Swallowing Portugal Will Settle My Spanish Bellyache

by Geoffrey Watson

  Vere grinned. “I am aware of that, Grau. On the way to the mill, however, there is a battery of artillery. I am sure that they will have some powder that they can spare.”

  A similar grin spread over Grau’s face. “Natürlicherweise, Sir. The Französisch always most helpful have been. I must select some of the men to come with me who with gunpowder most promising talent have shown. At dark we start, ja?”

  “An hour after sundown, Sergeant Major. Be ready!”

  The men spent that hour preparing their weapons and themselves. Normally they would smear their faces and hands with burnt cork for night work, but allowing for the persistent rain, they mixed it with a little olive oil to stop it washing away. It became very difficult to remove afterwards but there was currently no lack of water to wash with.

  Captain Hagen led out Lieutenant Richter and Number One Platoon, together with Lieutenant Meier and Number Three Troop, all wearing bonnets instead of helmets. Sergeant Major Grau and five of his explosives squad went with them, encumbered with satchels of quick and slow match to use as fuses for the powder they hoped to find in the artillery caissons.

  Vere followed behind with Lieutenants Bauer and Hahn leading 2 Platoon and 4 Troop respectively. Their objective was the mill and the ovens at the top of the hill, but they were prepared to linger until they were sure the gunners were not causing problems.

  After two years with a much smaller force of Hornets, Vere was doing his best not to be over-complacent when tackling enemy numbers smaller than his own. He couldn’t imagine that there would be trouble with fifty gunners and thirty to forty millers and bakers, but he had learned from experience that Dame Fortune was a fickle wench and no plan ever went entirely as expected.

  The rain clouds ensured that the night was darker than normal. A dozen men with keener night vision had to be sent to locate the positions of the sentries posted round the guns. All cloaks had been discarded and the men were in their fighting rig. It made little difference, as all uniforms had been wet for days. The cloaks perhaps helped to keep the winter night chill away, they had long ceased to be any protection against the rain.

  Such miserable weather might even be an advantage for the Hornets. Sentries were far less observant when they were concerned with sheltering from the elements and these sentries had no reason to believe that there were any serious enemies within twenty miles.

  Locating and dealing with them was to be the least of the problems. The guns, wagons and caissons were parked over quite a wide area and forty-odd horses were hobbled in the cleared space in the centre. The sentries were scattered round the perimeter of the camp, facing out into the dark, with half a dozen campfires behind them, burning under improvised canvas shelters.

  Most of the Hornets carried long and vicious knives, made by Roberto the smith to the design given to him by Sergeant Major Ryan, an Ulsterman and acknowledged expert at all forms of knife fighting.

  All six sentries were dealt with silently and lethally, then sixty Hornets with fixed bayonets surrounded the camp. They moved inwards, slowly contracting their circle, filtering through the hobbled horses and between the guns, winkling out any gunners who had found shelter of a sort under the wagons and caissons.

  Any gunner who rose to his feet was silhouetted against the light of the campfires. Being gunners, very few carried personal weapons. The sentries had muskets, of course, but were now in no position to use them.

  Every man in the camp was soon on his feet and surrounded by a ring of sharp steel, glittering faintly in the light of the fires and all the more terrifying for that. No resistance was encountered because it was very evident that none was possible. Everyone submitted to being bound and left lying in whatever shelter there was, while Vere led the rest of the Hornets in a leisurely climb up the hill towards the mill.

  Sergeant Major Grau and his select band found the powder they needed in the caissons under oiled canvas. Much of it was in small wooden kegs that would be ideal for keeping it dry while it was carried up the hill. The few linen-swathed charges were left where they were for the present. Grau had no faith that they would still be usable, exposed to the rain on the way to the mill.

  They carried a keg each as they followed the attack force. Captain Hagen promised that Richter and his platoon would follow with more kegs as soon as all the gunners had been secured.

