Thus it came about that, while the ordinary Englishman despaired of Portugal and expected nothing better than an evacuation,1 a Government with a precarious majority accepted Wellington's contention that it should be held. This was the more praiseworthy in that any fighting there was bound to be defensive and could offer few prospects of political glory. But after seventeen years of almost unbroken war British statesmen were at last learning how to wage it. " We must make our opinion," the War Secretary wrote," between a steady and continued exertion upon a moderate scale and a great and extraordinary effort for a limited time which neither our military nor financial means will enable us to maintain permanently. If it could be hoped that the latter would bring the contest to a speedy and successful conclusion, it would certainly be the wisest course; but unfortunately the experience of the last fifteen years is not encouraging in this respect."2 Instead of seeking in every corner of the globe like their predecessors for opportunities "to give a good impression of the war in England," Ministers, therefore, concentrated on building up expanding strength in Portugal. In this they were helped by the fact that in the fifth year after Trafalgar and Austerlitz there was not much left outside Europe for them to conquer and nowhere inside it save Portugal where they could even hope to retain a footing. The capture of the last French Caribbean islands in the summer of 1809 released the garrisons of no less than seventeen British stations for service elsewhere. By the following summer a small but steady flow of reinforcements was heading for Portugal from every corner of the world.
Yet the growth of this confidence and support was a gradual
1 "The people here are become indifferent to that country." (Sydenham to Wellesley, 19th Sept., 1809), .Wellesley, I, 258. See also Lennox, II, 228, 233. "Quit it we must." (Lady Sarah Napier, 19th Dec, 1809.)
2 Fortescue, VII, 562.
thing and largely of Wellington's own creation. The Lord Liverpool who became the War Secretary of the Peninsular campaign was the despised Hawkesbury of the Peace of Amiens and Addington's Administration. His own and his chief's tenure of office were so slender that they had at first to trim their sails to every parliamentary wind. " The Government are terribly afraid that I shall get them and myself into a scrape," Wellington wrote in April, 1810, "but what can be expected from men who are beaten, in the House of Commons three times a week ?M1 Yet, though he did not expect them to last for more than a few months, he calmly took the responsibility of urging them to cling to Portugal, knowing that if he failed the full weight of the disaster would fall on his own head. At the best the defensive campaign he was planning could win him little credit —one, as he said, in which there could be few brilliant events and in which he was almost bound to lose the little reputation he had. " I am perfectly aware," he wrote, "of the risks which I incur personally, whatever may be the result of the operations in Portugal. All 1 beg is that, if I am to be responsible, I may be left to the exercise of my own judgment."2
For he was under no illusions as to the weight of the impending attack. As soon as he learnt of the Austrian armistice he warned the Government to dispatch transports to the Tagus on the first intimation that Napoleon was reinforcing Spain. " You may depend upon it," he wrote, " that he and his Marshals must be desirous of revenging upon us the different blows we have given them and that, when they come into the Peninsula, their first and great object will be to get the English out."3 For this he knew they would face heavy risks and losses.
He therefore scrupulously sought to spare his army. Contrary to the expectation of Ministers, who feared that he would try to snatch another desperate victory like Talavera or Oporto,4 he refrained from every move that could expose his troops. To Spanish pleas for new adventures he opposed a bleak and undeviating non-possimius. "Till the evils of which I think I have reason to complain are remedied," he informed his brother, the Ambassador, "till I see magazines established for the supply of the armies and a regular system adopted for keeping them filled, and an army upon whose exertions I can depend commanded by officers capable and willing to carry into execution the operations which may have been planned
1 To Vice-Adm. Berkeley, 7th April, 1810. Gurwood.
2 To Lord Liverpool, 2nd April, 1810. Gurwood.
3 To Lord Castlereagh, 25th Aug., 1809. Gurwood.
4"Depend upon it, whatever people may tell you, I am not so desirous as they imagine of fighting desperate battles." To Liverpool, 2nd April, 1810.—Gurwood.
by mutual agreement, I cannot enter upon any s^'stcm of cooperation with the Spanish armies."1 Save for Cadiz, he left that country alone; he had fished, he remarked, in many troubled waters, but Spanish troubled waters he would never fish in again.
