by Peter Snow
The army spent the coldest winter months quartered in towns and villages in the hills east of Oporto. Jonathan Leach encouraged the men in his company to keep fit. They had running races, held football matches and even played racquets against the tower of a church. Leach, like many others, was an enthusiast for hunting, coursing and shooting by day, ‘and by night we either whiffed away cigars over some Douro wine and speculated on the campaign which was soon about to commence, or danced boleros, fandangos, and waltzes with the good looking daughters of an Israelite, in whose house I was billeted’.
6
Unpardonable butchery
The Côa and Bussaco, 1810
THERE WERE TWO ways Marshal Masséna could invade Portugal in 1810. The southern route ran past the strongholds of Badajoz in Spain and Elvas in Portugal. The northern approach was effectively controlled by the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo just inside Spain and Almeida twenty miles inside Portugal. No intrusion deep into Portugal would be secure without the forts on at least one of these routes being captured. In the spring of 1810 all were in the hands of Wellington and his allies. Masséna chose to advance by the northern route and duly laid siege to Ciudad Rodrigo.
Wellington had to make a strategic choice. Should he march his entire army into Spain and challenge Masséna outside Ciudad Rodrigo or wait for him at Almeida? As always he erred on the side of caution, calculating that his 55,000 men would be more judiciously placed to confront the French marshal’s 60,000 in the hills around Almeida than on the flat landscape around Ciudad Rodrigo. French numbers and their superior cavalry could cause havoc on a wide, open plain. Wellington wrote to Lord Liverpool: ‘The country in which I must have carried on the operations to raise the siege, or even to relieve the place, would have been highly advantageous to the enemy, on account of his superiority in cavalry.’ So, in spite of his concern for the inhabitants of Ciudad Rodrigo and its ‘brave’ Governor, ‘I have considered it my duty to refrain from an operation which it was probable would be attended by the most disastrous consequences.’
Wellington reckoned that artful use of the rolling ground inside Portugal would be more likely to thwart the French. He was also concerned that 25,000 of his men were still largely untried Portuguese troops. Craufurd’s light-infantry troops, the 1/95th, 1/43rd and 1/52nd, would now be joined with two battalions of Portuguese Caçadores in a new Light Division under Craufurd’s command. (Up to now Craufurd had commanded only a brigade of light troops.) The rest of the Portuguese, commanded mainly by British officers and sustained by a £1 million grant from the British government, would gradually be incorporated into Wellington’s other divisions. Wellington was still uneasy about some of his senior commanders, whom he had no power to sack, but he did have at least three fine divisional commanders in the reliable Rowland Hill and the newly arrived Picton and Craufurd. ‘Hill does what he is told,’ the Commander in Chief told his friends. He probably would not have said the same about the other two. Relations with Picton and Craufurd were occasionally strained, but he appreciated their courage and their capacity to inspire. Other commanders, such as Major General Sir William Erskine, who Wellington complained was virtually blind, kept being foisted on him by London. He didn’t hesitate to make his feelings known to his masters in Whitehall: ‘When I reflect upon the characters and attainments of some of the general officers of this army … on whom I am to rely … I tremble.’
It was not just Erskine who raised eyebrows. Craufurd added to his maverick reputation by failing to go to the rescue of some British cavalry which he had ordered against a French infantry position not far from Ciudad Rodrigo. Wellington’s ADC, Alexander Gordon, blamed the cavalry unit for charging foolishly against the odds: ‘It was ill planned and worse executed.’ But Harry Smith, one of Craufurd’s own junior officers, blamed Craufurd himself for not sending some of his light infantry to the rescue of the horsemen. ‘Craufurd never moved one of us … Our loss was very considerable. Poor Colonel Talbot of the 14th (commanding) killed and a lot of men … Had two companies of ours only been moved … the enemy would have lain down their arms.’ Wellington knew that Craufurd aroused controversy, but he valued him too highly to have him removed.
