by Peter Snow
During a break in the fighting Leach took a moment to accept a swig of wine from a brother officer’s canteen. A musket ball passed through the canteen and severely wounded its owner. The canteen was shattered and Leach’s face was ‘splashed thoroughly with wine’. He felt a blow, ‘which cut my mouth and spun me round like a top. For a few moments I concluded I was wounded.’ But it was his friend who had got the worst of it: he was out of action for weeks.
While the riflemen were trying to confuse the enemy, Wellesley’s next task was to deliver his infantry – with their muskets – to within killing distance of the main French lines. They approached their enemy in column but, well before they reached them, they would fan out into lines in order to bring as many of their muskets to bear on the French as possible. A few hundred men in one or two ranks in line abreast could utterly destroy an enemy if they held their formation and their fire till they were at point-blank range, as little as thirty yards. But that required supreme coolness and discipline. Everything would depend on how well drilled Wellesley’s footsoldiers would be under fire, compared with the French.
The first phase of the battle passed fairly quickly. Delaborde, still without Loison’s reinforcement, had already decided not to make a major stand in the village but to retire to his second position on the escarpment overlooking it. Before the British could engage the whole enemy line at close quarters, the French pulled back to the hillside. This was when the real struggle began. Jonathan Leach found the heat suffocating. ‘Every mouthful of air was such as is inhaled when looking into the oven.’ The French fought hard to defend the steep windy paths trailing down the hill in front of them. Lake’s battalion, the 1/29th, found itself ahead of the rest of Wellesley’s force and plunged deep into the French line.
Landmann’s impression was that the 29th had actually chosen ‘the steepest and most difficult ravine’. They were drowned in heavy musketry fire, which killed sixty men from the special grenadier company, the fittest and strongest element in the battalion. Traditionally they had been the men picked to throw grenades, which were now long out of use. They were elite troops whom Wellesley could ill afford to lose. ‘Poor Lake was killed at the commencement near the foot of the heights while riding at the head of his regiment and his horse was also killed it would appear at the same time; for when I saw them they were very near to each other … Thus died the Honourable George Lake “like a gentleman”.’ The leaderless 29th owed a lot at that moment to Wellesley’s old friend Major General Rowland Hill. Harris watched him gallop across, rally the troops and lead them in a charge. ‘Few men could have conducted the business with more coolness and quietude of manner, under such a storm of balls as he was exposed to.’
Wellesley too was seldom far behind the front line. He knew that in a fast-moving battle command and control were the most critical features of leadership. And the surest way of communicating orders was for the commander to deliver them to subordinate commanders in person. He was never still, his telescope at his eye, members of his staff, like Fitzroy Somerset, frantically trying to keep up with him as they cantered from unit to unit. Wellesley was able to relieve pressure on the 29th only when his troops’ superior numbers prevailed and the British managed to scale the hill, obliging the French to retire. The 29th had lost 300 men and their colours. In the despatch Wellesley wrote to London that night, he implied that Lake had been foolish to launch his attack without waiting for other units to join him. He reported that they had ‘attacked with the utmost impetuosity, and reached the enemy before those whose attacks were to be made on their flanks’. But in a rare show of feeling Wellesley wrote a very sympathetic letter to Lake’s brother-in-law, a Mr R. Borough: ‘However acute may be the sensations which it may at first occasion, it must in the end be satisfactory to the family of such a man as Col Lake to know that he was respected and loved by the whole army …’
Others grieved that day. Benjamin Harris, the Dorset shepherd, had been standing beside a man called Joseph Cochan who suddenly fell dead with a bullet through his brain. He was one of the few men who had been accompanied by his wife, and Harris had the painful task of taking her to where her husband’s body lay on the battlefield. She dissolved in tears at the sight of his disfigured face, and Harris was so sorry for her he offered later to marry her. ‘She had, however, received too great a shock on the occasion of her husband’s death to think of marrying another soldier,’ and she soon went home to England.