  Vere and the two lieutenants approached the top warily. The millers and bakers would be feeling secure within the ring of regiments, but there was always the chance that those regiments would have posted guards around, if only to safeguard their own supplies against unauthorized foragers.

  Vere’s band of unauthorized foragers searched patiently for any posted sentries as they spread out around the crest of the hill. They found no sign of any such precautions, but it did occur to them that the guards were only likely to be there as a deterrent to their own troops. That duty could be served quite adequately in the dry, comfortable conditions inside the mill, or even the warm, dry, comfortable conditions inside the sheds housing the ovens.

  So attractive did it seem, considering the miserable conditions outside that Vere wondered whether it might be the only time ever that an army had volunteers clamoring for a spell of sentry duty.

  When the sun set the wind had dropped. Without the wind the mill could not work and the workers were off duty for the night. Maybe they never worked at night, but the mill and the ovens were shut down and quiet. Probably the bakers would be up and about well before dawn to get the first batch of bread ready for their hungry clients by first light.

  Judicious applications of eyes to cracks in the cladding that was sheathing the mill and the baking sheds, soon determined that two squads of soldiers were in occupation, in addition to the workers. Each squad was taking its duties seriously enough to have three or four men sitting round a makeshift table playing dice. Everyone else was catching up on their sleep, wherever they could find a comfortable spot.

  There was no point waiting for a change of sentry. All the guards were within the buildings, making the best of their luck while it lasted.

  It didn’t last long. The Hornets burst through the doors and spread out, their carbines stripped of protective canvas covers and ready to deal with any resistance. Within the walls and on top of the hill there was no chance of any shots being heard elsewhere.

  As it came about, there was no need for shots to be fired at all. The entire operation had been completed without the use of firearms and the only casualties had been the six luckless sentries. Vere had every excuse for being complacent in this case.

  The terrified guards in the mill and baking sheds were caught without their weapons to hand and capitulated with indecent haste as soon as they realized that the attackers were not Portuguese looking for vengeance.

  All the prisoners were marched down the hill to the gunner’s camp and tied up alongside them. Grau and his helpers were let loose with thirty-plus kegs of gunpowder and coils of slow match. Nothing too ambitious: all they had to do was wreck the mill machinery and baking ovens so that they could never be used again.

  Flour that had been milled ready for baking, was scattered down the steep slope, where the rain would wash it into the soil. All the baked bread and biscuit had been handed out, apart from small amounts that the guards and workers had reserved for themselves.

  Grain was the problem. There were tons of it stored loose in the large barn-like building attached to the mill, plus two or three hundred separate sacks which must have come from a different stock that had been discovered.

  A couple of hour’s hard labour transferred the sacked grain into the wagons below in the gunner’s camp, filling three of them and leaving the fourth to carry the remaining kegs of powder.

  These were driven back to the Hornet’s temporary camp, together with all the horses and anything else that could be useful. A soaked and miserable column of prisoners accompanied them, while the unwanted caissons and anything else that would burn was smashed and piled
round the guns and set on fire. The guns themselves would not be damaged seriously, but they would be of little use to the French with their wheels and carriages reduced to ashes.

  Sergeant Major Grau and his demolition party rejoined them at their camp. It was only a couple of hours until dawn and the Hornets moved out with their loot, leaving the prisoners to their own devices.

  The column of horsemen with the extra wagons and captured horses was trotting clear of the camped regiments when the storage barn caught fire and started to flame brightly and most enthusiastically. Grau had mixed the contents of all the remaining kegs of powder with the top layer of loose grain and made sure that the wooden stalls in the barn would burn as soon as his fuse reached the exposed gunpowder.

  They heard the muffled explosions as the charges he had placed in the ovens and the mill machinery went off at the same time. The roof of the barn would undoubtedly collapse and the rain would complete the ruination of the loose stored grain that the mixed powder had not already charred and spoilt.