For more than six months after Talavera the British army did not fire a shot. As soon as the collapse of the Spanish offensive in November made its continued presence in the sickly Guadiana valley unnecessary, Wellington marched the bulk of it over the mountains into northern Portugal. Here he cantoned it along the Mondego and in the upland valleys of Beira, while Craufurd with his riflemen watched the Spanish frontier and Hill with two Anglo-Portuguese divisions kept guard south of the Tagus. The main activities of the winter were training and sport, while the men recovered their strength and spirits and the hospitals emptied. The officers engaged in coursing, shooting and horse-racing, the rank and file in poaching and fishing. It was surprising how quickly under such a regimen every one's confidence returned.
For, as Wellington had the good sense to see, from the drunken Irish spalpeen to the lordling from the hunting shires, it was a young army and a sporting one. Its readiness to lark was an index of its readiness to fight. Its allies, the Portuguese, suffered a good deal from its high spirits but learnt to take them in good part; the young gentlemen of the Rifle Corps invariably gave chase to any officer of the Cacadores who passed them on the march, galloping after him— to the delight of the troops—with horns and hunting cries up to the head of the column.2 At Villa Vicosa the officers of the 23rd Light Dragoons—survivors of the charge at Talavera—dressed up one of their members as an English bishop in red velvet breeches, white gaiters trimmed with lace, an old dressing-gown and clerical band and collar, and, arming him with a huge lemon stuck on a stick, processed behind him bearing their helmets in their hands while, a devout populace cheered itself frantic.3 The innumerable Portuguese ecclesiastics and their strange superstitions proved an irresistible butt for such high-spirited boys; young Charles Napier, recovering from a wound in the face, gravely offered a splinter from his jawbone to a monk as a relic, explaining that it was a piece of St. Paul's wisdom tooth given him in a dream by the Virgin Mary. The larking
1 To Marquis Wellesley, 30th Oct., 1809. Gurwood.
2 " We never carried the joke too far, but made it a point of etiquette to stop short of our commanding officer, who was not supposed to see what was going on." Kincaid, Random Shots, 159-60.
3 "I only wished that Lord Wellington might by chance have encountered this cavalcade; how quickly it would have dispersed."—Schaumann, 210.
spirit broke out even at headquarters. Taking tea one day in the parlour of Vizeu Convent, Wellington was surprised to see one of the nuns turn on her head and, throwing her heels in the air, reveal not only a wealth of conventual petticoat but the boots and trousers of a British officer. It proved to be Captain Dan Mackinnon of the Coldstream Guards, who was always "running, chasing and climbing" and whose practical jokes became a legend throughout the Peninsula.1
Under the skylarking surface the army was busy preparing for the grim tasks that lay ahead. The great men whom Moore had taught and inspired, like Donellan of the 48th and Wallace of the Connaught Rangers, were reducing their regiments to a perfection of discipline which was to astonish friend and foe. Yet it was not in the bleak hill cantonments above the Mondego but forty miles to the east along the Spanish frontier that the flower of the Army was to be seen. Here the Light troops Moore had trained were watching the French at the edge of the plain beyond the Agu
eda under the brilliant soldier who had led them through the horrors of the retreat from Vigo. Robin Craufurd was now just on forty-six, five years older than his chief and nine than the youngest divisional commander, and a little soured by adversity and long-delayed promotion. He was still only a junior brigadier, but on March 1st, 1810, his brigade, consisting of the first battalions of the 43rd, 52nd and 95th, a troop of horse artillery, a regiment of Hanoverian hussars and two battalions of Portuguese Cacadores—about 4000 men in all—was reconstituted as the Light Division. Its instructions were to screen the army, maintain communications with the Spanish frontier fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo and keep Wellington punctually supplied with intelligence of every enemy movement.
