Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  It was in a fairly desperate condition in the spring of 1811 anyway, not because of disaffection, but simply because of numbers. The British government had yet to realize that in Wellington they had at last discovered a general who knew how to fight and they were still niggardly in sending him troops. The shortfall was partly remedied by the fine Portuguese battalions that were under Wellington's command. Some divisions, like the Seventh, had more

  Portuguese than British soldiers and every account of the war pays tribute to the fighting qualities of those allies. The relationship with the Spanish was never so easy nor so fruitful, even after General Alava became liaison officer to Wellington. Alava became a close friend to Wellington and was with him, indeed, on the field of Waterloo. The Spanish did eventually appoint

  Wellington the Generalisimo of their armies, but they waited until after the battle of Salamanca in 1812 had driven the French out of Madrid and central

  Spain.

  But in 1811 the French were still very close to Portugal which they had occupied twice in the previous three years. Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz barred

  Wellington's progress into Spain and until those twin fortresses fell (in early 1812) no one could be certain that the French would not attempt another invasion of Portugal. Such an invasion became much less likely after the battle of Fuentes de Onoro, but it would not have been impossible.

  Fuentes de Onoro was never one of Wellington's 'favourite' battles, which were those that he could recall with some pleasure at his own generalship. Assaye, in India, is the battle of which he was most proud and Fuentes de Onoro is probably the one of which he was least proud. He made one of his rare mistakes when he allowed the Seventh Division to march so far from the rest of the army, but he was rescued by the brilliant performance of the Light Division under Craufurd on that Sunday morning. It was a display of soldiering that impressed everyone who witnessed it; the Division was far from help, it was surrounded, yet it withdrew safely and took only a handful of casualties. The fighting in the village itself was far worse, little more than a slaughterous brawl that left the streets glutted with the dead and dying, yet in the end, despite the French bravery and their one glorious moment when they did capture the church and the crest, the British and their allies held the ridge and denied Masséna the road to Almeida. Masséna, disappointed, distributed the rations he had been carrying for Almeida's garrison among his own hungry army, then marched back to Ciudad Rodrigo.

  So Wellington, despite his mistake, was left with a victory, but it was a victory soured by the escape of Almeida's garrison. That garrison was being blockaded by Sir William Erskine who, sadly, did not have too many 'lucid intervals'. The letter from the Horse Guards describing Erskine's madness is genuine and shows one of the problems Wellington had in trying to prosecute a war. Erskine did nothing when the French blew up Almeida's defences and slept while the garrison slipped away in the night. The whole lot of them should have been made prisoner, but instead they escaped a feeble blockade and went to reinforce the vast French armies in Spain.

  Most of those armies were fighting guerrilleros, not British soldiers, and in another year some of them would be fighting an even more terrible enemy: the

  Russian winter. But the British too have their hardships to come, hardships that Sharpe and Harper will share, endure and, happily, survive.

  The End