Читать книгу Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 23

14 Across the Douro

1809

‘Ma foi! La discipline anglaise est bien sévère.’

AS SOON AS he landed at Lisbon, ‘the most Horrible Place that ever was seen’,¹ Wellesley threw himself into work on those administrative details which he always regarded as essential to the proper conduct of a military campaign. He turned his attention to bullock carts and food supplies, to horse transport and forage, to blankets and kettles. He commandeered all the boats he could lay his hands on so that Marshal Soult, whose army was quartered in and around Oporto, some two hundred miles to the north, could not attack him across the Tagus; and he arranged for all his brigades to have a company of riflemen attached to them.

He had studied the way in which France’s Revolutionary armies had swept across the plains of Central Europe in dense columns behind a screen of voltigeurs and tirailleurs, both protective and destructive. Their new formations had proved highly effective against the ranks of infantry that opposed them. Wellesley had also studied the tactics employed in the forests of America by Colonel Bouquet, the brilliant Swiss officer who commanded the 60th (Royal American) Regiment, later the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and who had taught his men to fight the French as the American Rangers had done, not as unthinking parts of a clumsy whole but as intelligent men with individual duties to perform in a scheme of warfare that had no rigid rules.²

The Duke of York, always ready to listen to new ideas as a reforming Commander-in-Chief, had instructed various regiments to send officers and men for a course of instruction in light infantry tactics at the newly created camp of the Experimental Rifle Corps at Horsham. Two years later, in 1801, the 95th Regiment (later the Rifle Brigade) was formed and the green jackets which the men wore so proudly gave a name to their own and other regiments which were to become among the finest in the Army.

Wellesley had cause to regret that so many of the soldiers in his regiments of the line were far from being as good soldiers as his companies of riflemen. Several of the best battalions in the Army had been held in England for a proposed – and, as it was to prove that summer, disastrous – attempt to send troops up the Scheldt to seize Antwerp from the French; and in the British army in Portugal there were many soldiers, a large proportion of them Irish, whom Wellesley considered, as he was to say of those of a later army, ‘the scum of the earth’. ‘We are not naturally a military people,’ he wrote; ‘the whole business of the army upon service is foreign to our habits … particularly in a poor country like this.’³ Yet he saw in that poverty an advantage since the French armies would find it difficult to raise supplies in enemy territory, as was their usual method, while the British could be supplied by sea and the navigable rivers of Portugal.⁴

So Wellesley marched north with confidence against Marshal Soult who he knew had lost the trust of many of his officers and was in a bitter dispute with his fellow Marshal, the brilliant, courageous and temperamental Michel Ney. Wellesley had learned about this dispute from a traitorous French officer, Captain d’Argenton, who crept into the British lines to inform the General that Soult – who had already been created duc de Dalmatie and now had ambitions to declare himself King of Northern Lusitania – was to be deprived of his command in a mutiny. Wellesley, sceptical but curious, listened to d’Argenton in the flickering light of a camp fire; he provided him with papers to assist him in his conspiracy, but assured Castlereagh, who had advised him to treat d’Argenton cautiously, that he ‘would not wait for revolt’. Instead he would try his ‘own means of subduing Soult’.⁵

On the road north the British army and its Portuguese allies were greeted enthusiastically by the people of the towns and villages through which they passed. Flowers were thrown upon them from windows and cups of wine pressed into their eager hands. They reached the Douro beneath the cliffs of Oporto in the second week of May. It was a broad river here; but Soult had not ensured – as Wellesley had by the Tagus – that no boats could be found by the enemy. The British troops were ferried across in daylight, thirty at a time, in wine-barges which had been discovered concealed from view beneath overhanging cliffs by a Portuguese barber; and Soult, who had no idea that the British were so close, was sent flying out of the town in the pouring rain, abandoning guns and stores, as well as chests of bullion, sick soldiers in the town’s hospitals and an excellent meal which General Wellesley and his staff ate instead.

The French army, in a retreat almost as arduous as Sir John Moore’s to Corunna, struggled through the harsh landscape of Tras os Montes into Spain, stragglers from their columns being attacked by Portuguese peasants who, in retaliation for the cruelties inflicted upon their people in the villages through which the French passed, burned wounded men alive, pushing them into piles of burning straw with pitchforks.