Wellington sent only token forces to harry the French besieging force at Ciudad Rodrigo. By 10 July the garrison could hold out no longer and it surrendered. Masséna’s next target was the fortress of Almeida. If he could storm that too, he believed the road to Lisbon would be open. But yet another of Napoleon’s marshals was underestimating the resourcefulness and tactical skill of his opponent. Wellington decided to make a stand at Almeida by buttressing the defence of the fortress itself with an attempt to stop the French crossing the River Côa, which ran just behind it. Rather than place his whole army in a defensive position along the Côa, he preferred to keep most of his units in reserve behind it, leaving Craufurd’s Light Division on the east bank. The plan was to delay the French without actually engaging them in a pitched battle. It was bound to be an uneven struggle. Masséna and Ney could concentrate enough troops on the east bank of the Côa to leave Craufurd massively outnumbered. They crossed the Portuguese frontier on 21 July with as many as 70,000 men. The Light Division faced gigantic odds.
What followed was one of the most heroic though controversial clashes in the Peninsular War. In spite of repeated warnings from Wellington, Robert Craufurd took the risk of fighting the French with his back to a river, which was in full flood and could be crossed only by one narrow bridge. The countryside is some of the roughest in Portugal: the Côa runs through a deep gorge with steep, rocky sides cluttered with huge boulders; any movement is severely restricted. Two weeks earlier Wellington had ordered Craufurd to withdraw to Almeida if the French threatened to attack him. ‘In short,’ he said, ‘I do not wish to risk anything beyond the Coa.’ On 16 July Wellington was more ambivalent: ‘It is desirable that we should hold the other side of the Coa a little longer … At the same time I do not wish to risk anything in order to remain at the other side of the river.’ Six days later he was more emphatic: ‘I am not desirous of engaging [in] an affair beyond the Coa.’ And he asked Craufurd if it wouldn’t be better to pull his infantry back across the river.
Unusually for Wellington the orders were not precise, but their thrust was clear: Craufurd was to avoid being drawn into battle on the far side of the Côa where his line of retreat would be dangerously constricted. He should cross the river before he could be attacked. Craufurd did nothing of the sort. Driven by his ambition to show that he and his Light Division, which had missed Talavera, could perform outstanding feats of arms, he fought a major battle on the east bank of the Côa. It was a brave attempt, but it was against such numbers that he was bound to lose far more men than if he had moved his defensive line to the high ground the other side of the river, as Wellington had indicated. William Napier, one of Craufurd’s light infantrymen, wrote in his history of the war, ‘[Craufurd] with headstrong ambition resolved, in defiance of reason and the reiterated orders of his General, to fight on the right bank.’
Jonathan Leach was right in the middle of the action. ‘Although the left of our line was under the protection of the guns of the fortress [of Almeida] the French assailed it with great impetuosity and the right and centre also soon found itself beset with a swarm of light troops, supported by heavy columns constantly advancing, and aided by their artillery which cannonaded us warmly.’ George Simmons saw the whole plain in front of him covered with advancing troops. He watched them form lines and attack: ‘we repulsed them, but they came on again, yelling, with drums beating … French officers like mountebanks running forward and placing their hats upon their swords and, and capering about like madmen, saying as they turned to their men “Come on, children of our country. The first that advances, Napoleon will recompense him.”’
Craufurd quickly woke up to the disaster he had inflicted on himself and his men and started shifting troops to the other side of the river. Many of his infantrymen were soon fighting
for their lives. Ned Costello and his comrades were taken by surprise as the cry went up, ‘The French cavalry are upon us!’ They could do little to defend themselves against the slashing sabres of the horsemen and many were trampled underfoot. ‘A French dragoon had seized me by the collar, while several others, as they passed, did me the “honour” of aiming at me with their swords. The man who had collared me had his sabre’s point at my breast, when a volley was fired from our rear by the 52nd … which tumbled the horse of my captor.’ The horse collapsed on top of its rider, who dragged Costello down with him. ‘Determined to have one brief struggle for liberty, I freed myself from the dragoon and dealing him a severe blow with the butt of my rifle,’ he made for the shelter of a wall behind. But his ordeal wasn’t over. He felt a shot hit his right kneecap and he fell. His comrades were now all retreating fast and he was lucky to be picked up by one of them, who heaved him up on his back and ran for the bridge. His rescuer had to drop him when he too was hit by a shot, which also slammed into Costello’s thigh ‘where it has ever since remained’. Somehow he managed to drag himself across the bridge and ‘in this crippled state and faint through loss of blood, I made a second appeal to a comrade, who assisted me to ascend a hill on the other side of the river’.
