The Making Of The British Army (27 page)

Advancing on three widely separated axes, in a month he was at Salamanca, 100 miles north-west of Madrid.
⁶⁰
Here he learned that the situation had indeed taken a turn for the worse: Napoleon had already smashed the Spanish army in the centre of the country, and Valladolid, not 70 miles to his north-east, was in French hands. Without his heavy artillery, which was travelling by a different route – none too quickly, because of faulty intelligence on the going – and with no sign of Baird, Moore faced rapid annihilation. But astonishingly, Napoleon now obliged him by halting his westward advance and directing his attention on Madrid. Given a fortnight’s breathing space, Moore was able to gather in his artillery and begin planning an orderly withdrawal on Lisbon. But then he learned that Madrid was fighting, and decided that he must support the Spanish defenders – for this had been the import of Castlereagh’s instructions. He decided therefore to mount a diversionary attack on Marshal Soult’s corps of 20,000 covering Napoleon’s flank and line of communications at Valladolid.

It proved a major error. How far Castlereagh’s instructions obliged Moore to make so desperate a feint have been debated ever since, but there is no doubt that ‘the Whig general’s’ unbending sense of honour propelled him to keep fighting for as long as there was hope of rousing the Spanish to resist. The stakes were high, after all, for Moore believed that if Spain fell, so again would Portugal, leaving Britain with no toehold on the mainland of Europe except Gibraltar, and France with all the strategic advantage of owning the entire Atlantic coast. And yet Castlereagh’s instructions did not oblige him to fight except in cooperation with the Spanish
armies.
The doughty civilians of Madrid scarcely constituted that. Moore’s own estimation of their capacity to resist the French, and the capacity of the Spanish forces outside the
capital to rouse themselves, was anyway not great: ‘I much fear that they will not move,’ he wrote in his diary on 11 December, ‘but will leave me to fight; in which case I must keep my communications open with Astorga and Galicia.’

The strategic situation had changed, too, for the cabinet had not made its plans on the assumption that Napoleon would flood the country with troops. There were now possibly three times the number originally supposed, though even Moore underestimated the total, such was the lack of good intelligence from the Spanish. He was wary, none the less, writing to Baird that ‘I mean to proceed bridle in hand, for, if the bubble bursts, we shall have a run for it.’

And so he proceeded north-east instead of south-west, ‘bridle in hand’, brilliantly screened by his two cavalry regiments – 1,200 sabres under Castlereagh’s younger brother, Lord Charles Stewart. Scouting deep, Stewart’s men learned that Valladolid had been evacuated, and that Soult, believing the British to be withdrawing west, had moved to Burgos, 60 or so miles north-east. The British cavalry had not yet gained half the reputation of the infantry – even Granby’s bald head could not quite displace the image of Sackville’s motionless wig and Prince Rupert’s uncontrollable Cavaliers – but in the month’s campaign in Galicia, especially once united under Paget, the regiments of hussars and light dragoons showed what they could do when handled firmly and boldly. Without them – without Paget, perhaps – when Moore had to run for Corunna the army could scarcely have made it.

One of Stewart’s regiments was the 3rd Hussars of the King’s German Legion. The KGL had been formed in 1804 after Napoleon over-ran the electorate of Hanover and disbanded its army, many of whose officers and soldiers fled to the Elector George’s British realm.
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Equipped in just the same way as British troops, they had a high reputation for efficiency and reliability (at Waterloo, Wellington deployed them exactly as if they had been British), and their cavalry – five regiments of hussars and light dragoons, the two types differing in name and dress only – were generally reckoned superior in horse-mastership to the British. The diary of Captain James Hughes, in temporary command of the 18th Hussars, describes how after an inspection in 1813 in the Pyrenees the brigade commander invited him to visit the 1st Hussars of the Legion to see how well the horses looked
in comparison with the Eighteenth’s. There is an affectionate, if not always accurate, picture of them in Thomas Hardy’s
The Trumpet Major.
⁶²

On 19 December Moore and Baird met up at last, at Mayorga 80 miles west of Burgos. Baird’s troops were led in through deep snow by the splendid 15th Light Dragoons (now styled ‘hussars’) who had done so much to recover the cavalry’s reputation in the Seven Years War by their
élan
at Emsdorff. Awaiting them were the pickets of the 4th (King’s Own) Foot, yet again in the cannon’s mouth, along with the 28th (North Gloucestershire) who had fought back-to-back with Moore at Alexandria; beyond the pickets waited also many more of the best infantry regiments of the line. And in with Baird marched two battalions of the 1st Foot Guards, their field uniform no different from that of the line regiments, yet their bearing such that Moore remarked, Ah, they must be the Guards.’

Moore had decided to regroup this army of 30,000 to spread the experience evenly through the brigades, for some of the reinforcements had not lately seen action. He therefore formed four infantry divisions, each under an unusually able commander, three of them fellow Scots (Baird, Hope and Alexander Fraser) and the other, Edward Paget, the younger brother of the cavalry commander. And for the first time he formed two light brigades as flank guards, one consisting of two light infantry battalions of the KGL under the Hanoverian general Karl Alten, the other of two battalions of the 43rd and the 52nd Light Infantry together with the second battalion of the 95th Rifles under yet another Scot, the formidable Robert ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd.