‘The ball is now at my foot,’ Wellesley wrote contentedly having cleared the French out of Portugal, inflicting upon them losses of over 4,000 men, ‘and I hope I shall have strength enough to give it a good kick.’⁶ He could not speak highly of his allies. He believed that, had the Portuguese been ‘worth their salt’, the French might well not have escaped from Oporto.⁷ His Spanish allies seemed to promise no better, when, because of an officer’s oversight and a misleading map, the British General arrived late for a review and had to inspect them by the light of flaring torches. When it came to fighting, he afterwards decided, they were no better than they looked. ‘They would fire a volley while the enemy was out of reach, and then all run away.’ ‘They were, no doubt, individually as brave as other men,’ he conceded. ‘I am sure they were vain enough of their bravery, but I never could get them to stand their ground.’⁸ It was largely the fault of their officers, he decided on another occasion. ‘This would ruin any soldiers – and how should the Spaniards have confidence in officers such as theirs?’*⁹

As for the guerrillas, they looked formidable enough with their fierce moustaches, their heavy belts and bands of ammunition strung round their waists and across their shoulders beneath heavy cloaks; but, while he did not doubt their bravery, he could not but wonder how reliable they might prove to be.†

The Spanish generals, too, their medals clanking on their exotic uniforms, were an unknown quantity, although it was at least certain that the one with whom Sir Arthur had so far had the closest contact – the aged, frail and very vain Don Gregorio Garcia de la Cuesta, Captain-General of Estremadura, ‘as obstinate as a gentleman at the head of an army needs to be’ – had led his troops far less often to victory than to defeat.¹⁰

Wellesley was asked for his opinion of another Spanish General, Francisco de Castaños, who had brought about the surrender of Dupont’s troops at Bailén. Surely he was an able man?

‘Oh, no, no!’ he said, ‘lowering his voice and gently shaking his head as he usually did whenever giving an opinion unfavourable to any one.’¹¹

If Don Gregorio and Francisco de Castaños and their troops did not impress him, Sir Arthur was still little more content with his own men, despite their success at Oporto. On the march towards Spain they behaved abominably. ‘They have plundered the country most terribly,’ he had to report. ‘I have long been of the opinion that a British army could bear neither success nor failure, and I have had manifest truth of this opinion in the recent conduct of the soldiers of this army … They are a rabble.’*¹²

He endeavoured to bring discipline into the ranks by the most severe punishments, issuing and repeating orders that the first man caught in the act of plundering should be hanged on the spot.¹³ But, as he related years later, he was ‘famously taken in on one occasion’:

One day just as we were sitting down to dinner three men were brought to the door of the tent by the prévôt. The case against them was clear, and I had nothing for it but to desire that they should be led away, and hanged in some place where they might be seen by the whole column in its march next day. I had a good many guests with me on that occasion, and among the rest, I think, Lord Nugent. They seemed dreadfully shocked, and could not eat their dinner. I didn’t like it much myself, but, as I told them, I had no time to indulge my feelings, I must do my duty. Well, the dinner went off rather gravely, and next morning, sure enough, three men in uniform were seen hanging from the branches of a tree close to the high road. It was a terrible example, and produced the desired effect … But you may guess my astonishment, when some months afterwards I learned that one of my staff took counsel with Dr Hume, and as three men had just died in hospital, they hung them up, and let the three culprits return to their regiments.¹⁴

‘Weren’t you very angry?’ someone asked him. ‘Well, I suppose I was at first,’ he replied. ‘But as I had no wish to take the poor fellows’ lives, and only wanted the example, and as the example had the desired effect, my anger soon died out, and I confess to you that I am very glad now that the three lives were spared.’¹⁵

On occasions, however, he made sure that plunderers’ lives were not spared. One of his aides-de-camp recorded an instance of this when two soldiers were found looting a shop and assaulting a woman who was attempting to protect her property. ‘Having satisfied himself as to the guilt of the soldiers, Wellington turned round to the Provost-Marshal, and in that brief expression which ever characterized him, said, “In ten minutes report to me that these two men have been executed”.’ When the French under Junot entered the town, the two bodies were still hanging there. An English surgeon, who had remained behind under a flag of truce to attend to the wounded, was questioned as to the offence for which the soldiers had suffered. ‘“Plundering and violence towards an inhabitant,” responded the surgeon. “Ma foil” exclaimed Junot, shrugging his shoulders, “la discipline anglaise est bien sévère.”’¹⁶

It did not altogether surprise Sir Arthur that the soldiers were inveterate plunderers since the army’s commissaries were ‘incompetent to a man’; and to add to his difficulties the Treasury were being more than commonly dilatory in sending him the currency he so urgently needed. He would advance into Spain immediately, he wrote, but he could not ‘venture to stir without money’.¹⁷

‘We are terribly distressed for money,’ he wrote on another occasion, voicing a complaint he was often to make in the future. There were other grumbles, too; and he expressed and continued to express them with petulant irritability, complaining that the Cabinet did not ‘repose confidence’ in him, and that he was unable to obtain any ‘specific instructions from the Minister of War’,¹⁸ whereas he had earlier expressed satisfaction in being given a free rein, a ‘general object’ which allowed him to consider himself ‘authorized to pursue any other object … likely to conduce to the benefit of the Spanish and Portuguese nations’.¹⁹