Thomas Garrety found the bridge so congested that he had to make a stand with some soldiers on the river bank. ‘The conflict was tremendous: thrice we repulsed the enemy at the point of the bayonet … my left-hand man, one of the stoutest in the regiment, was hit by a musket shot – he threw his head back, and was instantly dead. I fired at the fellow who shot my comrade; and before I could reload, my pay-sergeant, Thomas, received a ball in the thigh and earnestly implored me to carry him away.’ Somehow Garrety lugged Thomas across the bridge and was rewarded with a swig of rum from his canteen.
Craufurd struggled to prevent his Light Division’s annihilation by trying to orchestrate a fighting withdrawal. Leach and a contingent of riflemen were sent to secure a small hill which commanded the approach to the bridge. ‘In ascending the hill,’ recalled Leach, ‘a musket shot grazed the left side of my head and buried itself in the earth close by.’ He struggled on up to the top and between them he and his comrades helped secure the road back to the bridge. But the French seemed to be everywhere in overwhelming numbers. The murderous fire they now brought to bear on the shrinking band of Craufurd’s men on the east side of the river led to an order to abandon the hill and retreat to the bridge. It was too soon: there were hundreds still waiting to cross. The hill would have to be recaptured. The next thing Leach knew he was charging back up the hill with a bunch of skirmishers led by a Major Macleod. ‘How either he or his horse escaped being blown to atoms, when, in the most daring manner, he charged on horseback, at the head of a hundred or two skirmishers … I am at a loss to imagine.’ Scores of them were killed and injured in a few bloody minutes as their counter-attack tore into the French. It bought just enough time for the rest of Craufurd’s force to reach the bridge. And then the skirmishers had to fight their way back to it themselves. Somehow the survivors ran or crawled back to Craufurd’s new front line in the middle of the bridge. Some carried their wounded comrades, others dragged their own shattered limbs behind them, desperate to avoid capture. A frantic fight then followed for the bridge itself. A great cloud of smoke arose as the intense musket and artillery fire of both sides concentrated on that one narrow crossing point. Craufurd had placed Hew Ross and his Chestnut Troop of Royal Horse Artillery on the bridge and their guns gave powerful supporting fire to the retreating troops.
Once the last fugitives had managed to scramble across the bridge, Leach watched ‘a few hundred French grenadiers, advancing to the tune of “Vive l’Empereur!” and “En avant, mes enfants!”’ The bridge was the only place where the French could cross the Côa as the river was a fierce torrent after hours of heavy rain, and the narrow road across the bridge was now covered by three British and two Portuguese battalions. Leach was appalled by the French commander who ordered his men across the bridge into such a lethal killing zone: ‘It was a piece of unpardonable and unjustifiable butchery on the part of the man who ordered those brave grenadiers to be thus wantonly sacrificed, with the most remote possibility of success.’ Tom Garrety watched as ‘a French surgeon coming down to the very foot of the bridge, waved his white handkerchief, and commenced dressing the wounded under the hottest fire: the appeal was heard: every musket turned from him …’
It had been a bloody combat for both sides. Craufurd was lucky to escape with casualties of around 400 dead, wounded or taken prisoner. But he didn’t escape sharp criticism: William Grattan accused him of ‘fighting a very dangerous battle – contrary to orders I believe … with hardihood bordering on rashness’. Jonathan Leach noted: ‘we were puzzled to conjecture why General Craufurd, if he was determined to give battle … did not cross the Coa, without waiting to be forcibly driven over … and there challenge his opponent’. He accused Craufurd of making a mistake that ‘the most uninstructed boy of one month’s standing in the army’ would not have made. He wrote home that Craufurd was even ‘more abhorred’ than he had been a few months earlier. Leach said Craufurd was a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘blackguard’, who had ‘proved himself totally unfit to command a company much less a division.’ Colonel Torrens, the influential Military Secretary in London, declared that he was ‘disappointed’ and that Craufurd’s reputation had taken ‘a knock which it will be difficult for him to recover … he appears to me to allow the violence of his passions and the impetuosity of his disposition to overthrow the exercise of his judgement’.
