Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (88 page)

The battle was resolved by the action of the 4th Division. Major-General Lowry Cole had reached his allotted station behind
the original allied centre at d
awn after a fourteen-mile night march from Badajoz. Unfortunately one of his two brigades, that of Brigadier-General Kemmis, had got left behind owing to the premature removal of a pontoon bridge over the Guadiana and had
been compelled to set off on a
thirty-mile detour by Jerumenha. This reduced Cole's strength from 7000 to 5000, made up of 3000 Portuguese under Brigadier-General Harvey and the three British Fusilier battalions of Myers's brigade. At the time that Beresford sent the 2nd Division along the ridge to drive back the French from his right, he had moved up the 4th in support on the plain behind. Here with Brigadier-General Lumley's small force of British cavalry it had contained Latour-Maubourg's three brigades of horse, deterring them by its watchful presence from repeating their earlier success against Stewart's infantry.

Cole, a thirty-nine-year-old Irishman, was a first-rate if strictly orthodox soldier. Seeing the turn the battle had taken, he sent his aide-de-camp to Beresford to ask if he might move up on to the ridge and relieve the pressure on the 2nd Division. The aide-de-camp was wounded and never arrived, and Beresford, who, after desperate efforts to wheel some immobile Spaniards into the fight, was now attempting to bring up Hamilton's Portuguese from his left,

¹
Leslie,
222.

con
tinued to leave Cole without orders. At this point a young major on the Portuguese Staff named Henry Hardinge—one day, like Colborne, to become a Victorian Field Marshal—took it upon himself to urge Cole to advance as the one way of saving the devoted infantry on the hill from complete destruction and the whole army from disaster. This Cole, on his own responsibility, proceeded to do, despite the risk involved, forming his admirably steady Portuguese brigade as a flank guard against Latour-Maubourg's cavalry and deploying Myers's 2000 Fusiliers as they moved up the hill under fire.

At the sight of this menacing chain of bayonets, stretching for nearly a mile and steadily advancing against the flank of the mauled and now almost helpless
5th
Corps, Soult at last staked his reserves and threw Werle's 6000 men into the fight. But though they outnumbered Cole's Fusiliers by more than two to one, they repeated the old, fatal error of opposing the British attack in column. Each of Myers's three regiments—the 23rd or Welch Fusiliers and the first and second battalions of the
7th
Fusiliers—as they continued to move upwards concentrated their fire on the enemy's crowded ranks. The rest of the story lives for all time in Napier's prose.

"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke, and rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude, startled the enemy's heavy masses, which were increasing and pressing onwards as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and then vomiting forth a storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through the British ranks. Myers was killed, Cole, the three colonels, Ellis, Blakeney, and Hawkshawe, fell wounded, and the Fusilier battalions, struck by the iron tempest, reeled, and staggered like sinking ships. But suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans, extricating themselves from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm, weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front, their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as slowly and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There, the French reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to sustain the fight, but the effort only increased the irremediable confusion, the mighty mass gave way and like a loosened cliff went headlong down the steep. The rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill."
¹

Stewart's dogged English battalions bore their share in that final triumph, breasting the hill where the French had stood so long side by side with the Fusiliers. Of Colborne's brigade only a quarter survived, of Abercromby's three-quarters, of Hoghton's a third. The latter marched off the field commanded by a junior captain.
²
Myers's Fusiliers lost over half their 2000 men, and a Portuguese battalion which had accompanied them almost a third. The battle had lasted seven hours. The total allied loss was 5916 out of 35,284; that of the 6500 British infantry engaged 4407, or more than two-thirds. The French lost nearly 7000 out of 24,260, of which about 4000 fell on the 5th Corps and 1800 on Werle's reserve.
³
These casualties were so staggering that both commanders felt that they had been defeated. While Beresford sadly regrouped his shattered units to resist a fresh assault, Soult withdrew slowly towards Seville under cover of his cavalry. "They could not be persuaded they were beaten," he wrote angrily of the Englishmen who had foiled him. "They were completely beaten, the day was mine, and they did not know it and would not run."

When Wellington reached Elvas three days after the battle and read the melancholy account which Bercsford had sent to greet him, he said directly, "This won't do; it will drive the people in England mad. Write me down a victory."
⁴
The dispatch was altered accordingly, and Albuera was enrolled among the most glorious battle honours in the British Army's history. Its losses had been largely needless, but it had achieved its purpose and, though Philli-pon took advantage of Beresford's absence to level the allies' siege-works, the investment of Badajoz was immediately resumed. Nor was the battle without consequences of a moral kind. The French gallant and experienced soldiers though they were, never wholly recovered from the effects of that terrible day. The memory of it

¹
Napier, Hook XII, ch. vi.
²
Broughton, I,
34.

³
Fortescue, VIII,
205-9;
Oman, IV,
392-5, 631-5.
4
Stanhope,
Conversations,
90.

haunted them thereafter in the presence of the British infantry like a blow across the eyes.

The discord in Wellington's plans caused by the loss of Badajoz had still, however, to be resolved. So long as that fortress and Ciudad Rodrigo were both held by the French, the strategic initiative remained beyond his reach. Not till he was master of one or the other could he pursue the train of favouring circumstance offered by a bold advance into Spain. Forced until then to campaign on two fronts, his problem was to concentrate sufficient strength to besiege one fortress and fend off attempts to relieve it without dangerously weakening the other half of his army.

