Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (81 page)
The other attack along the fringe of the wood was equally impudent and equally successful. Here the three companies of the
1
Blakeney,
187-8.
Rifles and their Portuguese comrades had gone into action while a battery of artillery unlimbered and halted the enemy with shrapnel. The riflemen, like Browne's men on the hill, paid dearly for their gallantry. But they won their commander the time he needed. As soon as they were ready, seven hundred men of the 87th or Irish Fusileers, two hundred Coldstreamers, four hundred and fifty
of the 28th—the North Glouceste
rs—and two hundred, and fifty of the 67th—the South Hampshires—pressed forward with such determination that the French, thinking themselves outnumbered, hesitated and began to give way. The fire of the extended line against the column did the rest. "Fire at their legs," ordered Colonel Belson of the 28th, "and spoil their dancing!" When the British followed up with the bayonet the conquerors of Europe made off, still firing, across the heathy plain to the east.
Such w
r
as the battle of Barrosa. Six guns, an imperial eagle
1
and a wounded general of division remained in the victors' hands. In less than two hours the French had lost 2000 out of 7000 men. The British casualty list was almost as high. The First Foot Guards lost 219 out of 600, the Coldstream 58 out of 211, the Third Guards 102 out of 320. Of the 76 officers and 1873 men of the brigade which stormed the hill, 25 officers and 588 men fell, or nearly one in every three. And this in a force which was without any reserves. The captured General Ruffin spoke to Graham of "the incredibility of so rash an attack."
2
Throughout the engagement the Spaniards on the beach never moved. Many of them grumbled bitterly at their fate, but La Pena seemed incapable of action. The truth was that he had reduced himself and his men to a state of complete prostration. It was the inevitable consequence of the habit into which the military system of Spain had fallen. Don Quixote at his most fantastic now sat in the saddle of the Conquistadores. "They march the troops night and day without provisions or rest," Wellington wrote to Graham after the battle, "abusing everybody who proposes a moment's delay to afford either to the famished and fatigued soldiers. They reach the enemy in such a state as to be unable to make any exertion or to execute any plan, even if any plan had been formed; and, when the moment of action arrives, they are totally incapable of movement, and they stand by to see their allies destroyed, and afterwards abuse them because they do not continue, unsupported, exertions to which human nature is not equal."' Graham was so angry that next day
1
Captured by Sergeant Maste
rson of the
87th,
one of whose family won a V.C. with the Regiment at Ladysmith.
2
Granville, II,
385-6.
See also
idem.,
382-4;
Lynedoch,
468-483;
Blakene
y,
189-98;
Oman, IV,
110-25;
Fortescue, VIII,
47-65.
he withdrew to Cadiz
without even acquainting La Pen
a? Nothing could be looked for from such a Commander-in-Chief, and the British had suffered far too heavily to be able to profit by their success on their own. The Spaniards followed them, and the French, who were on the point of retiring to Seville, resumed their blockade.
Four days after Barrosa Soult, in despair at the news of Graham's landing behind Victor's lines and of an advance by a Spanish patriot army from the Rio Tinto against Seville, summoned the Governor of Badajoz to surrender. It was his only hope of averting disaster. To his utter astonishment the infirm and desponding Spaniard who had succeeded to the command of the fortress on the death of its gallant commander, General Menacho, surrendered next day without having sustained a single assault. A breach had been made in the walls, but he had 8000 troops, 150 guns and ample ammunition, and had just learnt that a British army was hastening to his relief. Luckily Soult could not exploit his triumph, f
or his concern now was not Masse
na's starving army but his own rear. Leaving Mortier with 11,000 troops to hold the captured fortress, he hurried back to save his Andalusian capital and the blockade of Cadiz.
Even had Soult been free to advance towards the Tagus, it would now have availed Massena nothing. For on the evening of March 5th—the day of Barrosa—the Marshal had begun his retreat to the north. A month earlier Foy, with an escort of 2000 men, had fought his way through the mountains and the encircling guerrillas to bring him his first news of the outer world. The orders he bore promised early relief, but they were already six weeks out of date when they arrived, and by the end of February it was plain that any help would come too late. Of the
73
,000 first-line troops who had originally invaded Portugal or joined Massena since, only
44
,000 survived. Every foot of the country the
y occupied had been scoured for
food and more than five thousand horses had been eaten. To have delayed another week would have seen the end of the Army of Portugal's capacity to move at all.
Already
the patient Wellington, judging
the long-maturing plum ripe and in daily expectation of reinforcements in the Tagus, was preparing to close for the kill. When on the morning of March 6th his men moved catiously into Santarem, the full nature of the French disaster became apparent. The road was covered with dead soldiers" and abandoned carriages; the houses filled with sick and dying in the last loathsome stages of disease. Many lay on the floor in full uniform, their arms still grasped in their hands as if asleep, or sat in chairs, stiff and upright, with shakos on and pinched
1
To Lieut.-Gen. Graham,
2
5
th March,
1811.
Gurwood.
features frozen in death. The route their comrades had taken was marked by straggling wretches with pallid, swollen faces which they turned with inexpressible pathos on their pursuers. The Rifles in the British van threw them their biscuits in pity as they passed.
