To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

  In all the frivolity of the first few days in Madrid, hardly anyone seemed to notice that there were still 2,500 Frenchmen holed up in the so-called Retiro, a fort that stubbornly held out for forty-eight hours. Its garrison soon decided that they could not withstand Wellington’s artillery, and, when they surrendered, the place was found to contain no fewer than 20,000 muskets and 180 guns, a sumptuous haul for Wellington’s army.

  Wellington’s future plans depended to a great extent on the support he could expect from the Spanish armies. His problem was that, ever since the now long-departed and unlamented General Cuesta had let him down at Talavera, he had little faith in the Spanish. Although the Spanish ‘cry viva, and are very fond of us, and hate the French’, he said he did not ‘expect much from their exertions’. Spanish regular forces had been defeated in nearly every encounter with the French and they appeared unwilling to respond to Wellington’s call to raise, train and arm the extra forces that he badly needed to match French numbers. Wellington appreciated actions by Spanish guerrillas like Juan Martín Díaz, known as ‘El Empecinado’ (the Undaunted), and Julián Sánchez. They had long been doing much to harass the French and distract them from turning on his army. But he believed that, if he was to throw the French out of Spain, the Spanish had to do much more. He complained that they were ignoring his demands for a substantial increase in their regular forces. ‘What can be done for this lost nation? As for raising men or supplies, or taking any one measure to enable them to carry on the war, that is out of the question. Indeed, there is nobody to excite them to exertion, or to take advantage of the enthusiasm of the people, or of their enmity against the French. Even the guerrillas are getting quietly into the large towns, and amusing themselves …’ Wellington’s frustration was understandable: central organisation was not a Spanish strength but guerrilla warfare was. It was ungracious of him not to recognise that.

  Wellington now embarked on a course of action he was later to regret. He realised that his position in Madrid was vulnerable. If Soult left Andalusia, which he soon did, and joined up with Joseph he could threaten Madrid. Rather than attempt to hold Madrid against such a superior force, Wellington would go for the French army that was weaker. He decided to leave part of his army in Madrid and turn his attention back to the enemy force he had defeated at Salamanca. It was now moving south again from Burgos under General Clausel, and Wellington saw a chance to bring it to battle and defeat it or at least drive Clausel back towards France. Hill could be summoned from the south-west to guard his southern flank in case a retreat back towards Portugal became necessary. As always Wellington calculated carefully, ready to err on the side of caution, but this looked to him like an opportunity too good to miss. He left Madrid on 30 August and sent his forces north-west with the cavalry racing ahead. It was the start of a three-month campaign in which nearly everything went wrong.

  Clausel had started stealing back towards the Duero river when Wellington and his forces had occupied Madrid. But when he saw Wellington was on his way back he retreated. It was all Fred Ponsonby’s cavalry could do to catch up with him. He and his fellow cavalryman and friend William Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons found themselves constantly in action. Ponsonby was asked by Wellington to seize a bridge across one river and secure it for his infantry to cross. But before he could canter across it the bridge was blown up by the retreating French. Clausel was taking no chances.

  Five days later Ponsonby and Tomkinson were thirty miles further on, way ahead of the main force, probing up the main road towards Burgos. It was evening and the French noticed that Ponsonby and Tomkinson had only a small force with around 300 horses between them. The French decided to try and drive them back. The only way – back or forward – was along the road. The country either side was difficult for cavalry, made up of vineyards intersected by ditches. The British horsemen formed up in a block across the highway as the French made their approach. ‘They came down the road at a trot, trumpeting to charge. We stood still,’ wrote Tomkinson, ‘and they halted within thirty yards, firing volleys at us. When we moved forward they retired, and we kept our ground till dark. Colonel Ponsonby spoke highly of our squadron, and we can with equal justice bear testimony to his conduct.’ The next morning the French gave up and moved back nine miles. Clausel was not going to give Wellington a chance of attacking him, and by 18 September Wellington’s army found the city of Burgos empty but for a garrison of 2,200 men, which Clausel had left in the castle there under a resourceful commander called General Dubreton. Wellington wanted to pursue Clausel beyond the Ebro if necessary, but he dared not leave Burgos behind him in French hands. He needed a secure escape route. Besides, he now heard that Marshal Soult had been ordered by Joseph to abandon Andalusia and march north to join him. The opportunity to chase Clausel was still there, but Wellington needed to capture Burgos quickly.

