Salamanca 1812- Wellington’s Year of Victories Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  The Praetorian Press

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

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  Copyright © The Estate of Peter Edwards 2013

  9781783830343

  The right of Peter Edwards to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library.

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  The publishers would like to thank Tim Saunders and Andrew Duff of BHTV for providing the modern photographs in the plate section.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Maps

  Preface

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3 - The Affair at Villagarcia 11 April 1812

  CHAPTER 4 - Hill’s Raid on the Almaraz Bridge 19 May 1812

  CHAPTER 5 - Maguilla, San Cristoval and the Salamanca Forts June 1812

  CHAPTER 6 - The Affairs at Castrejon and Castillo and Parallel Marching 1—21 July 1812

  CHAPTER 7 - Salamanca — The Early Morning Wednesday 22 July 1812

  CHAPTER 8 - Salamanca — The Middle of the Day Wednesday 22 July 1812

  CHAPTER 9 - Salamanca The 3rd Division’s Attack

  CHAPTER 10 - Salamanca The 5th Division’s Attack

  CHAPTER 11 - Salamanca The Cavalry Charges

  CHAPTER 12 - Salamanca Cole and Pack’s Attacks

  CHAPTER 13 - Salamanca Ferey’s Rearguard

  CHAPTER 14 - Salamanca Casualties and Comment

  CHAPTER 15 - Salamanca The Sad Field of Battle

  CHAPTER 16 - Salamanca Garcia Hernandez 23 July 1812

  CHAPTER 17 - Madrid and Burgos 12 August – 21 October 1812

  CHAPTER 18 - Back to Portugal 22 October-19 November 1812

  Further Reading

  Memoirs, Journals and Letters etc. quoted in the Text

  APPENDIX 1 - Orders for the Attack on Ciudad Rodrigo 19 January 1812

  APPENDIX 2 - Orders for the Attack on Badajoz 6 April 1812

  APPENDIX 3 - A Memorandum Critical to his Army

  Index

  Maps

  Map 1: The Peninsular War: Portugal, Spain and south-western France showing principal battles, sieges, fortresses or strongholds and places of revolt.

  Map 2: Ciudad Rodrigo: Final Assault, 19 January 1812.

  Map 3: Badajoz: Assault, 6 April 1812.

  Map 4: Almaraz, 19 May 1812.

  Map 5: Salamanca Campaign: Manoeuvring before the battle, 13 June to 21 July 1812.

  Map 6: Salamanca: Early Moves, 22 July 1812.

  Map 7: Battle of Salamanca, 22 July 1812.

  Map 8: Salamanca: Le Marchant’s Charge.

  Map 9: Burgos: Siege, 19 September to 21 October 1812.

  Map 1: The Peninsular War: Portugal, Spain and south-western France showing principal battles, sieges, fortresses or strongholds and places of revolt.

  Map 2: Ciudad Rodrigo: Final Assault, 19 January 1812.

  Map 3: Badajoz: Assault, 6 April 1812.

  Map 4: Almaraz, 19 May 1812.

  Map 5: Salamanca Campaign: Manoeuvring before the battle, 13 June to 21 July 1812.

  Map 6: Salamanca: Early Moves, 22 July 1812.

  Map 7: Battle of Salamanca, 22 July 1812.

  Map 8: Salamanca: Le Marchant’s Charge.

  Map 9: Burgos: Siege, 19 September to 21 October 1812.

  Preface

  I look upon Salamanca, Vitoria and Waterloo as my three best battles – those which had great and permanent consequences.

  My Regiment, the 48th (Northamptonshire), fought with Lord Wellington throughout his Peninsular campaigns of 1808 – 14, notwithstanding in his unfortunate absence from that fatal hill near Albuera in 1811, our 2nd Battalion was well and truly knocked over, as were the Buffs, the Worcesters, the Middlesex and the Berkshires. By 2pm that wet afternoon we were twenty-five men lined up fit for duty, of 413 who had eaten breakfast. Over the years, the 48th were awarded thirteen Peninsular Battle Honours, absent from parade only at Roliça, Vimeiro, Fuentes, and Ciudad Rodrigo. Our part in the campaigns of 1809 and 1811 have been set out in my two earlier histories, wherein the crossing of the Douro and the bloody battles of Talavera and Albuera rightly formed a large part of those accounts; but I also endeavoured to give a fairly accurate picture of the confrontations at Roliça, Vimeiro, Barrosa, Campo Major, Sabugal, Los Santos, Fuentes, the 1811 Sieges of Badajoz and El Bodon.

