The Making Of The British Army (26 page)

With Spain in rebellion against Bonaparte, Britain at last had her chance to enter the war on land in strategically favourable conditions. For in the Iberian Peninsula the French were operating on long, exterior lines of communication, while the British would be campaigning on interior lines and in a part of Europe whose lengthy coastline seemed tailor-made for the exercise of her naval strength, with Gibraltar the sure and steady rock on which that naval power could pivot between Atlantic and Mediterranean. And the difficult country of the interior, its scale and its climate, somehow seemed to favour the temperament and experience of Britain’s soldiers, especially her commanders: it was like India, but nearer home. The uprising and the British intervention would be the beginning of Bonaparte’s ‘Spanish ulcer’.

That intervention began wonderfully well, and with luck, too, for had the Spanish left it another few weeks Britain would not have been able to move in so fast and with such rapid success. Arthur Wellesley had been about to embark at Cork with 9,000 men to sail to the assistance of the Venezuelan revolutionary General Miranda when suddenly Spain was no longer the enemy and it was therefore no longer expedient to help the Venezuelans seize their independence. Instead, Wellesley’s force received orders to proceed to Spain.

Though he now faced an entirely different kind of undertaking, Britain’s youngest lieutenant-general was not in the least dismayed. Before sailing he attended a dinner in Dublin, remarking on his future task in a way that showed both his extraordinary percipience and his confident grasp of where the strength of the British army lay compared with Bonaparte’s vast military machine:

In the summer of 1808 the undaunted Wellesley landed at Corunna in north-west Spain to consult with the Galician junta, but the Spaniards gave him a cool reception, not at all happy to see British troops, the old enemy, on Spanish soil. He therefore sailed on to Portugal, landing at Mondego Bay well out of range of the French Marshal Junot’s army in Lisbon 100 miles to the south. Junot was one of Bonaparte’s favourites. He had risen from the ranks and distinguished himself in the Italian campaign, but had received a head wound in Italy which made his judgement erratic – or so it was said. Since Bonaparte had been pouring troops into the Peninsula for a year, however, even a marshal with a sore head was not going to be easy to oust. In any case, Wellesley’s force could only be a small part of the army that would eventually be needed to cooperate, however remotely, with the Spanish armies (and the Portuguese would be in no shape for months). More troops were already on their way: 4,000 under Major-General Brent Spencer and 10,000 under Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore – to whom, as senior general, overall command would pass when he arrived.

But therein lay a problem. Moore was a Whig, and an outspoken one at that; it would not do that a general who had been so critical of the Tory government’s military policies should now be in command of its principal campaign on land. More senior lieutenant-generals were therefore ordered to Portugal: first, Sir Harry Burrard, whose nickname was ‘Betty’; second, Sir Hew Dalrymple, who was known as ‘the Dowager’. The nicknames were not auspicious. ‘Betty’, although he had done his share of fighting, was more at home on Horse Guards Parade; ‘the Dowager’ had not seen service for fourteen years. How could such
inapt appointments be made after so many years of learning the hard way – in Wellesley’s words, what not to do? In truth, the duke of York was still not master of the system: it was the civilian secretaries – the cabinet, even – who controlled appointments at this level. And in truth too a commander-in-chief in a distant theatre of war, as Moore would be, did require a sound political sense as well as sound military ability – but not as a substitute for it. It was not the first time that a general possessing one quality but not the other would be tested in both; and it certainly would not be the last.

Before Betty or the Dowager could do much damage, however, Wellesley had won two quick victories. Setting off without delay towards Lisbon, on 17 August he bumped into Junot’s advance detachment of 4,000 men at Roliça, whom he forced from their positions by a combination of manœuvring on the flanks and direct assault, his two rifle regiments leading. And then four days later the main body of the French in turn attacked him – some 13,000 men under Junot’s personal command. To meet them, Wellesley deployed his main firing line in what was to become his trademark defensive tactic – the reverse-slope position, the regiments concealed behind a ridge, lying down, muskets loaded and bayonets fixed.

For the first time since the battle of Alexandria the French were about to feel the full effect of British musketry allied with the best of generalship.
⁵⁸
Two dozen regiments of the line stood or lay concealed behind the crest of the ridge south of the little Portuguese village of Vimeiro, 100 miles north of Lisbon, as 2,000 veteran French infantrymen in their habitual close-order columns, supported by hand-wheeled guns and screened by the customary cloud of
tirailleurs
, marched confidently towards the centre of the position.

In command of the brigade in their path was Henry Fane, cornet at thirteen, captain the following year, veteran of many an affair in Flanders and many a raid up and down the French coast – and not yet thirty. To counter the
tirailleurs
he had detached four companies of the green-jacketed 60th (Rifles) and ranged them at the foot of the slope. Most of the riflemen lay down to take a steady aim, some on their backs
supporting the barrel of the rifle in the ‘V’ of their crossed feet. At 600 yards, well beyond smooth-bore musketry range, they began sniping, taking a steady toll of the
tirailleurs
so that those who were not hit were soon falling back on the brigade columns, against which the guns of the Royal Artillery were already firing the new ‘shrapnel’ ammunition, peppering the densely packed masses of infantry with musket balls from overhead like lethal hailstones. The French artillery replied, though with limited effect on men lying in ‘dead ground’.