In Madrid a day or two later Napoleon learned what was happening. He at once flew into an energetic rage, gathered up men from all directions – 80,000 of them – and marched north to deal with the impertinent British. In his path lay the snow-covered Guadarramas, mountains that even in summer would have tested an army. But mere mountains, even storm-bound mountains, could not stop Napoleon in his pride. Down from the saddle he clambered time after time, waist-deep in snow, leading his columns as much as driving them. An aide-de-camp wrote of the ordeal:

On Christmas Eve, all unknowing, Moore’s troops, in great high spirits despite the equally wintry conditions on their side of the Guadarramas, set out to cross the Carrion River to attack Soult in his quarters. Halfway there, Moore learned that Napoleon was making for him, and in strength. With Canning’s words ringing in his ears –‘Another army it has not to send’ – and with the knowledge of what Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga and Cornwallis’s at Yorktown had brought in their wake, he saw no alternative but to abandon the attack on Soult’s corps and run for safety. This would, however, require an even greater exertion than the French had made to force the Guadarramas, for the route that ‘
the
British army’ would have to take would be through the mountains of Galicia.

But had not Moore and his men won a victory in drawing off so many French troops from Madrid? In fact Spanish resistance there had already collapsed; and elsewhere, if there was resistance at all, it was ill-coordinated, self-serving and sporadic. Moore’s diversion had been to no avail and would earn him no laurels. Indeed, even if he could save his force Moore knew he could expect opprobrium. He was, after all, ‘a Whig general’.

And
could
he save his force? If he had been withdrawing from Salamanca, before his bold – some might say foolhardy – thrust on Valladolid, he would have been falling back on decent lines of communication into Portugal covered by strong fortresses en route, with evacuation if necessary from Lisbon. The path he had now ‘chosen’ lay due west, over arduous country he did not know at all, and it led only to the trickier ports of Corunna and Vigo.

The mood of Moore’s army at once swung from high spirits to low. No one seemed to understand that they were trying to evade the greatest peril; and when they did learn that Napoleon was coming, they could not understand why they ran without any sort of fight. But one part of the army would be very much in action from the outset. Indeed,
the retreat to Corunna stands as probably the finest service the British cavalry ever performed, for as soon as Soult learned of Moore’s movements and the approach of his emperor he loosed his own vastly superior numbers of cavalry west to harry his would-be attackers. So superior were they, indeed, that they ought to have been able to overwhelm Moore’s cavalry rearguard and in no time turn retreat into rout. But Paget’s five regiments of hussars, tightly handled by their commander with what would later be recognized as ‘cavalry genius’, went at their work with a relish and skill that utterly unnerved their opponents. Paget and his 2,000 sabres bought vital time for the infantry to get across the swollen rivers of northern Castile and into the relative safety of the Cantabrian Mountains, and had they not been able to do so the game would have been up for Moore by New Year’s Day.

But it was still 200 miles to Corunna. It was deep winter, there was no supply system in place, and the terrain was as inhospitable as the local people through whose villages, few and far between, the army now trudged, hampered all the while by stragglers from the disintegrating Spanish army of Galicia, and harried by Soult’s cavalry. With every mile too the grumbling got worse – not so much at the conditions (for could not a redcoat take it?) as at the thought of running without a fight. Some regiments maintained their discipline; others did not. Legitimate foraging by starving troops turned into murderous pillaging. Wine and brandy reduced whole regiments to supine rabbles. At one point Moore halted the retreat, put up the gallows and made a few examples of the worst offenders, but even this did little to check the leaching of discipline and morale. If only they could stand and fight, the men complained – as did many of their officers, some of them generals. But Moore, outraged and wholly astonished at the rapid collapse of so large a part of his army, insisted he would fight only at a time of his free choosing. The retreat continued.

Finally, after three weeks of despondent marching, with stragglers and camp-followers being cut down every mile of the way by Soult’s harriers, the army reached Corunna. Here the Royal Navy, as many a time past and in the future, was waiting to take them off. And as if they had reached some sort of Promised Land, when the regiments staggered down to the coastal plain the sun came out at last. With the mountain snow behind them, the plain lush in its midwinter greenery and the orange trees full with fruit, spirits started to lift of their own
accord. But they positively soared at the news that now Sir John Moore would fight. When the order went out to take post, regiments which had barely passed muster during the march took up their arms as if on parade in Hyde Park. And when the enemy did appear, Moore’s depleted, sickness-ridden, ragged, half-starved army fought as well as any since Marlborough’s time, beating off the French so determinedly that, with the help of the Spanish garrison to cover their embarkation, the whole force was got aboard the ships and away to England in just four days – and without a single Frenchman getting into the town to shoot them off.

Corunna was a true ‘set-piece’ defensive battle, one of the few to that date in the army’s history. It played well to the strengths of the disciplined volleying that the regiments had been perfecting over the years, to the defiant character of the men under arms, and to the sangfroid of British officers once brought to battle in front of their men. But the departing army left much behind: guns, baggage, horses – slaughtered horses, not a pretty sight, and an even uglier job. And they left behind their commander, for at his hour of victory Moore, like Wolfe and Nelson, fell to a bullet, mortally wounded. But unlike Nelson’s, Moore’s body was not brought home: he was buried in the field, in the early morning of 17 January, wrapped in his cloak and blanket, and with little ceremony – though with much reverence. Eight years later the Irish parson Charles Wolfe wrote ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’, beginning, in the beat of the slow funeral march:

The lines reflect the sense of loss which the regiments felt, for although the retreat had been infamous, and they had cursed their general in their incomprehension, the final battle – and the escape of ‘
the
British army’ to fight another day – had restored their self-respect, and with it the respect and affection even for their commander-in-chief. To some extent the same would be true after Dunkirk nearly a century and a half later, although it would take longer for the army to understand Lord Gort’s achievement there than it did to grasp Moore’s at Corunna.