  I turn now to the pivotal year of 1812, with Napoleon safely self-wrapped in his faraway Russian adventure. And what a year it was to be: the surgical capture of Ciudad Rodrigo, that northern key to the long road to the Pyrenees (or a Portugese haven, if things went wrong); the shockingly unsurgical storm of Badajoz and its subsequent sacking, entirely of the unpopular Spanish inhabitants and their property; the near destruction of Marmont’s Army of Portugal and French fighting morale thereafter at Salamanca – oh! what a victory!; the triumphant entry into Madrid; the step-too-far at Burgos; and the closing of the year with that humiliating withdrawal which in various respects echoed Corunna, Mons, Dunkirk and episodes in the Western Desert. That the year ended on a sour note seems obvious, yet after Salamanca no French general would now cheerfully tangle with our ’Atty. The strategic initiative had already shifted to him the previous year, from the Lines onwards; now his superb generalship around the Arapiles, and the staunch qualities of his infantry and their mounted comrades, present for our admiration what must surely be his finest victory. Yet while it was a testament to the previous four years of learning, it was far more than a repetition of the defensive superiority of the line versus column, of the proven sequence of volley-cheer-charge emerging from a reverse slope, and of the formidable squares so adeptly formed and which no French cavalry could breach. For at Salamanca we attacked with both foot and horse, and we smashed them, and so showed we were the complete, all-purpose fighting machine.

  In the space of an hour at Salamanca, Lord Wellington demonstrated by his superb tip-toe balance his ready ability to fight a wide range of tactical scenarios. Having encouraged mystery in Marmont’s mind, by moving overnight to place his mass just so, behind a ridge, at first light they were largely hidden. Thus Marmont was invited to guess their numbers, position and intentions. He he
ld ground so lightly – one of the hardest things to do – that he effectively dared Marmont to attack. By 2pm, having stifled his frustration himself to attack, he was entirely ready to withdraw in the face of both turning and frontal movements, while so defensively placed by 2.30pm that the latter had no chance of success. The former – the puzzling march by Thomières – allowed that further versatility which would mark this day forever. At 2.45pm when his telescope whispered to him ‘By God, that will do’, he was able to transform his stance yet again into the stunning flank march by Pakenham and the stirring order to Le Marchant ‘You must charge at all hazards’ and which in Philip Guedalla’s terse words was to launch ‘twenty-eight battalions against seventy-eight and send them reeling eastwards into Castille ... the Army of Portugal hurried to shelter with a loss of 15,000 men and twenty guns.’ One of the hurrying divisions was ably commanded by the thirty-seven-year-old General Foy, who six days later in his diary wrote handsomely of the conqueror of Salamanca:

  This battle is the most cleverly fought, the largest in scale, the most important in results, of any the English have won in recent times. It brings up Lord Wellington’s reputation almost to that of Marlborough. Up to this day we knew his prudence, his eye for choosing good positions, and the skill with which he used them. But at Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manoeuvring. He kept his dispositions hidden nearly all the day: he allowed us to develop our movement before he pronounced his own: he played a close game; he utilised the ‘oblique order’ in the style of Frederick the Great ... The catastrophe of the Spanish War has come – for six long months we ought to have seen that it was quite probable.

  As a demonstration of off-the-cuff military virtuosity it is hard to think of a better. Waterloo was a mere slogging match. And as a precursor to the 1813 advance to Vitoria, Salamanca stood plain and upright, a promise of things to come. While the year 1812 began with Wellington’s army concentrated for the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo licking its lips, it ended with a similar concentration under the same walls, this time licking its wounds. In between lay many months of efforts, of seizing opportunities, of evading an enemy four times his own strength and choosing so neatly where and when to strike. ‘The beating of 40,000 men in 40 minutes’ at Salamanca remains to this day a fine story, and I hope I do it justice. My effort so to do in large part is to acknowledge that my own Regiment lost half our twenty-two officers that day, and a fifth of our men. Since this was just twelve weeks after another 200 had been laid low in the bloody, desperate ditch at Badajoz, the campaign of 1812 remains understandably large in regimental folk memory, along with Talavera and Albuera.

  It is that mention of Badajoz and the blood that was spilt on and under its walls which gives the year 1812 its shape, and its contrasts, for the modern reader to enjoy in the safety of his armchair. For if Rodrigo and Salamanca can both be viewed rightly with pride and no little amazement, Badajoz was the sombre filling in the sandwich. That, together with the concluding road back from Burgos, presents darker pictures. Darker because of the terrible casualties of the storm, and the subsequent shame of the sack. Yet, all in all, the year 1812 ended a good deal for the better. The two key frontier fortresses had been secured, the French effectively had been cleared out of southern Spain, and were leaching back to France as the Emperor sought to rebuild his forces after his gigantic losses in Russia – and 20,000 French prisoners had been taken. To quote Foy again, ‘Lord Wellington has retired unconquered with the glory of the laurels of Arapiles, having restored to the Spaniards the country south of the Tagus, and made us destroy our magazines, our fortifications – in a word all that we have gained by our conquests.’

  It will be seen that my narrative style leans heavily on eyewitness accounts, even (reluctantly) where these were written up long after the event, and in some cases where they may owe more than something to earlier narratives by Napier, Southey, Londonderry, John Jones etc., and which provided ready-made inspiration for veterans suffering temporary memory loss; although the more blatant copyings of course I spurn. For example, Sergeant Thomas Garretty, 43rd, published his Memoirs in 1835, devoting five pages to the attack on Ciudad Rodrigo, in which he was present on the Lesser Breach. One page (what a waste! one page!) described what he saw, the other four were precise regurgitations of Napier’s very words, published eleven years earlier.