  He settled down reluctantly to besiege the castle at Burgos. It stood on a steep knoll north of the city, and its walls had recently been rebuilt on Napoleon’s orders. Wellington had only three medium eighteen-pounder siege guns and five smaller guns. He should have had at least twelve siege guns, and preferably twenty-four-pounders. Even six would have helped. Three eighteen-pounders were glaringly inadequate. Wellington knew it, but he still persisted with the siege. And he failed to make adequate arrangements to provide himself with more guns. Months of success had made him over-confident.

  The first task was to seize a fortified bastion on a small hill just north-east of the castle. On the night of 20 September Charles Cocks, a young intelligence officer, whom Wellington prized greatly, led what was supposed to be a diversionary attack on the outpost, which turned into a real attack when the main attack failed on the other side. After a desperate scramble, Major Cocks and his men scaled the walls and made it into the fort. But they suffered more than 400 casualties, twice as many as the French. And they still hadn’t captured the castle itself. Alexander Gordon wrote home that the ‘affair was not well managed’. He also mentioned that they were attacking the main castle with ‘only three 18 pounders. I am not very sanguine about the result.’ His chief, Wellington, was writing home the next day: ‘I am getting apprehensive that the means which I have are not sufficient to enable me to take the castle. I am informed, however, that the enemy are ill provided with water; and that their magazines of provisions are in a place exposed to be set on fire.’

  But Dubreton had a resolute garrison and a few powerful guns in the castle to train on its attackers. By 2 October Wellington was reporting to Hill, ‘I am afraid we shall not succeed in taking this castle … I have only three guns one of which was destroyed and another much damaged last night.’ The attackers were now affectionately calling their damaged gun ‘Nelson’, after Britain’s one-armed naval hero, and digging mines under the walls as a further way of forcing a breach. But it was to no avail. And on 8 October the valiant Charles Cocks was killed in an attempted storming of the breach they had made. When he was at the top of the breach, a musket ball passed between his ribs and severed an artery just above his heart. It was a severe blow to Fred Ponsonby and William Tomkinson. They had all been light dragoons together, almost inseparable. Tomkinson lost a ‘sincere friend … He had always been so lucky in the heat of fire that I fancied he would be preserved to the army.’ Wellington was to miss Cocks badly too. Ponsonby remembered the Commander in Chief walking into his room, announcing briefly that Cocks was dead and then pacing up and down silently. Wellington was close to tears. Cocks, with his easy Spanish and his superb horsemanship, had ridden many a lone mission as the army’s eyes and ears: he had been a fine intelligence officer as well as lively company at Wellington’s dinner table.

  A few days later while the siege continued Ponsonby was galloping among his outposts on the road north-east of Burgos when he was wounded by a stray shot. ‘So highly did the Duke of Wellington value this excellent officer that after his wound he had him brought to his own quarters and made him travel in his carriage until
sufficiently recovered to ride.’ Ponsonby’s cousin, Colonel William Ponsonby, wrote to Fred’s father to reassure him ‘that no serious consequence is at all to be apprehended from his wound’. William said that Fred had been in a skirmish at an advanced post and received a musket ball in the thigh, ‘which however was immediately extracted. The bone is certainly not injured, nor has there been any inflammation or fever, so that there is every reason to hope that he will be very shortly on his legs again.’ It wasn’t till two weeks later that Fred Ponsonby wrote to his sister-in-law to tell her that she could pass on to the family the news that he had ‘met with a little accident … I hope they will not be in a great fuss about this scratch of mine.’ Ponsonby was soon back in the saddle.

