The peninsular war, p.49
The Peninsular War, page 49
In March 1811, however, such a prospect would have been hard to envisage. In Cádiz, true, there had been fresh trouble in that, beguiled by serviles eager to engineer British discontent with the Regency, Henry Wellesley had been tricked into putting forward a plan much favoured by both himself and his eldest brother, the marquess, whereby Wellington would be given the command of the Spanish army and British officers posts in its ranks, in exchange for which Britain would grant the enormous loan which the Spaniards had for some time since seen as the only way out of their penury. In political and financial terms alike, this was utterly impractical – gaditano opinion was hostile, whilst Lord Wellesley’s enthusiasm failed to win over his Cabinet colleagues. Only slightly less maladroit, meanwhile, was a follow-up suggestion that the provinces bordering on Portugal should be placed under British authority, this idea, too, being rejected out of hand. However, with the French still ensconced in Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, the problems which the measures were designed to combat – essentially, a repetition of the troubles of the Talavera campaign – remained wholly academic.
With no political considerations to get in the way, operations began immediately, the first blow being struck in Extremadura, where we left Beresford marching to the relief of Badajoz with 18,000 men. A French force that had captured the minor strongpoints of Alburquerque and Campo Mayor having been chased off, the field marshal crossed the swollen River Guadiana at Juromenha some twenty miles downstream. Badajoz could not be attacked immediately for want of a siege train, but Olivenza was retaken and the French field forces that had remained in the region forced to withdraw across the Sierra Morena. Eventually, however, all was ready. Very considerable numbers of Spanish forces having come up to join Beresford, there were plenty of troops, whilst the want of siege guns had been remedied by sending up twenty-three heavy cannon from Elvas.*
There was much optimism in the Allied camp: ‘We looked forward with eager hope’, wrote Sherer, ‘to … a triumphant march over the Sierra Morena … The towers of fair Seville … seemed to ride before us, and in imagination we were already wandering … on the banks of the far-famed Guadalquivir.’1 But very soon things were going wrong. When the heavy cannon finally arrived, most were found to be very old (four, indeed, dated from the first half of the seventeenth century). Varying enormously in calibre, they had also proved difficult to supply with proper ammunition, and, this, together with their casting defects and lack of modern sights and elevating gear, suggested that their fire would be distinctly inaccurate. Meanwhile, the walls of Badajoz had been thoroughly repaired, matters being made still worse by the fact that Beresford and Wellington settled on a faulty plan of operations. Whereas the best chance of success was to concentrate on the southern walls – the section of the defences which had been breached by Soult – it was decided to mount no more than a secondary assault in this sector, most of the attackers’ resources rather being deployed against the detached fort of San Cristóbal. Perched on its lofty bluff across the river, this fort was crucial, for such was its command of the town that the latter could not be held without it. On the other hand, however, it was also immensely strong and built on stony ground that was hard to work.
When operations began on 8 May, progress was very slow: the attackers were hampered by heavy rain; the French guns outmatched those of the besiegers at every point; two-thirds of Beresford’s limited number of engineer officers were killed or wounded in the trenches; and the governor, Armand Philippon, was a most determined opponent. Nor, it seems, did Beresford help. According to Edward Pakenham, ‘Indecision has been his bane, and want of strength in command his misfortune. He has the cards to play that ought to have made him a peer of the realm, but still continues Sir William … and I fear … posterity will have no … ground to defend him on.’2 The result was much dithering. To quote one of the British commander’s engineers, ‘The investment having been completed on the morning of the eighth … Marshal Beresford was pressed to allow us to begin … our principal attack on the next night … but it was not until the … twelfth that [he] finally consented to our beginning.’3 As a result morale plummeted in the Allied camp: ‘Little has been done … and we are all in a state of complete despondency at having witnessed so much bloodshed in vain; the blame rests somewhere, and our brigade have … been the victims of some shameful mismanagement.’4 Time, meanwhile, was exactly what the attackers did not have, for Soult had long since resolved to march to the relief of Badajoz. At the head of 25,000 troops on 12 May he crossed the Sierra Morena, whereupon the largely Spanish covering forces that had been watching the passes hastily fell back to the rendezvous point that had previously been agreed at the village of La Albuera. Knowing that he could count on the Spaniards, whose behaviour throughout had been impeccable, Beresford resolved to fight and by 15 May some 35,000 Allied troops were blocking Soult’s way.