  The French encampments that they were leaving behind were beginning to react to the blaze on the hill. It would do no good. By the time the first of them arrived on the scene, there would be nothing of any value left for them to save.

  Vere was philosophical. The amount of bread and biscuit he had destroyed and captured would have fed the whole French army for perhaps half a day. It was a pinprick, but then, there were other mills operating close to the towns and docks on the River Tagus. The Hornets would have to investigate as see if they were guarded as badly.

  CHAPTER 2

  Welbeloved was rearranging his command. It was more an increase in representation. His Spanish and Portuguese platoons were being used as nuclei to train more of their countrymen and form Spanish and Portuguese companies. As part of the Naval Brigade, the Admiralty would, of course have to pay for it, but Lord Wellington had shown himself eager to press them for additional support.

  In this case, their Lordships at the Admiralty were more than happy to co-operate. Since Trafalgar, five years before, there had been no major engagements by the fleet. It was the army that was becoming the darling of the country and taking appropriations away from the Navy, after successive triumphs at Oporto, Talavera and Buçaco.

  Funding from Parliament followed popularity and the Navy still needed vast sums just to maintain the dockyards, arsenals, ships and thousands of fighting sailors and marines all round the world.

  Small, but quite startling successes by the Hornets, under the umbrella of the Naval Brigade, brought a measure of popularity back to the navy. It was popularity for such a ridiculously small outlay when compared with the generous appropriations that followed when a grateful government was prepared to vote them what they wanted.

  Even recruitment was hardly a burden on them. Since the initial formation of the Naval Brigade after Talavera, recruitment from the Royal Marines was merely a matter of replacements. Half the brigade was now made up of foreigners. There was a company and a squadron of Germans, a company of Spaniards and a company of Portuguese.

  The Spanish and Portuguese contingents were still in training at Oporto and Santiago del Valle and the Navy had merely contributed two extra platoons of Royal Marines to replace the core Spanish and Portuguese platoons now growing into companies.

  If one included the wagon train operating from Oporto, the Brigade was over a thousand strong and the Admiralty really only had to provide funds to feed them and clothe them. Their horses were nearly all captured from the French, as many of their weapons had also been. (Modified 1777 pattern French muskets and carbines, taken after the battle of Talavera)

  The arrangement, therefore, was agreeable to the Admiralty, to Lord Wellington and to the Government, particularly as the reverses of La Coruña and Walcheren had strengthened opposition demands for the Government to withhold reinforcements for the Peninsular or evacuate the army altogether.

  Wellington, therefore, was pleased to have the extra strength of the Hornets harassing the French, plus the military reinforcements that the Horse Guards were able to send following all the latest positive news stories flowing back to England.

  The Navy was delighted with the excellent despatches from Iberia, bringing them welcome credit and relief, particularly after storms of criticism of their part in the disastrous and badly handled Walcheren campaign.

  Everybody, it seems, was happy. Well, not quite. The French were not happy. Welbeloved could understand that, but it had been entirely their own fault. They had been brimful of confidence when they left Salamanca, all one hundred thousand of them.

  The Spanish fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo had resisted for a couple of weeks, expecting Wellington to come to their aid. The French had twice as many men, mostly battle hardened, against the mixed Anglo-Portuguese force. Wellington declined to fight such odds in such a position and Ciudad Rodrigo surrendered.

  The Spanish then, were not happy. The British and Portuguese should have fought gallantly to save Ciudad Rodrigo and lost. Just as the Spanish had done in nearly every battle against the French in the last three years.

  Masséna left a thousand or two men to garrison the town and moved on to the Portuguese fortified town of Almeida. It was strong and well supplied. It should have resisted for a month or more. A French shell ignited a leaking barrel of gunpowder and the entire arsenal exploded. Almeida surrendered next day. The Portuguese Regency Council in Lisbon was not happy. Half of Wellington’s army was Portuguese and he should have used them to fail gallantly at Almeida.

