Can No One Win Battles if I'm Not There Read online

  Can No One Win Battles If I’m Not There?

  Geoffrey Watson

  Napoleon’s Spanish Ulcer

  Book 5

  Copyright © 2012 Geoffrey Watson

  All Rights Reserved.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  PROLOGUE

  At the beginning of March 1811, Marshal Masséna finally started his retreat from Portugal. He left twenty five thousand men to fertilise the soil of the country that he had so savagely despoiled and he abandoned most of his baggage, most of his guns and at least half his horses.

  As a last gesture of defiance before he got to Spain, he tried to move south through the Mountains of the Stars – the Serra da Estrela – to join up with Soult at Badajoz, but his men were just too sick and exhausted. He retraced his steps. Briefly contested the line of the Côa river, then fled back to Ciudad Rodrigo to try and recover.

  Marshal Soult had come north from Seville, too late to support him, but had routed the Spanish armies and had captured Badajoz. He had had it in mind to strike across the Alentejo towards Lisbon.

  The fall of Badajoz was a mystery. It was enormously strong. It was held by eight to ten thousand Spanish troops. It had food and water for at least a month and it was daily expecting relief from divisions of Wellington’s army under Beresford, marching across from Lisbon.

  Indeed, the day after it fell, Soult had to leave in a hurry. He left eleven thousand garrison troops and rushed back to rescue Seville from another attack by Ballasteros and to support Victor after his defeat at Barossa.

  Wellington’s strategy had inflicted the biggest disaster on French forces since the French revolution, but within a month of their expulsion from Portugal he found himself outnumbered once more around both Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz because he had been forced to divide his army to cover both towns.

  The French may have been forced out of Portugal, but they had actually strengthened their grip on Spain. No Spanish army had been able to stand against them and those that tried had been scattered into the mountains or were under siege in Cadiz and Cartagena.

  Between four and five hundred thousand French troops were occupying Spain, scattered throughout the poor and mountainous country in half a dozen or more army groups, all trying to feed themselves from a country that had difficulty feeding itself.

  General, the Viscount Wellington had almost doubled his strength. Portuguese troops, under British generals, were now highly competent and had shown themselves equal to the British army when well led and trained.

  Instead of withdrawing the British army, as had been considered, a grateful government had sent many reinforcements and given him unofficial permission to carry the war into Spain, if he dared.

  The overall odds against him were now only five to one and the ‘gateways’ to Spain; the fortress towns of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz; were held against him.

  If Spain had been a rich, agricultural country, Wellington would have had to pack up and go home. Some areas were indeed fertile and could feed an army stationed there. Mostly it was mountainous, with poor roads and subsistence farming. An army of fifty thousand in most areas would be starving in two months, together with the local population.

  The French could and did concentrate up to one hundred thousand men in one place at one time, but it was a massive undertaking of short duration before they ran out of food. What is more, they found that the region they had left sparsely garrisoned, was teeming with aggressive partisans; the guerrilla fighters of the mountains.

  If Wellington had more than one objective at a time, he was always going to be outnumbered, but the French were forever being forced to seek battle before they ran out of food. Almost always he had to fight on the defensive in places he had chosen himself. The French came to regard him as a purely defensive general. They were wrong, but he wasn’t going to throw England’s only army away just to change their opinion of him.

  CHAPTER 1

  The winter in Oporto had been the wettest for years and the interesting mixture of Royal Marines and Portuguese light infantrymen in training, had become used to damp clothes, even when they had to sleep in them for night after night. In reality, they knew that it had been much, much wetter farther south, where the French Armée de Portugal was slowly starving to death, or dying of fevers in the foodless region north of Lisbon and south of Coimbra.

  The Hundred Royal Marines and fifty Portuguese had been under instruction for some weeks, beneath the jaundiced eye of Lieutenant Colonel Bailey and several wounded; though mostly now recuperated; veteran instructors of the British Naval Brigade, known in Spain and Portugal as the Hornets.

  Only in the last six weeks had the number of recruits stabilised at a hundred and fifty. There had been twice that number before that, before the tough selection process had weeded out half the volunteers. These unfortunates were still very good soldiers, but not good enough to be selected for the final weeks of training hell that would entitle the survivors to call themselves Wasps, or potential Hornets.

  Within the next fortnight, nearly seventy of the marines would qualify as Wasp recruits for the British battalion, now resting at their secret base in French-occupied Spain. Thirty of the Portuguese would be joining Captain Fernando Gonçalves, in charge of E Company; the Portuguese Hornets, or Vespãos.

  The Portuguese was already the largest company in Brigadier General Sir Joshua Welbeloved’s Naval Brigade. The additional thirty recruits would give Gonçalves six full platoons or nominally a company and a half. Two more platoons from the volunteers that were flocking to join and there would be two hundred and fifty Portuguese: enough for two companies, commanded by a major.

