by Peter Snow
‘The men suffered dreadfully’ on the way up from Portugal, Ned Costello remembered. Many men dropped and died by the roadside suffering from heat, excessive fatigue or fever. ‘Two men of the 52nd actually put a period to their existence by shooting themselves.’ Craufurd ruthlessly pressed the pace and men who were pronounced fit were given the lash if they fell out of the ranks without permission. The main hardship apart from the heat was the bivouac. Leach recalled that the best they could do for a dinner table was ‘neither more nor less than the turf at the foot of a tree with a soldier’s knapsack by way of camp chair; a Japanned half pint tin cup stood for a wine glass, which with a pocket-knife, fork and spoon and a tin plate constituted the whole of our dinner service’. Then they would tuck into ‘an onion or two, some rice and a mouldy ship’s biscuit’. John Dobbs wrote that one hazard of bivouacking was wolves, which once attacked a dragoon and ate all of him except his feet, which were protected by boots.
Another invaluable arrival with Craufurd’s brigade was the first mounted gun battery to join Wellington. ‘A’ Troop Royal Horse Artillery was commanded by Captain Hew Ross. It was known as the Chestnut Troop because all its 220 horses were chestnuts. To haul, prepare and fire just six guns (five that could fire six-pound balls and one 5.5-inch howitzer for lobbing shot over high walls) the battery had no fewer than 162 men. Each gun needed eight horses to drag it – a driver perched on the left-hand horse of each pair – and six more to haul along an ammunition wagon behind. There was a horse for each of the ten men loading, aiming and firing each of the six guns. Beside this, the troop had a farrier, three shoeing smiths, two collar-makers, one wheeler, one trumpeter and one acting trumpeter. There were three more wagons in the troop, a spare ammunition wagon, a baggage wagon and a forge. But, unwieldy though it sounds, the horse battery was a highly manoeuvrable weapon system that could deliver massive firepower to any part of the battlefield at a commander’s nod. Ross’s troop was another detachment that would fight with Wellington all the way to Waterloo.
The newcomers were shocked by the sight that met their eyes at Talavera. As Thomas Garrety put it, ‘combatants who had mingled in the fray belonging to either army lay intermingled in frightful heaps’. Harry Smith saw a battlefield ‘literally covered with dead and dying … the stench was horrible’. But when the men tried collecting the bodies to burn them, the smell was so dreadful that they gave up. William Green noticed that on the corpses of bayoneted British soldiers ‘the palms of their hands and their faces were covered with live maggots’. In one dead man’s knapsack he found a letter from the soldier’s wife. The man had three children and Green answered the letter ‘to let the poor woman know the fate of her husband’. Fred Ponsonby, the day after his first baptism in blood and fire, was out on the battlefield with the only sergeant who had survived their charge. They found the corpse of a young lieutenant who had ridden to his death beside Ponsonby, and buried him where he lay.
August Schaumann was one of the first to see the mess a Spanish unit had made of the British quarters before they fled in panic at the start of the battle. ‘Heavens! What did our quarters look like? They had been plundered by the Spanish soldiers … All our boxes and cases had been burst open, and their contents strewn over the floor … All about the floor lay broken crockery, pots, books and written records.’ Schaumann and his friends found themselves a saucepan in which to prepare their usual breakfast of chocolate and water and ship’s biscuits. ‘We made a fire out of a few histories of the saints bound in pigskin and a number of crusty old legal authorities.’
Wellington’s men didn’t have to endure this harrowing scene for long. Once the Commander in Chief had judged that they were well rested, he gave the order for the withdrawal to begin. It was a mortifying moment, turning his back on the road to Madrid and ordering his men to do an about-turn. He was counting on Cuesta to stay at Talavera and ensure the safety of the British wounded. But when Victor decided to march westward again, Cuesta abandoned Talavera and 1,500 British wounded to the mercies of the French. George Simmons, who had trained as a doctor, said, ‘our astonishment and vexation were beyond conception, knowing that the sick and wounded Englishmen had fallen (through the cowardice of the Spaniards) into the hands of the enemy …’ Ned Costello was even more out spoken. He called Cuesta ‘that deformed-looking lump of pride, ignorance and treachery’. Alexander Gordon, Wellington’s ADC, no doubt expressing his chief’s anger, wrote home to his brother: ‘The Spaniards are the same lying deceitful set we found before. Cuesta is an old fool, and his army radically bad, half of them ran away at Talavera.’
