by Peter Snow
Joseph Donaldson was in no doubt which side had the best doctors: ‘The French army was much superior to ours … Those medical men that we had were not always ornaments of the profession. They were chiefly, I believe, composed of apothecaries’ boys, who, having studied a session or two, were thrust into the army as a huge dissecting room, where they might mangle with impunity … and did much mischief.’ As for the disposal of the bodies, James Hale was shocked by what he saw. ‘As soon as a man was dead he was sewed up in an old blanket … and put in a coffin. But as soon as they arrived at the grave, the coffin was … turned over and so [they] let the corpse roll out into the grave.’ The coffin was then taken back to do its job again. ‘One coffin would serve a hundred men as well as one.’
Within two weeks of chasing Craufurd across the Côa the French laid siege to Almeida. It was one of the most powerfully built fortresses in the Peninsula and was well stocked with food and ammunition. There would certainly be no shortage of gunpowder or musket cartridges: a huge quantity – enough to last for months – was stored in an ancient fortified keep in the centre of the fortress. Its commander was confident and morale was high. Wellington hoped Almeida would hold out long enough to discourage Masséna from advancing deep into Portugal. What happened next was as cruel a blow as any Wellington suffered in the entire Peninsular Campaign.
By the last week in August, Masséna had sixty-five guns pounding the walls of Almeida. Its British guns roared in reply, and its walls remained intact. But it had one point of vulnerability that was to prove catastrophic. No one knows exactly what happened. It may be that in the hectic ferrying of powder and cartridges between the central fort and the gun emplacements a small trail of powder spilled from a barrel. Whatever it was, a lucky shot from a French mortar ignited some powder that led straight to the magazine in the old castle. The explosion that followed was like the eruption of a volcano, throwing up a huge cloud of smoke and a great shower of debris. Even the British guns on the battlements were tossed into the air as the entire town appeared to be blown into fragments. Stones even landed on the French trenches, killing some of the besiegers. When the smoke cleared the town was in ruins. The fort where the powder had been stored was pulverised, nothing left of it except the foundations. Almeida was defenceless and within thirty-six hours Masséna was in possession of it and planning his advance on Lisbon.
Way off to the west, more than ten miles away, Wellington’s advance posts had heard the roar of the explosion. Two days later when he learned that the French had destroyed his frontier fortress, Wellington was dismayed: ‘I cannot express how much I am disappointed at this fatal event.’ But he soon recovered when he learned that Masséna was leading his army westward into some of the most difficult mountain country in the whole of Portugal. ‘There are certainly many bad roads in Portugal,’ he wrote, ‘but the enemy has taken decidedly the worst in the whole kingdom.’ Instead of heading south-west towards Lisbon, Masséna was struggling west along poor roads that made his progress pitifully slow. He had been badly misled by indequate maps and incompetent guides. By now autumn was setting in and for both sides the piercing wind and nightly dew made bivouacking an ordeal. The French found that the Portuguese had stripped the land of any useful crop, and even the British had a hard time: Jonathan Leach complained that the supply of wine and rum had run out, and that he had to make do with water.
Wellington, with his keen eye for terrain, saw a major opportunity in Masséna’s change of route. The roads and tracks in this area all led unavoidably to a prominent mountain ridge, 1,870 feet high and seven miles long. Its steep and rocky slopes straddled Masséna’s route and offered Wellington a commanding line of defence. It was called the ridge of Bussaco. ‘We have an excellent position here, in which I am strongly tempted to give battle,’ Wellington wrote to his cavalry commander, Sir Stapleton Cotton. He could not have chosen a more powerful defensive position. Indeed the most astonishing thing about Bussaco is that Masséna decided to attack Wellington at all. Today the entire ridge and its precipitous sides are cluttered with close-packed trees and dense undergrowth. An energetic climber could scramble up it unseen. In 1810 Bussaco was bare. Wellington and his commanders could see every move of an approaching enemy struggling up through the rocks and low brush.