  Gonçalves did not allow himself to contemplate the prestige of being given command of two companies of the renowned Hornets. He had worked hard to build the Portuguese contingent from a mere single platoon of twenty-five men, little more than a year ago. The successes they had achieved had warranted the increase in numbers and enabled him to claim with some justification that his men were almost as good as the original nucleus of Hornets that Welbeloved had brought to Spain, three years ago.

  It was not a shortage of recruits that restricted his numbers. The response from applicants had been overwhelming. Even though the selection and training process rejected two out of three, he could have oversubscribed two companies by now, if only he could have found a few more suitable officers and enough of the special breech-loading muskets to arm everyone.

  Joshua Welbeloved had conceived a force like the Hornets as far back as the year ’99, when as a naval lieutenant, he and his captain had been active in thwarting Napoleon’s ambitions in Egypt and Palestine.

  As a boy in America, working with his father, scouting for the British against the local backwoodsmen and indians, he had been witness to the horrific casualties inflicted on the masses of brightly coloured redcoats by the buckskin-clad, rifle bearing skirmishers. The colonists used their rifles for hunting smaller prey and the large, white crossbelted, red coated infantry were targets not easy to miss.

  After independence, he had been forced to leave his homeland with
little but his wits and his father’s breech-loading Ferguson rifle. Now nearly forty years old, this rifle was still the most accurate and rapid-firing weapon available and many years ahead of its time.

  It was lethally accurate up to a quarter of a mile and could comfortably fire four aimed shots every minute. If it had a drawback, it was that it was a thoroughbred and needed to be maintained lovingly by experts trained to understand it. It was also hand made and very expensive to produce. Only eighty remained in the hands of the survivors of the original two platoons of the Hornets.

  After initial misgivings, Lord Wellington had seen the Hornets in action and had himself encouraged Welbeloved to increase their numbers. A weapon had to be found to enable the additional men to maintain both their lethal reputation and rapidity of delivery.

  The solution was found in the talented young blacksmith Roberto; working on the estate of Welbeloved’s new wife, the Condesa de Alba in central Spain, not far from Toledo and close to Talavera.

  Toledo is the steel making capital of Spain and Talavera is where thousands of 1777 pattern French muskets and carbines were captured after the battle.

  Roberto invented a swivelling breechblock for these captured muskets; enlarging and polishing the bore to accept an accurately cast 0.70 inch ball and cartridge. Loading and firing became marginally faster than with the Fergusons and the accuracy up to two hundred yards almost as good. Over that range, the smooth bore allowed the balls to wander ever so slightly.

  Quite large numbers could be fabricated. Enough that all the five hundred German Hornets now carried the carbine version and that both companies of the Spanish Avispónes had either the musket or the carbine modification.

  The British Hornets and the Portuguese Vespãos mostly used rifles. The British still had their eighty Fergusons, but Roberto had modified the Baker rifle with a screw plug similar to the Ferguson. They were considerably more difficult to modify than the muskets, but produced a trickle of weapons that were just as much thoroughbreds as the Fergusons. They were cheaper, more robust and more available than the Fergusons and almost their equal in speed, range and accuracy.

  Eventually, every member of the Naval Brigade would have a rifle, but at a production rate of only twenty-five a month, it would be another year before all the British and Portuguese were fully equipped. All the newly qualified Wasps would have to be content with the muskets and carbines during that time and then have to compete with the German battalion that was itching to get its hands on the new Bakers.

  Those recruits who completed the full training course did not necessarily qualify as Wasps. There was fierce competition to gain selection for a place and it was often difficult to separate the good from the very good.

  In the last eighteen months it had become necessary to form an official Wagon Train to keep each unit supplied with essentials such as ammunition, harness, replacement uniforms and boots; even food when they were in areas that had been stripped of all supplies.

  Welbeloved had not been in favour of wagons in the early days, when mobility had been essential for his small band. Now that he was commanding fifteen hundred men, mostly away from outside support, regular supplies became essential and each company and squadron had its own farrier’s wagon and general purpose wagon, built to be drawn by two horses almost anywhere that a mounted Hornet could reach.

  That only accounted for half the wagons. The other half was built to the same design and quality and provided the convoys between Oporto and Santiago del Valle and wherever the individual units were fighting.

  Each wagon had a driver and a guard. Both were dressed and armed as Wasps and the guard was mounted independently, essentially as one of the Wasps. The Wagon Train rapidly changed itself into a separate, specialist company that added over a hundred men to the strength of the Naval Brigade. All its personnel had the necessary training to enable them to step effortlessly into the shoes of any Hornet unfortunate enough to be wounded.

  * * *

  In the last two weeks, the training programme at the base near Oporto had become intense. Major Hagen had arrived with D squadron of German Hornissen, escorting many hundreds of French prisoners that they had taken in the mountains. These had belonged to several small garrisons left by the French to try and keep their communications open with Spain.

