Within days they were moved to the east end of the island, to be first in the enemy’s sights if the French left Antwerp, but with no imminent assault likely, time weighed heavy on their hands. Campbell occupied the men with vaulting ditches so ‘if the enemy should make an attack on the island, we should not be unacquainted with jumping’, as one soldier put it.100 But the French had no intention of attacking. They preferred instead to open the sluices holding back the sea to drown their enemy into submission.
Meanwhile, along the coast at Flushing, Chatham had finally got his artillery in place. At 1 p.m. on 13 August his guns opened fire. Two days and 10,000 rounds later, the garrison surrendered. Three hundred and thirty-five locals were dead, and many more wounded or homeless. The Stadt Huis, two churches and 247 other houses lay in ashes.101 ‘Never was a town made so cruel an example of’, wrote one naval officer.102
With this last pocket of French resistance defeated, the British were able to close the dykes and stop the water in the ditches rising, but in the summer heat the air still became uncomfortably humid, especially at night. Having taken off his boots before bed, one officer complained that by morning they were encrusted with green mould.103 The men were pestered by ferocious mosquitoes. All the time, the stench from the dykes was getting worse. Campbell’s men had still not shaken off the dysentery and fever they had contracted in Spain, and now found themselves in the perfect environment for another outbreak. After just a few days on South Beveland soldiers began to complain of the cold, despite the August sun. The colour drained from their faces as they were convulsed with shivers. The attacks would then subside, only to return a short while later. ‘I was in a burning fever at times, at other times trembling and chilled with cold’, recalled one sufferer. ‘I was unfit to rise or walk upon my feet.’104 The fever was followed by symptoms of typhoid, anorexia and deliriums, coated tongue and severe headaches. ‘We send a great many men every day in the Hospitals [sic]’, wrote Ensign Le Mesurier. ‘The Inhabitants tell us it will be much worse in September.’105
Medical opinion was divided as to the cause of the new ‘Walcheren Fever’, but the miasma generated by the heat and water was thought the most likely culprit. With no inkling that the transmission mechanism involved insects, they had, by accident, identified the underlying cause: stagnant water providing a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes. Malaria, or ‘marsh ague’, had been prevalent in coastal Europe during warm summers since the Dark Ages, and continued right up until the 1950s. Most of the population of Walcheren suffered attacks in early childhood and again in adolescence, leaving them with some degree of immunity.106 The British soldiers had no natural protection and the lack of freshwater sources on the island exacerbated the problem as troops filled their canteens from whatever puddles they could find.107
On 27 August Chatham held a council of war. Reviewing the scale of French reinforcements, the intelligence that the defences of Antwerp were more formidable than first thought and the news that, if attacked, the French warships could retreat further upriver to Ruppelmonde or Dendermonde,108 he decided that besieging Antwerp was now beyond him. South Beveland was to be evacuated. It was too late. By 28 August, 4,000 troops on the island had caught the disease. Ten days later, 11,000 troops were sick, including Campbell. The response of the Army Medical Board was contemptible: when the government requested that the board investigate in person, its members tried to weasel out of going.109
On 14 September Chatham’s second-in-command, Lieutenant-General Sir Eyre Coote, took over. An experienced veteran of the American Revolutionary War and of expeditions to the Low Countries in the 1790s, the government was confident he would take control of the rapidly worsening situation. Instead, he wrote to Lord Chatham with the constant refrain of the unimaginative, ‘Something must be done.’110 On 27 October, Coote, unable to cope,* handed over to Lieutenant-General Sir George Don, who fortunately was a man who knew exactly what to do. He arranged to remove 6,000 troops to England, away from the murderous miasma.
Campbell was fortunate to be among the first evacuated. The 1/9th were picked up on 4 September but, due to contrary winds, did not reach English waters for eleven days.111 With so many feverish soldiers crammed into a ship, secondary infections spread fast. Campbell had been on Dutch soil for just twenty-five days, had played no part in the offensive against the French and now returned in a wrecked battalion for the second time in a year. He seemed doomed to be a witness to war and never its wager.
