by Peter Snow
Another young officer joined Fred Ponsonby’s 12th Light Dragoons about this time. William Hay, who had been in the Peninsula earlier, was appalled by the difference he saw in the regiment within a few months. Campaigning had taken the shine off the men’s once immaculate equipment. ‘The men’s clothes were actually in rags – some one colour, some another, some in worn out helmets, some in none; others in forage caps with handkerchiefs tied round their heads, their horses in a most woeful state, many quite unfit to carry the weight of the rider and his baggage.’ Hay rode as one of the light dragoons trying to protect the army’s rear. ‘It was truly one of the most painful and sickening sights I ever before or afterwards witnessed.’ Hundreds of British, Portuguese and German soldiers fell by the wayside, starving, sick or just exhausted. But Hay spoke warmly of Ponsonby’s leadership. ‘I have had the great good fortune to be commanded by one who was not only a most gallant soldier but most kind and considerate alike to men and officers.’ Ponsonby’s overriding anxiety at the time was to get his regiment into shape after the ordeal it had gone through, and to do so by giving as little trouble as possible. The men ‘fully appreciated their colonel’s kindness and gave no trouble’.
At the end of each day’s march, the bedraggled army would look for what shelter it could. The soldiers would halt in a field – or, if they were lucky, in a wood – by the roadside and attempt to light a fire to cook any beef that remained. Even Joseph Donaldson and the Scots, used to fierce enough conditions in their own country, found it intolerable. ‘Sometimes, indeed we managed to raise a smoke, and a number gathered around in the vain hope of getting themselves warmed, but the fire would extinguish in spite of all their efforts. Our situation was truly distressing: tormented by hunger, wet to the skin and fatigued in the extreme … a savage sort of desperation had taken possession of our minds.’ William Grattan found himself with a dose of the ague, a form of typhus fever which could prove fatal. He was not amused when his servant remarked with a laugh: ‘Don’t the jaws of the boys with the ague, when they rattle so, put your honour greatly in mind of the castanet?’
Many of those who were left by the roadside, too weak to move from hunger or disease, died miserably in the bitter cold. The survivors were killed off or taken prisoner depending on the mood of the French soldiers who found them. Many who had any energy left attempted to make up for their hunger by turning to plundering the local people, action that Wellington had long preached against as a heinous crime. It was a crime now committed on a mass scale.
One further problem was that the land between Burgos and Salamanca was rich in vineyards, and there had been a good harvest. William Wheeler said that many of his fellow soldiers ‘ran mad. I remember seeing a soldier, fully accoutred with his knapsack on, in a large tank he had either fell in or had been pushed in by his comrades … there he lay dead. I saw a dragoon fire his pistol into a large vat containing several thousands of gallons, in a few minutes we were up to our knees in wine fighting like tigers for it.’ Wheeler added that the conduct of some men ‘would have disgraced savages, drunkenness had prevailed to such a frightful extent that I have often wondered how it was that a great part of our army were not cut off … the sides of the road were strewed with soldiers as if dead, not so much by fatigue as by wine’.
But the men weren’t just drowning themselves in wine. They were looting livestock as well. The most accessible were pigs which they would find looking for chestnuts and acorns in the woods. Wellington was determined to stamp out this practice, which alienated the local Spanish population. ‘The commander of the forces requests the general officers commanding the divisions will take measures to prevent the shameful and unmilitary practice of soldiers shooting pigs in the woods … he has this day ordered two men to be hanged who were caught in the act of shooting pigs.’
One day William Hay and some hungry fellow dragoons were chasing some sheep with their sabres. One sheep had its head cut off ‘from the powerful blow of my friend’s sharp sword’. But then the shepherds appeared and Hay was well aware that Wellington had ordered no plundering of the inhabitants. So he grabbed the dead sheep, slung it across his friend’s saddle and together they dived into the wood just as a column of British soldiers appeared. The shepherds immediately complained to the soldiers, who, fortunately for the mischief-makers, could not understand a word of the language. Hay and his mates escaped and tucked into an excellent meal. Later he and some fellow dragoons witnessed a whole British infantry division so hungry that they plundered a town and utterly destroyed it, knocking down houses for firewood and stealing food. ‘I looked on with surprise and could not help reflecting upon what our tyrannical General Craufurd would have done had he been alive and witnessed the scene: at least – to be consistent – he must have hanged half the famished soldiers.’