  The siege did not last much longer. The weather was appalling. Sheets of rain were making work on the breaches well nigh impossible. But the critical turning point came when Wellington heard on 19 October that Soult was on his way from Andalusia to join up with Joseph and march on Madrid. Wellington had hoped that Soult and Joseph would be delayed by the weather or by the Spanish. He had hoped too that the Spanish would reinforce him with more than the 11,000 fresh troops they had provided over the past month. Most of all, he had hoped to be way beyond Burgos chasing Clausel across the Ebro. Only six weeks earlier he had said, ‘I hope before Christmas … to have all the gentlemen safe on the other side of the Ebro.’ But none of these things had come to pass. He decided he now had no choice but to turn round and retreat, join up with Hill and find secure winter quarters. No general likes to retreat, but Wellington was a realist, always ready to exercise judicious caution when he felt he had to. He had retreated after Talavera three years earlier. He would retreat now. He wrote to Hill telling him to abandon Madrid and march north-west to meet up with him. He also wrote to Britain’s naval commander in Biscay, Commodore Sir Home Popham, telling him that he no longer needed to shift new siege guns inland from Santander, the port in northern Spain which the Royal Navy had now established as Wellington’s new point of supply.

  There was a lot of muttering in the ranks about Wellington’s ill-conceived siege of Burgos. Occasionally the disgruntlement boiled over. While the Commander in Chief was visiting some soldiers wounded in the siege, one of them, who had lost both his legs, burst out: ‘Maybe yer satisfied now, you hooky nosed vagabond!’ Wellington took it in good humour and sought special treatment for the soldier, who ended up a pensioner at the Chelsea Hospital.

  Nevertheless, he was deeply aware that his attack on the castle had been a mistake, and one of his gunners wrote later of the ‘inadequacy of our means in artillery’. He said there wasn’t the same spirit as there had been at the sieges of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. And this ‘seemed to cause some discontent at the troops in the mind of the Commander in Chief’. Once again, Wellington was guilty of a certain ambivalence. Late in the siege he wrote a remarkable despatch to Lord Liverpool, now Prime Minister, saying that some people were blaming the government for the siege, but that ‘it was entirely my own act’. He insisted on taking the blame for embarking on the expedition with inadequate means and inexperienced troops. But he did imply that more could have been done by the Royal Navy and by his own supply team to get some heavy guns moving faster towards Burgos. He then went on to criticise very directly an officer in charge of one attempt to storm the castle:

  He paid no attention to his orders, notwithstanding the pains I took in writing them; and in reading and explaining them to him twice over. He made none of the dispositions ordered … and instead of regulating the attack as he ought, he rushed on as if he had been the leader of the Forlorn Hope, and fell, together with many of those who went with him. He had my instructions in his pocket; and as the French got possession of his body, and were made acquainted with the plan, the attack could never be repeated.

  That Wellington attempted – in a letter to the Prime Minister – to shift part of the blame for his failure at Burgos on to an officer who had died in the siege does him no credit. At least he had the grace to admit that he himself had made a strategic blunder in going to Burgos at all. And most of his men were in no doubt: ‘I have not been in the habit much of questioning the conduct of our chief,’ said one young Guards officer, John Aitchison ‘even when it differed from what I expected, but … it appears in this instance to be extremely impolitic, not to say most wantonly reprehensible.’

  Late on 21 October, under cover of darkness, Wellington set his army moving south – back towards Valladolid. What was left of his battered old siege guns was lugged across the river with straw attached to the wheels to muffle the noise. The last of the troops in the trenches didn’t pull out till five o’clock the following morning.