Morale in the battalion, already depressed, was dragged down further as the fatalities increased. The 1/9th lost seventy men to malaria.112 As Private Hale wrote, ‘several times, three or four in a day were carried to the burial ground … There were but few in the regiment that escaped having the ague either sooner or later.’113 The doctors tried emetics and purgatives, camphor, ether, mercury, warm baths, blisters applied to the shaven head or chest, and saline mixtures using tincture of opium, but nothing seemed able to conquer it.114 Infusions of bark were credited as partially effective,115 but one treatment stood out in preference to all others: as one doctor wrote, ‘Without Port Wine the Walcheren Fevers would have almost always terminated in death.’116
While soldiers died, the government vacillated. At first they wanted to leave a garrison at Walcheren, but at length Castlereagh realised that his expedition was over, a prominent entry in the catalogue of martial botchery. By 9 December the last British soldier had left. Campbell had seen Moore’s reputation trashed by military disaster and now watched Chatham suffer the same end. These exhibitions of the fragility of senior command, that a general was only as good as his last battle, were ideal preparation for the maulings that lay ahead for Campbell.
‘No one could have foreseen such an appalling plague as fell upon the troops’, claimed historian Sir John Fortescue.117 In fact, ‘the nature of the disease, known to be incident to that climate, and of which no apothecary’s apprentice in London could have been ignorant before the expedition sailed’,118 was well known, if anyone from the government had bothered to ask.** The people of Walcheren had suffered the fever for centuries: Albrecht Durer contracted it on a visit in the 1520s.119 The locals had tried to warn the British. Captain Gomm of the 9th, while billeted with a local doctor in Walcheren, wrote home on 7 August that his host had warned ‘the weather is very healthy now, but that in a couple of months his harvest begins, and lasts until the frost sets in’.120 As a staff officer, Gomm was ideally placed to pass this information on to Chatham, but evidently didn’t think it worth repeating. Gomm went down with the fever a few weeks later.
During the government enquiry which followed, the medical experts were quick to wash their hands of the affair. Physician-General and member of the Army Medical Board, Sir Lucas Pepys assured the enquiry, ‘If the destination of the expedition had been confided to him, he should have advised extraordinary precaution for the preservation of the health of the troops.’121 Almost every eminent physician declared that, had he only been consulted, he would have counselled against invading Walcheren. Likewise, the Army Medical Board was at pains to stress that the government had not sought their advice before the expedition, and spinelessly claimed that as a consultative board it was not their job to voice their opinion unless it was solicited. The Board was duly disbanded in February 1810, mourned by few, and replaced by a more interventionist body.122
There is an obvious fatalism in the focus of contemporary critics upon the choice of location, rather than the treatment given, as the cause of the disaster. Medicine was still too much of a black art for the press, public and politicians to blame hospitals for the death toll – rather they accused the army of courting pestilence by heading for Walcheren. It was a mistake Campbell saw repeated in the West Indies, in China, in Hong Kong and in the Crimea. Disease on campaign was expected and tolerated, but a skilled commander still did his best to avoid or at least circumscribe it. Walcheren made Campbell an expert. When he led the 98th Foot to China on a six-month journey on a pack
ed naval frigate, he lost not one man to illness. In the Crimea his Highlanders enjoyed a better survival rate than most, despite the same inadequate medical provision and ignorance of climate shown at Walcheren, while during the Indian Mutiny the mortality of troops under his command was lower than it had been in peacetime.
That concern was partly selfish. Campbell was a martyr to agues for the rest of his life. One staff officer recorded him ‘pretty well riddled with wounds, and still suffering from fever contracted at Walcheren’ in February 1858.123 Bark infusions gave some relief, but nineteenth-century medicine had no cure. After service in the Caribbean, China and India, all of which were malarial, it is hard to be sure whether his lifelong susceptibility to fevers was due to recurrent Walcheren fever, reinfection in the tropics, or a series of distinct diseases, each subsequently contracted on his travels, but each with similar symptoms. Whichever it was, it plagued him year after year.
