by Peter Snow
Wellington climbed one of the most prominent hills on his defence line to see for himself. No doubt about it: Masséna had pulled out. Wellington sent his men in immediate pursuit. Many of them were horrified at the misery and brutality of the French retreat. ‘We could not advance a hundred yards, without seeing dead soldiers of the enemy stretched upon the road or at a little distance from it, who had lain down to die, unable to proceed through hunger and fatigue.’ But Todd said he wasn’t sorry for them: ‘Their retreat resembled more that of famished wolves than men. Murder and devastation marked their way, every house was a sepulchre, a cabin of horrors … In a small town … I saw twelve dead lying in one house upon the floor! Every house contained traces of their wanton barbarity.’
Masséna withdrew about twenty miles up the north bank of the River Tagus to the town of Santarém. And there Wellington was content to leave him for the winter. Just before he called off the pursuit, he had to intervene to stop General ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd and his Light Division making another bid for glory. Craufurd thought he saw an opportunity for his men to destroy what looked like a French rearguard force of 2,000 or 3,000 men just ahead of him. He waved his division out into one long line and gave orders for an attack. Suddenly ‘Lord Wellington arrived on the ground and stopped the attack, observing “Are you aware, General, that the whole of Junot’s corps is close to the advanced body you now see, amounting to at least 23,000 men, a large portion of which is cavalry?” The attack was of course abandoned.’ George Simmons had no love lost for Craufurd. Only a day later he noted that Craufurd ‘over his wine, took it into his head that the enemy was moving off and he was anxious to be the first to find out’. The general nearly walked into a French picket, which opened fire on him. He had to retire, Simmons says, after he had taken ‘a great chance of throwing away his life’. William Napier tells us that Craufurd ‘seized a musket and, followed by a Sergeant, advanced in the night along the causeway, thus commencing a personal skirmish with the French piquets from whose fire he escaped by a miracle …’ It certainly was a quirky and reckless action on the part of a divisional commander, but such shameless audacity was typical of the man.
Fred Ponsonby, now a lieutenant colonel, occasionally felt a pang of guilt that he was not among his constituents as MP for Kilkenny in Ireland. But the seat was more or less a Ponsonby family possession, so he was usually very relaxed about it. That autumn he was enjoying life at Wellington’s headquarters. Wellington had asked him to join his team with responsibility for the cavalry. Ponsonby wrote home that he was finding life at headquarters ‘very very different from the life of a regimental officer’. He spent his time hobnobbing with the other young aristocrats who made up the Commander in Chief’s staff, and complaining that his family didn’t write to him. He singled out his sister Caroline Lamb in a letter to his mother: ‘Tell Caro she is a shabby person.’ It wasn’t just that Caroline wasn’t a good letter-writer. Her fits of temper and violent fights with her husband, William Lamb, were a growing source of gossip. ‘She stood in a corner one day and threw cups and saucers at William’s head,’ wrote one of her cousins. Her uncle, the Duke of Devonshire, notes that her ‘oddities’ prejudiced people against her, and he observed knowingly, ‘men like her a lot better than women’. Ponsonby disapproved of Caro’s wayward and flirtatious character: we can only guess what he would have called her if he could have foreseen her affair with Lord Byron a year later.
7
A dangerous hour for England
Fuentes d’Oñoro, 1811
IT WAS A difficult winter for Wellington. He believed he had a strong case for continuing support from London. He had defeated another of Napoleon’s marshals and stopped the French reoccupying the whole of Portugal. He could now confidently rebuild his strength behind an impregnable defence line as 1810 turned into 1811. And, come the spring, he would pounce on Masséna’s wretchedly deprived army and throw it back into Spain. But that was not how it looked to many in London. To the doubters Britain’s prospects in the Peninsula seemed more fragile than ever. After all, two and a half years after his first arrival in Portugal Wellington held only a tiny sliver of the country around Lisbon – less than he had controlled after the Battle of Vimeiro in August 1808. The MP William Fremantle dismissed any prospect of Wellington being able to push the French out of the Peninsula: ‘Where is the man in his senses who believes that … we shall be able to accomplish this?’ he asked. Alexander Gordon wrote home, ‘People now are not satisfied because Wellington has not utterly destroyed Masséna and his army and nothing will satisfy them but a great battle being fought. Thank God Wellington is not a man to be moved by popular clamour.’ Spencer Perceval’s weak government was unable to give Wellington the robust support he needed and demanded. The Opposition, calling for peace with Napoleon and an end to the whole enterprise in the Peninsula, was – for the moment – supported by the Prince of Wales.
