Flashman in the Peninsula (19 page)

As we sat and watched, strangely calm now, the salvos got longer and the gaps between them shorter until the French fire was continuous. It was punctuated by the crashing discharges of our guns from their batteries on either side of the hill top so that it was now almost impossible to hold a conversation. We watched as the French columns slowly crossed the valley floor and I realised that soon matters would come to a conclusion one way or another.

The word ‘column’ may be misleading as they were wider than they were deep. I estimated each contained fifteen hundred men, being over a hundred and fifty men wide and around ten men deep. All three seemed still to be heading directly for our position on the hill. The French were clearly determined to capture it with its commanding position over the rest of the battlefield. The French marched with the confidence of men who knew that nothing could stop their mighty columns smashing through whatever they were aimed at. These were the veterans that had smashed through the armies of emperors, tsars, kings and princes, even the Mamelukes in Egypt. Some heavily outnumbered redcoats on the top of a hill were not considered a great obstacle. Golden eagle standards glittered along the lines marking out each regiment, and within their mass the drummers beat the pace like the heartbeat of a single huge creature. Then, as I had heard in Alcantara but now on a massive scale, the drummers would pause and in unison nearly five thousand men would roar out, ‘
vive l’empereur!
’

‘Thank Christ I am on a horse,’ I thought as I watched them approach, for it seemed impossible that our flimsy ranks would stop them. I even glanced back down the hillside I had climbed to ascertain the best route back. I looked around to see if any of my brother officers were also edging back a little but they were all sitting resolutely on their mounts.

It was one of the heaviest cannonades I have ever experienced. The smoke from the French guns slowly built in the valley until I could barely see the French columns at all. But I could still hear them, and in some ways that was even more unnerving. The steady tramp, tramp, tramp of thousands of boots, the pounding of the drums and then that regular bellow of loyalty to their emperor. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, aye and it did every time I heard it over the coming years too. Even the redcoats, sitting and lying on the reverse slope in their long lines, had fallen silent now as they listened to their approaching enemy and tried to picture the scene they would shortly be facing.

As the French columns emerged from the smoke near the Portina stream at the bottom of the valley, the order was finally given for the British troops to come over the crest and form up on the slope. Most companies marched forward in lines but the light companies ran scattered down the hill to disrupt the enemy approach. There was no hesitation but I guessed there must have been some gasps of trepidation when they finally saw the smoke and maelstrom of shot they were walking into.

Somehow the French gunners had seen the British troops move and now all the French cannon seemed to be trained on the men on the slope in front of me, even those to the south which had previously been firing at the redcoats opposite them.

The iron whizzed through the air now like mosquitoes in a swamp.
In the first few seconds I saw four balls tear through the double lines of red coated men, smashing bodies and flinging them away like rag dolls.
Some cannon balls bounced before reaching the lines and gave the men a small chance to avoid them, while others screamed over our heads. But the French gunners knew their business and most were well aimed.

I saw freakish deaths and miraculous redemptions. One ball bouncing on the ground towards a group of infantry men hit a rock, deflecting it to decapitate a corporal who had been shouting a warning to his men in its earlier path. A sergeant was snatched away but instead of being killed he got up unharmed to find the ball buried in his pack. One young ensign, a boy of no more than fourteen by the look of him, was white and shaking with fear. His captain noticed and walked over to help strengthen his resolve. God knows what was said, but the boy stiffened and stuck his chin up, and then to show his courage he took a few steps towards his men shouting encouragement to them in his piping voice. A few seconds later a ball whipped through the line taking one of the rear file men and the young ensign, smashing them both to a pulp. I reflected that if the lad had stayed quaking where he was he would probably have survived, which shows what courage gets you! Hill must have seen it too, for now he shouted for his men to lie down again to get what little protection there was.

There was the intermittent crackle now of British skirmishers picking off officers and the leading ranks in the French columns as they came into range, before falling back up the hill. I did not have to see them to know that this would be as effective as firing pins at an elephant. The French marched on as though they were not there.

Eventually, when the French soldiers started to climb the slope before us, the cannonade eased as the French gunners worried about hitting their own men. Attention turned now to the battle between the skirmishers in front of the columns. The French had sent out their own skirmish troops to keep ours at bay. The light troops were battling each other but the British were putting up a good defence and falling back in good order. In fact they were falling back too slowly for Hill who feared that they would still be in the way when he wanted to fire his volleys. The French were now half way up the hill and he roared at his light company officers, ‘Damn their filing, let them come in anyhow.’

As the last light company troops disappeared into the ranks. The French were just a hundred yards away now. The stamp of their thousands of boots alone was enough to drown out conversation. I saw some of the front ranks grinning at the thin line of men still lying down in front of them, and they gave a final below of loyalty to their emperor, perhaps in the hope of just frightening our men way. It nearly worked with me.

Hill turned to the nearest regiment and shouted, ‘Now twenty-ninth, now is your time.’ The men of the twenty-ninth rose to their feet and all along the line other regiments followed suit, so that the front ranks of the French must have seen a wall of red rise up in front of them. Then, for the French, the horror began.

The French might have been used to enemies melting away in front of them, but the hard faced men in red showed no sign of going anywhere as they half turned and raised muskets to their shoulders. The crash of the volley was not as loud as I had anticipated and I glanced quickly down the line to see what had gone wrong. I half expected to see streams of men pouring back over the hill and I was ready to join them if they were. But not a single man had moved, and as I wondered what was going on another volley crashed out, well before the first could have reloaded. Then I realised that only part of our line was firing at a time.