So far, Campbell had been through one victory, one draw, one appalling retreat and the most disastrous amphibious operation in British history. On paper it might not look like a propitious start to a great military career, but these four key formative experiences moulded his whole approach to war. While Vimeiro showed him how to fight, Corunna impressed upon him the fragility of an army poorly supplied and the limits to the demands a commander could make of his men. Walcheren demonstrated the importance of intelligence about local conditions, of knowing when to retreat and regroup and the capacity of disease to ruin an army far more quickly than the enemy. Starting with the captain who took him by the hand to the British front line at Vimeiro, he had so far been only an onlooker, but at one remove from the conflict, he learnt the vital art of detachment. So armed, Campbell, despite many injuries and near misses, could put himself in the very thickest of the fighting well into his sixties. It imbued him with that most sought-after of military attributes: fearlessness.
Notes
* Because of the heat, the French commander had issued light linen smocks (Fortescue, VI, 223; Chartrand, 68; Anon., Vicissitudes, 16).
* The prohibition on bobbing was strictly enforced. ‘You are a coward. I will stop your corn, three days!’ bellowed Colonel Mainwaring of the 51st as one of his charges flinched as a cannonball flew past. The reaction of the object of his wrath – his horse – is unrecorded (Davies, 103).
* On 16 January 1804 he retired from the 68th Foot on half-pay. On 4 June 1811 he was promoted, still on half-pay, to lieutenant-colonel. From 1820 he briefly returned to full pay with the 2nd Royal Veterans Battalion, but disappears from the Army List in 1822. Burke’s Peerage (1860) also records another uncle called Colin Campbell, who ‘was killed a subaltern in the war of the American Revolution’.
** An entry in a bond of provision in the Sheriff Court Books of Argyll records how in 1768 Henry Campbell made over £500 to his son Duncan, and £200 to his daughter Hester, appointing tutors for his ‘lawful children’, as he described them, because his wife Alice had run away (see Paton). The ubiquity of the Campbell name in Islay and Argyll is amply demonstrated by the fact that all three parties in this love triangle bore the surname Campbell, including Alice as her maiden and both her married names.
*** See Appendix B.
**** That Major Campbell could afford the Royal Academy fees of £53 15s 10d on half-pay in 1806–07 suggests he was a man of independent means.
***** He was discharged on account of the ‘infirmities of advanced life’ aged 35 (Loraine Petre, II, 439).
* That Captain Alexander Campbell is described as a non-specific ‘relation’ suggests that he was a relative of some distance. He died in Lisbon on 8 December 1810. According to his cousin, Colin’s brother John also gained a commission but died on active service during the Napoleonic Wars. Without any record of regiment, date, age, etc., he has been impossible to trace.
** Given that promotion would have cost them nothing, it is curious that all three stayed at the same rank throughout the Peninsular War.
* The standard infantry deployment against cavalry was a hollow square of men. This action of the 2/9th is in most accounts forgotten. ‘The 2nd Battalion 9th Regiment had been omitted in the order of thanks to the army on this occasion from an omission of General Anstruther … I mentioned the circumstance of the omission to Sir A. Wellesley on the following day and he very handsomely corrected it in the general orders of that day. They were too late to be mentioned in the dispatch’, explained Cameron (RNRM/45.2).
* What we would call boots today; they were termed shoes to distinguish them from the thigh-length boots of the cavalry.
* Promotion ‘without purchase’ was by seniority, i.e. the longest-serving ensign got first refusal when a lieutenancy fell vacant.
* His resignation may have been due to recurrent fever picked up in the West Indies. In November 1815 he was charged with indecent conduct and accused of paying boys from Christ’s Hospital to flog him. He was acquitted, but after an inquiry by the Duke of York, he was dismissed from the army and stripped of his knighthood. He died in 1823 a broken man.
** See Pringle.
1 Hale, 21.
2 Glover, Wellington’s Army, 44.
3 Napier, C., Remarks on Military Law, 263.
4 Glover, Wellington’s Army, 166.
5 Hennell, 92.
6 Landmann, II, 205.
7 Shadwell, I, 4.
8 Morgan, 185.
9 Chapman, 197.
10 Ashmall, 14–15; Lockhart, 48.
11 Senex, I, 302.
12 Lockhart, 48; Cleland Burns, 11.
13 Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863.