In the brief if rather breathless pause gained by Fuentes de Onoro and Albuera, Wellington attempted once more to reduce Badajoz with the means at his disposal. He relied on the greater speed with which he could concentrate and the ignorance in which the guerrillas kept the French generals of one another's movements. Marching fifteen miles a day, the
3rd
and 7th divisions reached Elvas on May 24th, once more bringing the half-crippled Anglo-Portuguese force in the south to 24,000 effectives. Fourteen thousand of them reinvested Badajoz, while the remainder, under Rowland Hill, who had providentially arrived from England, pushed Soult's outposts as far down the Andalusian highway as was compatible with safety. Here on the 25th, at Usagre, forty-five miles south of Albuera, Lumley's cavalry scored a brilliant and unexpected success, ambushing and destroying three hundred of Latour-Maubourg's greatly superior force of horse for a loss of less than twenty troopers.

The second British siege of Badajoz proved no more successful than the first. Like Beresford, Wellington lacked both the heavy guns and the trained sappers to prepare a way for his infantry. There were only twenty-five Royal Military Artificers, as the engineers were called, in the whole Peninsula.
¹
Most of the big guns assembled by Colonel Dickson, the young British commander of the Portuguese artillery, dated from the seventeenth century. When on June 6th, a week after opening the trenches, a storming party essayed an inadequate breach in the ramparts of San Cristobal, ninety-two men out of a hundred and eighty were lost. A second equally vain attempt three days later resulted in another hundred and forty casualties, half of them fatal. Two hundred more were killed or wounded by enemy shells and mortars in the wet, exposed trenches. By June 10th the ammunition of the siege-guns was almost exhausted. Realising that he was attempting

¹
Oman, IV,
417.
441

something beyond his means, Wellington thereupon raised the siege. Immediately afterwards, though the garrison was almost down to its last ration, he withdrew his blockading screen. Important as the recapture of Badajoz was to him, there was something even more essential—the Anglo-Portuguese army. He would not risk its ultimate safety for any secondary object, however great.

For the expected had happened. Not only had Soult, rallying after Albuera, called up his reinforcements, but the Army of Portugal was coming down from the north to his assistance. On May 10th, five days after the battle of Fuentes de Onoro, Massena had been superseded by Marshal Marmont, the thirty-six-year-old Duke of Ragusa. This brilliant soldier, who had fought by Napoleon's side in almost every major campaign since Toulon, had not yet inherited his predecessor's feud with Soult. He not only acceded to the latter's request for help but, reorganising his depleted formations at astonishing speed, set off for the south
with his entire force on June 1st. Re
victualling Ciudad Rodrigo on the way, he crossed the Tagus by a flying bridge at Almaraz and reached Merida by the middle of the month with 32,000 men. Here he was joined by Soult and reinforced, by Drouet's 9th Corps. With more than 60,000 troops between them the two Marshals were in a
n
immediate position to advance on Badajoz at once.

Wellington had also concentrated his forces, and more quickly than they. Admirably served by his quartermaster-general, Colonel John Waters, and the host of Spanish spies whom that genial, chameleon-like Welshman controlled,
¹
he knew every change in the enemy's dispositions almost before it happened. At the end of the first week in June, Spencer, acting on his orders, set off to join him with his four divisions from the North. Marching twenty miles a day in heat so intense that more than one of the proud infantry of the Light Division dropped dead sooner than fall out like the weaker brethren of other corps,
²
they crossed the Tagus by pontoon at Villa Velha and reached Elvas before their adversaries got to Merida.

Even with this reinforcement Wellington had still only
54
,000 troops, of whom less than two-thirds were British. He had no intention of being forced to fight against odds in an open plain or of being hustled into a hasty and costly retreat. He therefore withdrew to the north of the Guadiana on June 17th, before the enemy's

¹
For a delightful account of his activities, see Gronow, I,
15-16.

²
Tomk'mson,
106;
Smith, I,
50;
Simmons,
188.
"I do not believe that ten of a company marched into the town together," wrote a private of the
71st
Highlanders. "My sight grew dim, my mouth was dry as dust, my lips one continued blister."—
Journal
oj
a Soldier,
114.

junction was still complete, and took up a carefully chosen position on the Portuguese frontier. When two days later the French moved forward from Merida in the direction of Albuera, they found that the shadow they were seeking had vanished.

One June 20th th
e two Marshals entered Badajoz,
to the joy of Phillipon's hungry garrison. The next week was critical. Less than ten miles to the west Wellington with an outnumbered Anglo-Portuguese army was holding a twelve-mile line of hills stretching from Elvas through the Caya valley and Campo Mayor to the little walled town of Ougella near the Gebora. He could only retreat at the cost of exposing the key fortress of Elvas and laying Portugal open to a fourth invasion. But he had chosen his ground and placed his troops with such skill that they could neither be overlooked nor outflanked; nothing could expel them but a frontal attack on a position that was almost as strong as that of Bussaco.

This, with the memory of other attacks against hill positions chosen by Wellington fresh in their minds, the two Marshals refused to attempt. Although Latour-Maubourg's cavalry, keenly scrutinised by British outposts in the Moorish watchtowers along the wooded heights, made a great show of strength, a homogeneous army of
63
,000 French for five days declined the chance of battle with an Anglo-Portuguese force of 54,000.