by Peter Snow
Seymour Larpent dined with Wellington the night before the attack, staying there until ten o’clock. ‘He was all gaiety and spirits and only said on leaving the room: “Remember! At four in the morning.”’ Larpent was up early to watch it all from the top of La Rhune. ‘Even the doctors and the two parsons’ went off to get a ringside seat. Larpent saw it all. The day, he said, was ‘beautiful’, his view ‘an uninterrupted panorama of battle, fire and smoke’ all the way from the western seashore to the mountains over to the east. The view from La Rhune is breathtaking enough in time of peace. To the south precipitous, rocky slopes plunge sharply down to the town of Vera by the Bidasoa 3,000 feet below. To the north an elaborate pattern of hills and valleys falls gently away across the Nivelle to the plain of Bayonne and, beyond, the Biscay coast of France stretching up towards Bordeaux. On 10 November 1813, this landscape presented Larpent with a unique spectacle of death and destruction. Through gaps in the smoke he would have seen thousands of small flecks of red and blue where the footsoldiers were fighting it out. He may have spotted the odd extra flash of white and gold where light dragoons on either side cantered past the fighting looking for points of enemy weakness or carrying orders to unit commanders. Larpent may even have had a glimpse of the understated blue-grey of Wellington’s jacket flitting past rocks and trees as he rode from one crisis point to another, usually with a small, colourful group of aides behind him, sometimes alone.
George Bell was with one of Hill’s divisions on the far right. ‘As we advanced the red-glare flash of the cannon, the bellowing of the guns and the white puff far to our left, showed us that death and destruction were extremely busy.’ The French at last collapsed under the impetus of Hill’s attack. ‘I confess I was not sorry to see them give way, for we had enough blood and brains on the sod for one day … we passed on through their lines of defence … we found their rations uncooked and plenty of onions and other vegetables, which were transferred tout de suite into our haversacks en passant.’ Bell and his mates chased the French till sundown and then sat down to rest. ‘We turned out the contents of our larder – a Dutch cheese, onions, biscuit, cold ration beef and a little rum … it was marvellous how quick the dead and the wounded were stripped on the battlefield by the camp followers of the two great armies – an unhallowed trade.’
Further west, the Light Division swept nearly everything before them and when they came to a stop Colborne and Smith found themselves facing one last very well-defended enemy redoubt. Sydney Beckwith, who had been a highly successful and popular Rifles commander ever since he landed in Portugal just before Vimeiro five years earlier, rode up and told them that their orders were to ‘move on’. ‘What do you mean – attack?’ asked Colborne. ‘I don’t know: your orders are to move on.’ ‘What an evasive order!’ remarked Colborne. ‘Oh sir,’ said Smith to him, ‘let’s take the last of their works: it will be the operation of a few minutes.’ Colborne allowed himself to be persuaded by Smith’s enthusiasm. But it turned out to be a lot more difficult. The regiment lost a large number of men. Wellington said he was sorry they had attacked the strongpoint; he had not meant them to. ‘Some discussion took place as to the order Colborne had received,’ said Smith. ‘However I think now as I did then, “move on” implied “attack”.’ Juana’s premonition turned out to be correct. Smith’s ‘beautiful thoroughbred mare’, called Old Chap, was hit at the Nivelle and ‘she fell upon me with a crash, which I thought had squeezed me as flat as a thread-paper, her blood, like a fountain, pouring into my face.’ Wellington thought Smith must have been wounded when he saw him a few minutes later, and Juana was ‘horror-struck’ but deeply relieved.
The Battle of the Nivelle again caught Soult on the wrong foot. As Wellington had guessed, the marshal had expected the attack on the coast where he was stronger. It came in the hills. With his forces hurled back by the force of Wellington’s right hook, Soult abandoned his positions by the sea, around Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and pulled back to Bayonne, a massive fortress, strategically placed on the confluence of the Rivers Nive and Adour. Saint-Jean-de-Luz became Wellington’s first headquarters in France.