Never was reconnaissance more brilliantly carried out. Since the retreat from Corunna and his return to Spain Craufurd had been improving on Moore's rules in the light of experience. To the original handiwork of his master he had added a wonderful polish. Impulsive and hot-tempered in action, "Black Bob" was under ordinary circumstances a man of immense method. He once insisted on a commissary keeping a journal like a log-book so that he might see how and where he spent every moment of his time. Wherever he went himself he carried a pocket-book and whenever he encountered anything worthy of remark, down it went.2 From this he elaborated
1 Stanhope, Conversations, 14-15. On another occasion he impersonated the Duke of York at a Spanish port until, wearying of the tedious gravity of Iberian hospitality, he suddenly plunged headfirst into a bowl of punch, thereby creating a minor international incident. Wellington, however, always forgave him.—Gronow, I, 61-2.
2 Standing Orders. Preface.
his divisional Code of Standing Orders which governed all movements on the march, in camp and on outpost duty. It was designed to ensure an automatic response to every order and to give his entire force the precision of a single section on the parade ground. "All sounds preparatory to turning out and marching," it began, "will commence at the quarters of the Assistant Adjutant-General and be immediately repeated by the orderly bugles attending on the officers commanding regiments. As soon as possible after the first sound all the bugles are to assemble at the' quarters of the commanding officers of regiments from whence all the other sounds will be repeated.
From this start everything went with a steady, unhalting, unhurrying swing which only an earthquake could have interrupted. Officers.and camp-colourmen went ahead to the night's quarters, the baggage was packed and loaded, and, an hour after the first, a second bugle call sounded for the companies to fall in. Thereafter bugle horns in carefully-timed succession brought the companies together and set the regiments marching to the accompaniment of music. Step and perfect dressing were observed until the word was given to march at ease. During the march guides, who had already gone over the ground, directed the head of the column, and every officer and N.C.O. kept his appointed place. Straggling was forbidden: no man was to leave the ranks save with his company commander's permission and only after a signed ticket had been issued. Any one straying or stopped by the camp-guard without a ticket was to be arrested, tried by drumhead court-martial and flogged.1 In crossing streams and other obstacles, no regiment, company or section was to defile or break rank unless the preceding unit had done so: any man who disobeyed was to be given a dozen lashes on the spot.2 Where defiling was necessary, it was to be carried out with precision by the proper words of command. Hurrying or exceeding the regulation step were forbidden; half an hour after the start and at hourly intervals—to be governed by the proximity of water—the division was to halt for five minutes, during which time, and at no other, the men were to fill their water-canteens.
The reason for all this—mercilessly enforced and, at first, much disliked—was made clear to all. Every battalion defiling on the march caused a delay of ten minutes or, in a brigade of three battalions, of half an hour. In a country like Portugal, with in-
1 Standing Orders, 24. On the march to Talavera, before he had evolved his system, Craufurd took away the ramrod of every man found straggling, later punishing every one who paraded without one.—Harris.
2 Kincaid, Random Shots, 46. "Sit down in it, Sir, sit down in it," Craufurd himself would cry if he saw a soldier avoiding a puddle.-—Seaton, 173.
numerable water-courses, many hours could be lost in this way. The tail of the division might arrive at its destination hours late, perhaps drenched to the skin, and be confronted at the day's end with all the confusion and discomfort of bivouacking in a strange place in the dark. Experience demonstrated the wisdom of Craufurd's rules: punishment, at first frequent, became almost negligible. "The system once established," wrote an officer, "went on like clockwork, and the soldiers became devotedly attached to him; for while he extracted, from all the most rigid obedience, he was, on his part, keenly alive to everything they had a right to expect from him in return."1 The beauty of such discipline, as the editors of the Standing Orders pointed out, consisted of doing everything that was necessary and nothing that was not.
Craufurd, by sterner methods engendered by the realities of war, systematised Moore's training of common sense and humanism. His rules made it second nature for men to do the right thing. By obeying them all grew accustomed to looking after themselves in all circumstances. The troops of the Light Division did not give way to fatigue after a long march and drop asleep when they halted, later to awake in the dark, cold, supperless and miserable. Instead, the moment the bugle sounded for them to dismiss, they bustled about securing whatever the neighbourhood could contribute to their night's comfort. Swords, hatchets and bill-hooks were soon busy hacking at every tree and bush: huts were reared with roofs and walls of broom, pine branches or straw, fires lit and camp kettles set boiling; and presently, when the regulation pound of beef had been fried, tired but happy souls, their feet toasting round the cheerful blaze, would fall on their meal with a will, taking care, however, like good soldiers, not to consume anything that belonged to the morrow's ration. And, before they slept, wrapped in sedge mat or cloak and leather cap and with sod or stone for pillow, every man carefully arranged his accoutrements ready for nocturnal emergencies.2
The value of all this became plain in the presence of the enemy. Seven minutes sufficed to get the whole division under arms in the middle of the night and fifteen to bring it in order of battle to its alarm posts, with the baggage loaded and assembled under escort in the rear. And this, as Johnny Kincaid wrote, not upon a concerted signal or at a trial, but at all times and certain. The moment the division or any of its units halted, guards and piquets were posted automatically, while every road was examined, cleared, and reported upon so that the troops could move off again at once in any direction.