Outnumbering Soult by almost three to two, Beresford’s army was drawn up in a strong position along the crest of a line of low hills. In the centre of the Allied position – of which the Anglo-Portuguese occupied the left and centre and the Spaniards the right – the closely packed houses of La Albuera provided a natural defensive redoubt, whilst the ridge provided plenty of shelter for the defenders. Soult, however, was no mean general, and, reconnoitring his own position, which was thickly covered with olive and ilex trees, he perceived that he was well placed to outflank the Allied right without Beresford realising what was happening. Accordingly, a little while after what appeared to be a strong French thrust opened against Albuera itself, a massive column debouched from the woods facing the troops of Blake and Castaños. Swinging beyond the Spaniards’ flank, these forces – the infantry divisions of Girard and Gazan and a brigade of cavalry – crossed the stream and began to ascend the heights on the near side with the obvious intention of rolling up Spaniards and Anglo-Portuguese alike.
In the face of this brilliant piece of grand tactics, Beresford and Blake proved slow to react (Castaños had surrendered the command of the two brigades that were all that he had contributed to the Allied array to the latter*). Thus, both seem to have remained convinced that a huge French force was still hidden in the woods to their front, and that Soult’s outflanking move was little more than a dramatic feint. Beyond sending over a cavalry brigade, Beresford therefore initially left his Spanish allies to deal with the threat, and even sent troops to reinforce Albuera. As for Blake, meanwhile, he wheeled back only a single infantry brigade, supported though this was by the 1,000-strong brigade of Spanish cavalry that he posted to guard the end of his line.
If disaster was averted, it was therefore no fault of the Allied commanders. What saved them was, first, the fact that the French strike force had to deploy from column of march into a formation more suited for field action, and necessarily took much time in doing so. No frontal attack of the sort that Beresford and Blake feared being forthcoming – on the contrary, some of the troops who had initially threatened the Allied centre could now be seen marching to their left – it finally dawned on them that they had been outwitted. Desperate to remedy matters, the British commander immediately ordered the Second Division of William Stewart and the Fourth Division of Lowry Cole to follow the cavalry he had already sent to support Blake, leaving his centre and left to be held by no more than an independent King’s-German-Legion brigade that had been placed in Albuera itself, the Portuguese division of General Hamilton, and a brigade that had been improvised from a few Portuguese regulars that had remained in the Alentejo during the blockade of Lisbon. Galloping over to the right flank, meanwhile, Beresford found Blake frantically trying to get more of his men into line, but by then it was too late: commanded by José de Zayas, four Spanish infantry battalions and a single battery were facing the onslaught of two entire divisions.
Coming on one behind the other, with the first in ordre mixte – a formation in which column was mixed with line in an attempt to combine impetus with firepower – and the second in a dense mass of battalion columns, and supported by three batteries of artillery, the French ought in theory to have made short work of the Spaniards. However, we now come to the second factor that saved the Allies from disaster. Thus, Blake’s troops (those of Castaños were at this point still in reserve) were the best in the entire Spanish army. The two divisions brought up from Cádiz – in origin the troops of Alburquerque – had remained intact since the middle of 1809 and had, with the exception of the brief Barrosa campaign, spent the whole of the past year in training on the Isla de León. As for Ballesteros’ men, they had been intact for even longer, whilst a year of marching and counter-marching in western Andalucía had turned them into hardened veterans. At all events, positioned on a small rise, the four Spanish battalions stood firm and opened fire on the French, who responded not by rushing in with the bayonet – a tactic that might well have succeeded – but by slowing their advance and firing back.