The next day Landmann was appalled to see a Portuguese woman about to crack open the skull of a badly wounded French soldier so that she could rob him. His hand was on his sword to try and stop her when another soldier suddenly leaped out of the thicket, shouted at her that she was not a woman but a devil, put his rifle to her head and blew half of it off. ‘Bravo!’ shouted Landmann, and he then watched as the man ‘carefully untied the woman’s apron which was thickly filled with watches, rings, valuables of all kinds’. The man scooped them up, ‘darted from the spot and disappeared among the bushes casting at me a ferocious glance’.
Roliça was a savage little overture to the long Peninsular campaign that was to follow. The British had narrowly won. Wellesley’s casualties were 500 to Delaborde’s 700. Wellesley later reckoned Roliça was ‘one of our most important affairs … it was terrible hard work … our men fought monstrous well’. Both armies had now got the measure of each other. The British quickly realised that even with overwhelming numbers no battle with the French was going to be a walkover. And those French soldiers who had hoped that the British had forgotten how to fight on land were disappointed.
Jean Andoche Junot believed that the French were invincible. He was Napoleon’s commander in Portugal and a man who acted more on impulse than cool calculation. Even before he had a full report on the fierce fight at Roliça, he was already on his way north to fight Wellesley. He didn’t yet know that Sir Arthur was about to be reinforced by 4,000 men landing further down the Portuguese coast. Utterly confident of victory, Junot marched boldly north without even taking all his available troops with him. He left 6,000 of his 20,000 men to guard Lisbon.
The Battle of Vimero (1)
The Battle of Vimero (2)
2
You must have bribed Junot
Vimeiro, August 1808
WELLESLEY WAS DETERMINED not to lose momentum in his drive south. He wrote to Castlereagh saying he hoped to defeat the French, although he warned the government that he probably would not destroy them altogether ‘for want of cavalry’. He still had only 200 horsemen. On his map he had ringed the village of Vimeiro – twelve miles south of Roliça. It was a short distance from a beach where reinforcements could land, and had clearly defensible ridges running north and west from the village. Just the place to consolidate and build up strength before advancing on Lisbon.
But Wellesley’s spell as an independent commander was about to come to an end. Three days after Roliça, General Sir Harry Burrard, appointed by London as his superior, turned up with reinforcements in the frigate HMS Brazen, in the bay off Vimeiro. It was the evening of 20 August. Wellesley, with his army now at Vimeiro, took a boat out to meet Burrard and told him he was planning to advance the following day. Burrard told Wellesley he was deeply unhappy with the idea of any further move on Lisbon, and certainly none should be made until General Moore’s army of some 20,000 extra troops, only a day or two’s sailing away, could join Sir Arthur’s force. Wellesley, disguising his impatience, asked Burrard if he wanted to come ashore. Burrard, a fifty-three-year-old veteran in the twilight of his career, who had earned himself the nickname ‘Betty’ because his troops thought him a bit of an old woman, said he would prefer to spend one more night afloat. It proved to be one of those strokes of fortune that would help transform Wellesley into the future Duke of Wellington.
Some time that night, after Wellesley had stepped back on shore, he was told that the French were advancing. He must have thanked his luck that Burrard was not ashore, because a cavalry patrol early
the following morning led by Sergeant Norbert Landsheit reported that the French were within an hour or two of his front line, clearly seeking a battle. After listening to Landsheit’s account Wellesley ‘gave his orders in a calm, clear and cheerful voice … “Now Gentlemen, go to your stations but let there be no noise made – no sounding of bugles or beating of drums. Get your men quickly under arms and desire all outposts to be on the alert.”’
Wellesley surveyed the ground with care. From the village of Vimeiro ran two ridges – one north, one west. Most of Wellesley’s troops were bivouacking on the western ridge, facing south, the direction from which he expected the French to attack him. His left was just in front of the village, on Vimeiro Hill, whose gentle slopes rise some 150 feet above the valley. He placed about 5,000 of his most trusted troops – with a row of guns – just behind the brow of the hill: the French wouldn’t see them until they were almost upon them. Ahead of these units on the forward slope of Vimeiro Hill and in the undergrowth below he scattered his light troops, the skirmishers, mainly riflemen. Captain Jonathan Leach was among them, with Benjamin Harris in his company, and so was Lieutenant Colonel Sydney Beckwith, leading two companies of the 1st Battalion the 95th Regiment (1/95th). Beckwith had landed from the ships with his 200 men only the night before. He was about to embark on the first of many engagements that were to make him one of the great commanders in the Peninsula, and his regiment – the Rifles – the one most feared by the French.
