True Soldier Gentlemen (Napoleonic War 1) (19 page)

L
ieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley urged his weary horse over the rise and then pulled on the reins to halt the poor beast. He allowed himself a moment to take in the view over Mondego Bay and permit the three young staff officers trailing behind him to catch up. Their horses were only marginally weaker than the grey gelding he was riding, but as always he pressed his mount just a little harder than anyone else, whether in a hunt or on campaign. Tomorrow should be better. Two of his own horses had been landed that morning and the grooms had spent the rest of the day helping them to recover from the weeks at sea.

He patted the gelding’s neck and could feel the animal breathing hard. It was a thin, half-starved creature, but the best the Portuguese commander could provide. Not that the man was any judge of horseflesh. Until a few weeks ago the worried, grey-faced man had been a professor of law at Coimbra University, until he and his students had taken up arms against the French and seized the fort overlooking the bay. After a few days, the Royal Navy had landed some companies of marines to provide a professional stiffening for this garrison. Wellesley was glad they were there, for it took a long time to raise and train an army and the Portuguese had only had weeks.

The students were a ragged-looking bunch. Only a minority had muskets, while a red rag tied around the arm was all that most of them had as a uniform. When he had ridden through the gates the enthusiastic salute offered by the young Portuguese volunteers had seemed almost a parody of the marines’ smart presenting of arms. He had acknowledged it anyway, just as if it had
been done by Guardsmen in London. In the same way he had saluted and offered his congratulations to the former professor.

The Portuguese were not yet organised, but they were welcoming and very keen and that in the end was what mattered. Things had been so different in Spain. Wellesley’s original orders had been to take the army to Corunna and help the authorities in the province of Galicia. He had sailed ahead of the main convoy, but discovered no enthusiasm for the British expedition. The Galician junta welcomed English arms and money, but refused to accept any soldiers, let alone an entire army. With resources they could fight the French themselves, boasting of a major victory already won by a Spanish army farther south.

Disappointed, Wellesley had gone back on board the navy frigate and sailed to Portugal. At Oporto there was a bishop leading resistance to the French. The man was no soldier but seemed a talented organiser, and there was no doubting his zeal for expelling the French. It was the first taste of the greater willingness of the Portuguese to admit their weakness and co-operate, helped by the fact that there was already a British officer liaising with the bishop. The two countries were old allies, but Britain had done nothing to help the Portuguese the previous autumn when General Junot had led his columns into Lisbon. There had not been anything much they could have done, but that can have been little consolation to the Portuguese. Only the risings in Spain gave the chance of dividing the French forces in the Peninsula and making them vulnerable.

Oporto was too far from Lisbon and the main concentrations of French troops to be a good place to land the army. So Wellesley had gone back on board the fast-sailing HMS
Crocodile
and once again headed south. They could not land on the Tagus at Lisbon itself. The French would be bound to meet such a move on or near the beaches before the British Army was fully disembarked and ready. Added to that, there was the squadron of the Russian navy in the Tagus. The Tsar was an ally of Napoleon, and although his country was not actively at war with Britain, it was very hard to be sure of their neutrality. The Royal Navy were hungry for a
fight, and hungrier still for the prize money it might bring, but Wellesley wanted to avoid any confrontation. It was enough having one enemy to fight.

Then the students had seized the fort at Figueiras-da-Foz at the mouth of the Mondego and resolved the problem.

‘Fine sight, eh, Bathurst,’ barked Wellesley to his Deputy Quartermaster General, who had just managed to persuade his exhausted screw of a horse up the last few yards of the slope. A young staff officer was beside him; the other had dismounted and was ruefully examining his mount’s front left hoof. The shoe had lost two nails and looked ready to come free. The officer hoped it would last for the next hour. None of the three men had been quite prepared for the pace set by their thirty-nine-year-old commander. They were sore and weary themselves, but guessed that it would be a long time before they rested.

The scene before them was certainly impressive. Longboats shuttled back and forth to the shore loaded with tightly packed rows of seated redcoats or boxes, barrels and sacks of supplies. Behind were some of the sixty-eight ships which had sailed from Cork. The sea seemed to have calmed a little, and the big ships scarcely moved at anchor, but the rowing boats were still sometimes tossed by the waves. One looked to be in bad trouble and was being carried away by the current towards the rocky out-crops near a small headland. Bathurst pulled out his telescope and focused on the dark, almost black longboat. The soldiers sitting in the middle still looked rigid and impassive, but he could guess at their growing nervousness. There was no noise, but he could see a naval officer with his hand raised – probably a young midshipman not old enough to shave and yet still calmly giving orders in a high falsetto to men twice his age. For a moment the boat resisted the pull of the water, but then it was jerked suddenly towards the rocks. Oars reached out to push away from the boulders, but with another swell the boat struck hard against the rock and tipped.

Bathurst asped. ‘Poor devils,’ he muttered as the little red figures and the white-shirted sailors were tossed into the grey water.
Again, through the glass it was eerily silent.

The general watched intently, but without resorting to his telescope. His eyesight was good, and there was nothing he could do to help the men from up here. Other boats were circling as close at they dared, and already one or two survivors were climbing on to the rocks themselves.

‘Find out how many men we have lost today, as well as any supplies that have perished,’ Wellesley instructed the young ADC.

‘It could have been worse, sir,’ ventured Bathurst. He had seen the little blue figure of the midshipman being pulled on to the rock by a redcoat and was pleased by that.

Wellesley grunted. There was an hour of good light left, and after that they would need to cease landing men until dawn tomorrow. Fane’s brigade was already ashore. The Rifles had come first, little piquets of green-jacketed sharpshooters quickly forming all around the beach and linking up with the fort. The line battalions had strengthened the outposts. Now men from the other brigades were starting to join them. Some two thousand eight hundred men would be ashore by the end of the day, and that was a good start.