And things would only get worse. Wellington now began a long retreat. He had to go through a particularly arid and barren part of Spain where food and forage were hard to find. He appealed to Cuesta to help with supplies, but without success. ‘Your Excellency cannot be surprised that I should think that the British army has been neglected and ill treated … I shall march them back into Portugal, if they are not more regularly and more plentifully supplied with provisions and forage.’ When Cuesta suffered a stroke in the middle of August, Wellington appealed to his successor, again without effect. A demoralising retreat now became a wretched ordeal for the British army. August Schaumann, who was responsible for keeping the army’s meagre supplies moving on bullock carts, complained that the bullocks were being slaughtered by hungry troops and the carts abandoned in the hills. Besides, the weather got hotter every day and when they bivouacked the grass would occasionally catch fire ‘owing to carelessness when cooking. Then the tumult was almost as great as when the fire alarm is rung in a town …’ In one of these grass fires, Schaumann noted, the 23rd Dragoons, Fred Ponsonby’s regiment which had suffered so severely at Talavera, lost a hundred saddles, and all their cartridge pouches were blown sky high. Soon afterwards the 23rd, sadly depleted at Talavera, was disbanded. Ponsonby was promoted lieutenant colonel and Wellington took him on to his personal staff.
Hunger was the army’s main problem. ‘The soldiers’ wives,’ wrote Schaumann, ‘who as a rule went about decently clad, and were most faithful to their husbands, now rode around hungrily in rags and gave themselves to anyone who wanted them in exchange for half a loaf of bread.’ By the second week of August Wellington was close to despair: ‘A starving army is actually worse than none. The soldiers lose their discipline and their spirit. The officers are discontented and are almost as bad as the men.’ Two weeks later he complained that it was impossible to stay in Spain. His men were starving and their horses dying in hundreds. ‘More than a month has now elapsed since I informed General Cuesta if the British army were not supplied with means of transport and with provisions, not only I would not cooperate with any forward movement … but that I could not remain at all in Spain.’ As a result he said he was now withdrawing to Portugal. Five days later, in a letter to his brother Richard, he allowed his feelings about his Spanish allies to spill over: ‘It is my opinion that I ought to avoid entering into any further cooperation with the Spanish armies.’ He wrote to Castlereagh in London to complain that the Spanish ‘are really children in the art of war’. At the end of August Wellington’s famished, dispirited men finally crossed into Portugal.
Just past the border George Simmons was to experience the hot temper of his commander, ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd, who had ordered him to keep an eye on the mule cart that carried his personal baggage, including a great deal of wine and food. Simmons’s men were whipping the mules to try to get them moving, when suddenly the beasts took off and sped down a very steep hill: they were soon out of control and the cart was dashed to pieces. When Craufurd, who was giving a dinner party that night, heard what had happened, he roared at Simmons and told him to have the culprits lashed. Craufurd ‘never forgave me’, wrote Simmons in his diary for 29 August. ‘I felt highly indignant at such usage for having exerted myself to serve him.’ Jonathan Leach, another of Craufurd’s officers, who remained an inveterate critic, remembered Craufurd’s unrelenting discipline du
ring the retreat. ‘The division paraded at 6 this evening when we got volleys of abusive and blasphemous language from that infernal scoundrel Brig Gen Robert Craufurd … after flogging half a dozen men for some very frivolous offences committed on our harassing marches …’
But ordinary soldiers like Ned Costello admitted to a certain respect for Craufurd. Costello had a habit of getting himself into awkward scrapes, and one morning he went to have a drink with a friend, who was Craufurd’s private servant. He went to Craufurd’s room, thinking the general was out, and saw a man he thought was his friend looking out of the window. ‘It entered into my head to surprise my servant friend; so … I stepped softly up to his rear, and with a sudden laugh, gave him a smart slap on the back. But my consternation and surprise may be better imagined than described when the gentleman in the dressing gown, starting round with a “Who the devil is that?” disclosed not the merry phiz of the valet, but the stern features of General Craufurd himself.’ Costello thought he should have ‘sunk through the ground at that moment, had it opened to swallow me’. He tried to mumble an explanation as he retreated towards the door. But the general ‘with a good humoured smile … observed the fright I was in. “Well, well, you may go,” said Craufurd, “but pray, sir, never again do me the honour to take me for my servant.” ‘Craufurd’s gentler side is also apparent in a touching letter he wrote to his son Charles that summer. ‘Your mama tells me you want to be a soldier, but I hope you never will. When you are a man perhaps you will have a wife and children … and I am sure you will love them; and then, if you are obliged to leave them, it would grieve your heart as it does mine to leave your dear mama, whom I love with all my soul … so I hope you will never be a soldier.’