Napoleon’s hold on his own country was crumbling for the first time since he had come to power. Even as he heard Wellington was threatening the next riverline, the Nive, he was faced with invasion of the French homeland in the east by Prussia, Austria and Russia. But few thought the outcome inevitable. The talk on the eastern front, with varying enthusiasm on the part of each of the three powers in the alliance, was of making peace with Napoleon. They would offer the Emperor recognition within France’s traditional, natural borders. Even Wellington was careful to hedge his bets. On 21 November he wrote to Bathurst in London that he was being told ‘the sentiment throughout France is the same as I have found it here, an earnest desire to get rid of him [Napoleon], from a conviction that as long as he governs they will have no peace’. But Wellington’s advice was ‘I recommend to your Lordship to make peace with him if you can acquire all the objects which you have a right to expect … If Buonaparte becomes moderate, he is probably as good a Sovereign as we can desire in France …’ As 1813 turned into 1814 and Wellington occupied more of France, his view hardened. He reported that the vast majority of French civilians he was encountering wanted Napoleon’s regime replaced by the old Bourbon monarchy. But Napoleon’s soldiers, for the most part, fought on and, as the Emperor himself rejected compromise, it became clear that only his defeat would end the war.
It was to take five months of occasionally very bitter fighting before the struggle ended. The first major encounter took place on and around the River Nive, which flows north-west into Bayonne from the Pyrenees. On 9 December Wellington sent part of his army across the Nive to seize the territory between it and the next river, the Adour, a little further north. Soult, with his back to Bayonne, fought back hard – first attacking the troops Wellington had left west of the Nive, then those under General Hill who had crossed it on the 9th. The pontoon bridge Wellington stretched across the river to allow his forces to support each other was swept away by a flood on the 12th. On the 13th Soult attacked Hill, who was now on his own east of the river. Soult’s 35,000 French hammered into Hill’s 14,000. George Bell’s regiment, the 34th, was pushed back by overwhelming weight of numbers until it was rallied to make a desperate stand. ‘Dead or alive, my lads, said our chief, we must hold our ground.’ Bell and his men made a bayonet charge, with powerful artillery support. ‘Writhing and quivering humanity lay over each other now in mortal combat, steeped in blood. The cannon shot from each side was crushing up the living with the dead and dying … The broken column retired.’ Once again British lines were able to take a heavy toll of French columns. Bell remarked that the French always attacked in column, and he thought they were wrong to do so. ‘They … gave us an opportunity of showing them their error, which they never acknowledged to this day.’ Colborne, one of Wellington’s greatest admirers, felt that on this occasion the Commander in Chief had ‘committed a great error’ leaving Hill quite isolated on the east bank of the Nive. It had been a risk, but Wellington wanted to keep the pressure on Soult by widening the scope of his advance. And if there was one commander he could trust to do it, it was Rowland Hill. Wellington was quick to congratulate Hill afterwards, shaking him by the hand and saying, ‘Hill, the day’s yours.’ In spite of the odds against him Hill had inflicted 3,300 casualties on the French – almost twice the number his own side had suffered.
For much of January and February 1814 the weather made any progress impracticable. The two sides stayed in winter quarters. Jonathan Leach found plenty of time to do some shooting in January. ‘The snow drove the woodcock down onto the low ground by which I profited and had some capital sport.’ The brief interlude allowed the usual fraternisation to take place between some front-line pickets. One lady from Bayonne ventured as far as the front line with her pet poodle to see what the British redcoats looked like. The poodle took off and ran into the British lines. ‘Witho
ut a moment’s delay,’ reported John Cooke, ‘we sent it back by a soldier to its anxious mistress, who was highly delighted and with her own delicate hand presented a goblet of wine to the man, who … quaffed the delicious beverage to the dregs, touched his cap and rejoined us with a pipe in his mouth and a store of tobacco … presented to him by the French soldiers.’