Leach was out front on picket duty in a pine wood when ‘a cloud of light troops, supported by heavy columns of infantry, entered the wood, and assailing the pickets with great impetuosity, obliged us to fall back …’. Harris was in the middle of so much firing and smoke that all he could see was the red flash of his rifle in the cloud of smoke that enveloped him. ‘The Rifles, as usual, were pretty busy in this battle. The French, in great numbers, came steadily down upon us, and we pelted away upon them like a shower of leaden hail.’ They darted from one piece of cover to the next, ‘firing one moment, jumping up and running for it the next; and, when we could see before us, we observed the cannon balls making a lane through the enemy’s columns as they advanced, huzzaing and shouting like madmen’.
The British guns, which created such havoc among the French, were on the crown of Vimeiro Hill in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Robe of the Royal Artillery. His gun teams worked tirelessly to make every shot count as the French, in massed columns – thirty men wide by forty-two deep – pushed back the British riflemen by sheer weight of numbers and advanced up the hill with their own light troops probing towards the guns. Robe ordered his men to fire alternate shots: first, roundshot – great heavy cast-iron balls that could shatter whole files of men at several hundred yards – and then canister or case, which sprayed a whole bag of musket balls like a giant shotgun over a wide circle at much shorter range. And they were firing a new type of ammunition as well: the shell, invented only recently by William Shrapnel. It was a hollow roundshot stuffed with musket balls and carrying a further charge within it that caused it to explode on or above the ground, killing or wounding anyone unprotected and within reach. Shrapnel shells were to play a lethal role in conflicts from then on.
But the vigorous artillery fire did not stop the French. Robe shouted to Landmann that he was lucky to have a horse, as some of the French were yards away and would soon be upon them. But when Landmann suggested he get a horse himself, Robe replied, ‘No no. I’ll neither leave my guns nor my gunners.’ The French could not yet see the main British infantry lines waiting concealed behind the guns. By now the French columns – thousands of men in close formation – were close enough for the British to hear shouts of ‘En avant, mes amis!’ and ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ French drums sounded the pas de charge and their pace quickened. The regiment directly ahead of the advancing French was the 50th, known as the Dirty Half-Hundred after the black flashes on their uniforms. As the French came over the brow of the hill, Landmann saw the commanding officer of the 50th, Colonel Walker, advance his troops to the crest, ‘where he gave the words “Ready, present! And let every man fire when he has taken his aim.”’ The result was ‘destruction and carnage’.
The effect of some 800 men in two ranks firing their muskets from very close range ravaged the approaching French columns. ‘I received them in line,’ Wellesley remarked later, ‘which they were not accustomed to.’ Caught before they were able to fan out into long lines abreast where each man could bring his musket to bear, the French were utterly outgunned. Only some thirty men in the front rank of each column were able to fire their weapons at the redcoats who sprang up suddenly from the dead ground just beyond the brow of the hill. And as the French columns hesitated and crumpled, the men of the 50th charged them with their bayonets, yelling and stabbing at the enemy soldiers. The column had proved to be Napoleon’s most successful infantry formation in his battles in central Europe and Italy. A great solid mass of tightly packed French footsoldiers, rank after rank of them, had smashed through enemy defences by concentrating force on a particular point. But now the French columns were faced with long, thin red lines of footsoldiers who stood their ground, and every one of them discharged his musket at point-blank range. Landmann watched as the entire French force turned around and ran, ‘every man throwing away his arms and accoutrements as also his knapsack, cap and, in short, everything that could have obstructed speed’. A force that had advanced proudly just minutes earlier, a dense mass of 5,000 men, disintegrated. It was ‘like an immense flock of sheep scampering away from the much-dreaded shepherd’s dog’.
