Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Next morning, as the sun rose, the view out to sea was chilling. As one soldier put it, ‘Nothing was to be discovered but the wide waste of water’,71 and without ships they had no means of escape. Moore’s original request for transports to the admiral at Vigo had never arrived. His army was cornered. ‘My position in front of this place is a very bad one’, he confessed to Castlereagh. ‘Corunna, if I am forced to retire into it, is commanded by high ground within musket shot. In that case the harbour will be so commanded by cannon on the coast that no ship will be able to lay in it.’72 The locals shared his pessimism and as the British entered town, thousands of refugees headed in the opposite direction.

  But when the 14th dawned the lookouts in Corunna’s Roman lighthouse noticed a fuzzy mass on the horizon. After a while it started to sharpen into individual shapes. They were men-of-war, the Victory and Audacious among them. Five days before, an exhausted galloper had reached Vigo with a second rain-spattered note from Moore, demanding all ships sail for Corunna. Adverse winds prevented the departure of the transports, but the warships managed to make it out of the harbour. By the 11th the weather had improved enough for the 300 transports to follow. As the warships anchored in Corunna, the transports, which had closed the gap, began to appear on the horizon and in a few hours the harbour was packed. Moore ordered the injured, the sick, the cavalry and all but nine guns aboard. Campbell sifted through the remnants of the battalion, sending those too weak to fight down to the quay. The rest were billeted in a convent in town, where they were fortified with Royal Navy salt beef and pork, and bread and wine from the Spanish. Corunna was well stocked with materiel so while the French still suffered the shortages they had endured throughout their long pursuit, Campbell’s men had new muskets and cartridges.73

  The next day the French occupied the Penasquedo ridges a few miles south of town. Napoleon’s rivals were plotting against him in Paris, while the Austrians were preparing for war, so the emperor had delegated Moore’s destruction to Soult, the ‘Hand of Iron’. Commanding the high ground with forty guns and an army 20,000 strong, Soult had the advantage. Nevertheless, the 15th came and went and still there was no sign of a French offensive. Campbell spent the morning of the 16th overseeing repairs to the town walls, strengthening batteries and repairing ramparts.74 The townspeople helped, encouraged by the Spanish governor who roamed the streets, belabouring any locals he found idle.75 It was early afternoon when Campbell heard the first musket shot crack across the valley. He ordered the men to stop what they were doing, fetch their weapons and gather at their alarm post.

  A little before two o’clock Soult began his assault. Whatever qualms Moore may have had about his troops’ resolve, French fire acted like a tonic. Towards the western end of the British lines, fighting was concentrated around the village of Elvina, the British pitching in with obstinate ferocity and forcing the French back gradually through the narrow streets. Moore brought the Guards up to finish the job, but as he led them forward, the Black Watch in front hesitated. Moore rode ahead to rally them, conspicuous on a fiery-tempered cream horse with a distinctive black mane and tail. As he spurred the men on, a French cannonball caught him on the left shoulder, knocking him from his saddle. ‘The ball had carried away his left breast, broken two ribs, shattered the shoulder, and the arm was scarcely attached to it.’76 Still conscious but failing fast, Moore was manhandled back to Corunna. Command devolved upon Major-General Sir Alexander Hope.

  After their behaviour on the retreat, Moore had been loath to rely on the 1/9th, so they were deployed a little way outside town to guard the coast road and be ready as reinforcements, if required.77 Campbell’s view of the battle to the south was obscured by the gunsmoke filling the plain, but in Corunna every tower, church spire and ship’s mast swarmed with spectators.78 The correspondent of The Times, lunching at a hotel in town, asked one of the waiters what all the fuss was about. When he heard battle had commenced, he pondered whether to get a ringside seat, but decided to finish his meal first.79

  Soult ordered his cavalry round to the west to attack Moore’s flank and cut off his retreat to Corunna, but General Sir Edward Paget’s troops advanced to stop them and slowly rolled them back. More French cavalry under General Franceschi were descending on Corunna itself, but having watched the offensive against Paget collapse, Franceschi decided to withdraw. The British had beaten off Soult’s flanking manoeuvre, stopped the enemy at Elvina and, at the east end of the line, at the village of Piedralonga, had prevented Soult from making a decisive breakthrough. As night fell it was clear any prospect of outright French victory had perished.