Disapproval of Craufurd’s bloody encounter on the Côa was widely echoed in the rest of the army. Wellington chose not to rebuke him, but wrote a revealing letter to his brother William which suggests just how angry he was privately at his subordinate’s conduct. He said he had repeatedly told Craufurd not to engage the French on the far side of the river. ‘You will say, if this be the case, why not accuse Craufurd? I answer, because, if I am to be hanged for it, I cannot accuse a man who I believe meant well and whose error is one of judgment and not of intention.’ Wellington was being remarkably lenient, but he was convinced that Craufurd with all his faults was too precious an asset to lose, and he was proved right over the next few months. Alexander Gordon was more blunt. ‘Craufurd remained much too long before a vast superiority of the enemy. We’ve lost in killed or wounded 30 officers and 400 men to no purpose whatever.’
Craufurd was evidently deeply sensitive to the criticism his action at the Côa provoked. He wrote a letter to The Times in an attempt to justify his conduct. ‘The retreat was made in a military, soldier-like manner, and without the slightest precipitation … we inflicted on the enemy a loss certainly double that we sustained.’
It was during the fighting on the River Côa that Craufurd and Picton had a particularly bitter row. Picton rode forward at one stage and met Craufurd, who asked him urgently for support. Picton refused it, embittered, William Napier suggests, by previous disputes between the two men. Napier says Picton was quite wrong to refuse help, as Craufurd’s situation was very grave. ‘Picton and Crawfurd’, he observed, ‘were not formed by nature to act cordially together. The stern countenance, robust frame, saturnine complexion, caustic speech, and austere demeanour of the first, promised little sympathy with the short thick figure, dark flashing eyes, quick movements, and fiery temper of the second; nor did they often meet without a quarrel.’ Wellington was aware of the growing tension between Picton and Craufurd. He knew they were both highly ambitious, brave to the point of recklessness and viciously competitive. But he believed, rightly, that over time they would prove to be of inestimable value to him in fighting the French.
On the British side Harry Smith and George Simmons were among the wounded. Smith had a ball lodge in his ankle joint and was saved from being left on the east side of the bridge only by the heroic Major Macleod. He hoisted Smith up on his horse and raced him across the bridge in the
nick of time. Simmons suddenly found himself plunging to the ground in the thick of the fighting. ‘For a few moments I couldn’t collect my ideas, and was feeling about my arms and legs for a wound, until my eye caught the stream of blood rushing through the hole in my trousers, and my leg and thigh appeared so heavy that I could not move it … Some men put me in a blanket and carried me off.’ They passed Craufurd on the way back, who hadn’t forgotten that it was Simmons who had ruined his dinner party a year earlier. Craufurd told the men it was no time to be taking away wounded officers and ordered them back. But they retorted: ‘This is an officer of ours, and we must see him to safety before we leave him.’ Simmons then had to suffer the discomfort and pain of being carried away with Harry Smith on a bullock cart which bounced up and down agonisingly on the bumpy roads. ‘The bullocks ran away with poor George,’ Smith wrote later, ‘and nearly jolted him to death, for he was fearfully wounded through the thick of his thigh.’
A little later Smith, still hobbling around with a musket ball in his foot, so impressed his commanding officer, the much loved Sydney Beckwith, that the colonel asked him to become his ADC. When Smith finally got to see a doctor, ‘I cocked up my leg, and said “There it is: slash away.” It was five minutes, most painful indeed, before it was extracted. The ball was jagged, and the tendonous fibres had so grown into it, it was half dissected and half torn out, with most excruciating torture for a moment, the forceps breaking which had hold of the ball.’ The doctors were too busy to attend to Ned Costello and maggots got into his wounds. But ‘by care and syringing sweet oil into my wounds, I … managed to get rid of them’.