It was a grim autumn for Wellington and his men. They had won a battle but lost a campaign. In spite of the triumph of Talavera Wellesley had retained not an inch of Spanish territory. The French had the pleasure of seeing Wellington withdraw to Portugal. Napoleon’s marshals also managed to defeat the Spanish in a number of encounters and in early 1810 captured all of Andalusia except Cadiz. From now on guerrilla warfare replaced pitched battles as the most telling weapon Spain could use in its revolt against France. The news the British received from the rest of Europe was glum too: the expedition to Walcheren in Holland, an attempt to get another British foothold on the continent, had been abandoned. Napoleon, fresh from his triumph over the Austrians, told his marshals to prepare 100,000 troops to remove Wellington from Portugal once and for all. He wrote to his brother Joseph in Madrid, ‘There is nothing dangerous in Spain except the English; the rest cannot keep the field.’ But he refrained from commanding in person. He still regarded the Peninsula as a sideshow and Wellington as a minor threat that another of his marshals should easily be able to brush away.
The new man Napoleon chose to confront Wellington was André Masséna, a sharp-minded master of campaign strategy who had fought with the young Napoleon in Italy in 1799 and helped him to win the battles of Marengo and Wagram. Masséna had a flair for the sort of independent command that the faraway war in the Peninsula demanded. Moreover Napoleon backed him up with Michel Ney, an inspiring if sometimes reckless leader in battle.
As the British army finally settled down to spend the winter on the Portuguese border, Alexander Gordon, the young ADC, expressed the pessimism that appears to have infused some of those on Wellington’s top team: ‘We may protract the war for a few months but it is I think impossible to hinder Portugal from eventually falling.’ Gordon’s view was shared by the new Tory Secretary of State for War in London, Lord Liverpool, who wrote to Wellington in early 1810: ‘Your chances of successful defence are considered here by all persons military as well as civil to be improbable.’ Liverpool actually asked Wellington about contingency measures for the total evacuation of the army from Portugal. Wellington, his natural self-assurance now reinforced by the conduct of his units at Talavera, replied: ‘All I beg is that if I am to be responsible I may be left to the exercise of my own judgement and I ask for the fair confidence of the government upon the measures which I am to adopt.’ To Colonel Torrens, the army’s key staff officer, the Military Secretary in London, he wrote, ‘If I am in a scrape, as appears to be the general belief in London, though certainly not my own, I will get out of it.’