The Government were, in fact, giving him their full support: George Canning, the Foreign Minister, wrote of Wellesley’s ‘frankness – honesty – quickness – and military Ability’ being ‘not only beyond those of any other military Commander that could be chosen but perhaps possessed by him alone, of all our Commanders, in a degree that qualifies him for great undertakings’.²⁰ Yet Sir Arthur professed unreasonably to ‘suspect that the Ministers in England [were] very indifferent to our operations in this country’. He wrote to complain of their supposed attitude in an angry letter to his brother William who replied, ‘I am perfectly satisfied that you are mistaken in supposing that you do not possess the confidence of ministers. If there is anything like truth in man, there never was more implicit confidence felt in any General officer than is felt by [the First Lord of the Treasury and the Secretary for War] and I firmly believe by all the other members of the Cabinet in you.’²¹

Sir Arthur was not to be mollified. He continued to suspect strongly that some members at least of the Cabinet were blaming him for allowing Soult to escape into Spain. It was most unreasonable that they should do so, he thought: ‘From the force I had & the force opposed to me what right had they to expect that I should do so much?’ he asked William. After all, he never asked the Government for more than he thought they could reasonably allow him, on one characteristic occasion concluding a request for craft for river crossings with the assurance that he would expect them only if they were not needed elsewhere. Surely he had a right to be rewarded for such moderation.²²

He could derive some comfort at least from the unhappy state of the French marshals and generals who were constantly at loggerheads, each going his own way, despite the occasional efforts of King Joseph to impose some common plan and the directives that successively arrived from Napoleon’s camps in Central Europe and from Vienna’s Schönbrunn where the Emperor had installed himself, having entered the city on 12 May after driving the Austrians out of Ratisbon.

Faced by a choice of operations against these French generals, Wellesley decided to move against Marshal Victor, who had given a drubbing to Cuesta’s army at Medellin on the south bank of the Guadiana at the end of March. Indeed, Sir Arthur had already told Castlereagh, ‘I should prefer an attack on Victor, in concert with Cuesta, if Soult were not in possession of a fertile province of this Kingdom, and the favourite town of Oporto.’ Now that Soult had been deprived of Oporto, the attack on Victor in New Castile could begin.

So, on 27 June 1809, Wellesley left Abrantes on the Tagus north-east of Lisbon with some 20,000 men, and having crossed the Spanish frontier on 4 July, he was riding a fortnight later into Oropesa where he joined forces with Cuesta’s army of more than 30,000 men. The old hidalgo, who had broken several bones when his retreating cavalry had ridden over him in one of his various defeats, was lifted from his mule-drawn coach and placed upon a pile of cushions from which he conversed with the British General by means of an English-speaking officer on his staff named O’Donoju.

Sir Arthur proposed that they jointly attack the French the next morning. Marshal Victor had already withdrawn his troops some miles towards Madrid; and it was essential that an attack be launched before they combined forces with King Joseph’s army in and around the capital. Cuesta could not be persuaded to agree. Day by day, he was ‘more and more impracticable’, Wellesley said; it was ‘impossible to do business with him, and very uncertain that any operation’ would succeed in which he had ‘any concern’.²³

Eventually, however, he was persuaded to advance; but by then Victor had made a further retreat, and the opportunity to attack him before he joined forces with the King was lost. So Wellesley declined to go with Cuesta. He was bound ‘to get in a scrape’, Wellesley said; any movement by the British army to assist him was ‘quite out of the question’. In any case he had heard that Cuesta’s officers were ‘all dissatisfied with him’ and that there was a movement afoot to have him dismissed from the command.²⁴

Denied the help of his allies the headstrong, gallant and obtuse old man took his men unsupported against the French until, near Toledo, they came upon almost the entire French army in New Castile; and, startled by this unfortunate and unexpected encounter, he brought them scurrying back again towards the Alberche river, furiously pursued by Imperial cavalry.

Deeply concerned as to what might happen to the Spaniards should they be brought to battle with their backs to the Alberche, Wellesley went in search of their commander to ask him to move further back to a stronger position at Talavera. He found him in the middle of the afternoon fast asleep. Stubborn as ever, he declined to retreat any further; Wellesley begged him to do so; he remained adamant. Wellesley, so Cuesta said, went so far as to kneel down in supplication before him; and at last he gave way.²⁵

It was not before time. French skirmishers were already approaching his own lines. They came upon the men of a British brigade as fast asleep in the hot July sun as Cuesta had been and killed many of them before they were fully awake. Many more were killed before they could be rallied; in all Wellesley lost over 400 men before the battle proper began.