If Wellington’s war was to continue, he needed to deliver a successful campaign in 1811. Gordon’s main correspondent in London was his often scathing brother, Lord Aberdeen, who told him that, if the general feeling in London was ‘gloomy and unfavourable’, it was largely Gordon’s fault for raising hopes too high. Months earlier Gordon had promised him the destruction of Masséna’s army. Aberdeen now shot back: ‘You taught us to expect the utter annihilation of Masséna and his army over and over again. And these expectations which you entertained so warmly were certainly in some degree countenanced by the despatches of Lord Wellington. This is the reason people are in some degree disappointed.’ In reality, the most noticeable feature of Gordon’s private correspondence throughout the campaign is his volatility. He swings freely between pessimism and optimism, no doubt partly reflecting the mood of the man with whom he worked so closely.
The winter break gave Wellington’s men time to remember that there was more to life than war. Jonathan Leach found abundant game: ‘We contrived to amuse ourselves very well … and often with success: hares, quails, snipes and golden plovers being abundant … The French cavalry pickets … never interfered with us, nor interrupted our sport, although we frequently coursed hares and shot quails, within half range of their carbines.’ Some of the soldiers in Leach’s battalion put on a play, but actors got so drunk they forgot their parts. Thomas Todd and his Highlander mates found they had not much to do during the winter: ‘Having very little duty, our time was spent at football.’ They were based in a convent and were poorly supplied with food until ‘an accident procured us a short relief. Some of our men, amusing themselves in piercing the ceiling with their bayonets, discovered a trap door, and found a great concealed store of food and valuables. We fared well while it lasted.’
Highlanders played a pivotal role in the British army. Since the catastrophe of the Battle of Culloden half a century earlier, when the flower of Scotland’s Highland clans died for Bonnie Prince Charlie in his rebellion against George II, Scotland had been the British army’s most fertile recruiting ground. The Scots like the Irish were fine fighters, and in those parts of the British Isles where jobs were short the army meant work, money and adventure. But there was only one army and it was only natural that within it national feelings sometimes ran high. In Major General the Honourable Charles Colville’s brigade, Joseph Donaldson and other Scots found themselves resenting their very English commander, who appeared to despise all things Scottish. ‘He found means to annoy us a good deal. Perhaps he believed with many people in England that the Scots run about their native hills eating raw oats like horses with nothing but a kilt to cover their nakedness and that they had no right to receive any other treatment when they entered the army than what is usually given to any animal when caged.’
Another commander who didn’t enjoy universal affection, the Light Division’s Robert Craufurd, went home on leave that winter. Jonathan Leach was delighted: ‘God be praised we have got rid of that vagabond.’ His place was filled by Major General William Erskine. He was a near-disaster: Craufurd
may have been unpredictable but he had moments of inspired brilliance; Erskine by contrast was excessively cautious and Wellington had already complained that the man was nearly blind. His poor leadership of the Light Division in 1811 made Wellington count the days to Craufurd’s return.