It must have been an exceptionally anxious time for Wellington. Publicly he displayed that imperturbable demeanour that was now his hallmark, but if he was to pursue his campaign he knew he had to fight a long-range political battle for support. There was a constant debate between his supporters and opponents in London. Thanks to the letters and journal of Thomas Creevey, who admits he ‘hated’ Wellington, we have an insider’s account of the bitterly hostile Whigs whom Wellington and his family – particularly his brother Richard, the former Governor General of India – had to fight. In late January Creevey described the House of Commons debate after which MPs passed a vote of thanks to the new Lord Wellington for the Battle of Talavera. The leader of the Opposition Whigs, Lord Grey, ‘disputed the military, moral, and intellectual fame of Lord Wellington most capitally and called loudly upon the Marquess [Wellington’s elder brother Richard] to come forward and justify the victory’. The following day Grey sat in a coffee house with Creevey and ‘damned with might and main Marquess Wellesley’. But a few days later on 1 February Creevey reported that ‘all the indignation against Wellington has gone up in smoke – some of the stoutest of our crew slunk away or rather were dispersed by the indefatigable intrigues of the Wellesleys’. A little later, Creevey wrote that Wellington’s career ‘approaches very rapidly to a conclusion’. Wellington was not insensitive to all this. He clearly felt that his honour was being impugned and when one particularly vocal opponent of his campaign in the Peninsula, the MP Samuel Whitbread, accused him of exaggerating his achievement in the war, Wellington wrote personally to him to say that the allegations ‘must have been most injurious to me’.
To add to Wellington’s woes, his family was mired in worse gossip than ever. His brother Marquess Wellesley, whose standing was fast being overshadowed by his younger brother, settled down to some blatant womanising in London. ‘I wish’, wrote Arthur to his elder brother William, ‘that Wellesley was castrated … it is lamentable to see talents, character and advantages such as he possesses thrown away upon whoring.’
Wellington recovered quickly from the frustration of retreat. He had set himself the task of demonstrating to his supporters in London that he could save Portugal from being overwhelmed by France. On several occasions that winter he was seen riding over the hills north of Lisbon with his chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Fletcher. They were hills through which any French army would have to move to capture Lisbon. The contours had a shape that persuaded Wellington he could turn them into a barrier of defensive fortifications. Over the next nine months Fletcher transformed these hills into a thirty-mile-long network of 165 hillside redoubts with parapets and ditches to protect them. Called the Lines of Torres Vedras, their construction was a remarkable act of strategic foresight by Wellington, and they would prove to be worth every penny of the £100,000 they cost to build.
That autumn two other forceful and irrepressible characters joined Wellington. One, a young Irish subaltern, William Grattan, distant cousin of the great Irish statesman of the same name, arrived to help rebuild the Connaught Rangers, a feisty Irish regiment (the 88th of Foot) which had suffered badly at Talavera. The other, a general, Thomas Picton, was summoned from London to lead the 3rd Division, whose commander had died at the Battle of Talavera. Picton was a powerfully built, boisterous man with a mind of his own and a healthy disrespect for authority and convention. Like Wellington, he preferred wearing civilian clothes to uniform on the battlefield. He also had a ruthless reputation. He had narrowly escaped conviction when tried for torture: as governor of the slave island of Trinidad, he had allegedly forced a thirteen-year-old girl to stand on a spike while suspended from the ceiling. He was fiercely ambitious
and determined to prove that he was the most fearsome commander in the army, to rival even ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd.
Grattan’s Connaught Rangers, which would be one of the regiments in Picton’s 3rd Division, awaited their new general’s arrival ‘with some anxiety’. When he first reviewed them, all went well to begin with, and Grattan remarked, ‘I never saw such a perfect specimen of a soldier … there was manly open frankness in his appearance.’ But although Picton appeared suitably impressed by the 88th on parade, when he heard that two of its members had stolen a goat on their march to join the regiment, he ‘ordered an immediate drumhead court martial and had them flogged on the spot in full view of the … whole division’. He then addressed the men, declaring, ‘You are not known in the army by the name of Connaught Rangers but by the name Connaught Footpads.’ Even though Picton praised some of the regiment’s later exploits, Grattan noted that throughout the Peninsular Campaign he never promoted any of the officers of the 88th. Wellington knew a rough diamond when he saw one, but he was soon to appreciate Picton’s qualities. ‘I found him to be a rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived, but he always behaved extremely well, no man could do better in different services I assigned to him.’ Wellington valued commanders who could inspire their men to fight with bravery and tenacity. But he was wary of officers who showed too much independent initiative. He believed passionately in his own judgement and his own need to exercise control of every part of the battlefield. Most of all he abhorred incompetence and admired officers who obeyed his orders and carried them out to the letter.