Even as the bloody duel that resulted began, help was starting to arrive. On either side of and behind the defenders, many more Spanish battalions were filing into position, whilst some way to the right rear the first brigade of Stewart’s division had made its appearance. On the right, meanwhile, the Spanish cavalry of Loy had been joined by two regiments of British heavy dragoons. Beresford had been planning a great counter-attack involving both Stewart’s division and the increasing numbers of cavalry that were reaching the right flank (not far behind the British heavy dragoons was the brigade of cavalry belonging to the Fifth Army commanded by Penne Villemur). However, hot-headed and ineffectual, Stewart ruined this scheme by going straight in without waiting for the rest of his men. Speed was of the essence, true – what would have happened had Zayas’ men collapsed before the counter-attack was ready? – but what Stewart cannot be excused for is the order in which he made his attack. Despite the fact that Girard and Gazan’s flank was protected by cavalry, the troops were sent in in line. Stewart may have expected the Allied cavalry to protect his advance, but even so this was an extremely dangerous manoeuvre. Wheeling to their left so as to advance against the French infantry, the brigade concerned, which belonged to John Colborne, necessarily had completely to expose its right flank, whilst matters were further complicated by the onset of a sudden thunderstorm. With their own cavalry apparently blinded by the deluge, Colborne’s men therefore suddenly found themselves attacked by a brigade of enemy horsemen. Caught in the open, three-quarters of them were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, whilst two squadrons of British heavy dragoons that attempted to effect a rescue were themselves charged in the flank by a unit that had been kept in reserve for just such a purpose and they were driven off in disorder. As for the cavalry, they were merciless:
Part of the victorious French cavalry were Polish lancers. From the conduct of this regiment … I believe many of them to have been intoxicated, as they rode over the wounded, barbarously darting their lances into them … I was an instance of their inhumanity: after having been most severely wounded in the head, and plundered of everything that I had about me, I was being led as a prisoner between two French … soldiers when one of these lancers rode up, and deliberately cut me down. Not satisfied with this brutality, the wretch tried by every means in his power to make his horse trample on me.6
With exultant cavalrymen and desperate fugitives streaming past their rear ranks and many men felled by a volley fired at the enemy horsemen by the newly arrived brigade of General Hoghton, the Spaniards still did not break, whilst their fire had done so much damage to their French assailants that the latter broke off their assault and tried to bring forward their second division (that of Gazan). This, however, led to chaos: with the two divisions much too close together to allow them freedom of movement, they merged into a single confused mass. With all forward movement impossible, Soult should either have disengaged, or flung in the two infantry brigades that he had in reserve, along with his powerful cavalry, in a last-ditch attempt to tip the balance. Such a stratagem might yet have succeeded, but, whilst Soult was in his element when it came to formulating battle plans, he was less effective when it came actually to implementing them, let alone to reacting to changing conditions on the battlefield. Taken completely by surprise, he therefore failed to issue the fresh orders that were needed, condemning his men to a most ill-deserved defeat.