Rolling company volleys are a devastating technique, but they can only be done by well-trained troops. The British had practised them well. Every third company along the line fired their eighty muskets at the enemy and then started to reload using the fast drill that was now automatic to them. A few seconds later the next third of the regiment would fire and then after another short delay the final companies, by which time the first company was readying itself to fire again. The end result was an almost continuous hail of lead into the front of the column.

The French commanders had probably expected a single volley and then planned to return fire, having closed the range while the British were reloading. They had never faced anything like this and must have realised with a shock that there was not going to be a lull for them to prepare their men to fire. Not only were the British fast to reload, but they were experienced enough to know to aim their guns low against the French, so that the recoil took the ball into their bodies and not over their heads. Already between the volleys we could hear the screams and yells of the wounded as they were hit or trodden on by the men behind.

The front ranks of the columns were collapsing in waves as the men in front of them fired, but the French still came on. The regular marching was more hesitant and stumbling now as they stepped over the dead and wounded. The range closed to seventy yards and then fifty, but by now there was carnage in the front ranks of the huge columns which were overlapped by the continuous line of redcoats. At that distance a musket ball could easily pass through two or more bodies, and men were being shot down faster than those behind could climb over them. I watched in fascinated horror as the front ranks crumpled and the men behind struggled to get around or over their comrades, with disorder rippling through the ranks. Too late the French commanders tried to get their men to return fire.

The column finally ground to a halt. While the French still outnumbered the British, only their front two ranks could bring their guns to bear, and they were also the ones facing the devastating storm of shot from the men in front. I glanced quickly along the line and the other two columns had similarly ground to a halt and one was already starting to fall back. I turned to the men in front of me as a sporadic volley finally rang out from the front of the French column but it seemed to do little damage. Many of the French seemed to have fired wildly just to obey the order as British balls continued to slash through their ranks.

The French could see that they were making no progress and that the British fire was steadily turning their front ranks into a blue coated rampart of dead. With no sign of a let up in the steady barrage of lead, some of them now started to edge back. Suddenly the edging back broke into a run, and like a dam breaking, the rear files of the huge columns were hurtling back down the hill as fast as they could go. Ironically it was this sign of their breaking that gave the French the respite from volleys that they wanted. Not that it did them much good.

‘Cease fire,’ called British officers and sergeants down the ranks. Then after a brief pause came a new order, ‘Fix bayonets.’

Even if the front French ranks did not understand the English, there was no mistaking the portent of eighteen inches of cold steel being attached to every musket in front of them. The screams and yells of the many wounded were now augmented by yells of panic as the front ranks pushed desperately at the men behind them to get away from the onslaught they knew was about to be unleashed on them. The rest of the French column had broken before the order to charge was given. With a roar the redcoat line sprang forward at the survivors. Some of the French whose muskets were still loaded tried to make a stand half way down the hill to cover their retreat, but a third of the British were also loaded and the rest had their blood up. A red coated tide swept down the hill driving all before it and in a matter of moments the hillside was ours.

As you can imagine I was jubilant, if not a little awestruck, at the devastating firestorm that had just been delivered. Like the French I had not seen anything like it, and for the first time I began to understand why some of my brother officers had more confidence in our success. Our charging infantry stopped at the bottom of the hill; the French side of the valley was still wreathed in artillery smoke and who knew what horrors waited there. The officers, conscious of the gaping hole left in our lines, urged the men back up the slope to fill it again. They were worried that French cavalry could swoop forward and cut up the redcoats who were scattered out of formation, but none appeared. The cannon fire did not even resume, and as the French had disappeared into the smoke on their side of the valley, our guns stopped too. We listened for the noise of more marching men but all we could hear was distant French shouting.

After such a deafening cannonade and then a battle, the relative quiet – with just the odd groan or whimper from the wounded – seemed almost eerie. Hill had ridden forward to congratulate his men as they climbed back up the slope, while Wellesley kept glancing up and down the line to see if the French were preparing to attack somewhere else, but all was still. Slowly the smoke began to thin in the valley and we could see that there was no movement in the French lines at all.

‘Surely they will attack again sir?’ one of the staff officers asked Wellesley.

‘They will certainly try something,’ he said. ‘Hello, what is this, a flag of truce?’ I looked, and about a hundred men could be seen coming forward, but they were unarmed and not in any military formation. They met Hill on the slope and he sent them further up where they began to collect the French wounded. More French soldiers could be seen now gathering by the Portina stream where they filled canteens and drank the water. Our soldiers watched enviously, the sun was climbing high in the sky now and the morning was already warm. They had been biting down on cartridges and spitting the balls into the muzzles of their guns as they loaded; the salty gunpowder had made their mouths dry and their own canteens were empty. It was evident that the French had not sent nearly enough men to collect their wounded, so now some British soldiers were allowed to leave the line to help carry the French wounded down the slope to the stream. Once there I noticed they did not rush back up and were busy drinking their fill and trying to talk to the French soldiers around them.

There was no formal truce, but it was unofficially understood all along the line that hostilities had temporarily been suspended. Men who had previously been trying to kill each other now worked together to bandage wounds and carry those that needed help.
There followed one of those curious incidents that are hard to understand by those who were not actually there. The British soldiers still on the hill had watched the French, and their comrades who had helped them, drinking and filling their canteens from the stream while their own throats burned. They must have appealed to their officers to be allowed to get water themselves. One British captain released his men to go down and the French soldiers made room for them. In a moment the whole British line had been released. Soon the former enemies were helping to haul bodies out of the stream and pointing out the clearest flows of the precious water.