  The French advanced through the mountains into Portugal a month later, leaving a thousand or two men at Almeida. It wasn’t the resistance of the town that delayed them. They had run out of food. Even the accumulation of thousands of rations of bread from the ruined town was too little to enable them to move until more had been brought from Spain. They were still confident but not happy.

  The roads were not good in Portugal, especially in the mountains. Wellington had built defences on the ones he did not want the French to use. They duly did not use them, but not wishing to be too co-operative, they also ignored the ones he hoped would bring them to his choice of battlefield.

  They chose a road that even Hannibal would have rejected and it led them; losing thousands of men in ambushes by Ordenança, Militia and Welbeloved’s Hornets; straight to the middle of the nine mile length of lofty granite: Buçaco ridge.

  It was a daunting prospect, but Masséna knew how many soldiers Wellington led and they weren’t enough to defend nine miles of ridge. Anyway, he couldn’t see them as they were all hidden behind the crest and wasn’t Wellington only a timid, defensive general with an undeserved reputation, gained commanding sepoys in India?

  It took five thousand casualties to prove him wrong and the damned English had then retired behind fortifications that completely sealed off the Lisbon peninsular. His army was short of ammunition, short of food and stranded in a country stripped of almost everything needed to sustain them.

  Perhaps then, it was only the British who were happy? The army certainly, had been anything but happy to retreat from Buçaco after beating the French. Now that they could appreciate Wellington’s masterful strategy from the security of an impregnable defence system, they were grateful for their period of rest and recuperation.

  The Portuguese army had shared a magnificent victory at Buçaco and was naturally elated. They probably shared the same degree of happiness as their British comrades.

  The Portuguese government and people couldn’t be happy that a large area of their country had been turned into a virtual desert and occupied by a starving enemy horde, but now that they were assured that Lisbon was safe and that the British had no intention of running away, perhaps they could be said to be content.

  Brigadier General of Marines, Sir Joshua Welbeloved, Conde de Alba, was certainly content that this slack period gave him time to complete the formation of his new Portuguese Company at Oporto.

  Captain Fernando Gonçal
ves had handed over his platoon to one of the original Hornets, Sergeant Major Dodds who had accepted a commission as lieutenant in the new company and was now helping Gonçalves select men for a total of three or more new platoons from over two hundred Portuguese volunteers.

  Less than a hundred were likely to achieve selection for intensive training. Thirty or forty near misses would be offered a place with Lieutenant Colonel Bailey’s growing wagon train. The new year would come before this fledgling company was fit to serve in action. Welbeloved was happy to use the time relaxing while building up relations with the Portuguese Ordenança and Militia bands, guarding the mountain roads and maintaining the fitness of the two British companies that he had based in the deserted little mountain town of São Martinho for the winter.

  Not quite two companies in fact. His wife, the Condesa de Alba, had rejoined him from Spain about six months ago, but had now returned once more to her estate at Santiago del Valle. She had been reluctant to go, but Welbeloved had been so pleased to see her when she arrived that she was now expecting their second child. She had been persuaded without too many eruptions of her famously volatile temper.

  A number of wagons with powder and other supplies was heading in that direction and the replacement platoon for B Company would accompany them. Sergeant Major Evans and his platoon would go along as well. There was the precious cargo in the person of the Condesa to guard on the way there and another precious cargo of modified (converted to breech loading) Baker rifles and French carbines to bring back.

  Dai Evans’s Spanish wife had recently presented him with a daughter at Santiago, who was now about three months old. He had yet to see her and the opportunity seemed too good to miss.

  It left Welbeloved with six platoons of Hornets and one of Wasps. The Wasps were the newly trained marines who had little combat experience as yet. He could also call upon hundreds of Ordenança, scattered throughout the mountains. They were coming to rely upon the supplies of food that was being brought in on the wagon train from Oporto. The mountains had been stripped of all sustenance in the face of French incursions and the armed peasants would themselves be in dire straits without these supplies.