Another officer Wellington had to part with was Fred Ponsonby, who was needed to command the cavalry protecting Cadiz 200 miles away to the south. He found himself leading a charge by German hussars at the Battle of Barrosa on 5 March 1811. A young infantry officer, Robert Blakeney, watched Ponsonby’s hussars passing in front of the British line: ‘We gave the Germans a cheer … The enemy’s cavalry turned round and faced them stoutly, their commander placing himself some distance in their front. As the Germans closed on the enemy our cheers were enthusiastic. The brave French leader was instantly cut down; our cavalry charged right through them from rear to front, one red coat always conspicuous, Colonel Ponsonby.’ This was Fred Ponsonby in full cry: ‘The fox-hunting instinct was strong in Col Ponsonby,’ said one chronicler. The British commander at Barrosa, General Graham, described Ponsonby’s action as ‘a brilliant and most successful charge against a squadron of French dragoons who were entirely routed’. Ponsonby was wounded in the charge and had a narrow escape. Someone lashed out at him with a sabre, but he managed ‘very dexterously to turn the edge of it’ so that it didn’t cut through his knee. But he had a huge bruise and a slight cut across his face. He longed for the day when he would have his own regiment. He got his wish in June 1811. Wellington gave him command of the newly arrived 12th Light Dragoons. Ponsonby was delighted, and the 12th’s historian described him as the ‘Beau Ideal’ of a cavalry officer: ‘chivalrous, modest, untouched by fear, he combined cool judgment with the utmost resolution in action … The 4 years in which he led the 12th light dragoons were to be numbered amongst the most brilliant in their history.’
Wellington had not been at Barrosa. He had been preoccupied with preparing his army for an early campaign. It had been a hard winter for his troops and it had been dreadful for Masséna’s. By February 1811 the French around Santarém were suffering severe privation. ‘The horses in Masséna’s army were kept alive … on the stalks of the vine, bruised and mixed with corn … Many of the Portuguese peasantry, armed with fowling pieces, pikes etc etc aided by the militia … continually harassed the French, cut off their supplies, killed stragglers without mercy and in various other ways placed Masséna’s army in anything but an enviable situation.’
By the beginning of March Masséna’s position had become impossible. His army was on the move – northwards, away from Lisbon. Within hours the British were in Santarém seeing for themselves how the French had suffered and how they had taken it out on the local population. Jonathan Leach reported ‘squalor and filth’ everywhere. George Simmons found the houses ‘torn and dilapidated, and the few miserable inhabitants moving skeletons’. In another village he walked into a house and found ‘two young ladies … brutally violated … unable to rise from a mattress of straw …’ The way the French ‘vandals’ had treated the Portuguese, he said, ‘rouses the fiercest passions within us, and will make us, when we come up with the enemy, take ample vengeance upon them for their unheard of and disgusting cruelties’. August Schaumann saw the corpse of a peasant propped up in a ludicrous position in a hole in a garden wall ‘to make fun of us when we came along’. The French left suffering animals in their wake too. John Kincaid, Joseph Donaldson and William Grattan found 500 donkeys left by the French hamstrung and wallowing helplessly on a river bank. ‘The poor creatures looked us piteously in the face as much as to say: “Are you not ashamed to call yourselves human beings?” … had fate at that moment placed five hundred Frenchmen in our hands … I am confident that every one of them would have undergone the same operation.’
Slowly, inexorably, Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army propelled the French back towards Spain. Wellington continued his strategy of careful exploitation of Masséna’s discomfiture rather than outright confrontation. He was determined to ‘force them out of Portugal by the distresses they will suffer, and do them all the mischief I can upon this retreat. Masséna is an old fox, and is as cautious as I am: he risks nothing.’
In less than a week the French pulled back seventy miles to just south of Coimbra and turned north-east apparently heading for the Spanish border. Occasionally they turned and fought. In one of these encounters Ned Costello showed what a soft-hearted fellow he was when a Frenchman sent a musket ball whizzing past his head. The Frenchman didn’t then retreat with his comrades, but began to reload, so Costello promptly shot him from fifty yards away. ‘In an instant I was beside him, the shot had entered his head … A few quick turns of the eye as it rolled its dying glances on mine turned my whole blood within me, and I reproached myself as his destroyer. An indescribable uneasiness came over me, I felt almost a criminal.’ He knelt down, gave the dying man a swig of wine and wiped the foam from his lips. Then he heard a groan from another Frenchman, ‘big tears suddenly gushing down his sunburst countenance, as he pointed with a finger, to my victim, “vous avez tué mon pauvre frère”, he said (you have killed my poor brother)’.