At last the men who had survived the wretchedness of the retreat arrived in the area of Ciudad Rodrigo. Kincaid’s feet were so swollen he had to cut his boots off. But at least he had arrived. Many hundreds of others never made it. The exhausted army was finally able to consolidate and find itself winter quarters in friendly territory.
Wellington, infuriated and depressed by the level of looting and plundering, decided to issue a scathing letter of disapproval to his senior officers. It was not supposed to go further than that, but its contents soon became widely known. It was dated 28 November 1812. Wellington said discipline was often hard to exercise in difficult conditions. But ‘I am concerned to have to observe that the army under my command has fallen off in this respect in the late campaign to a greater degree than any army with which I have ever served, or of which I have ever read … from the moment the troops commenced their retreat from the neighbourhood of Burgos on the one hand, and from Madrid on the other, the officers lost all command over their men. Irregularities and outrages of all descriptions were committed with impunity, and losses have been sustained which ought never to have occurred …’ He went on to say that there was no excuse. The army had ‘suffered no privations which trifling attention on the part of the officers could not have prevented’. It was tough stuff, and its apparently blanket condemnation of everyone was unfair and ill-judged at a very demanding time when the army had been subject to weeks of severe privation. Some units had behaved disgracefully and discipline had collapsed, but others had struggled to keep their spirits up and had survived the hardships largely unscathed. Jonathan Leach observed that many thought Wellington’s reprimand was ‘too sweeping’ and John Kincaid said it ‘afforded a handle to disappointed persons, and excited a feeling against him on the part of individuals which has probably never since been obliterated’. When Fred Ponsonby received Wellington’s letter, he couldn’t bring himself to read out parts of it to his staff. According to his friend William Tomkinson, Ponsonby was anxious to make out that Wellington had written this rebuke to his men ‘in a hasty moment when vexed with the result of the campaign’.
It was as well for Wellington that his men’s resentful reaction to his message came as they entered comparatively comfortable winter quarters on and around the Portuguese frontier. His miscalculation in attacking Burgos without the right siege train and his meanness in blaming others for the consequences of his own mistake make those few weeks in the autumn of 1812 one of the low points in his career. At least one man on his staff, Alexander Gordon, believed that if Napoleon were to succeed in Russia, Britain would have to withdraw from the Peninsula. Back home the government stood loyally behind their Commander in Chief: Castlereagh, now Foreign Secretary, told the Commons that Wellington had ‘accomplished all he expected … and gained immortal glory’. Another of Wellington’s supporters, Sir Frederick Flood, said, ‘Thank God we have committed our army to the care of a man of cool and deliberate judgement, one who is not foolhardy and who knows when he ought to go forward and when he ought to go backward.’ But Wellington’s retreat from Burgos gave his and the government’s political opponents in London their last real chance to condemn the campaign. The
radical MP Francis Burdett told the Commons the retreat from Burgos was ‘most disastrous’ and the country was still ‘deeper in a destructive and ruinous war’. Fred Ponsonby’s cousin George Ponsonby, the leader of the Whig Opposition, said it had now been proved that the ‘power of England is not competent to drive the French out of the peninsula’.
But, as the winter wore on, all debate about Wellington’s staying power in the Peninsula came to look very different. There was startling news from the other side of Europe. Napoleon’s audacious gamble in trying to add Russia to his empire had ended in total collapse. He was retreating from Moscow and his army was suffering more losses and misery than almost any other in history.
12
I saw them fall like a pack of cards
Vitoria, 1813
AS 1812 TURNED into 1813 it became clear that the gloom about Wellington’s prospects in the Peninsula was misplaced. For a start his army’s achievements in 1812 far overshadowed the setback of the retreat. It had secured the great frontier fortresses that now made Portugal impregnable. In Spain it had decisively demonstrated its superior fighting skill at Salamanca and the fragility of the French hold on the Peninsula by occupying Madrid.
