Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (57 page)

¹
Harris,
120-1.
"Just before we sat down to dinner Sir John Moore asked him if there was anything he wished, upon which Lcfebvre cast a glance at his side (his sword having been taken from him when made prisoner), and then looked at Sir John Moore, who, comprehending what he meant, with all the high feeling of a soldier and the grace of a perfect gentleman, unbuckled his own sword and presented it to his prisoner. . . . The whole transaction was perfect, the kindness of expression and the soldier-like sympathy which was apparent in the British general's countenance were perfectly beautiful; but was there any.act of his during his life that was not perfect?" George Napier,
54-5.
See also Forte
scue, VI,
354;
Lynedoch,
293;
Schaumann,
94-7;
Harris,
120-1;
Blakeney,
43-4;
Seaton,
103-4;
George Napier,
53;
Boothby,
201;
Leith Hay, I,
102-3;
Major Ludlow Beamish,
History
of
t/ie King's German Legion
(1832),
I,
165-6;
journal of a Soldier,
56-7.

But for the moment the question was whether the British could escape Napoleon's converging jaws. Already the threat to their flanks was developing fast. On December 29th, the day Paget's rearguard evacuated Benavente, Soult's cavalry, fanning out to the north, overwhelmed La Romana's disintegrating army at Mansilla. By leaving the bridges over the Esla undestroyed the Spaniards opened the road through Leon and beyond. Meanwhile it was discovered from the captured Chasseurs that other forces were seeking to reach the great mountain defile at Villafranca. As soon, therefore, as he reached Astorga on the 30th, Moore sent officers ahead to watch any attempt either to cut the Corunna road from the direction of Leon or to use the track from Benavente to Orense to work round his southern flank.
¹
However bad such cross-country roads might be, he could not forget how often he had been misled about Iberian topography. Nor could he rely on the Spaniards defending their native passes; La Romana, ignoring every entreaty and his own promise, had failed to take his starving army over the Cantabrian range into the Asturias, and was now flying across the British line of retreat towards Orense. For these reasons Moore on New Year's Eve dispatched Major-General Craufurd's Light Brigade towards Vigo to guard the valley of the Minho and his southern flank.

The threat of hunger kept pace with that of encirclement. Owing to the inadequacy of Baird's commissariat only two days' provisions were found at Astorga, while the flight of the Spanish bullock-drivers and their carts made it impossible to bring up supplies from the next magazine at Villafranca. The only course was to cover the fifty miles to that place before the army starved. Shortage of rations further undermined discipline; the natural tendency of the frightened inhabitants to hide what little food they possessed led to illicit house-to-house searches, and these in their turn to orgies in the cellars. The bad characters, who according to one witness numbered from fifty to a hundred in every battalion, came into their own. The national weakness for drink—always accentuated in an army recruited at the ale-house door—found a terrible vent, and hundreds of uncontrollable and armed men roved the streets in delirium. To add to the horror La Romana's troops poured into the town while the British were still evacuating it—a starving, shivering, stinking, typhus-ridden rabble who fell on the homes and chattels of their countrymen like a wolf-pack. Their example was eagerly followed by their allies.

The renewed retreat completed the army's demoralisation. In many units the sullen men became openly mutinous. The road into

¹
Boothby,
202
-3,
212;
Schaumann,
98-9,118;
Fortescue, VI,
357.

the mountains was knee-deep in snow and ice that became a river of slush by day and froze again at night. Boots, already in tatters, were wrenched off bleeding feet; horses could not stand and died in the snow or slid over frozen precipices. With every gust of wind clouds of snow blew in the men's faces. It was bitterly cold: there was no fuel, no shelter and nothing to drink but snow. "We suffered," wrote a soldier of the 71st, "misery without a glimpse of comfort." All the time La Romana's pitiful scarecrows kept getting in the way, swarming with famished howls through the battered doors of every wayside farm or hut.
¹