The weather improved enough by the middle of February for Wellington to order his men forward again. Bayonne was to be encircled and besieged. Wellington did not want to leave such a formidable fortress in his wake without at least neutralising it by blockade. The treacherous mouth of the River Adour would have to be bridged to cut off the city from the north. A small British detachment managed to cross the river in small boats on 24 February and seize a position from the French on the north side of the river. A few of Fred Ponsonby’s dragoons went in the boats as well, their horses swimming alongside their riders. It was now vital to construct a bridge to supply and reinforce them. What followed was an engineering feat as daring as any in the war so far. It was achieved only when the Royal Navy, inspired by the army’s success, braved the wild surf at the exposed mouth of the river to ship in the heavy equipment needed to strap together a bridge of boats. Several sailors and engineers lost their lives, swept away by the waves, but the bridge was deftly built and thousands of men were soon across.
Bayonne was now surrounded and Wellington reported to London that Ponsonby and his dragoons had patrolled as far as twenty-seven miles inland before he was halted by a French outpost. Wellington remained uneasy about his cavalry and Ponsonby was one of the few cavalry officers he still felt he could trust on special operations after six years of campaigning. ‘In Spain’, he was to say later, ‘the Germans, the 14th Light Dragoons and perhaps the 12th under Fred Ponsonby were the only regiments that knew their duty and did not get into scrapes of every description.’
Wellington’s main force pressed east from the Nive leaving Bayonnne surrounded but untaken behind them. Only when they had crossed four more rivers was there serious opposition from Soult at the town of Orthez. The French marshal had taken up a formidable position on a great ridge. The only way to dislodge him was for Wellington’s men to fight their way up four steep spurs. Three and a half years earlier the French had clambered up the steep slopes of the ridge at Bussaco only to be thrown back each time by the British defenders on top. Now it was the French who were defending the high ground and the British who were suffering the exhaustion of the climb and the steady fire of French skirmishers in their struggle to reach the summit. William Surtees of the Rifles watched Wellington – at his command post – looking ‘extremely thoughtful and serious … the enemy’s position proved to be exceedingly strong and difficult of access by us’. But Wellington co-ordinated his attacks with such care that his men eventually scrambled to the top from a number of different directions at the same time.
Wellington made Colborne’s light infantrymen the arrowhead of the assault. ‘They did it beautifully,’ wrote Colborne, unashamedly claiming the glory. ‘When all the rest were in confusion, the 52nd marched … as if on parade, accelerating their march as they approached the hill … I rode on to the top of the hill and waved my cap … and the men … trotted up in the finest order.’ The final showdown took place at the church of Saint-Boes, which still stands above the trees on the skyline today. By the evening the French were in headlong retreat to the north, crossing the River Adour and eventually retiring to the well-fortified city of Toulouse.
Wellington wrote to his brother Richard: ‘The action was for some time very warm but I never saw troops get such a beating as they did … and they were saved at all only by the night.’ Just over 2,000 British, Portuguese and Spanish were killed or wounded at Orthez; the French lost twice as many. In recent years a stone has been erected in a small clearing just north of the town commemorating the ‘English, Portuguese, French and Spanish who died in the Battle of Orthez’. It’s the work of an elderly local resident, Jacques Cloup, who says the monument owes its existence to a remarkable piece of oral history. When he was a boy, he says his great-aunt told him the story of a mass burial at this spot which she had, in her turn, heard of as a young girl from her great-grandfather, who was a child at the time of the battle in 1814. He told her that the farmers of the time were so appalled by the thousands of stripped and plundered bodies of men and horses littering their fields after the battle that they clubbed together to bury them. All were moved to this spot and interred, regardless of their nationality, horses and all, in one large pit.*
Just for a moment it looked as if the ‘finger of God’, which Wellington had boasted about, might be pointing elsewhere. During the attack on Saint-Boes the Commander in Chief had dismounted and was standing with his Spanish liaison officer, General Álava, when a Portuguese soldier limped to the rear explaining as he passed that he was ofendido (‘wounded’ in Portuguese). ‘Wellington was laughing at the expression when a grape or musket shot struck the hilt of his sword driving it violently against his hip. He fell to the ground, but rose to his feet immediately, smiling and saying: “By God I am ofendido this time.” He was able to remount and ride slowly.’