There were two other great strategic shifts that now swung the balance in Wellington’s favour. First the catastrophic defeat Napoleon had suffered in Russia. By mid-November 1812 the news was out that the Emperor was retreating from Moscow, unable to cope with the length of his supply line and the fierce Russian winter. By mid-December Marshal Ney, who had failed to blunt Wellington’s defence at Bussaco two years earlier, was the last French commander to leave Russian territory. Napoleon’s retreat left 400,000 men dead or disabled. The Grande Armée of more than 425,000 men was reduced to 25,000. This was welcome news to Wellington in his winter quarters on the Portuguese border.
The second great change was in France’s hold on Spain. Napoleon’s march to Moscow meant that he was unable to reinforce Joseph when the Spanish rebellion was hurting the French more than ever before. So severe was the pressure that Joseph had ordered Soult to abandon Andalusia in the autumn of 1812. The news that Soult had been recalled had prompted Wellington to abandon the siege of Burgos. Soult was ordered to move his army to bolster France’s fragmenting position in eastern Spain. Soult was furious. He despised Joseph and he relished the power and opulence that had come his way as ruler of the south. The bitterness between the two men further weakened the French. The Spanish resistance, whose leaders had been holding out against Soult in the Andalusian city of Cadiz, invited Wellington to be commander in chief of their armies. In spite of his long-standing contempt for what he saw as the indiscipline and disorganisation of Spanish regular forces, he accepted.
All this strengthened Wellington’s position back home and reduced the pressure on the government. Lord Aberdeen wrote in his usual rather grand manner to his younger brother Alexander Gordon: ‘Lord Wellington’s retreat gave a shake to Ministers, but people are absurdly desponding about it; for my part I expect to see you advancing very shortly into Spain.’ Wellington, who followed all Napoleon’s moves in meticulous detail, was in no doubt about the vast improvement in his prospects. He wrote to his brother Henry in February 1813, ‘there is scarcely any French army left, except that in our front.’
He asked London for reinforcements and began to prepare for a major campaign in the spring of 1813. He made his plans in his headquarters in a long low building that still stands on the edge of the main square in the small village of Freneda just inside Portugal. Around him and as far forward as the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo, twenty miles to the east inside Spain, his troops did their best to survive in winter quarters. The greatest threat to them, apart from the usual diseases that came with the poor sanitation, was the penetrating winter cold. Up to 500 people in the army died each week according to Seymour Larpent, who had just joined Wellington’s staff as his legal adviser or judge advocate, mainly responsible for courts martial. Larpent was a well-read and thoroughly engaging character who wrote lively letters home and kept a fascinated eye on his Commander in Chief. Wellington, he noted, ‘has a good stud of around eight hunters: he rides hard and only wants a good gallop, but I understand knows nothing of the sport, though very fond of it in his own way … He hunts almost every day, and then makes up for it by great diligence and instant decision on the intermediate days’. Larpent observed that Wellington was ‘remarkably neat and most particular about his dress … he is well made, knows it and is willing to set off to the best what nature has bestowed’. In a word Larpent described him as ‘vain’. He ‘cuts the skirts of his own coats shorter, to make them look smarter: and only a short time since I found him discussing the cut of his half boots and suggesting alterations to his servant’. Larpent watched Wellington working till about four o’clock in the afternoon, and ‘then for an hour or two, [he] parades with anyone whom he wants to talk to, up and down the little square in Freneda in his grey great coat’. Larpent clearly felt rather deprived at headquarters. ‘Here are no books, no women but ladies of a certain description.’
Harry Smith and Juana found themselves billeted with many of his Rifles comrades at Fuentes d’Oñoro where the battle had been fought nearly two years earlier. In spite of the weather, ‘my vivacious little wife was full of animation and happiness … I went out coursing every day, and some of our regimental fellows, notwithstanding “the retreat” and its hardships, went out duck shooting, up to their middles in water, Jonathan Leach among them.’ Leach shot some woodcock as well, and he also found time to get together with some others in the Rifles to stage an all-male production of The Rivals by Sheridan. ‘It is impossible to imagine anything more truly ludicrous than to see Lydia Languish and Julia (… performed by two young and good looking men …) drinking punch and smoking cigars behind the stage at a furious rate between the acts.’ They even invited the Duke of Wellington and were delighted to see that he revelled in the fun of it. Leach found himself forgiving his Commander in Chief for his reprimand a few months earlier. ‘This is the right sort of man to be at the head of an army … he knows perfectly well that the more the officers and soldiers enjoy themselves during winter, the more heartily will they embark in the operations of the forthcoming campaign.’