14 Anon., The Ancient and Modern History, 93.
15 United Services Journal, June 1855, 213.
16 PP/Report on System of Purchase, 190.
17 Rose, 30.
18 Glover, ‘Purchase, Patronage and Promotion’, 211.
19 Hale, 6.
20 PRO/WO31/253.
21 Glover, Wellington’s Army, 42.
22 Dent, 13 (the cost in the 4th Foot Mess, but comparable).
23 PP/Report on System of Purchase, 193.
24 Annual Register (1808), 124.
25 Holmes, 165.
26 Bew, 255.
27 The Examiner, 4 September 1808.
28 Oxfordshire Light Infantry Chronicle 1902, 191.
29 Schaumann, 2.
30 Shadwell, I, 4.
31 Neale, 8.
32 Loraine Petre, II, 346.
33 Landmann, II, 200.
34 Leslie, 48.
35 Landmann, II, 211.
36 Wyld, 3; Landmann, II, 218.
37 RNRM/45.2.
38 Landmann, II, 212–15.
39 Roberts, A., 46.
40 Hale, 22–3.
41 Bew, 235.
42 Wood, G., 61.
43 Holmes, 122.
44 Neale, 58.
45 Maurice, II, 309, 272.
46 Tylden, 145.
47 Shadwell, I, 144.
48 Neale, 214.
49 Hale, 25.
50 Hale, 26–7.
51 Tylden, 139.
52 Oman, I, 548.
53 Anon., Memorials of the Late War, I, 178; Ormsby, II, 102.
54 Wheeler, 24.
55 Ormsby, II, 103.
56 Schaumann, 93.
57 Neale, 289.
58 Surtees, W., 88.
59 Wylly, A Cavalry Officer, 160.
60 Wheeler, 28.
61 Blakeney, 81.
62 Hale, 30.
63 Anon., Memorials of the Late War, I, 190–4.
64 Hale, 30; Blakeney, 90.
65 Napier, G., 59.
66 Hale, 32.
67 Neale, 315.
68 Hibbert, 145.
69 Ormsby, II, 174.
70 Wheeler, 33.
71 Anon., Memoirs of a Sergeant, 56.
72 Glover, The Peninsular War, 83.
73 Napier, G., 67; Blakeney, 112.
74 Hale, 33.
75 Schaumann, 135.
77 Blakeney, 113.
78 Schaumann, 138.
79 Robinson, H.C., I, 288.
80 Hale, 34.
81 Schaumann, 141.
82 Ormsby, II, 181.
83 Schaumann, 146.
84 Hale, 35, Anon., Memoirs of a Sergeant, I, 208; Milburne, 70.
85 Hale, 35; Shore, 495; Milburne, 83; Wheeler, 34; Shadwell, I, 7.
86 RA/VIC/MAIN/E/6.
87 Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 244.
88 Munro, 37.
89 Hale, 38–41.
90 Glover, Wellington’s Army, 36.
91 Hale, 41; Fortescue, VII, 58; Brenton, IV, 302; PP/British Minor Expeditions, 1.
92 Codrington, I, 136.
93 Fortescue, VII, 72.
94 Jones, J., II, 247.
95 Fortescue, VII, 64.
96 PP/British Minor Expeditions, 60.
97 Dyott, I, 279.
98 WIG/EHC25/M793/17.
99 Jones, J., II, 264; Anon., Expedition to the Scheldt, 93; Hale, 43; WIG/EHC25/M793/18.
100 Hale, 44; WIG/EHC25/M793/19.
101 Jones, J., II, 278–87.
102 Codrington, I, 143.
103 Ross-Lewin, 264.
104 Howell, 45.
105 WIG/EHC25/M793/18.
106 Knottnerus, 339–53.
107 Anon., Letters from Flushing, 252.
108 Clowes, V, 277.
109 Kelly, 47.
110 Fortescue, VII, 89.
111 Loraine Petre, I, 189; Hale, 46.
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