  Having not fired a shot, the 1/9th were dragooned into helping the injured, until at 9 p.m. they were ordered back to their convent.80 An hour later the rest of the battlefield survivors began to stagger into town ‘all in tatters, hollow-eyed, and covered with blood and filth’,81 as the navy quietly resumed the embarkation under the cover of darkness. With luck, the battle had bought them enough time to escape. The great worry was the French guns. If Soult realised his enemy had pulled back, he would bring up his artillery and shell the town, so the British lit bonfires on the Monte Mero to maintain the charade that they still manned the lines, and allow the boats time enough to complete the evacuation.82

  Morning revealed the truth and Soult rapidly redeployed his artillery to bombard Corunna. Frightening though they were, the French guns were too high up to cause much damage to the ships below. All that day troops were steadily stowed aboard as enemy artillery thundered overhead. Shot punched through the roof of the building where the remainder of Campbell’s battalion was sheltering, but no one was hurt. Perhaps as punishment, it fell to the 1/9th to form part of the rear guard that evening and fend off the French while the last men were rowed away. They had one other task to perform: to bury Sir John Moore. Born in Trongate, Glasgow, Moore was an old boy of the Grammar School like Campbell and had been gazetted underage. More than a century later, when his alma mater decided to name four houses after illustrious alumni, they chose Moore and two prime ministers (Bonar Law and Campbell Bannerman). The fourth was named after the ensign who stood watching as his general was laid to rest.

  Steel engraving of the Battle of Corunna from Album de vingt batailles de la Révolution et de l’Empire. (Courtesy of www.albion-prints.com)

  By the time Moore’s body was being interred, very nearly the entire army had embarked and still the French had not stormed the town. Campbell remained guarding the ramparts until 10 p.m., when the 1/9th was ordered down to the quay to board the last boats. Corunna was shrouded in a thick mist, with an eerie glow where one suburb had been set on fire by the French bombardment.83 Just as the men were vaulting into the boats, locals appeared, shouting and beckoning. Three houses full of wounded British soldiers had been overlooked. Forty of the 1/9th were sent into town to bring them out. ‘This task was a very fatiguing one,’ complained Private Hale, ‘being full a quarter of a mile to carry the men, and having no convenience for so doing, except on our backs, or in blankets, which was very uneasy carriage for us, and worse for the wounded.’84

  Once the last of the injured were away, the 1/9th were free to leave. By now the ships had moved out to sea and out of range of Soult’s artillery. For Campbell this meant a row of 3 miles in an open boat across rough water. Some of the oarsmen had been without food for nearly two days. At around 4 a.m. they reached the fleet and hurriedly boarded Audacious, Alfred and more than half a dozen other ships. Below decks the cold night air gave way to the stifling heat of an overloaded warship, causing wracking pains among the weary men. Campbell found the leather of his sole-less shoes had stuck fast to his feet. Though he soaked them in the hottest water he could bear, when he tried to peel them away the skin came with it.85

  ‘He, with many other officers, landed at Plymouth without a rag to cover him’, explained Colonel Forster. ‘He was a stranger and my father took him in.’ ‘I never shall forget the kindness your father and mother showed me’, C
ampbell told Forster forty-six years later in the Crimea, handing him an envelope addressed to ‘Mary Forster – a Christmas present with the love and blessing of an old friend of her dear father’. Inside was a cheque for £100 – more than most people earned in a year. Such a sum ‘would have a bad effect on a mere child’, Forster protested, but Campbell insisted: ‘Do not be so cruel as to deny me the gratification of forming my everlasting remembrance of it – although it is but a trifle. I have more than I require, for my desires are moderate.’ ‘It has touched my heart and shows the man’, wrote Forster. ‘He is as brave a soldier and as honourable a man as graces the Army List.’86

  Though traumatic, the retreat was the crucible of Campbell’s methodology. It showed the fulcrum on which everyday grumbles turn into defiance. For an ensign to witness the near-total breakdown of army discipline was rare, but it equipped Campbell to deal with fractious troops in the Punjab forty years later, and a decade after that right across India, not once but twice. There have been few British commanders who faced down civil unrest (in Demerara, Ireland and Newcastle, and three times in India) with such a deft touch. Much of that was down to Corunna.

