Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (65 page)

Shortly after
daybreak the smoke of a gun curling in the air and the report of a single cannon gave the signal for the attack. Immediately a tremendous cannonade broke from twenty-four pieces of artillery opposite the British left. When the shot tore gaps in the ranks, Wellesley made the six battalions holding the Cerro de Medellin withdraw beyond the brow of the hill and lie down with their arms in their hands. At the same time the bugles sounded to call in the skirmishers before they became submerged by the advancing French; true to their training, however, they fell back slowly with the regularity of a field-day so that General Hill—startled for once out of his habitual sobriety of speech—called out, "Damn their filing, let them come in anyhow!" As the earth shook with the thunder of guns and the shot whizzed and whistled overhead, the Commander-in-Chief stood by the regimental colours wondering if his men could take it.
²

He need have had no fears. As the French neared the summit with loud shouts Hill's battalions rose as one man, doubled forward in perfect formation and, taking the time from their officers, poured volley after volley into the surprised columns. Then Sir Arthur called to them to charge, and, as the 29th and 48th rushed forward,
"a
wall of stout hearts and bristling steel," the triumphant cries of "
Vive L'Empereur!
"' changed to
"Sauve qui peu
t.'
The victors of Austerlitz had again under-estimated the discipline and fire-power of the British line. For half an hour the struggle swayed down the steep eastern slope, the British firing, running and cheering till the last Frenchman had been driven across the Portina brook, leaving the hillside covered with dead and dying. By eight o'clock in the morning it was all over.

By now the sun was high in the sky and the day was growing hot. The gunfire died away, and burial parties from both sides and men filling their canteens mingled, fraternising, in the stagnant pools of the Portina brook. Having proved their manhood, the young British soldiers felt a curious elation, and their hearts warmed towards the famous warriors they had repelled. Many shook hands and conversed by signs: a lieutenant of the Worcesters handed a

¹
Schaumann,
184;
Munster,
505;
Leslie,
147;
Oman, II,
521.

²
Leith Hay, I,
151-2;
Leslie,
147-8;
Schaumann,
185;
Oman, II,
523.

French officer two crosses of the Legion of Honour which he had raken from bodies on the hillside. Among the rocks of the Sierra de Segurilla half a mile to the north desultory sharpshooting broke out between French
tirailleurs
and some Spaniards of Bassecourt's reserve division which Wellesley, fearful of an infiltration round his left, had hastily borrowed from Cuesta. But elsewhere almost complete peace had fallen on the battlefield.

Meanwhile the French generals were in acrimonious consultation on the summit of the Cerro de Cascajal facing the scene of the late encounter. Jourdan, who had opposed the attack from the start, could see no point in further fighting. A few weeks before, orders had come from Napoleon to withdraw Ney's and Mortier's corps from the Galician and Asturian mountains and concentrate them under Soult for a grand new offensive against Portugal with the aim of " beating, hunting down and casting the British army into the sea." The Emperor, writing from the Danube, had been unable to foresee that when his orders arrived the British would themselves be marching on Madrid, but his concentration of
50,000
men in Salamanca province offered a splendid opportunity of striking at Wellesley's rear. Accordingly on July
22nd
instructions had been sent to Soult to march with al
l speed through the pass of Ban
os on Plasencia. There seemed no point in wasting good troops in fruitless frontal attacks when Wellesley's ultimate encirclement and destruction were certain. But Victor—like all the Revolutionary leaders a passionate egotist—wanted all the triumph for himself and was in no mood to wait for his fellow Marshals. The British, he insisted, were still outnumbered by two to one, and the hour for annihilating the Emperor's principal enemy had arrived. With threats to report any cowardice to Napoleon, he insisted that the attack should be renewed.