At the top of the mountain a great pass ran through a barren waste of snow. All the way through it, for eight or nine miles, the men trudged in angry silence broken only by the groans of the dying by the wayside or the occasional report of a pistol fired at the head of a fallen horse. Afterwards at the village of Bembibre hundreds of troops left the ranks and, burning and plundering, fought their way into the wine vaults. Here, as the old year went out, horrible scenes were enacted. "Bembibre," wrote an officer, "exhibited all the appearance of a place lately stormed and pillaged. Every door and window was broken, every lock and fastening forced. Rivers of wine ran through the houses and into the streets, where soldiers, women, children, runaway Spaniards and muleteers lay in fantastic groups with wine oozing from their lips and nostrils."
²

Here too on the first day of the New Year came the rearguard, sounding their bugles, hammering on the doors and rousing the insensible men in the cellars and streets with blows from their rifles. Behind them—though still at a respectful distance—came the French cavalry. As the rumour of their approach ran through the plundered town the streets filled with revellers whom all the efforts of their comrades had failed to rouse, reeling, staggering and crying out for mercy. They received none from the French dragoons who, eager to avenge Benavente, slashed at drunkards, cripples, women and infants in arms. Yet even in this pit of shame the stubborn English spirit flickered; during the night and following day with a wonderful persistence many stragglers regained the retreating columns— tattered soldiers with bloodshot eyes and festering wounds and women who had been raped in barns but had fled from their violators to rejoin the colours.
³

It was this spirit, almost as much as the valour of the Reserve

¹
Journal of a Soldier,
58-9;
Schaumann,
107-11;
Moore, II,
378-9.

²
Blakeney,
49-50.

³
Blakeney,
50-1;
Journal
of
a Soldier,
61;
Harris,
96;
History
of
the Rifle Brigade,
36, 104;
Lynedoch,
293;
Fortescue, VI,
364;
Moore, II,
284, 379;
'Schaumann,
128.

and Light Brigade, that robbed Napoleon of his triumph. "The English are running away as fast as they can," he wrote from Benavente; "they have abandoned the Spaniards in a shameful and cowardly manner. Have all this shown up in the newspapers. Have caricatures made and songs and popular ditties written. Have them translated into German and Italian and circulated in Italy and Germany." For, as his prey eluded him, the Emperor's indignation rose. He hated the British from the bottom of his soul. The man who had plundered half the cities of Europe felt genuine horror at the ill-disciplined rapscallions who had pillaged the wine shops of Benavente. He particularly disliked their barbaric destruction of bridges—one of the principal channels of civilisation.

On New Year's Day, 1809, while pressing forward from Benavente to Astorga to join Soult, Napoleon learnt that Moore had reached the mountains and that his last hope of forcing a battle on the open plain had passed. He at once resolved to leave Spain. As he approached Astorga a courier galloped up with dispatches from Paris. He dismounted, read them in the presence of his troops and paced angrily up and down. Later it became known that momentous tidings had arrived: that Austria was arming for war, that there had been a revolution—incited by British agents—in Turkey, that traitors had been plotting in Paris. That night the Emperor handed over command of the army to Soult, and ordered the immediate return of the Imperial Guard to Vallodollid. The English were beyond his reach. So for that winter were Portugal and southern Spain.

From this time, though 50,000 Frenchmen with more than fifty guns were still at their heels, the chief threat to the British came not from the enemy but from the weather and their own indiscipline. At Villafranca—a mountain town fifty miles from Astorga and a hundred from Corunna—where the main body of the retreating army arrived on New Year's Day, the troops refused to await the official distribution of rations and sacked the magazines while the commissaries stood by helpless. "Every soldier took what he liked, everything was plundered, carried away and trampled under foot; the casks of wine were broken open so that half their contents were spilt over the floor, and the general fury and unruliness of these hordes of men was such that those officers who attempted to maintain order had to make haste to fight their way out of the crowds, if only to save their lives."
¹
Fourteen days' store of biscuits, salt meat and rum vanished in a few hours, and with them all hope of a stand at Villafranca. Later houses were beaten up in search of drink, and the disgraceful scenes of Bembibre re-enacted. Almost every sign of

¹
Schaumann,

a disciplined fighting force disappeared. The artillerymen broke up their ammunition waggons for fuel and threw their contents into the river.

