Flashman in the Peninsula (12 page)

There was a long silence in the carriage after that tirade because there was little I could say. The presence of the British had helped persuade Napoleon to reinforce the raw recruits he had initially sent to Spain. As soon as Bonaparte led his veteran troops into the fray the British army had been in retreat until it was evacuated at Corunna. I could have told Cuesta that even counting Corunna, of the battles we had fought with the French we had won two out of three, whereas the Spanish had suffered a long series of disastrous defeats; but that probably would not have helped the mood in that confined carriage. I was on the point of making my excuses to leave when he asked another question.

‘Why did Wellesley send you? I have already had another message from him telling me of his plan to join me to attack Victor.’

I guessed that Wellesley must have got impatient when I did not return to him quickly and had sent another messenger. ‘He sent me when we landed but suggested that I look for you at Alcantara.’ I added with a touch of pride, ‘I was there with the Lusitanian Legion when it turned back Victor’s attack.’

‘They destroyed the Alcantara Bridge,’ he said with an accusing tone. ‘Spain needs that bridge.’

‘Yes sir,’ I conceded, irritated that he was missing the bigger picture. ‘But we did turn back an attack from a French marshal, who could have swept into Portugal and attacked Wellesley’s flank or even captured Lisbon.’

‘I don’t care about Portugal or Lisbon, I care about Spain and Spain needed that bridge.’

‘Then perhaps you should have sent more than fifty cavalrymen to help defend it,’ I protested hotly.

‘Damn your impertinence,’ he snapped back. ‘You might be the grandson of a Spanish marquis but you know nothing about Spain or about this war.’ He took a breath to calm himself and then continued. ‘Only I know how to beat the French, not those chattering fools in the juntas or the self-appointed popinjays that now command the other Spanish armies. I beat the French twice in ’95 fighting in the Pyrenees and I will do it again.’ It was true, I learned later, he had beaten two French armies then, but they were poorly led revolutionary conscripts. Since then Napoleon had taken over in France with new tactics and strategies. Things were very different now, but clearly Cuesta did not realise that. I held up my hands in surrender, remembering I was supposed to be Wellesley’s liaison man with this proud fool.

‘You must understand sir that the British want to help Spain
and
Portugal.’

‘Yes. No doubt so you have some ports that you can conveniently flee from when things get tough again.’ He gave a dismissive gesture to the carriage door as he added, ‘Tell your sepoy general that I would welcome his support when I next attack Marshal Victor.’ I took my leave and wandered back to the dragoons. Having heard about the battle of Medallin I had not expected Cuesta to be a good general but I was not prepared for such deluded arrogance. I had seen Victor’s army, they were well equipped and well trained. In contrast Cuesta’s army looked like a bunch of lethargic, half-starved scarecrows.

‘Is all well sir?’ asked Chapman.

I looked around to check we were out of earshot of the other Spanish officers and gestured at the surrounding troops. ‘He seriously thinks that this rabble can beat Victor and seems to put his previous defeats down to bad luck. He is no friend of ours either,’ I added. ‘He is very resentful that we evacuated the army last year.’

‘Well, we did cut out and run,’ Doherty reasoned. ‘But we should never have got ourselves trapped in the north of the country at all. Wicked cruel place that was in winter.’

‘Yes, but...’ I started to reply, exasperated that they were not seeing my point of view, but was distracted when I saw that their breeches were all patched and worn. They were like a spare pair you might keep in a saddlebag; and then I noticed a new gold ring on Chapman’s finger. Swinging round to the staff officers under the awning I now saw that two of them were looking a lot less ragged in the breeches department than they had been before.

‘We did a trade,’ explained Chapman simply. ‘I could get a dozen pairs of breeches from the quartermaster with this ring when we get back.’ He paused as though he had surprised himself with a thought and then added, ‘Will we be coming back this way sir?’

We needed to get back to Wellesley, but on the way out of the valley I stopped a couple of times and spoke to the men dozing under the olive trees. Many had strong regional accents which made them hard to understand, but I divined that most of them were conscripts who had been forced to join the army by their towns or villages to make up a quota. They stayed with the army not out of patriotic duty but because they were peasants with no land who would be arrested if they returned home. Being in the army was marginally safer than roaming the countryside in bandit gangs that were hunted by both the Spanish and the French. When I asked about drilling and training they just shrugged. Many had sold most of their cartridges to local farmers to buy food and so with little powder left they rarely used their muskets.

I won’t bore you with a detailed account of what happened over the next two months; suffice to say that Trooper Chapman’s travelling trouser emporium flourished, as we did two more journeys with messages from Wellesley to Cuesta. The British army having beaten Soult was now heading south, but painfully slowly as Wellesley would not move until he was sure that he had supplies to feed his men. As June progressed into July the weather got warm and then hot and the road between the British and Spanish armies became well travelled.

It was on one return journey from Cuesta that we passed the Loyal Lusitanian Legion and Wilson waiting on the road for the British advance guard that could be seen coming over the horizon. Wilson explained that he had been ordered to join Wellesley’s army by the Portuguese, but he intended to engineer an independent command if he could. He was fuming that it had taken Wellesley a month to march south and he was even then still not over the Spanish border. Wilson swore that he could do far more damage to the French with his own small force. I explained about the shortages of food and medical supplies but he claimed that Cuesta had promised to meet all the British needs if Wellesley only increased the pace of the march. Having seen Cuesta’s camp it was a promise that I doubted he could fulfil and I am sure Wellesley felt the same.

As the British advance guards marched to within a few hundred yards of us, Wilson turned to the Legion and ordered them to advance so that they were the lead regiment. This was normally an honoured position because the soldiers were not breathing in the dust kicked up by all those that had marched before. Wellesley rode up with some of his staff officers and Wilson went to report to him, but I stayed close as I wanted to watch this encounter.