Early in the afternoon a general resumption of the bombardment showed that he had carried his point. In the town of Talavera a few faint-hearted Spaniards, who did not know the courage and endurance of the English, dashed headlong through the streets and out to the west along the Oropesa road.
¹
There twenty miles away in insufferable heat the three finest regiments in the British Line—the
95th, 52nd
and
43rd,
whom Moore had trained at Shorncliffe— were marching under " Black Bob" Craufurd as even they had never marched before, pressing forward at their light infantryman's quick pace through the stifling dust. Every man carried, besides rifle and ramrod, eighty rounds of ball and a pack weighing at least forty pounds. Yet though few had eaten anything that day but a crust

¹
Schaumann,
189.

of mouldy bread, and the heat was so great that more than one rifleman fell dead as he marched, not a man voluntarily left the column. For far ahead the men could hear the rumble of the guns, and, from the lips of cowards flowing past them into the west the tale of a British army fighting against overwhelming odds.
¹

This time the attack was general and directed against almost the entire British line. It was preceded by a short but intensive bombardment by
the eighty guns of the French 1
st and 4th corps which overwhelmed, though they did not silence, the thirty British and six Spanish guns opposed to them. On the British right, close to the junction of the allied armies, Major-General Campbell's 4th Division —stoutly supported by some neighbouring Spanish cavalry—not only repelled the assaults of General Leval's Dutch and German troops but in the course of a counter-attack captured seventeen guns. The feature of the fighting was the steadiness with which Campbell controlled his men and prevented them from going too far in their success.

In the open ground farthe
r north Lieutenant-General Sher
brooke's ist Division of Guards and Hanoverians was less skilfully handled. Here, following a more prolonged bombardment, two strong divisions led by Generals Sebastiani and Lapisse moved forward at about three o'clock a
gainst the British centre. Sher
brooke's men, waiting in line, held their fire till the leading files of the enemy columns were within fifty yards and then followed up a devastating volley with a bayonet charge. The French were flung back in confusion, but the Guards and Germans, losing cohesion in their advance, pursued them beyond the Portina brook and were shattered in their turn by the advancing waves of the enemy's reserves. In the ensuing rout the Hanoverians lost their general and half their strength and the Guards 611 out of 2000 men. Within twenty minutes a great gap had been torn open in the weakest part of the line, and 15,000 French infantry were driving through it in triumph.

At this moment the battle was saved by Major-General Fraser Mackenzie's Reserve Brigade. Three regiments—the 24th, 31st and 45th Foot—numbering little more than 2000 held up forces seven times as numerous while the Guards and Germans re-formed behind them. Warwicks, Huntingdons and Nottinghamshires—many still wearing the accoutrements of the militia regiments from which they had been hastily drafted a few months before—fought with the

¹
Le
ith Hay, I,
137;
Simmons,
15-16, 32;
Costello,
19-20;
Smith, I,
18-19;
Leach,
Rough Sketches,
81;
Leslie,
155-6;
George Napier,
108-9.

steadiness of veterans. Mackenzie and a third of his men fell, but the line held. An unexpected charge by the 14th Light Dragoons, led by Major-General Stapleton Cotton, who had last ridden over the French as a boy of sixteen at Le Cateau fifteen years before, halted a battalion at a decisive moment. Meanwhile Wellesley, keeping a firm grip on the battle from the Cerro de Medellin, brought down the 48th Foot from the north and launched it against the enemy's right flank. As the steady volleys of the Northamptons raked the crowded columns the fiery
elan
of the French began to ebb. Lapisse fell at the head of his men, and the Guards and Germans returned cheering to the fight. The British centre was saved.
¹

Scarcely had the great shout of triumph from the tired, smoke-grimed victors died away when a new scene opened to the north of the Cerro de Medellin. Here, though Victor inexplicably failed to renew his frontal attack on the hill—so enabling Wellesley to reinforce his centre at the crucial moment—the divisions of Ruffin and Villatte, following the winding course of the Portina brook, had pressed up the ravine between the battle-scarred slopes and the rocky Sierra de Segurilla. Since this new movement threatened to envelop the British left, the Commander-in-Chief, who had resumed his commanding station on the Cerro de Medellin, gave orders to Brigadier Anson's cavalry brigade, waiting below, to mount and clear the valley.