Wellington had to wait till late May to start his advance into Spain. The rains were late and his horses would go hungry without a carpet of lush green forage in the fields. But he was never idle. He supervised constant training in battlefield drills. His campaign so far had demonstrated the superiority of his British infantry in face-to-face combat. He was determined to build on that advantage. It was, for example, essential to get his men to practise forming lines from columns and vice versa in no more than thirty seconds. George Bell remembered being ‘very busy with parades and drills and field-days, and some little horse racing in April’. Wellington improved the men’s living conditions too. To avoid the dreaded bivouacking, he managed to get tents to house everyone in the army for the coming campaign. He also provided the men with light tin kettles instead of the heavy iron ones they had carried before.
Wellington also approved plans by his Chief Medical Officer, James McGrigor, whom he greatly admired, to improve care of the wounded. McGrigor had long been concerned about the distance the wounded had to travel to hospitals often way behind the front lines. Casualties were usually transported many miles on bumpy bullock carts. The risks of further damage to their wounds and exposure to disease tended to prolong their disablement. McGrigor, with the enthusiastic support of an ever more experienced team of military surgeons, persuaded Wellington that modernising medical support would result in a much faster return of victims to active service. From now on there would be prefabricated field hospitals which would be carried forward and set up as near as possible to the front line to ensure much more rapid treatment of wounds in battle.
Wellington was always travelling. Whatever Larpent may have thought of him as a huntsman, he was second to none in the saddle. After
a morning’s work at his headquarters in mid-April, he thought nothing of a five-and-a-half-hour ride from his headquarters to Ciudad Rodrigo to check its fortifications. He was back for dinner. Two months earlier he had hosted a ball at Ciudad Rodrigo to celebrate the first anniversary of its storming. He rode back to headquarters afterwards in the January moonlight.
In April George Scovell, an officer who had been working hard to break Napoleon’s codes, handed Wellington a message he had deciphered. Intercepted on its way from a French commander to Joseph Bonaparte, it said that a substantial part of the French army was preoccupied with chasing Spanish rebels in northern Spain. Wellington would have to face a reduced force of 80,000 rather than 100,000 French troops in any thrust he made across Spain. It was a remarkable coup by Wellington’s codebreaker and by the Spanish guerrillas who were now making an almost routine habit of waylaying French messengers in any part of the country.
In mid-May Wellington had his army on the move. George Bell reported ‘great hilarity, buoyant spirit and cheerfulness’ among the men, although the light infantryman and future historian William Napier was said to have grumbled: ‘Well, here we go again. We shall go so far and then have our arses kicked and come back again.’ Wellington’s strategic plan was a bold one. He would push the French back as far as he could towards their frontier at the Pyrenees. He was confident that he had enough men to risk a pitched battle with any force they could assemble. And he would attempt to roll the enemy back by splitting his force in two. He would lead the main force in a direct line north-east through Salamanca and Burgos. He would send another large force under Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham in a left hook through the hilly country to the north-west to exert constant pressure on the French right flank. The stratagem succeeded brilliantly. Wellington was not normally a man for theatrical gestures, but when he crossed the Spanish frontier heading east yet again, he waved his hat in the air and shouted, ‘Farewell Portugal. I shall never see you again.’ As he pressed on up the main road, Graham and his force in difficult country way over to the north-west conducted a series of lightning advances continually threatening to outflank the French. The combined movement of Wellington’s two armies kept the French retreating for fear of being cut off. One by one the towns fell to the advancing British: Salamanca, Zamora, Valladolid and Burgos. The castle at Burgos, which had resisted Wellington so successfully just six months earlier, was blown up by the French as they pulled back. Within little more than three weeks Wellington and his army had moved further north-east than ever before. The broad River Ebro stretched across their front.