Judging that the others had now had enough of a rest – and that was the sole reason he had stopped for so long – Wellesley decided to move.

‘On we go,’ he said, and was already trotting down the sandy hillside. He needed to have a word with Brigadier General Fane and then ride back to the fort to receive the latest reports sent in by the Portuguese scouts. Bathurst and the two ADCs trailed behind, the one whose horse had a loose shoe going as gingerly as he could while still keeping up.

They passed a half-company of redcoats. Shoulder wings and white plumes on their shakos showed them to be grenadiers, and Bathurst then had to work out which regiment in the army had red facings to their jackets. As usual, the general was ahead of him as he nodded to the young lieutenant colonel who was standing talking to a group of officers beside the men.

‘Evening, Moss, glad to see the 106th are with us,’ called
Wellesley as he sped past, somehow persuading his grey into a canter.

‘Thank you, sir,’ called Moss eagerly at the departing figure. ‘Always ready and always steady!’ It was a new motto he had come up with for the regiment and hoped to make popular.

Wellesley’s brief nod and gaze had scarcely been warm, but Moss knew that that was simply the general’s way. Bathurst smiled cheerfully as he passed. The two men had met during Moss’s service in Ireland.

‘Nice to be on dry land again!’ Bathurst called as he struggled to keep up with the departing figure of his chief. ‘Must go.’ He half turned in his saddle and waved back. ‘Don’t know where we can find a thousand mules, do you?’ he called back, and then was gone, followed by the ADCs.

‘Mules?’ asked Hanley, as he and Pringle stood together at a decent distance from where Moss, Major Toye and the adjutant were talking.

‘Bit like donkeys, only a lot more awkward,’ said Pringle. ‘Probably Welsh, I expect.’

‘Then they must be noble animals indeed,’ asserted Williams. ‘No wonder the general wants them on our side. If such warriors join the French then we might be in trouble.’

‘Curious thing to be worrying about on the day we have landed in an enemy-held country, though.’ Pringle shrugged and Williams as usual exuded utter faith in the wisdom of his superiors, but Hanley remained puzzled. ‘I would have expected the French to occupy his entire thoughts.’

Wellesley did think about the French, but it was not an immediate concern. The Bishop of Oporto had estimated General Junot’s army at fifteen thousand men. Fresher intelligence suggested that this was a considerable underestimate. Some thirty thousand French soldiers had invaded Portugal the previous autumn. Wellesley was confident that these were now spread widely across the country. Portugal’s people had risen in arms during the spring, just as the Spanish had done. The French had provoked them, for their soldiers looted freely, but there was a
deeper rage at the invader who had so easily and quickly taken their land. Militias appeared all around the country. French patrols were ambushed and stragglers caught and killed, often after long hours of torture. The French response was savage, and Junot split his army up into smaller columns which marched through the valleys burning and killing.

The French spread fear, but the hatred was even stronger and more and more people chose to fight. Junot did not have enough men to garrison every town and village and so his soldiers kept moving, and as they did they plundered and raped. Reports made it clear that the enemy were dispersed in several groups and that none was anywhere near Mondego Bay. They had at least a week before Junot might even contemplate launching an attack, and in the meantime there was so much to do. How many men the French could concentrate by that time was harder to estimate. Wellesley was confident that his soldiers would defeat the same number of Frenchmen. Still, no general chose to fight on equal terms unless there was no alternative.

That was the wider problem, but at the moment – and indeed for the rest of the campaign – he must devote a good deal of his attention to mules, and to horses, oxen and carts. Animals took up far more space than men in transport ships, and needed better treatment if they were to survive the voyage and still be useful. His lone cavalry regiment had brought more troopers than horses in the hope of finding mounts after they arrived. The artillery were the same; indeed, an artillery battery was almost more demanding of horses than a cavalry regiment like the 20th Light Dragoons. More than half of his guns had no horses to pull them, or the extra ammunition and other supply carts they needed to function.

Then there was the ammunition and food required by the rest of the army. Already the arithmetic was running through his head. Armies consumed food at a staggering rate even before they used powder and shot for fighting. Whether they fought, marched hard or did nothing at all, the men and horses ate and drank. Men needed meat and bread or biscuit – or if they were given
grain then they needed the opportunity to grind it into flour and then to bake the flour into bread, which in turn required copious amounts of firewood as fuel. Army regulations also entitled each soldier to an issue of alcohol every day. Horses needed food and fodder and good treatment if their health was not to decline.

The years in India had taught him that before anything else a general must keep his army fed and watered if it was to achieve anything. Having the supplies stowed safely in the holds of ships, or piled high on land in a depot, was in itself almost as useless as not having them at all. Everything needed to be moved to where the army wanted it and then to be immediately available. That meant transport, whether by pack animal or draught animals pulling wheeled carts. Without these, he could go nowhere. Yet in turn the baggage animals must have food and fodder, and so transport was needed for this a the animals involved would in turn want supplying. Oxen were strong – he had used thousands of them in India along with many elephants – but desperately slow. Mules were quicker, but needed more attendants.

He was unlikely to get a choice. Once the second fleet had arrived from Gibraltar in a few days and disembarked, he would have almost fifteen thousand men. From what he had seen it would be a struggle to find enough animals and wagons to move even half that number. The Portuguese were once again willing, but the country was poor, and even if every animal could be gathered they were unlikely to meet all his needs. There was no vast force of shire horses like those of England. So it was not a choice between oxen or mules, but a desperate search to find as many of each as he possibly could. To this end the general and his staff devoted their greatest efforts and would continue to do so as the days passed. They would ask, cajole, beg and, almost as importantly, pay their allies for every type of pack or draught beast that could be found.