  Six months in the Peninsula showed Campbell the antipodes of leadership: Wellesley, who wanted automata troops, and Moore, who preferred more initiative and less segregation. He absorbed elements of both. Moore’s progressive approach to training underscored Campbell’s career but having seen more soldiers die from hunger, exposure, cold and disease than bullets and shot, the importance of supplies was branded onto his consciousness, making Campbell doubly sensitive to the demands the thick-skinned sophistry of military bureaucracy imposed on the common soldier. When he was commander-in-chief, his men arrived on the battlefield warm, well fed and healthy. This was not simply out of the goodness of his heart. It was starkly practical. If the men had ample rations, there would be no need for them to strip the countryside. Theft on the march, such as he saw on the retreat, he deplored. Fifty years later, the sight of camp followers pillaging in India roused him to a fury: ‘Sir Colin himself charges fiercely among them with a thick stick in hand and thrashes the robbers heartily’, reported journalist William Russell.87 Campbell preferred to avoid subsistence looting by thorough planning, though it left him in bad odour with the press: Sir ‘Crawling Camel’ was too slow, too economical with his men, too cautious – while the Empire was in danger, he wasted his time arranging baggage trains and biscuit depots rather than slaughtering the heathen.

  When it came to discipline, Campbell inclined to the Wellesley philosophy. Straggling and disorder were the root causes of Moore’s losses. Where Wellesley would have put the indiscipline down to ill-breeding and ordered much flogging, Moore took it personally, mindful perhaps that the troops’ excesses drove a coach and horses through his conception of the infantryman as one who thrived when the reins were loosened. The retreat demonstrated the limits of Moore’s approach, turning Campbell into a sympathetic but demanding chief. ‘There never was a commanding officer or general more exacting on all points of discipline than he’, wrote one Highland Brigade surgeon,88 but that was why in the fetid barracks of Hong Kong, the freezing trenches outside Sebastopol and the searing heat of Oudh, when Campbell’s men were tested by conditions as bad as and worse than those on the retreat with Moore, their loyalty and discipline never wavered.

  Corunna was the Dunkirk of its day. Unfortunately for Moore, the British believed not that he had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, but that his retreat had eclipsed the triumph of Vimeiro. It left the public itching to get the cane out of the cupboard and give Bonaparte a sound thrashing – too visceral an impulse for the government to resist for long. Wellesley pushed hard for the army to return to Portugal, convinced that Spain was the vulnerable underbelly of Bonaparte’s empire. Castlereagh countered that distant expeditions drained the exchequer. He favoured something closer to home, where the army could be resupplied more easily, at lower cost – specifically, a raid on the Netherlands.

  The bridgehead was to be on the pretty Dutch ‘island’ of Walcheren, like so much of Holland little more than an enclave of marshy land reclaimed from the sea, bordered by the north and south channels of the River Scheldt as it flowed westwards to the sea. The plan was to land, subdue any local opposition, speed to Antwerp and, with the Royal Navy, destroy the French fleet at anchor there. It was to be a lightning raid, a coup de main demanding courage, agility and daring, and a general of rare gifts. Sadly, the man selected to command was Lord Chatham. Nominally a lieutenant-general, Chatham had spent most of his career behind a desk.

  While the invasion plans were finalised, the 9th Foot recuperated. Many men had dysentery and typhus or were lame from walking 300 miles barefoot across Spain. Those able to walk paraded like vagrants in rags ridden with lice. Their old uniforms were burnt and for once the army was quick to replace them. A successful recruiting drive, raising over 500 men from county militias, brought the regiment back up to strength and so, on 17 July, Campbell woke in his lodgings in Canterbury, to march for Deal, ready to sail for Walcheren. A court martial delayed departure for a couple of hours. Two soldiers were sentenced to 100 lashes each and justice administered, as usual, in front of the whole battalion. When they did move off, the locals thronged the streets to bid them farewell, among them ‘many women with watery eyes, who were then deprived of their fancy men’, as one soldier put it.89

  Since Campbell had joined the 9th the previous summer, fourteen ensigns had been promoted; due less to the casualties of war and more to the enlargement of the regiment to two battalions. Campbell had shot up the list and so when Lieutenant Lenthal, who had only just exchanged into the 9th from the 3rd Dragoons, suddenly resigned his commission, Campbell was gazetted lieutenant in his place.* The army needed 1,000 new officers every year during the Peninsular War90 and so, once again, he got the promotion without purchase. The realities of war meant that an ensign was an apprentice. A lieutenant, in contrast, had a position of genuine responsibility, sometimes charged with a whole company.