The rot continued until the 2nd when the Commander-in-Chief, who had been marching with the rearguard, arrived to restore order. All stragglers were at once arrested and locked up, and the emaciated, lacerated survivors of the French cavalry charge at Bembibre were paraded round the town as a warning. A man taken in the act of plundering a magazine was shot in the market place; another hanged for breaking into a house, while the troops were made to file past the dangling corpse. Later the army, with some semblance of discipline, marched out towards Lugo, and Moore rejoined the rearguard holding the bridge over the Cua at Cacabelos five miles to the east.

Here also, since the drunken orgy at Bembibre, there had been some loss of discipline. Sir John, whose faith in his army had been almost broken, ordered the division to parade in close columns and addressed it in forcible terms. Sooner than survive such conduct, he announced, he trusted that the first cannon-ball fired by the enemy would remove him from the scene of his disgrace. " And you, 28th" —turning on a famous regiment that had fought by his side in Egypt—"are not what you used to be. If you were, no earthly temptation could tempt one of you away from your colours for an instant." Next morning, some plundering having occurred in the village during the night, Major-General Paget had the culprits paraded in a hollow square and flogged. While the last offenders, who had been sentenced to be hanged, were waiting their turn under the triangles, the French were reported approaching, whereupon the thirty-three-year-old general—most impressive of disciplinarians
¹
— turned on his division with, "My God! is it not lamentable that, instead of preparing the troops confided to my command to receive the enemies of their country, I am preparing to hang two robbers ?" He then paused. " If I spare the lives of these two men, will you promise to reform ?" There was a great shout and the prisoners were taken down.

Immediately afterwards, as if the affair had been staged, the enemy appeared on the skyline in action with the piquets. Battle was immediately joined. It was the tonic the men required. In the fighting the 52nd, the Light Company of the 28th—the "Old Slashers"—and a battalion of the 95th that had not accompanied the

¹
When that
officer gave an order there was something so peculiar in his glance, so impressive in his tone of voice and so decisive in his manner that no one held commune, even with himself, as to its propriety."—Blakeney,
106.

other half of the regiment to Vigo covered themselves with glory. The French cavalry were repelled and their leader, General Colbert, killed. "We popped them off whenever they showed their ugly faces," said a rifleman, "like mice in the sun!"

After that there was no further difficulty with the Rearguard. That night, after Villafranca had been evacuated, the men marched eighteen miles to Herrerias without losing a straggler. The retreat now bore two faces, one of shame and suffering, the other of glory: the demoralised misery of the main body trudging over the frozen hills, and the splendour of the fighting division that covered its retreat. During the next fifty miles to Lugo the agony of the army surpassed anything yet encountered. Drenched with rain, famished with cold and hunger, ignorant when their torture was to cease, thousands of redcoats toiled up the agonising slope of Monte del Cabiero, leaving behind a trail of dying men, women, horses and mules. Above the howling of the wind nothing could be heard but groans and curses. In the terrible defile beyond Villafranca, where the road ran between enormous precipices round the bends of the raging Valcarso, the men, worn out by their excesses, dropped in shoals. The worst was endured on the high ground near Los Royales and Constantino. On that desolate, wintry height many, through the failure of the commissariat, died of starvation clasped in one another's arms in the snow. " The misery of the whole thing was appalling," wrote Schaumann, "huge mountains, intense cold, no houses, no shelter or cover of any kind, no inhabitants, no bread. The howling wind, as it whistled past the ledges of rock and through the bare trees, sounded to the ear like the groaning of the damned." At one point on that, march of death a dying woman gave birth in an overturned bullock cart; an officer of Moore's Staff, finding the living infant whimpering at her frozen breasts, wrapped it in his cloak and carried it away with him. Then "the dark, almost polar night fell," and concealed such sights from men's eyes."
¹