But their pity turned to anger as they saw what they had done. For everywhere were burning and ravaged houses, mutilated peasants with slit throats and gouged-out eyes, polluted churches and rifled graves. The whole countryside had been transformed into
a
waste fit only for wolves and vultures. The few surviving inhabitants looked like skeletons risen from the tomb. Gaunt and ghastly figures fed off the grass in the fields or scoured the woods for acorns and rotten olives. Violated women lay bleeding in charred and unroofed houses, the streets were strewn with putrid carcasses, children with bones sticking through their skin clung to the bodies of dead parents. Searching for a stream on the first night of the British advan
ce, Rifleman Costello stumbled o
n a fountain into whose waters the brains of three peasants were oozing, while all that had possessed fife in the village "lay quivering in the last agony of slaughter and awful vengeance."
1
Here a Cac
adore found the mangled bodies of his father and mother lying across the threshold of his home, while within his only sister was stretched dying on the floor. Staring wildly around him, the unhappy man rushed out and flung himself on a passing batch of prisoners, killing one and wounding another before he was pulled off by the guards. Another spectre stole towards a group of cadaverous Frenchmen and then suddenly, spitting on his hands, pulled out a club from under his cloak and beat out their brains.
Under the shock of defeat Massena's army had reverted to type. From the shambles of the Terror a whole generation had gone out to wage war and carry the Revolution into the lands of their neighbours. Since 1792 the French had been a nation in arms.
2
Welded by enthusiasm and fear into a single instrument of force, these active, handy little fellows with their broad shoulders and spreading shakos, their short-waisted, roomy, swallow-tailed coats and large, baggy trousers, had terrorised the world. Nothing seemed able to tire or deter them; they would swarm up the steepest hill under the deadliest fire with such fury that their foes were paralysed before they arrived. Matchless in
elan
on the field, they were equally brilliant on the march or in the bivouac; there was scarcely a man
1
Costello,
58-60, 69;
Anderson,
62-4;
Schaumann,
274-6;
Kincaid,
40-1;
Simmons,
138-9, 151-2;
Donaldson,
165-6.
2
When Haydon visited Paris in
1814
he found scarcely a driver of a fiacre, a waiter at a cafe or a man in middle life who had not served in a campaign or been wounded.
of them who could not cook his savoury
potage
and make himself comfortable in the most inhospitable conditions. They had elevated plunder into a military science and could support themselves in a wilderness: they would nose the last sack of peasant's corn or potatoes from the bottom of a well or the back of a bricked-up chimney and return next day with a shrewdly pointed bayonet for more. And like their Emperor and his Marshals, they generally contrived to take something home to France with them. "A French soldier, ever with something valuable about him," wrote Grattan, "was quite a prize to one of our fellows."
Cocksure and arrogant even in adversity—Welling
ton complained that after Vimie
ro Junot insisted on walking in to dinner in front of him
1
—the conquerors of Europe
possessed a certain charm. They were so gay, so ready to forget their hardships and make the best of the world which was their prey. They could be cheerful in the most unlikely places. George Napier described how after Sahagun he found a packet of famished prisoners in a cellar and ordered them bread and wine. "This being done," he wrote, "the poor fellows were as merry as possible and began dancing and singing; and one of them took a little fiddle from his pocket and commenced playing quadrilles with as much energy and life as though he were playing, to a parcel of ladies."
2
At their happiest there was something infectiously good-natured about them. "
Prenez tout, mes enfants"
cried the Imperial grenadiers to the peasants around the Prussian baggage-train after Jena,
"e
xcepte seulement le vin et l’argent’
Little, swarthy Frenchmen in front of the British lines would stick pieces of bacon on their bayonets or hoist up their canteens with cheerful shouts of "I say, come here—here is ver good rosbif!—here is ver good brandy!"
4
Wellington was perpetually having to take measures to stop fraternisation between the outposts; French officers were always inviting their British counterparts to plays and concerts and attending in turn their horse-races, -football-matches and dog-hunts. " Capering, scraping and bowing," as Midshipman Coleridge described the genus, every Frenchman, however humble his origin, seemed to have a genius for
la politesse.
In triumph, towards an adversary they respected like the British, die French could be astonishingly chivalrous. "Gentlemen,
" cried General
Laborde to his captives
after Rolica, "now that you are
1
"Although I was the stranger and although of the two I was certainly the victorious general."—Stanhope,
Conversations,
247.
See Simmons,
132;
Haydon, I,
259.
2
George Napier, I,
51;
Leslie,
52.
See also the delightful description of French gaiety by that un
relenting Gallophobe, Haydon. H
aydon, I,
247-8.
3
Broughton, I,
44-5.
4
Adventures in the Peninsula.
332-3.
my prisoners, we are no longer enemies."
1
Ncy, told that Charles Napier, captured at Corunna, had an aged and widowed mother, sent him home by the first ship without waiti
ng for an exchange. After Talave
ra a wounded captain of the
87th
was sent into the British lines under a flag of truce so that he might breathe his last among his countrymen. "Ours, indeed, was a noble enemy," wrote Rifleman Costello, "they never permitted us to flag for want of stimuli, but kept us for ever on the qui vive. We anticipated little terror from capture." For the French soldiers' attitude towards the British was purely professional: they regarded them as fellow craftsmen worthy of their steel: as pupils who had made good. "
Eh bien, e'est egal,"
cried the captured
moustache
to the Rifles standing around him,
"L
es ecoliers sont digues d
e leurs mait
res.
The French have taught you some terrible lessons, and you understand, at length, the art of making war as it should be."
2