  Colonel Lord George Vere had used the German (largely Hanoverian) battalion to clear out these garrisons and Hagen had been volunteered to escort them into captivity.

  He had been looking forward to a week or two relaxing in Oporto before taking D Squadron back to join the rest of the battalion in Lisbon. He should have known better. He was received with enthusiasm by Lieutenant Colonel Bailey, not only for bringing some captured horses to mount his recruits, but also for the squadron of men that was suddenly available to act as instructors for the last two weeks before final selection.

  He also found orders awaiting him, asking him to stop at Coimbra on his way south. He was to assist General Trant in his efforts to prevent the French crossing the River Mondego when they retreated. Accepting the inevitable, he spent an enjoyable fortnight, ensuring that no recruit would become a Wasp who was not completely up to his own high standards.

  It turned out to be a relaxing and most instructive break. He was able to give each half of his squadron a week’s leave in turn. The ones taking turns to do the instruction found that there was nothing like having to teach others to gain a superb grasp of a discipline that had now become instinctive to the teacher. It made them think about the techniques and analyse the problems all over again.

  That and the difficulties of communicating in english, german and portuguese, caused many brains to work harder than for many years past.

  At the end of February, Hagen took all the hundred and fifty trainees, together with D Squadron south to Coimbra. He reasoned that each one of them was now a deadlier shot than any other troops that Trant was likely to have.

  Gonçalves had been ordered to bring E Company, the Portuguese Hornets from their temporary base at São Martinho and give additional support. At the same time he would be able to collect his new reinforcements at Coimbra. Altogether, it would give General Trant an additional four hundred elite fighters to support his militia.

  The new British Wasps and wagoners could return to Oporto afterwards, hopefully suitably ‘blooded’, and be available to guard the convoy to Santiago while travelling to join General Welbeloved.

  General Trant and his brigade of militia had rapidly reoccupied Coimbra when the reinforcements had passed through. He had no chance of stopping them when they came at him from the north, but as they had rushed straight through and over the river without much thought of their primary orders to keep communications open with Spain, it seemed sensible to bar their return with defences along the north bank of the Mondego.

  The river was still in winter flood at the beginning of March and the bridge was destroyed. There was a two hundred yard width of unfordable river rushing past the town and a pontoon bridge was the only way the French could cross, unless they could find shallower water along the twenty mile stretch to the estuary, where the Mondego naturally became slower and wider.

  Gonçalves had arrived on the day before Hagen got there and when they met, his first thought was to split the fifty Portuguese equally among the four platoons that he had brought with him.

  It was more difficult for Hagen, who had to cope with the hundred British Wasp/wagoners. There were nearly as many of these as he had in D Squadron. He solved the temporary problem by dividing his four troops into eight half troops, each of which absorbed a dozen of the trainees. Throughout the Naval Brigade most commands by now were given in english and all of his officers had enough of the language for this basic purpose.

  Trant was more than happy to entrust the twenty miles of the north bank between Coimbra and the sea to Hagen and Gonçalves. They spent two days together exploring it and very quickly agreed that no army was going to cross the river anywhere without a pontoon br
idge while the winter rains continued to drain into the flood plain.

  This wide area of wetland started immediately east of Coimbra and continued all the way to the sea. For most of this stretch, the river split into several channels and it was always difficult to make out where the main flow was moving through the mile-wide expanse of water, broken only occasionally by mudbanks and patches of boggy marsh.

  Hagen and Gonçalves already had a great deal of respect for one another. Only a few weeks ago they had joined forces to frustrate another French attempt to get supplies and reinforcements through to Masséna. Hagen was not a little envious of the rifles that most of Gonçalves’s men – the Vespãos – carried.

  Hagen’s Hornissen had only Roberto’s modified carbines and he was still debating with his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Roffhack about the preferred role of the German battalion; dragoon-skirmishers or skirmishing dragoons. Their cavalry orientation was going to have to continue for another year whatever the final decision; there were just not enough of the rifles available until then.

  Because Gonçalves’s rifles had the advantage of twice the killing range of Hagen’s carbines, it was agreed that the Portuguese would continue to patrol the flooded riverbank, while the Germans returned to help defend Coimbra. The river flowed fast and deep past the town and was only two hundred yards wide.

  Along the flood plain it was barely possible that in one or two places the French would be able to ford or swim horses across. The Portuguese Vespãos, camped in platoon strength every four miles or so, could keep watch on the whole length and still have time to absorb their new recruits into reorganised platoons.

  It would also give a chance to the new brevet lieutenant; poached from a Portuguese rifle company; to get to know his platoon with its mixture of veterans and new boys. Lieutenant Jorge Oliveiro was something of an enigma. He was obviously educated, which would indicate aristocratic or upper class blood in his background.