For the Allies, meanwhile, things were beginning to look much better. Stewart’s remaining two brigades – those of Hoghton and Abercrombie – had now been formed in line behind Blake’s troops, and the latter now filed to the rear, Sherer remembering how ‘a very noble-looking young Spanish officer rode up to me and begged me … to explain to the English that his countrymen were ordered to retire [and] were not flying’.7 With Hoghton’s men facing the mass of Frenchmen on the ridge and Abercrombie’s prolonging the line downhill to the left, what remained of Stewart’s division now advanced. Disordered though they might have been, the French infantry were not cowards, whilst they could scarcely have run even had they wanted to, and there therefore followed a terrible firefight which earned one of the regiments involved – the Fifty-Seventh Foot – its long-standing nickname of ‘The Die-Hards’. Fighting in Abercrombie’s brigade, Sherer was an eyewitness:
This murderous contest of musketry lasted long. We were the whole time progressively advancing upon the enemy … The slaughter was now … dreadful: every shot told … To describe … this wild scene with fidelity would be impossible. At intervals a shriek or a groan told that men were falling around me, but it was not always that the tumult … suffered me to catch these sounds. A constant feeling [i.e.: closing in] to the centre … more truly bespoke the havoc of death.8
Faced only by French skirmishers, Abercrombie’s three battalions might have attacked the French in flank, but for reasons which are not entirely clear they did not do so. Orders are supposed to have been sent to them to this effect, but it is possible that they never arrived, whilst their commander may also have been worried at the possibility of an attack on his rear by the French troops around La Albuera. Once having ordered them up, meanwhile, Beresford seems simply to have forgotten them. Much shaken by the charge of the French cavalry (in which he and his staff had actually been caught up, the British general supposedly having dispatched one of the enemy horsemen with his bare hands) and all too well aware of the large numbers of horsemen further along the ridge and in the shallow valley on its northern side, he was now engaged in the fruitless task of bringing up the infantry brigade of Carlos de España belonging to the Fifth Army to guard Hoghton’s right (fruitless because the three battalions of which it was composed had all been at the battle of the Gebora, and in consequence refused to move). Also to hand was Cole’s Fourth Division and three brigades of cavalry, all of which were currently echeloned to the right, but these troops Beresford left alone for fear of incurring another disaster along the lines of that which had befallen Colborne, instead fixing on the astonishing plan of calling up more troops from his left and centre.
With men falling thick and fast, this can only be described as quite crazy, for the troops concerned could not have arrived for some time. Luckily for Beresford, however, an exasperated staff officer rode over to Cole and urged him to take the offensive. Having first obtained a promise of cavalry support and arrayed itself in a formation in which it would be safe from enemy horsemen, the Fourth Division therefore advanced across the valley. Flayed by French artillery fire, it was immediately charged by four regiments of dragoons, only for the Portuguese brigade facing them to perform the extraordinary feat of repulsing them without forming square. On the ridge, meanwhile, Soult had ordered forward the strong brigade of General Werlé to protect the left flank of Girard and Gazan, and, as Cole’s troops mounted the slope, this opened fire with considerable effect. Twice as strong as their assailants though they were, however, Werlé’s men had come forward in three closed columns of three battalions each, and they were therefore unable either to bring many muskets to bear or to deploy with any ease, and, after a fierce fight, they broke and fled. At about the same time, Abercrombie had finally led his troops up on to the summit of the ridge from the other side. Unable to take any more, Girard and Gazan’s divisions disintegrated in their turn, and within minutes the whole of the French left wing was in retreat. Fighting went on for a little while longer around La Albuera itself, but, with the Allies too exhausted to pursue, to all intents and purposes the battle was over.
Thus ended a terrible day. Not counting several hundreds of prisoners, the Allied armies had lost 5,380 men dead or wounded. As for Soult’s losses, they were still worse, the marshal having lost at least a quarter and possibly a third of his 24,000 men. As Long wrote, ‘I never … saw such a scene of carnage … The field of battle was a slaughter house.’9 Despite the heroism of many of his soldiers, Beresford had little cause to glory in his victory. Completely misjudging the situation at the start of the battle, he had then lost confidence in himself to such an extent that he became incapable of fighting it in an effective fashion. Badly served by some of his subordinates though he may have been, the fact is that he was simply not suited to the role of a battlefield commander, having been given the command of the southern front only because the solid and reliable Rowland Hill – Wellington’s usual choice when it came to appointing an independent commander for part of his army – had fallen sick. Surrounded by scenes of the utmost horror, meanwhile, Beresford seems to have experienced some sort of nervous collapse: letters written by him after the battle suggest a man gripped by panic and shock, whilst his official dispatch had to be substantially ‘written up’ by Wellington before he could send it on to London.