1 Kincaid, Random Shots, 17, 50.
2 Kincaid, Random Shots, 88-90. See also Leslie, 83-5.
Unless otherwise ordered, one company of every battalion served as outlying piquet, placed sentinels at all approaches and stood to arms from an hour before sunrise until a grey horse could be seen a mile away.1 Officers on outpost duty were expected personally to examine all inhabitants for information, reconnoitre all fords, morasses, bridges and lanes in the neighbourhood and post sentries in pairs, who were relieved every two hours, in all commanding hedges and woodlands, and at night on the reverse slopes of hills. If attacked, sentries were instructed to give the alarm and fall back obliquely so as not to reveal the position of the main guard. In addition patrols were sent out .every hour to visit posts and bring back information.
Wi th less than 3000 British infantry so trained and their Portuguese and Hanoverian auxiliaries, Craufurd for six months guarded a river line of more than forty miles between the Serra da Estrella and the Douro, broken by at least fifteen fords and with an open plain in front. His men were never less than an hour's march of 6000 French cavalry with 60,000 infantry in support. Yet they never suffered their lines to be penetrated or allowed the slightest intelligence of Wellington's strength and movements to reach the enemy. "The whole web of co
mmunication," as Sir Charles Oman has written, "quivered at the slightest touch.2
On one occasion, on the night of March 19th, 1810, a greatly superior force of Voltigeurs attempted to surprise a detachment of the 95th Rifles at the bridge of Barba del Puerco. A French general had been informed by a Spanish traitor that the British officers were in the habit of getting drunk every night and accordingly assembled six hundred picked troops at midnight under the rocks at the east end of the bridge. Creeping across in the shadows cast by the rising moon, with every sound drowned by the roar of the mountain torrent below, they succeeded in surprising and bayoneting the two sentries at the other end before they could open fire. But a sergeant's party higher up the rocks saw them and gave the alarm to the piquet company. Within a few minutes the rest of the regiment, with hastily donned belts and cartridge boxes slung over flapping shirts, led by Colonel Beckwith in dressing-gown, night-cap and slippers, was tumbling them down the rocks and across the bridge whence they had come. The French casualties in the affair were forty-seven, the British thirteen. It was the first and last attempt to surprise a Light Infantry piquet at night.3
1 Standing Orders, 47-8; Smith, I, 185; Kincaid, 33-5. - Oman,'III, 238.
3 Kincaid, Random Shots, 52-6, 59; George Napier, I, 113; Simmons, 56; Costello, 28-9; Oman, III, 236-8; Burgoyne, I, 69; Fortescue, VII, 465.
It was through this screen and its patrols of riflemen and hussars, ranging far beyond the enemy's lines into Spain, that Wellington obtained his knowledge of French movements. It was work which required, as Kincaid said, a clear head, a bold heart and a quick pair of heels, all three being liable to be needed at any hour of the day or night. Founded on the training, habits and virtues, of a few hundred humble British soldiers, its effect on the course of the European war was incalculable. For, in conjunction with the work of the Spanish guerrillas, it deprived the enemy of all knowledge of Wellington's strength and dispositions. While the British Commander knew from day to day what was happening on the other side of the lines and saw his enemy silhouetted, as it were, against the eastern sky, the French faced only darkness. This outweighed all their superiority in numbers. For it meant that, when the time came to strike, Goliath with his mighty sword lunged blindly. David with his pebble and sling had no such handicap.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 51