Wellesley watched the green jacketed troops marching away in the position of precedence for his whole army and glared at Wilson. Despite the heat of the day I swear that Wellesley’s disdainful look would have chilled champagne.

Wilson blithely ignored the hostility as he cheerily greeted his new commander. ‘Arthur, it is good to meet you at last. We have not had to wait long for your army to catch up.’ I realised he was deliberately riling Wellesley as he added, ‘I was hoping that you might grant my Legion the honour of leading the army for the rest of the day.’

Wellesley glared at the backs of the green jacketed troops that were even now disappearing around a bend in the road and turned back to coolly appraise Wilson. ‘It seems that it is an honour you have already anticipated, Sir Robert.’ He looked up at the sun which was still high in the sky as it was early afternoon. Normally the army would have marched for several hours but now Wellesley turned to his staff, ‘I think we will stop here for tonight, have the men fall out.’ One of his staff officers opened his mouth to question the decision but a glare from Wellesley froze him to silence.

Wilson just grinned, saluted and rode off after his men, winking at me as he did so. He had achieved his goal: he had nominally joined the British army but he would stay well ahead of the main column and operate as he saw fit. A few days later Wellesley decided to get rid of Wilson by sending the Legion and two Spanish regiments into Spain on what was supposed to be a foraging mission. But Wilson had far more ambitious plans that would come to light later.

Wellesley and Cuesta met for the first time on the tenth of July at Almaraz. It was not an auspicious beginning. I had been sent ahead and was waiting with Cuesta for the arrival of the British party. For all of his disdain of the British, Cuesta was determined to make a good impression. That afternoon he had a regiment equipped with the best clothes and weapons that they could find standing ready for inspection by the ‘
generale sepoy
’ as he called Wellesley. Whether Downie was acting as guide again I don’t know, but in any event Wellesley got lost and arrived later that night, five hours late. The inspection was much less impressive by torchlight, but Cuesta limped along beside him showing all the courtesy of a Spanish nobleman, which is to say he was a haughty bastard but punctilious in manners.

Marshal Victor’s army, now of twenty thousand men, was still isolated from other French forces. The allied commanders wanted to confront him before he could be supported by other marshals, so they agreed to combine their forces to attack him. The British army totalled twenty-two thousand and Cuesta had thirty-three thousand, so the combined army of fifty-five thousand was nearly triple the size of the French force. The British and Spanish armies met on the twenty-first of July at a place called Oropesa.

The British army had, thanks to Wellesley’s caution, been reasonably well supplied throughout its long journey, although some supplies promised by the Spanish had failed to materialise. You can imagine the men’s dismay when they came across the rag tag Spanish army that made up the bulk of their combined force. If anything their condition had deteriorated since I had first clapped eyes on them. Smartly dressed and well equipped British infantry men struggled to keep straight faces as they marched incredulously through the camp of the scarecrow army, saluting officers that looked little more than vagrants.

But it was not their appearance that most worried the British, it was their fighting ability. Most Spanish weapons carried visible signs of rust and the few Spanish units they saw drilling had British soldiers hooting with mirth. One company of redcoats demonstrated firing three volleys in a minute to some nearby Spanish troops who looked on in wonder at the regimented loading drills. When the British goaded the Spanish into a return demonstration of their skills, the result was pandemonium. The first volley crashed out reasonably well, apart from a handful of soldiers who were just going through the motions having apparently sold or lost all of their ammunition. Then the chaos really began with the officers and sergeants bellowing different commands at the same time. Weapons and cartridges were dropped, one man fainted and several looked as if they had never reloaded their guns before, watching the others to see how they did it. The second volley started in the first minute but was so ragged it stretched into the second and of the fifty men in the company, no fewer than six managed to fire their ramrods across the clearing.

There was debate amongst the British as to whether the Spanish would be a help or a hindrance in battle. What had seemed on paper an easy victory for the allies in reality looked as if it would be a much closer fought affair. To make matters worse, once the armies joined there was also increasing tension over supplies. The Spanish had promised large amounts of provisions but precious little seemed to be coming through. Doubtless some Spanish commissary officer saw the relatively well fed British and decided that the food was more deserving with the half-starved Spanish. A reasonable judgement from his perspective but not from the British point of view, who had no intention of sinking to emaciated ineffectiveness like their allies. Consequently there were stories of the British commandeering Spanish supply wagon convoys that according to manifests were destined for the Spanish army. Having carefully marshalled his supplies to feed his army all the way south, Wellesley was frustrated that the promised Spanish food was not coming through. He and Cuesta argued furiously about supplies although Wellesley denied knowing anything about the stolen convoys. He was lying; I know this because he sent me as translator on one of the raids to ensure the wagon drivers cooperated.

Despite all the friction, excitement was mounting at the prospect of a pitched battle. Many were eager to get to grips with the enemy but you can imagine that it was not an emotion I shared. With the Spanish as allies any battle was bound to be a confused and frantic affair. I was also mindful of Wellesley’s ‘generous’ promise to ensure that I would be given the chance to see some action during the campaign. That was the last thing I wanted, so as the armies joined I made sure I was indispensable as a liaison officer and toadied to both Wellesley and Cuesta for all I was worth. The generals were meeting regularly to discuss battle plans and seemed confident of catching Victor by surprise.

But you do not get to be a French marshal without some strategic awareness and Victor was watching his enemies gather. On the day the armies combined he retreated east, over the river Alberche, and stopped just a few miles north east of a place that was to be made famous by the Peninsular Campaign: Talavera.