As the trumpeters sounded the charge and the horsemen, comprising the British 23rd Light Dragoons and the ist Hussars of the King's German Legion, broke into a gallop, a second cheer went up from the troops watching the arena from the heights above the valley. Then, as that cloud of valiant, shouting dust moved forward towards the French, there was a fatal check. A deep cleft concealed by long grass ran right across the path of the charging squadrons. The Dragoons who were leading, headed by their colonel on a grey horse, had no time to draw up; many, riding knee to knee, vanished into the gully or were carried to the rear by their frightened horses. But the survivors calmly re-formed on the far side of the ravine under Colonel Elley and Maj
or Frederick Ponsonby—Lady Bess
borough's son—and resumed the charge. Galloping right up to the French, who had hastily formed square, they swept past them and, though one out of every two troopers fell, routed a regiment of Chasseurs beyond. Meanwhile Spanish horse artillery, un-limbering just out of shot of the now unsupported French squares, began to fire into their ranks. Other British and Spanish cavalry advancing down the valley under Brigadier-General Fane and the

¹
Oman, II,
537-43;
Fortescu
e, VII,
244-51
; Minister,
231
; Leith Hay,
1,
156-8.

Duke of Albuquerque prevented the French infantry from extending, while the guns on the Cerro de Medellin joined in the massacre from above.

By this time all but 5000 of the French had been engaged. The afternoon was growing late, and, ignoring Victor's protests, King Joseph determined to call off the battle. News had reached him that Venegas was advancing from the south on the capital, and he dared not throw in his last reserves with Cuesta's army still unused on his flank. Soon afterwards the French began to fall back along the entire front, though their guns continued firing tjll nightfall. As it grew dark the parched grass on the slopes of the Cerro de Medellin caught fire, and hundreds of helpless wounded were engulfed in the flames. All night their cries continued while the moon rose dimly over the battlefield and exhausted comrades slept where they had stood.

To the inexpressible relief of the British the attack was not renewed on the 29th. Shortly after dawn drums and bugles were heard from the west and the Light Brigade, after covering forty-three miles in twenty-two hours, marched on to the charred battlefield, with the Chestnut Troop trotting in its midst. Around its path lay thousands of dead and dying, piled in stiff or still faintly stirring hillocks of soiled scarlet and blue amidst dismounted guns and shattered ammunition wagons, broken horse-trappings and blood-stained shakos. But, as the bugle-horns rang out, the survivors broke into cheers. For, though more than 5000 of their comrades—or a quarter of their strength—had fallen, they knew at last that the battle was theirs. The French, leaving behind seventeen guns and 7000 dead and wounded, were in full retreat to the east. Then, as there was no longer any need to stand to arms, the regiments marched down from the Cerro de Medellin to encamp in the olive grove at its base, bearing their tattered, shot-ridden colours with them.

While these events were taking place in the Peninsula, England had been preparing to strike across the North Sea. In the early summer bad news from the Continent had made her statesmen pause; on June
3rd
the Commander-in-Chief and the Adjutant-General, who were backed by the old King, had formally advised against any attempt on Antwerp. But a week later London learnt of Napoleon's defeat at Aspern-Essling, and the necessity for doing something to weight the scales decisively in Austria's favour became obvious. Ten years before, when a similar situation had arisen, that great and neglected soldier, Charles Stuart, h
ad vainly pleaded for an amphi
bious offensive in the Mediterranean instead of a landing on the Dutch coast, where even the most resounding success would be too remote in the existing state of communications to decide a Franco-Austrian campaign. Yet though his unworthy namesake's 15,000 troops from Sicily, landed at any point on the old Venetian or Tuscan coastlines, might have prevented Eugene from reinforcing Napoleon on the Danube—with incalculable results— England again failed to use the strategic advantage which geography and sea-power had given her. Instead, while the volatile Sir John aimlessly occupied an island off the Neapolitan coast, the Government launched its main blow against Holland. Not only was it administratively simpler to do so but the pressure of the Admiralty for preventive measures against the Scheldt shipyards—eloquently voiced by the over-plausible Sir Home Popham—had become irresistible.
¹