Wellington placed his headquarters in a convent on the north end of the ridge and strung out his army along it, facing east. In the next two days the French appeared below and spread out along the bottom of the ridge clearly determined to attack. At dawn on 27 September, in thick mist, the Battle of Bussaco began. First Masséna threw General Reynier’s troops against the British centre, where the redoubtable Thomas Picton was in command. William Grattan’s Connaught Rangers were one of his battalions. Grattan couldn’t see much to start with but he could tell from the firing that French light troops were leading the attack up the hill towards him. Wellington was close by ‘and from the bustle amongst the staff it was manifest that the point held by Picton’s division was about to be attacked … the fog cleared away and a bright sun enabled us to see what was passing before us. A vast crowd of tirailleurs were pressing onward with great ardour.’ The skirmishers were followed by the main body of infantry scrambling up the rocky slope. It was vital they shouldn’t break through Picton’s men, seize the crest of the hill and cut Wellington’s line. The fierce French fire was thinning the Connaught Rangers, and Grattan’s commanding officer, Colonel Alexander Wallace, shouted to his men: ‘Now Connaught Rangers, mind what you are going to do … when I bring you face to face with those French rascals, drive them down the hill. Don’t give them false touch but push home [your bayonets] to the muzzle.’
The Battle of Bussaco
Grattan and his comrades followed Wallace in a counter-attack on the French. ‘All was now confusion and uproar, smoke, fire and bullets, officers and soldiers, French drummers and French drums knocked down in every direction; British, French and Portuguese mixed together; while in the midst of all was to be seen Wallace, fighting – like his ancestor of old – at the head of his devoted followers and calling out to his soldiers to “press forward”.’ Wellington, typically, was within reach of where the fighting was hottest. A soldier quite close to him was wounded in the face. One account says that the regiment’s colonel in chief, Marshal Beresford, was standing next to Wellington expressing unease that his lads faced an unequal contest. ‘But when they were mixed with Reynier’s men and pushing them down the hill, Lord Wellington, tapping him on the shoulder, said “Well, Beresford, look at them now!”’ A few minutes later he shook Wallace’s hand and said, ‘Wallace, I never witnessed a more gallant charge than that made just now by your regiment.’ Grattan says, ‘Wallace took off his hat – but his heart was too full to speak.’
The battle was only just beginning. Another division of Reynier’s launched an attack on Picton’s Portuguese troops a little further along the ridge. The Portuguese were pushed aside and the French looked like winning a foothold on top of the ridge. But thanks to Wellington’s foresight, General Leith’s division had moved up from the south. Leith and General Hill beyond him had been told by Wellington to shift north if it became clear that the French attack was not directed at them. Leith’s men raced up, keeping behind the crest of the ridge and confronted this second French onslaught as it broke through the Portuguese. James Hale was one of Leith’s men, a sergeant in the 9th Regiment of Foot. He and his company were told to load their muskets but not to fire until ordered – ‘so we continued moving on … until we got within about 100 yds of them, where we were ordered to wheel into line and give them a volley which we immediately did and saluted them with 3 cheers and a charge …’ General Leith the brigade commander ‘made the signal by taking off his hat and twirling it over his head’. Hale says the enemy stood their ground ‘till we got within 20 yards of them, but seeing it was our intention to use the bayonet, they took to their heels’.
It was now the turn of Marshal Ney to try to break through the British
line. He was one of Napoleon’s most flamboyant commanders, recklessly brave, a great inspiration to his men but an impetuous and unreliable tactician. He fiercely disliked Masséna and the feeling was mutual. Ney’s men were on the French centre right and they quickly threw British and Portuguese skirmishers out of the village of Sula, and then pursued them up the hill to where they could see Hew Ross’s battery of British guns. Exhausted from the climb and struggling to keep some sort of formation among the rocks, depleted by the canister fire, Ney’s men finally reached the line of guns. But Ross and his men sharply hauled the guns aside to reveal just over the crest of a ridge only twenty yards ahead two entire battalions of ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd’s light infantry in a long line. Craufurd himself stood on a rock alongside his line of soldiers. He waited until the French column appeared over the brow just a few yards in front of him. Then William Napier recalled Craufurd’s shrill voice yelling at his men to charge. ‘Now, 52nd, avenge Sir John Moore,’ he shouted waving his hat in the air. ‘A horrid shout startled the French column, and eighteen hundred British bayonets went sparkling over the brow of the hill … The head of their column was violently overturned and driven upon the rear, both flanks were lapped over by the English wings, and three terrible discharges at five yards’ distance completed the rout. In a few minutes a long trail of carcasses and broken arms indicated the line of retreat.’