  For the next four weeks Wellington’s deeply demoralised army dragged itself back the way it had advanced with such high hopes in the spring. The weather was dreadful, supplies were scarce or unobtainable, the French were constantly snapping at their heels and there were problems with their allies. Wellington sent Alexander Gordon off with two battalions of Spanish soldiers to push the French back at one river crossing. But Gordon complained that their ‘state of discipline is so terrible that one can do little or nothing with them … One regiment who was following me pretty well, upon seeing the French run upon their right who had been attacked by us, immediately set up a sort of yell and every fellow ran forward and let fly his piece and it was quite impossible ever to get them in order again. The fact is we are in a very ticklish situation.’ The French army which the British had held off during the siege of Burgos was now heavily reinforced and pressing hard on Wellington’s retreating army as it recrossed the Duero. It wasn’t until 31 October that Wellington, after a few anxious days, was able to say, ‘I have got clear, in a handsome manner, of the worst scrape I ever was in …’

  Hill, meanwhile, and the other half of the army were now evacuating Madrid and the surrounding cities of central Spain where they had spent the late summer. For all the fun William Grattan and his Irish companions had had there, Grattan observed that ‘after a sojourn of nearly three months in the Spanish capital [the British army] knew nearly as little of its inhabitants as they did of the citizens of Pekin’. He said if the British could unbend a little and conform to the ways of their hosts, the British nation would be ‘as much beloved as it is respected’. The British may not have been loved, but the people of Madrid were more than sad to see them go. They were devastated, deeply resentful that they faced renewed French occupation. They felt deserted and betrayed.

  The retreat of the two armies, which reunited near Salamanca and finally arrived at Ciudad Rodrigo in mid-November, was one of the most wretched episodes of the entire Peninsular Campaign, second only to Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna nearly four years earlier. They would start out at four o’clock in the morning, usually wet and cold after a night sleeping in the open in wind and rain. They were downhearted, exhausted and soon starving. John Kincaid and his comrades in the Light Division had seen tough marching before, but this was the worst: ‘we were now walking nearly knee deep, in a stiff mud, into which no man could thrust his foot, with the certainty of having a shoe at the end of it when he pulled it out again; and, that we might not be miserable by halves, we had this evening to regale our chops with the last morsel of biscuit that they were destined to grind during the retreat.’ Thomas Todd was a witness to perhaps the most horrific scene of all:

  One of our men, Thomas Caldwell, found a piece of meat, near the hospital … he brought it home and cooked it. A good part of it was eaten, before one of the men perceiving him, said ‘What is that you are eating?’ Tom said it was meat he had found. The others looked and knew it to be the fore-arm of a man; the hand was not at it; it was only a part from a little below the elbow and above the wrist. The man … never looked squeamish: he said it was very sweet, and was never a bit the worse.

  Wellington’s logistics team, the commissaries, failed to provide any food for part of the journey. Ensign George Bell said that the Co
mmander in Chief was partly to blame. The men were reduced, he said, to scavenging for acorns off the oak trees in the woods – anything to put in their stomachs. ‘Wellington supposed that the commissaries were supplying the army with their usual rations. The great commander, in whom we had the firmest reliance was unrivalled in skill, vigour, and genius, but could not see at once into the wants and necessities of 70,000 men.’ Wellington was not neglecting the need for supplies: the empty fields, the scarcity of food, the scale and speed of the retreat were just too much for his commissaries.

  Harry Smith had the further responsibility of looking after the fourteen-year-old wife he had rescued from Badajoz. Juana was never a burden. Her stamina and chirpy resilience constantly surprised him. He found her one evening after she had been wading through a river: ‘there was this young and delicate creature, in the month of November in the north of Spain, wet as a drowned rat, with nothing to eat and no cover from the falling deluge. Not a murmur escaped her but once.’

  One wife was not so lucky. She had loyally followed her husband through the war in appalling conditions, but one day’s march proved too much for her. She could go no further. Her husband managed to drag her a little way but at length she stopped, quite unable to move. Her husband tried to find room for her in one of the wagons, but they were all full. The army had already had to leave large numbers of people lying on the roadside. ‘The poor fellow’, wrote Joseph Donaldson, ‘was now in a dreadful dilemma, being necessitated either to leave her to the mercy of the French, or by remaining with her to be taken prisoner and even then perhaps unable to protect her … the alternative either way was heartrending.’ But there was no time to lose – the French cavalry were nearly upon them. ‘In despairing accents she begged him not to leave her … but the fear of being considered a deserter urged him to proceed, and with feelings easier imagined than described, he left her to her fate and never saw her again.’