Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (58 page)
Occasionally, where the mountains permitted, French cavalry patrols swept round the flanks of the Rearguard to fall on the stragglers. Yet though they gathered in nearly a thousand prisoners by this means, they always encountered more than they bargained for. The sound of their trumpets borne on the wind had an electrifying effect. However desperate their plight, the pallid British scarecrows would instinctively face about, level their muskets and fire. "I heard them more than once say," wrote a private of the 71st, "as they turned from the points of our bayonets, they would rather
1
Schaumann,
119-27;
Journal
of
a Soldier,
60-7;
Blakene
y,
63-4, 67;
Lynedoch,
293-4;
Leith Hay, I,
108-11.
face a hundred fresh Germans than ten dying Englishmen." Nothing in all their sufferings so enraged the latter as the failure of the enemy to close. " Why don't they come on like men," cried one, "whilst we've strength in us left to fight them?"
1
Scenes not disimilar were enacted in the parallel march on the road to Vigo. Here Brigadier-General Craufurd—the little, dark, wiry man whom the men of the Light Brigade called Black Bob— kept his troops in heart and good order by sheer strength of personality. Wherever suffering or danger was greatest, he was certain to appear, growling like a worried bulldog and bearing a canteen of rum and a small cup which he offered to his men with oaths and homely counsel. "Many a man in that retreat," wrote one of them, "caught courage from his stern eye and gallant bearing.
...
He did not like retreating, that man. War was his very element, and toil and danger seemed to call forth only an unceasing determination to surmount them." Once he caught an officer crossing a stream on a soldier's back: "Put him down, sir, put him down," he shouted, plunging into the icy water, "go back, sir, and go through the water like the others!" On another occasion, he halted the brigade and sentenced two men to be flogged by drumhead court-martial, standing beside them while the sentence was carried out. " If he flogged two," wrote Rifleman Harris, "he saved hundreds." His troops looked upon him as the finest soldier in the world and would have followed him to hell. They walked at his side like familiars and, whenever he halted to deliver one of his stern reprimands, half a dozen of them—unshaven, shoeless and savage—would stand "leaning upon their weapons and scowling up in his face as he scolded; and, when he dashed the spurs into his reeking horse, they would throw up their rifles and hobble after him again."
Such troops and their fellow light-infantrymen of Edward Paget's Rearguard developed as the retreat went on an immense pride in their powers of endurance. At night they lay down, as 19 year-old Lieutenant Blakeney wrote, in martial wedlock, each folding to his breast his better half—his musket. For the stragglers and weaklings littering the way they felt nothing but contempt: clodhoppers they called them. At every village along the line of retreat the angry shout would go up: "Burst open the door!" and the laggards would be frog-marched into the street and set marching with kicks and blows. "Now show yer nerve," cried the sergeant of the 43rd, throttling his own racking cough; "if you die to-day, you won't have to die to-morrow. Fall in!"
1
Journal
of
a Soldier,
64;
Harris,
123.
See also Leith Hay, I,
112;
Schaumann,
119.
At Lugo on January
6th
Moore halted his army and prepared to give battle. Despite the wet and dreadful cold the effect on discipline was instantaneous. The men asked only one thing: to be allowed to visit their sufferings and injured self-respect on the enemy. For two days they bivouacked on an icy ridge without shelter and with scarcely any food, hoping against hope that the French would attack.
1
On the third day, as the enemy made no sign and the last provisions were exhausted, the retreat was resumed in a terrible night of sleet and hail. Two more days of suffering and demoralisation followed, during which the French captured another five hundred footsore, starving laggards, though only after the latter, forming square under the orders of a sergeant, had put up a desperate fight. By the second night the march had become not a succession of battalions but a vast, disorganised multitude without respect of regiment, brigade or division; the colours of that famous corps, the Royals, were attended by nine officers, three sergeants and only three privates. During this time the Rearguard repeatedly saved the army.
In the course of January 10
th the hills were left behind and the main body reached Betanzos on the coastal plain. Here the sun was shining and the orange and lemon trees were in flower; there was ample provision of food, and the famished troops were able to fill their stomachs.
2
Next day, with indescribable feelings, they caught their first glimpse of the sea and the distant masts of ships. A thorough reorganisation having taken place under the supervision of the Commander-in-Chief, the army entered Corunna that night in tolerable formation, the ragged, shoeless scarecrows stumping on frostbitten, bleeding feet through the streets with every commanding officer leading his regiment and every captain and subaltern flanking his section. The high light was the performance of two battalions of the First Foot Guards, each 800 strong, who marched in perfect formation in column of sections, with drums beating and the drum-major twirling his staff.
Before the retreat Moore had urged the Government to send transports to Corunna or Vigo—a summons which had caused great indignation among the more sanguine Ministers.
3
But not till the night of January
3rd~4th,
during the midnight halt at Herrerias
1
"I can never look back," wrote Captain Leith Hay, "to the scenes in front of Lugo without a feeling of regret that the battle was not there fought, nor ever bring to recollection the gallant bearing of the troops under all their miseries without admiration." —Leith Hay, I,
115.
See also Boothby,
206;
Journal
of
a Soldier,
68-9;
Lynedoch,
294-5;
Blake
ney,
86-7.
2
Though not without disastrous results; several men died on the spot and others went mad."—Schaumann,
130.
3
"O
!
that we had an enterprising general with a reputation
to make instead of one to save
"—Canning to Bathurst,
9th
Jan.,
1809.