  Campbell found Deal brimming with soldiers, sailors, chandlers, grocers, farriers, tradesmen of all varieties, wives and lovers bidding fond farewells, and the usual mass of idle humanity that congregates wherever matters of moment appear to be afoot. The fleet was preparing to sail, so the 1/9th went straight to the docks to embark. Out to sea, the horizon was a forest of masts. Castlereagh had amassed the greatest British armada ever: 264 warships and 352 transports, including ‘all the fast sailing smuggling vessels which could be procured by hiring them – every rowing galley in Deal and Folkestone’, enough to carry 42,000 troops;91 a quarter of the infantry sent across the Channel on D-Day, but with no wireless communications or internal combustion engines, only signal flags, wind power and gunpowder. People travelled all the way from London to see it. Confidence among the officers was boundless. As one naval captain assured his wife, ‘We have every reason to believe what we hear – that there is not a French soldier in Holland!’92

  Events bore out that confidence, initially at least. On 30 July the bulk of Chatham’s army landed on Walcheren and next day forced the surrender of the capital, Middelburg. On 1 August General Hope landed at South Beveland93 and within twenty-four hours subdued the island. And all this was achieved at a cost of only a few hundred casualties.

  Campbell’s battalion was still offshore, in the division of Lieutenant-General the Marquess of Huntly. Huntly’s intention was to land at Cadzand, on the south shore of the Scheldt Channel, take the Wulpen semaphore signal station and then destroy the batteries at Breskens.94 At Cadzand he expected to find a garrison of no more than 1,000, but the French, having received confirmation of British intentions on 21 July, had been stealthily pouring in reinforcements.95

  Huntly commanded over 5,000 men but had only enough boats to land 700 at once. Unless they could get ashore in one large mass, they would be overrun by the National Guard at Cadzand and the three enemy battalions at Groede, south of Breskens.9
6 Huntly estimated that it would take over an hour and a half to land each tranche of 700 soldiers, which meant the first wave would have to hold the beachhead on their own against several thousand Frenchmen until the next wave of troops arrived.

  In the transports off Blankenberghe the men were restless. Three times Campbell had been ordered to ready them, even to the point that the landing boats pulled alongside, only for the offensive to be delayed due to squalls.97 Meanwhile, the French could be seen ‘exercising on the sands’ with ‘horsemen parading along the shore’, to unnerve the British.98 Huntly decided his best course was to wait for more boats from Chatham, who, having ensconced his troops securely, had no further need of his landing craft. Despite repeated requests, none arrived. The navy blamed the weather.

  The longer the attack was delayed, the more enemy troops arrived to reinforce Cadzand. At Breskens, General Rousseau had already ordered up two extra battalions from Ghent. Huntly was in an awkward position: by landing he would risk his entire division, but if he gave up he would be pilloried. After several postponements, and increasingly despondent at Chatham’s failure to send more boats, he threw in the towel. With Huntly’s threat gone, the French gleefully rowed their enlarged garrison at Cadzand across the Scheldt to reinforce Flushing.

  Chatham redeployed Huntly’s division to South Beveland, although quite why, when the island had already been subjugated and was teeming with British troops, is unclear. Strategic considerations aside, Campbell (a bad sailor) was happy just to be back on dry land. After two weeks at sea, he finally disembarked on the shore of the Sloe Passage on South Beveland on 9 August. The battalion’s light company were quartered in a chapel in the small village of St Herenshock, and the rest in barns nearby. Supplies were plentiful. ‘Eatables are very cheap here’, reported Ensign Le Mesurier. ‘Fowls a shilling a couple, butter 8d a pound. Wild ducks, partridges and pigeons are plenty hereabouts but for want of powder and shot we cannot kill any.’99