have the men of Charles Leslie’s 29th Infantry Regiment who had fought so well at Roliça and Vimeiro. He placed them under command of the doughty General Rowland Hill on the Cerro de Medellín, urging Hill to keep most of his men behind the hill on the reverse slope where the French could not see them. In the centre he put a powerful division under General Sherbrooke. It had two Guards battalions in its front line. And over on the right on the flat plain, William Lawrence’s 40th Infantry Regiment and John Cooper’s 7th Fusiliers were part of another division under Brigadier General Alexander Campbell. Fred Ponsonby and other officers in the 23rd Light Dragoons held their horsemen ready behind the centre of Wellesley’s long line of regiments, ready to charge off and support any unit that got into trouble. The British ranks were a sea of colour – mainly of redcoated infantry and the odd blue flash of cavalry. The French massed the other side of the brook, dressed mainly in blue. Holding the ground between the British right and the Tagus were Cuesta’s Spanish in uniforms of every imaginable colour. They were now held in widespread contempt by Wellesley and his army. Wellesley wrote later that the Spanish ‘are, in general, the most incapable of useful exertion of all the nations I have known’. Leslie, looking across at the Spanish from the Cerro de Medellín, said the Spanish presented the most ‘motley and grotesque appearance … their equipments of the most inferior description’. They were ‘deficient in discipline and regular organisation’. Even so, he said he recognised that ‘the men were remarkably fine, possessing the most essential qualities to make good soldiers, being individually brave’. Fusilier Cooper had unreserved contempt for the Spanish who were close to him in the front line. They were, he said, ‘a motley crowd’, and General Cuesta was ‘a worthless wretch’.
By the evening of the 27th it was clear to everyone that a battle was inevitable. There had been a lot of French artillery fire all day. ‘A battery was opened upon us,’ Fred Ponsonby wrote. ‘I must confess the sensation was by no means pleasant when the shots came whizzing by us and some came plunging into our columns. I felt very considerable pleasure when we retired out of this fire, the first I had ever experienced.’ Among the British ranks most men lay down to avoid presenting an obvious target and by evening all was quiet. The night was very dark and gloomy, and because the French were so close Leslie and his comrades on the top of and behind the Cerro de Medellín kept their weapons in their hands.
The French noticed that there appeared to be only a few British soldiers on the Cerro hill, and they launched the first of several attacks on it after dark. As Leslie recorded, ‘About nine o’clock there opened a tremendous fire on the top of the hill.’ The French infantry then charged up it and swept through two battalions of the King’s German Legion who were on the hill’s exposed forward slope. They were snoozing after an exhausting day’s marching and the shock of seeing the French racing towards them was too much for them: they could do nothing to stop them. Within minutes 146 out of the 557 men of one KGL battalion had been killed or wounded. ‘It was evident that the troops placed on the hill had been surprised.’ Within seconds the French were on top of the hill, and Hill himself was nearly captured. He had sped up to the crest to see what was going on and suddenly found himself surrounded. Someone seized his reins and would have grabbed the general himself had not Leslie and his comrades in the 29th at that moment surged up the hill, rescued him and pushed the French troops down again. ‘We could see the French column moving up across our front, their drums beating the charge, and we could hear their officers giving orders and encouraging their men: “En avant, Francais! En avant, mes enfants!”’ Hill had only narrowly escaped. A staff officer beside him was killed.
At this critical juncture there had been a brief and uncharacteristic lapse of command on the part of Wellesley. He appears to have decided that he had time to go and visit the Spanish troops on his far right. It was unusual for him to let his grasp slacken at vital moments in a battle, but whatever the reason he was not there to give the orders that he was normally so insistent on issuing himself. If it hadn’t been for the quick response of the 29th, the French might have established themselves on the Cerro and completely dominated the battlefield the following morning. Leslie was unclear how the 29th had got ‘so gloriously into the fight’, but they had saved Wellesley deep embarrassment right at the start of the battle. Schaumann, the commissary, was further back behind the front line during the crisis, but he credits Hill with regaining possession of the ground ‘by means of a bayonet charge … this combat proved very costly to both sides’.
Wherever he had been, Wellesley soon made up for his absence. He reappeared and spent the rest of the night wrapped up in a blanket on the top of the hill. He slept only fitfully, frequently waking and asking what time it was. From then on he remained in complete control of the battle. It was a nervous night for everyone – particularly the Spanish, who ran amok at around midnight. A sudden exchange of musket fire threw them into a panic. A whole section of their front line, believing the French were attacking in force, turned tail and ran back to the rear. There they found themselves among the British baggage train which they promptly began to loot. Cuesta was so furious at the conduct of his troops that he ordered 200 men to be picked out and executed by firing squad the following morning. Wellesley interceded with him to get the number reduced to twenty-five.
On the French side Marshal Victor was in command, even though Napoleon’s brother Joseph was there. Victor had had a distinguished career and was able to boast that he had been a fellow gunner with Napoleon Bonaparte at the siege of Toulon sixteen years earlier. He enjoyed a special position and that gave him the whip hand in the French hierarchy at Talavera. No one felt confident enough to dissuade him when he called for another attack on the now heavily reinforced Cerro at dawn.
As the light slowly crept over the two hills that faced each other only 200 yards apart, the British began to discern the strength of the French force Victor had mustered against them. No fewer than twenty-four guns faced them at close range and thousands upon thousands of French footsoldiers in their already grimy blue uniforms waited for the order to advance. ‘In the first place,’ observed Leslie, ‘immediately below us was formed a heavy solid column on the bank of the ravine … with field batteries on both flanks, and the guns already pointed towards us … our front showed an extended line only two deep.’ Once again Wellesley had ordered his men to deploy in line against the attacking French columns. Troops in a line, with every musket facing forward unobstructed, could concentrate lethal fire on the ground directly in front of them. Wellesley knew the risks: the line had no depth. If enemy cavalry charged troops spread out in a thin line, they could cause havoc. Everything would then depend on how fast the men in line could form a defensive square to foil the oncoming horsemen.
At 5 a.m. a single shot rang out from the French guns and the batteries opened up. But Wellesley had provided for this. As the French footsoldiers began their slog across the ravine and up the hillside, he ordered his men to fall back behind the brow of the hill, where they could shelter from the guns and lie in wait for the infantry. Leslie remembered, ‘we were ordered to lie down flat on the ground. The shot flew thick and fast but
it went principally over us, the guns being much too much elevated.’ On came the French up the hill but they could see nothing until they had reached ‘pretty close to us, when our Brigadier General, Richard Stewart, said “Now, 29th! Now is your time!” We instantly sprang to our feet, gave three tremendous cheers, and immediately opened our fire, giving them several well-directed volleys, which they gallantly returned …’ Leslie and the others in two lines were able to fire all their 400 muskets unobstructed. The French, by contrast, in massed columns of sixty men wide by thirty deep could bring only some 120 muskets to bear in their front two ranks. The soldiers behind were unable to fire for fear of hitting the men in front of them. The exchange of musket fire left the French badly depleted and the survivors confused and hesitant.