William Napier’s brother George was a yard or two in front of his men as he led them in a charge and was lucky to escape being killed: four of the nine men in the front rank just behind him were shot dead and all the rest fell wounded. George Napier was hit but managed to get on his feet immediately and chase the French down the hill ‘firing and bayoneting … till the French were driven from the top to the bottom of the mountain like a parcel of sheep’. Jonathan Leach was one of the riflemen firing at the retreating French while the horse artillery poured on them ‘a murderous fire of grape,* as they were struggling through the narrow streets of Sula, and trampling each other to death in their great haste to escape. Men, muskets, knapsacks and bayonets rolled down the side of the mountain in such a confused mass … it is impossible to convey a just idea of.’
Finally, in a last desperate attempt, Ney directed General Marchand’s division up the hill at the Portuguese battalions a little further along the British line. The French might have expected to break them, but Marshal Beresford’s painstaking training now began to show. The Portuguese fought well and turned another French attack into a rout. Wellington said later that Bussaco had inspired confidence in the Portuguese troops and gave them ‘a taste for an amusement to which they were not before accustomed; and which they could not have acquired if I had not put them in a very strong position’. Ever since that day the Portuguese military have regarded Bussaco as the battle in which their army came of age. Today the ridge is ornamented with a whole forest of plaques to commemorate their victory. With the collapse of Ney’s attack the French fell back and abandoned any attempt to shift Wellington from the Bussaco ridge. The British had lost 1,250 dead and wounded, the French four times as many.
Bussaco was an utter disaster for Masséna. Wellington had again demonstrated his genius for choosing the right ground on which to fight and for arranging the swift realignment of his units to concentrate strength where it was needed. The battle gave British morale a badly needed boost. Wellington’s mercurial ADC, Alexander Gordon, who had, like Wellington, been deeply depressed by the destruction of Almeida only three weeks earlier, wrote: ‘I have not now the least doubt of the success of this campaign and the destruction of Masséna’s army. We shall give them another sound drubbing and they must retire.’
Bussaco might have been the final chapter in yet another failed French invasion of Portugal, but Masséna wasn’t giving up yet.
Wellington said much later that, of all Napoleon’s marshals, Masséna was the most formidable. The very night of his defeat at Bussaco Masséna’s scouts revealed a canny way of turning Wellington’s flank. The next morning Wellington awoke to learn that the French army had sneaked off on a minor road round the northern end of the Bussaco ridge. He had no choice but to fall back towards Lisbon in order to keep ahead of them. Fred Ponsonby noted how calmly Wellington made his decision. ‘After it was made he was able to throw it entirely from his thoughts; most men would have felt anxiety; perhaps doubts till the event had taken place, but with him it was all over; at dinner that day he laughed and talked as if nothing was depending [on it] … it never disturbed his rest.’
Wellington’s withdrawal was no forlorn retreat. He had an elaborate defensive strategy. For the past year his engineers had been working on the Lines of Torres Vedras, the network of redoubts and ramparts in the hills north of Lisbon. He withdrew his army there and in his wake he left a great zone of desolation: towns, villages, houses and fields stripped and deserted. People were told to find refuge behind the Lines. The country was left utterly barren and devoid of supplies for Masséna’s army. Soon after leaving Bussaco Wellington’s commissaries destroyed most of their stores so that the French couldn’t lay their hands on them. They emptied kegs of rum in the streets of one village and the soldiers waded through it ankle-deep scooping up a swig or two with their cups as they marched. August Schaumann took teams of his commissaries into the territory the French army was heading for. ‘My people followed … with mules and empty sacks. Each village we got to we’d send patrols to left and right and plunder all the houses and barns which had long been deserted … we would find lots of food which owners had concealed very badly.’