H. M. C. Bathurst,
84.
after the action on the Cua, had he decided, on receiving his engineers' reports, to embark the main army at Corunna. When, therefore, it arrived, though the bay was filled with hospital and store ships, the transports were still wind-bound at Vigo. There was nothing for it but to wait for them and trust to their coming before Soult, who had lost a day or two on the march, could bring up his reserves and heavy guns. .
Nor had the General been well served by his engineers. Corunna was protected on the south by a range of heights. But, like those at Toulon fifteen years before, they were too extensive for the army to hold. Sickness, the detachment of Craufurd's contingent to Vigo and heavy losses on the retreat—at least 5000 had fallen or had been captured—had reduced Moore's infantry to a bare 15,000.! The only position on which so small a force could fight a delaying action was an inner ring of low hills completely dominated by the outer heights. Moreover embarkation presented grave risks, since it was almost impossible to get out of the harbour in certain winds. "Figure to yourself," wrote a naval officer, "two or three hundred sail of bad-sailing merchantmen, crammed chock full, and a French army at hand who, possessing themselves of the place, would be enabled from both sides of the entrance to throw shot and shells at leisure at the unhappy transports attempting to work out. Such a situation makes me shudder!"* To make matters worse, until the transports should arrive, there was a serious shortage of food; on the day the British marched into the town every provision shop closed its doors.
Therefore, though the soldiers rejoiced at the end of their sufferings and a happy commissary sat over Don Mascosa's mulled wine, smoking cigars and admiring the beauties of the harbour, those charged with the army's safety continued deeply anxious. Some even urged the Commander-in-Chief to ask Soult for a negotiated evacuation—a kind of Cintra Convention in reverse. But Moore rejected this humiliating proposal and proceeded with his usual energy to make the best of the situation. He at once embarked as many of his sick and wounded as possible in the store and hospital ships and began to fortify the landward approaches to the town. In this he was aided by the townsfolk, who, regardless of their own bleak future, threw themselves, men, women and children, with whole-hearted abandon into digging trenches, strengthening the neglected ramparts and carrying ammunition to the forts and batteries.
3
It was as though, touched by the sufferings of their allies,
1
Oman, I,
502.
2
Paget Brothers,
110.
3
Sch
aumann,
134-5, 137;
Blake
ney,
112;
Napier, T,
489.
they had resolved by a single impulse to make amends for all the improvidence and procrastination of the past six months. Among the consequences of the latter was a huge magazine of four thousand barrels of powder, sent out in haste from England at the beginning of the war and since left undistributed and unused. This was fired on the 13th, causing an explosion which broke every window in the town, swept the harbour with a tidal wave and killed a sergeant and two men on piquet more than a mile away.
Moore did not destroy everything that he found at Corunna. From the stores he took arms and ammunition, giving to every man a new firelock and a pouch filled with fresh powder—a valuable exercise of sea power, for the French, with the long mountain road behind them and their powder and arms damaged by exposure, could hope for no such advantage. And Moore needed all the help he could get. The Rearguard after its superb performance during the retreat—in which, though continuously engaged, it had lost fewer men than any division in the army—was holding t
he crossing over the Mero at El
Burgo, four miles cast of the town. But, with the enemy massing beyond the river, the position ceased to be tenable after the 13th when a partially masked battery was disclosed commanding the broken bridge. General Paget's small force had no alternative but to withdraw in haste, leaving the French free to cross. A battle under the walls of Corunna could no longer be avoided.
Fortunately on the evening of the 14th the missing transports arrived, no sail strong, bringing the total at anchor in the harbour to 250. With them came a squadron of battleships—
Ville de Paris, Victory, Barf
leur, Zealous, Implacable, Elizabeth, Norge, Plantagenet, Resolution, Audacious, Endymion, Mediator—
-a glorious spectacle, thought an onlooker, had it been possible to forget the service for which they had come. Yet it was one which brought relief to thousands of British hearts. That night Moore, not daring to waste an hour lest a sudden change in the wind should enable the French artillery to destroy the fleet at anchor, embarked the remainder of his sick, all but eight of his guns and, since the rocky terrain did not admit their of use in battle, the whole of his cavalry. Only a thousand horses could be taken. The remainder, having foundered during the retreat—not for want of shoes but for nails and hammers —were shot on the beach.
During the morning of the 15th Soult, forcing back Paget's outposts, occupied the heights round the town, overlooking and partially enclosing the inferior British positions on the slopes of Monte Mero. Sharpshooting and cannonading continued all day,
287
about a hundred men falling on either side. Sir John Moore spent the afternoon inspecting his lines, talking as usual to every officer and giving cautions, orders and exhortations. " He looked wistfully at the enemy," wrote young Boothby who rode with his Staff, "apparently wishing with painful eagerness for a battle." Those, Boothby added, who supposed that such wishes were excited by any thought of his own fame did not know Sir John Moore; only that morning in a letter to the Admiral, he had expressed his anxiety for an engagement as the only means of securing an unmolested embarkation.
Yet possibly another—and not ignoble—thought was in Moore's mind. In his last dispatch, sent off two days earlier, he had told Castlereagh that he could never have believed that a British army could become demoralised in so short a time; its conduct in retreat had been infamous beyond belief. Yet he could not refrain from also stressing his unbroken confidence in the valour of his troops; whenever there had been any prospect of fighting, the men had shown their determination to do their duty. In a retreat of nearly three hundred miles,
1
carried out under appalling conditions in the face of a superior foe and without the slightest help from the Spaniards, they had not—for all their insubordination—lost a gun or a colour.