As the French neared the bottom of the rise the riflemen withdrew. Without
tirailleurs
in front of them to flush out the main body concealed behind the crest, as the French reached the top of the slope they blundered into the 50th (West Kent) Regiment. At 100 yards the ‘Dirty Half Hundred’,
⁵⁹
drawn up in two ranks not the regulation three, opened fire. The French, still in column, wavered but continued. The 50th’s flank companies now wheeled inwards to add a deadly enfilade fire (exactly as the 52nd would do at the climax of Waterloo seven years later). The French broke and bolted, abandoning their guns and throwing away their muskets.

Soon the columns to left and right were wavering too as seventeen regiments of redcoats now rose up and began pouring fire into the mass of Junot’s infantry. The French tried to deploy and return fire, but Wellesley ordered his line to charge, driving them headlong back down the slopes. Then he loosed his cavalry at them – two regiments of light dragoons – and sealed a famous victory. It had taken him just two hours.

But next ‘Dowager’ Dalrymple, who had just arrived, failed at the one thing he was meant to be good at: judging the political–strategic situation. Junot sued for peace. Wellesley was all for pressing on for Lisbon and finishing the job with powder, but Dalrymple agreed to a conditional surrender: Junot’s troops would evacuate Portugal and return to France, but they would leave with all their arms and equipment – and in British ships.

When the details of this ‘Convention of Cintra’ reached London, the three British signatories – Sir Hew Dalrymple, Sir Harry Burrard
and
Sir Arthur Wellesley – were peremptorily recalled and arraigned before
a court of inquiry. Though all three were eventually acquitted, only Wellesley returned to active duty, and even then under a cloud, so appalled was the public reaction to Cintra (the press, then as now with a penchant for the pun, took to calling it a
Hewmiliation).
Even Wordsworth railed against it, and Byron, ever the soldier manqué, fumed in
Childe Harold:

The immediate beneficiary of the episode was Sir John Moore, who now took command of the army in Portugal, soon to grow to 42,000 men. Although this was now only about a fifth of Britain’s army, on paper at least, it was all that London could spare, the rest being committed to overseas garrisons, home defence and what would later be known as internal security. Indeed, the foreign secretary, the brilliant but exasperating George Canning, warned Moore that his army was ‘not merely a considerable part of the dispensable force of this country. It is in fact
the
British army … Another army it has not to send.’

Preservation of the force is the first duty of a commander, but such a warning wrote it in capitals. And yet Canning’s arch-rival Castlereagh, the secretary for war, had high strategic expectations of the 42,000 – as well he might, for it was the largest army that Britain had sent abroad since Marlborough’s day. His instructions to Moore were ‘to cooperate with the Spanish armies in the expulsion of the French from that Kingdom’. Indeed, any less ambitious an aim would have seemed unreasonable for so large an investment, and at what was now to be the army’s main point of effort.

Moore’s instructions, however, presumed the cooperativeness of Spain, a former enemy of Britain. And although Marshal Junot had been sent back to square one – in his case Rochefort – the French had plenty more counters on the board. These now began to come into
play. In October the emperor Napoleon, as he had crowned himself, free of the distractions of the big continental players after victories at Ulm, Austerlitz and Jena, marched into Spain at the head of 200,000 men – as many as Britain had under arms worldwide. His plan of campaign was, as ever, direct (like, reputedly, his lovemaking): he would thrust to Madrid in crushing strength, and then on to Lisbon, flinging aside contemptuously all in his wake, detaching a corps here and there to deal with whichever of the several rabbles that passed for Spanish armies was dolt enough to stand in his way. He had neither the inclination nor the patience for long campaigns.

Implicit in Castlereagh’s instructions to Moore was the willingness not only of the Spanish troops to fight, but, crucially, of the Spanish authorities to meet his logistic needs. The first would soon prove a dubious assumption, for factionalism in the Spanish army added another dimension of unreliability. As for the second, logistic support, as Moore quickly learned, was but a vain hope. A century and a half later, when NATO was putting together the plan for the defence of Western Europe against the Soviet tank armies, one of its fundamental principles was that logistics were to be an entirely national responsibility; where any reliance was to be placed on ‘host-nation support’ it had to be with the most meticulous prior agreements drawn up in legal form – much as Marlborough had done before his march into Bavaria. It was a doctrine born of hard experience. ‘Interoperability’, which holds out the promise of logistic partnership, has always been regarded as something of an illusory goal by seasoned warriors, and Sir John Moore’s experiences would ever stand as a warning to those who thought otherwise.

No more cooperative than towards Wellesley earlier in the year, the Spaniards would not let Sir David Baird and his 15,000 reinforcements land at Corunna; so they had to sail round the north-west point of the peninsula to Vigo instead, which took time. And since Moore had to leave 12,000 men to protect Lisbon, it meant that half of the force with which he intended to manœuvre against the French – including the bulk of the cavalry, of which he was especially short – would be joining him late. Indeed, in the increasingly uncertain situation that Moore faced, cavalry would have been his greatest asset, for had they been allowed to range and reconnoitre deep, the perilous position into which he now began to march (and would persist in marching) could have been recognized earlier.

Knowing that it would likely be a full month before Lord Paget (later Lord ‘One Leg’ Uxbridge, of Waterloo fame) and his cavalry division would land with Baird’s reinforcements, and knowing even less about the country into which he was to advance without maps or prepositioned ‘combat supplies’ (ammunition, food and forage), but knowing that he must move fast if he was to be of any assistance whatever to the Spanish, Moore set off on 16 October for the frontier, intending to rendezvous with Baird when and where he could.