There is another version of this story. Wellington was said to have been having a good laugh at the expense of Álava, whose bottom had just been bruised by a spent bullet. But the laugh was on Wellington moments later when he too was hit, and Álava remarked that he deserved it for laughing at him. ‘It was a bad bruise and skin was broken,’ Larpent observed, expressing the fervent wish that Wellington would soon make a full recovery ‘as all our prospects here would vanish with that man’. It is astonishing that this was the only time Wellington was ever hurt: musket balls tore his clothing at Talavera and Salamanca, and he lost two horses under him at Assaye. Very few of his aides escaped death or severe wounding in the two dozen battles and sieges in which he and his staff spent so much time together near the front line. A cannon ball took off the head of the aide crossing the river beside him at Assaye and his second in command, Lord Uxbridge, lost a leg to a piece of canister shot from a French cannon that shaved Wellington’s horse’s head at Waterloo.
The campaign that Wellington and his exhausted but triumphant veterans had fought for six years was drawing to a close. Napoleon’s hold on France was crumbling. In the towns and villages Wellington passed through, the white Bourbon cockade, the royalist emblem, was everywhere. Only Bayonne held out and the determined Nicolas Soult, whose army, though depleted by desertions, was still ready to fight for the Emperor. In the early months of 1814 Napoleon fought some of his most brilliant rearguard actions against the advancing Russians, Prussians and Austrians. Wellington said that Napoleon’s campaign that spring was ‘probably the ablest of all his performances’. Soon after the beginning of April rumours began to find their way from Paris that Napoleon had simply run out of ways to resist. But neither Wellington nor Soult knew for sure, and one final and ferocious battle in southern France was still to be fought before the shooting stopped. Soult concentrated his men in the fortified city of Toulouse, and Wellington found himself fighting more of a siege than an open battle. His plan was to conduct a multi-pronged attack on the French, who held a number of very strong positions. He made the mistake of giving his Spanish forces the task of attacking the most difficult strongpoint. Just about everything went wrong. Picton tried to turn what was to be a feint attack into a real one and lost 400 men, Beresford conducted his men in a long flank march which exposed them to murderous gunfire, and the Spanish were routed in an assault on the main French position at the top of a hill.
Colborne, already critical of his chief’s conduct of the Battle of the Nive, called Toulouse ‘the worst arranged battle that could be, nothing but mistakes … I think the Duke most deserved to have been beaten.’ Wellington’s loss was much greater than Soult’s – 4,600 to 3,200, and it was only the fact that Soult and his army abandoned the city the night after the fighting, on 11 April, that allowed the British and t
heir allies to claim it as a success. Wellington, making the most of the French withdrawal, described his rather dubious victory as a ‘very severe affair with the enemy in which we defeated them completely’.
The loss of nearly 8,000 killed and wounded on both sides made the Battle of Toulouse one of the bloodiest as well as the most pointless in this long war. The terrible irony was that Napoleon had given up the struggle five days earlier. Fred Ponsonby brought the news from Bordeaux, where his light dragoons had been welcomed by royalists. On the way back he galloped when he could, but he had to talk his way through several French outposts. He found Wellington in his shirtsleeves pulling on his boots. ‘I have extraordinary news for you,’ said Ponsonby. ‘Ay I thought so. I knew we should have peace: I’ve long expected it,’ said Wellington, assuming that the allies had made peace with Napoleon. ‘No,’ said Ponsonby, ‘Napoleon has abdicated.’ ‘How abdicated? Ay, ’tis time indeed. You don’t say, upon my honour! Hurrah!’ cried Wellington, ‘turning round on his heel and snapping his fingers’.