He was almost killed himself. He had climbed to the top of a tall building to survey the surrounding countryside beyond the cork and olive groves when, at the very foot of the tower on which he and his staff were standing, French troops suddenly appeared at the base of the wall. Dashing down the steps, they rushed across the courtyard to their horses and galloped away, as the French fired at their backs.

The battle fought at Talavera on 27 and 28 July 1809 was the ‘hardest fighting’ Sir Arthur Wellesley had ‘ever been a party to’.²⁶ Indeed, he declared with unaccustomed hyperbole, ‘it was the hardest fought battle of modern times … Never was there such a Murderous Battle!!’²⁷ He had lost over 5,000 men, inflicting more than 7,000 casualties on the enemy.²⁸ General Sir Alexander Mackenzie, one of the most reliable of his field commanders, whom he had known since his days at the Academy at Angers, had been killed; he himself had been hit in the chest by a spent bullet. During a brief truce in the fierce battle, his soldiers, overcome by heat and thirst, had been driven to run down to drink the brackish water of the stream between the opposing lines before carrying away for burial the bodies of the dead and dying. The day before, Cuesta’s Spanish troops, whose officers seemed to be endlessly smoking cigarettes, suddenly unleashed a terrific volley of musketry fire at some distant French dragoons who were taking occasional shots at their pickets. ‘If they will but fire as well tomorrow,’ Wellesley said to a member of his staff, ‘the day is our own; but as there seems nobody to fire at just now, I wish you would stop it.’²⁹

The officer galloped away to carry out the General’s order; but, before he reached the inexperienced Spanish levies, they had taken sudden fright and had run off in panic to the rear, plundering some British baggage-wagons on their way. General Cuesta, infuriated by the shameful behaviour of his men, gave orders that two hundred of them should be shot after the battle. General Wellesley put in a word for them; but Cuesta insisted that at least forty of them must suffer, and on the morning of the 29th they did.

Throughout the battle General Wellesley had insisted upon carrying out himself most of the duties usually assigned to staff officers as well as being his own intelligence officer; and he had consequently been obliged to ride about from one vantage point to another. Some of his officers questioned the wisdom of this, yet none denied that he had won an undoubted victory – though there were those who considered it a Pyrrhic one – a French army, almost twice as large as his own, had been forced into retreat; and, reinforced by Robert Craufurd’s Light Brigade, which had marched and run over sixty miles in less than twenty-six hours, he was justified in hoping now to move towards Madrid.

Yet this hope was not to be realized: Sir Arthur was informed that another French army was fast approaching and would soon be across his lines of communication with Portugal. His men were disastrously short of supplies as it was; and for this he angrily blamed his selfish and incompetent allies who ‘allowed a brave army, that was rendering gratuitous services to Spain, that was able and willing to pay for everything it received, to starve in the centre of their country … and who refused or omitted to find carriages to remove the officers and soldiers who had been wounded in their service, and obliged me to give up the equipment of the army for the performance of the necessary duties of humanity’.³⁰

‘We are starving and are ill-treated by the Spaniards in every way’, he added, making no allowances for the difficulties of gleaning provisions in a poor countryside already plundered by the French; ‘and a starving army is actually worse than none. The soldiers lose their discipline and their spirit. They plunder even in the presence of their officers.’³¹ His complaints were echoed by his brother Richard, who had been sent to Spain to represent the British Government in a more authoritative manner than had so far been displayed by John Hookham Frere, the British Minister at Seville. Although Sir Arthur did not think his brother would ‘be able to do any good’, the Marquess was certainly a match in haughtiness for the proudest of hidalgos and did not hesitate to protest that he would ‘not trust the protection of a favourite dog to the whole Spanish army’. And so long as his brother Arthur had cause to complain that his army wanted everything and could get nothing, that the Spanish treated their allies without respect, he ‘might almost say not even as friends’, he agreed that there was no alternative but to retreat towards Portugal.³²

Complaining that he had ‘fished in many troubled waters, but Spanish troubled waters [he would] never fish in again’,³³ Sir Arthur withdrew through Estremadura towards the Guadiana river and the Portuguese frontier near Badajoz, more annoyed than ever with the Spanish when it transpired that General Cuesta, who had undertaken to look after the 1,500 British wounded left behind in Talavera, had been obliged to abandon them there and march towards him at the approach of the French.

The Spanish authorities, as though wishing to make amends for Cuesta’s having enabled the enemy to take so many prisoners, tendered the British General tokens of their gratitude and regard: they presented him with six Andalusian horses and offered him the rank of Captain-General in their Army, an honour he accepted while declining to accept a Captain-General’s pay. The British Government rewarded him also: he was granted an income of £2,000 for three years, and, with the King’s approval, was created Baron Douro of Wellesley and Viscount Wellington of Talavera.* Lord Wellington had now to justify the honours bestowed upon him.