Wellington took every opportunity to use the momentum of his advance to harry the French retreat. His cavalry and his lighter troops were in constant touch with Masséna’s rearguard. In each clash Wellington managed to outsmart the French and force them back north and then east towards Spain. Kincaid says that at a spot called Foz de Arouce on the River Ceira, ‘Lord Wellington, having a prime nose for smelling out an enemy’s blunder … discovered Ney had left himself on the wrong side of the river.’ Wellington threw in the Light Division and Picton’s 3rd Division as well as the Portuguese, and the French were ‘driven back across the river with great loss’. Jonathan Leach saw many Frenchmen ‘drowned in the Ceira by attempting to flounder through its rapid stream. Some hundreds perished in this manner and they threw two of their eagles into the river to prevent their becoming trophies of the victors.’ The eagle was a Napoleonic regiment’s most prized emblem. At one stage Wellington had a lucky escape. He was, as usual, close to the action in order to maintain control. He stood on a little hill and ‘some of the enemy’s sharpshooters stole, unperceived, very near to him and began firing but fortunately without effect’. It was another instance of Wellington’s extraordinary good luck, which persisted throughout his military career. Over the seven years between Mondego Bay and Waterloo nearly all his close aides were killed or wounded beside him.
After a day’s rest Kincaid and his fellow Rifles crossed the river. ‘The fords were still so deep that, as an officer with an empty haversack on my back, it was as much as I could do to flounder across it without swimming. The solders, ballasted with their knapsacks and the sixty rounds of ball cartridge, were of course in better fording trim.’ When Ney and Masséna reached Celorico, the two rival French marshals clashed decisively. Masséna ordered the army to head south-east through difficult mountain country instead of along the road to Almeida and the Spanish border. Ney refused, saying it was an absurd route. Masséna dismissed him and the army’s most popular marshal returned to France.
Before quitting Portugal, Masséna decided to turn and do battle with Wellington. He chose to make his stand at Sabugal on the road to Spain, where the River Côa offered him a promising line of defence against the advancing British. The fighting started in dense fog: General Erskine, in his first major test as leader of the Light Division after relieving Craufurd, ordered his men east across the Côa without being exactly sure where he was. Light-infantry troops soon found themselves outnumbered by the French and in danger of being surrounded. If it had not been for the initiative of the ever resourceful Colonel Sydney Beckwith, now a brigade commander, who concentrated his men on a small hill and fought off several attacks, the Light Division would have been severely depleted. Thomas Garrety was standing nearby when Beckwith received a nasty wound in the head. ‘With the blood streaming down his face [he] rode
amongst the foremost of the skirmishers, directing all with ability and praising the men in a loud cheerful voice … I was close to him at the time. One of our company called out: “Old Sydney is wounded.”’ Beckwith heard the remark and instantly replied, ‘But he won’t leave you: fight on my brave fellows, we shall beat them!’ Garrety’s musket brought down a Frenchman: ‘I advanced close to the poor fellow as he lay on his side. Never shall I forget the alarm that was pictured on his countenance: he thought I was going to bayonet him, to avert which he held out his knapsack, containing most likely all his worldly substance, by way of appeasing my wrath. Unwilling to injure a fallen foe, I did not take his life …’
A few hours later the lifting fog allowed Wellington to send reinforcements across the river without any danger of the men losing their bearings, and the French soon retired from the battlefield. Masséna’s defeat at Sabugal prompted him to withdraw from Portugal to restock in Spain. Gordon confidently wrote home that they hoped to recapture Almeida and Badajoz, the two formidable border fortresses which had just fallen to the French. ‘I must say I think this has been the most brilliant campaign Great Britain has witnessed this long while, and has fully shown the superiority of British troops.’ But, again no doubt echoing the sentiments of his chief, Gordon went on bitterly to attack Wellington’s generals, whom he described as ‘not worth anything … In short if Lord Wellington is not on the spot everything goes on wrong and he can place little confidence in any of them.’ Erskine’s command of the Light Division was certainly disappointing, and Wellington was delighted when Craufurd returned from leave in early May.