  I am equally conscious of the danger of placing too great a reliance on any one account, if only because two accounts invariably prove neither participant could have been present at the same event, so differently do we all recall what we thought we saw. There is the related danger with multiple accounts that repetition can be boring or – when at odds one man with another – confusing; a good example are two of the accounts describing what happened at the right-hand top of Rodrigo’s main breach. Each adamantly claims his Colonel, not the other’s, was the first to cross the plank bridge – which is indeed confusing (if par for the course of regimental rivalry). One runs that risk, in seeking what journalists call verification: or, in this case, that there was indeed a plank bridge. One can but try.

  It is also true that mid-Victorian writers are frequently over-florid, even sanctimonious, for our modern ears; at times much verbiage flows with little content. Today’s reader should always feel free to skip our forebears’ excesses, keeping alert for the historical nuggets. We just must put up with the boring bits.

  Generally, eyewitnesses take the modern reader as close as he can get to a sense of ‘being there’, which presumably is what most of us seek. For example, read the description by Ensign William Grattan of his beloved Connaught Rangers watching in the gathering gloom before the assault on Rodrigo, as the 43rd passed them, going forward in the chill night air to the forming-up place. That may have been written in 1847, but what an immediate sense comes through of that moment, as the 43rd, shirt collars open, muskets slung, marched quietly into the bitter dusk to storm the Lesser Breach, their music fading to die away, for ‘they had no drums’. Perhaps just six drummer boys piping on their fifes; but all old soldiers who have been so woken at reveille will feel the blood quicken at the thought. Grattan’s memoirs, said Oman, ‘are on the whole the most graphic and picturesque (of the many I have read) in giving the details of actual conflict ... his accounts above all of the storm and sack of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz are admirable.’ For his storytelling and his humour, Grattan appears often in this book.

  On the subject of acknowledgements, I had hoped to illustrate this work by replicating the maps and plans of my good friend Ian Robertson, whose Atlas of the Peninsular War last year set such new standards via his brilliant cartographer Martin Brown. Unfortunately his publisher, Harvard University Press, have not felt able to match Ian’s generosity of spirit. I can only urge readers to acquire Ian’s Atlas.

  I am also indebted to Nick Hallidie, late 19th (Green Howards) and Chairman of the Friends of the British Cemetery, Elvas, whose battlefield-tour knowledge gleaned from twenty-seven years of residence in Portugal, gave me most helpful guidance in my narrative of the two great sieges.

  On a separate subject, I describe Lord Wellington’s troops (as he did) as ‘British’, even though his officers in their memoirs invariably used ‘English’; so too indeed his opponents to whom we also were always ‘les Anglais’. The Norman French, like the Romans a thousand years earlier, never did make much progress in our wilder Scottish, Welsh and Irish peripheries, and so perhaps their descendants may be excused for apparently disregarding them in the Peninsula. However, a cursory glance at the surnames in the Parade States in the National Archives at Kew will confirm that, even in ‘English’ regiments such as my own, the Celtic (especially Irish) content was fortunately substantial, and thus truly British.

  To readers of Spanish or Portugese blood, I apologise for writing in what fashionable English historians nowadays call an Anglo-centric manner, if thereby the reader feels diminished. Your forebears of course require no support from any Englishman, standing as the
y did so stoutly on their own feet at Busaco, Albuera, San Mascial, Alcaniz, Bailen, Tamares, or on the ramparts at Gerona and Zaragoza, or in the many extremely bloody partisan operations. It is condescending for we English to suggest otherwise. As it happens, the 1812 events I write about here somewhat preclude the multi-ethnic route now preferred by the politically correct. Napier, of course, is their big bogeyman and while they may well be right to criticise his powerful, sweeping History in its denigration of much that is Spanish, they are neither right nor patriotic to mock his admiration for Moore and Wellington, Soult and Napoleon, still less to blame him for inspiring the tone of all those many subsequent soldiers’ memoirs which, they aver, copied his contemptuous descriptions of our Spanish allies. It is always possible, one supposes, such misguided opinions were sincerely held by our veterans before they ever came to read Napier in the 1830s.

  A second area where I am vulnerable is my relaxed failure to quote chapter and verse for my eyewitness accounts. This will irritate scholars, who have never forgiven Sir Charles Oman for similar laxity (although unlike him, I do not re-write these accounts nor improve their grammar). My lazy excuse is a belief that proper Peninsula scholars are already familiar with the sources, while the rest of us aren’t too interested in page numbers. Anyway, what follows is just a proud if limited tale of British effort to help free our allies from their French yoke – another populist battle-based account of a Wellington campaign if you will – and I leave to wider-ranging minds the writing of a better.