Wellesley had been watching all this, mobile as ever on horseback, from the eastern ridge. It was quickly apparent to him that Junot had thrown only part of his army at Vimeiro Hill itself, and that he was planning to deliver the second prong of his attack not on the western ridge where Wellesley had placed his troops the night before, but on its twin the other side of Vimeiro – the eastern ridge. Junot had despatched two whole brigades under General Jean-Baptiste Solignac and General Antoine-François Brennier in a great sweep around to the east of Vimeiro. They were aiming for the village of Ventosa on the eastern ridge to threaten Wellesley’s rear. It was a classic tactic: outflank the enemy if you can and make him face two ways at once. At Vimeiro it met two snags. First, Wellesley was ready for it. The moment he saw the great cloud of dust early that morning indicating that Junot was heading round his east side and not towards his troops on the western ridge, he ordered a brisk move by half his army. He left the trusted Hill with some 5,000 troops on the western ridge and shifted all his other units to the eastern ridge to meet any attack Junot made on it.
Junot’s second problem was that the ground his flanking units would have to cover to approach the eastern ridge was hilly and broken. It would be a hard grind, difficult enough for one large force to traverse and maintain cohesion. And Junot took the further risk of dividing this force in two – sending the two brigades off separately but telling their commanders to synchronise their attack on Ventosa. This way he created two weaknesses that would prove fatal to his plans: he concentrated too few troops on the pivot of Wellesley’s deployment – Vimeiro Hill – and he landed his staff with a communications nightmare. They were unable to co-ordinate the movements of the three groups, which soon became separated in rough country.
The main battle was still raging at Vimeiro Hill. Junot had not yet exhausted his attempts to defeat the British there. Around 2,000 French grenadiers, massed this time in even narrower columns, advanced over the same ground and suffered the same fate. Robe’s shrapnel cut swathes through them as they approached. At the finish they were again caught in that tight vulnerable formation before they could expand into line and even fewer of their muskets could be brought to bear on the British. They were shattered.
Junot threw two further attacks at Vimeiro Hill, which suffered the same fate. Then, heavily bruised by these setbacks, he chose a slightly different approach for his next attempt to break through. W
here the hill fell away to the north there was a valley that ran up behind it towards the church in the village. He sent two further battalions of grenadiers under General Kellerman to smash their way up this hollow. But they marched straight into an even more murderous killing zone. They found themselves trapped – as they advanced – between the British troops on Vimeiro Hill and a brigade that Wellesley had placed on the other side of the valley. The village was at the top of the valley, and the British were there too. Charles Leslie watched a ‘party of the 43rd light infantry stealing out of the village and moving behind a wall … they opened a fire at the moment when the enemy came in contact … the French had been allowed to come in close, then our gallant fellows, suddenly springing up, rapidly poured on them two or three volleys with great precision, and rushing on, charged with the bayonet’. At the end of this phase of the battle Landmann saw the ground in front of Vimeiro Hill ‘seriously scattered over with killed, wounded, arms, drums, caps, knapsacks, canteens, dead horses, and ammunition wagons … and, where an attempt had been made to deploy to form a line, the dead and dying were in some places … lying in heaps three or four men in height’. It was at this moment that Wellesley ordered the 200 horsemen of the 20th Light Dragoons under Colonel Taylor to make the first cavalry charge of the Peninsular War. Wellesley knew that well-timed cavalry charges against a fleeing enemy could wreak havoc. This would be the first test for the horsemen he had brought with him. Landmann described Colonel Taylor as ‘a particularly handsome fellow’ on a ‘fine prancing horse’. He saw Taylor tying a handkerchief round a wound in his thigh and urged him to get it dressed. ‘I am just going to make a charge,’ replied Taylor. ‘If I survive I shall have plenty of leisure for tending to this trifle. If I fall I shall have spared myself some unnecessary trouble and pain.’