One newcomer to the army was John Kincaid, a twenty-two-year-old Scottish officer, with a wry sense of humour and a sparkling pen. He had seen no active service until he arrived after the Battle of Bussaco, at the height of Wellington’s scorched-earth policy. All he got to eat on the retreat was a pound of beef, a mouldy biscuit and a glass of rum. And he had left his cloak with the heavy baggage miles behind. ‘My only covering every night was the canopy of heaven, from whence the dews descended so refreshingly.’ He slept in constant fear of scorpions, snakes and lizards crawling all over him. And come the morning, the likeliest time for an enemy attack, ‘we stood to arms … at an hour before daylight and remained there until a grey horse could be seen a mile off (which is the military criterion by which daylight is acknowledged)’. It was cold sleeping in the open in October. ‘Nothing in life can be more ridiculous than seeing a lean, lank fellow start from a profound sleep at midnight, and begin lashing away at the Highland Fling … but it was a measure that I very often had recourse to, as the cleverest method of producing heat.’
By October the British were quartered in and among the Lines of Torres Vedras. Masséna took one look at them and decided that his adversaries were so well prepared that it would be futile to try to press through to Lisbon. His own army had a terrible winter trying to survive in countryside the Portuguese and the British had stripped bare. Wellington was not tempted to sally out and challenge Masséna, however. His instinct was to wait for the moment when he knew he would prevail rather than to take an unnecessary risk. Revealingly he wrote to a friend: ‘They won’t draw me from my cautious system … I’ll only fight them when I am pretty sure of success.’ All this was enough to get the tongues wagging at home. George, Prince of Wales, one of Wellington’s sharpest critics (and soon to become Prince Regent), was mean enough to say to Wellington’s brother Richard, ‘I condole with you heartily my dear Lord upon poor Arthur’s retreat … Masséna has quite outgeneralled him.’
For a month the two armies faced each other with only the occasional clash. Thomas Todd and his mates of the Highland Light Infantry who had fought at Vimeiro were now back in the Peninsula. They found themselves facing a French attempt to break through the British lines. Todd was soon fighting hand to hand in a very confined space. He managed to bayonet one Frenchman and escaped being killed by another only when a random shot struck his assailant. ‘I stood gasping for breath, not a shoe on my feet, my bon
net had fallen to the ground.’ That didn’t stop him charging off when the Frenchmen ran away. Todd then found a pair of shoes in the mud which fitted him and proceeded to plunder a dead Frenchman whose hat had fallen off. ‘I struck the hat with my foot, and felt it rattle; seized it in a moment and, in the lining, found a gold watch and silver crucifix. I kept them, as I had as good a right to them as any other.’ William Tomkinson and his light dragoons were in and out of French lines during those days in October too. During one night of torrential rain they found shelter, by good luck, in a wine vault. One dragoon managed to fall into a wine vat where he was trapped all night.
John Kincaid and some companions were keen to make a contribution to a party a local man threw for them together with his daughter and two of her young girlfriends. The young officers mischievously stole some turkeys and a sheep. Later, when the theft was discovered and an inquiry began, ‘as one of our party happened to be killed in action we, very uncharitably, put the whole of it on his shoulders’.
In places the armies were only fifty yards apart. Thomas Todd watched some Frenchmen, who were desperately short of supplies, trying to kill a bullock. But the butcher missed his blow, and the bullock ran off into the British lines. ‘The French looked so foolish, we hurraed at them, secured the bullock, brought him in front, and killed him in style. Shortly after, an officer and four men came with a flag of truce and supplicated in the most humble manner for the half of the bullock, which they got for godsake.’
Masséna’s plight worsened by the day. Alexander Gordon reported: ‘Masséna’s army now have nothing but meat alone to live upon, are very sickly and desert much … In about a month the rains will set in which will yet more increase his state of wretchedness.’ On the morning of 16 November Jonathan Leach, like many other British front-line observers that day, found that ‘the cunning rogues had played us an old trick of theirs, by placing figures of straw upright, with a soldier’s cap on each, and a pole by their side to represent a musket. Their whole army had retired.’