I Think I Really Do Have an Ulcer Read online

  I Think I Really Do Have An Ulcer

  Geoffrey Watson

  Napoleon’s Spanish Ulcer

  Book 6

  Copyright © 2014 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

  CHAPTER 22

  PROLOGUE

  In spite of being bundled out of Portugal by Wellington, defeated at La Albuera and Fuentes de Oñoro and losing thousands of men, horses and armaments, the autumn and winter of 1811 saw French arms in Spain at the zenith of their achievements.

  King Joseph Bonaparte had seen his kingdom grow by conquest, until all was under French occupation save Galicia, part of Murcia, the strongholds of Cadiz and Tarifa and some defended, walled towns in the north-east.

  French occupation should not be considered as French control. Some estimates show as many as half a million soldiers controlling all the cities and large towns and causing near starvation in a country that always had a problem feeding itself adequately.

  In between those towns were mountains; lots and lots of mountains. In those mountains was waged La Guerrilla, the little war. The men waging this little war were the guerrilleros; people that the French had dispossessed, or soldiers from the Spanish armies that had been beaten and dispersed.

  There were others too, who were no better than brigands, preying on anyone weaker than themselves. None of them could face the invaders in battle, but they could harass them and prevent them from moving between towns unless they were in large armed parties.

  Wellington now had a bigger, more experienced army. He was learning, through his own bitter experience, that he had to keep it supplied from his own stores all the way from Lisbon. There was little food to be found in Portugal and Spain. The French might assemble greater armies against him, but unless they could bring him to battle very quickly, they had to take them away again or starve.

  He was a master of defensive warfare; he had to be; and they had learned to leave him alone when he had chosen the battlefield that he was prepared to fight upon.

  On the Spanish/Portuguese frontier there was a stalemate. Wellington could not move into Spain until he had captured the French-held fortress towns of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo. Both had formidable defences and were held by large garrisons. Neither could support a protective French army for more than a week or so.

  All French armies expected to live off the land through which they passed. In Spain, most of the time, if they didn’t bring their food with them, they went hungry. They contented themselves with keeping forces in Salamanca and the valley of the Tagus, ready to respond quickly to any serious threat from Wellington.

  Nor were they terribly concerned. They knew that Wellington had no siege train and that both towns were secure until their walls were breached. No siege guns – no danger to the towns, that an occasional re-supply column in strength, could not eliminate.

  They had not yet discovered that a siege train was on its way up the River Douro, only a few weeks away now. Other priorities occupied their attention. They would make one last probe in strength to re-supply Ciudad Rodrigo and then hope not to be disturbed until well into the spring of next year.

  Wellington also was very happy to move into winter quarters until his siege guns arrived. Since the beginning of the year, his Anglo-Portuguese army had expelled the French from Portugal, fought two major battles and several notable engagements.

  His successes had silenced the critics in Parliament and a grateful government had sent reinforcements well in excess of his losses. A month or so to acclimatise them and prepare them for active service and the struggle to keep the French off balance, while trying to fight only one of their resident armies at a time; could repay his efforts many times over.

  The Hornets: the Naval Brigade commanded by Brigadier General/Commodore Sir Joshua Welbeloved, had already reorganised itself into four battalions; British, German, Portuguese and Spanish. All were mounted, enabling rapid deployment and all were armed with breech-loading and accurate flintlock muskets and rifles.

  Welbeloved recognised that Wellington’s army needed time to prepare itself for future endeavours. This did not apply to the Hornets. An occasional period of leave was acceptable, but they were essentially a mobile, intelligence gathering, enemy harassing, guerrillero training force that had long outgrown the traditional reluctance of the Admiralty to authorise marines to move far beyond reach of the sea and re-embarkation.

  While the army rested, some units of the Hornets were always out, close to the enemy, soaking up information and looking for any opportunity to wear them down and cause alarm and despondency far beyond what could be expected of their numbers.

  CHAPTER 1

  The mile-high peaks of the Sierra de Gata formed a small mountain chain some fifteen miles southeast of Ciudad Rodrigo. The chain continued to the northeast, running south of the main road between Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca and acquiring the splendid-sounding name of the Sierra de la Peña de Francia. The mountains were the source of numerous streams and rivers, all of which flowed more or less north to join the River Águeda, that lapped the walls of the French-held fortress town, on its way to the Douro and the Atlantic.

  Part of Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army; more than forty thousand men; was spread out in the foothills and plains south and west of the town, making no serious effort to do anything other than persuade the French garrison to stay within the walls and use up its supplies of food without bothering the surrounding farms and villages.

  Perhaps mid-September was early for the army to go into what was effectively winter quarters, but the last six months had been very demanding and Wellington was doing his best to convince the enemy that his forces needed at least another six months before they should be able to trouble them again.

  He hoped that the French also would wish to make use of this time to repair the damage that had been inflicted on them and to honour the unofficial and uncertain truce that seemed to be in place.

  Naturally, it was to be expected that Marshal Marmont, commanding the Army of Portugal from his headquarters in Salamanca, would not allow his garrison in Ciudad Rodrigo to starve. The town was blockaded, but was not yet under active siege and if a relief column was sent to re-supply it, then Wellington would not interfere.

  The French would understand the unwritten protocol. Any column they sent should be substantial enough not to be insulting and small enough to satisfy the Rosbifs that it had no aggressive intent.

  While the armies were resting, it was a situation made for the Hornets; the special fighting force created by Captain Joshua Welbeloved R.N. as a platoon of thirty seamen and marines, four years ago.

  Immediate and startling success in the early days had doubled their numbers and Sir Arthur Wellesley had then seen what they were capable of at Talavera.

  His subsequent active encouragement and petitioning of the Admiralty had expanded the British contingent to five hundred and added a complete battalion of Hanoverians. They had come over en masse from Napoleon’s Légion Hanovrienne to rejoin the army of their Elector, King George III of England, and had been trained as H
ornissen.

  Small seed platoons of Portuguese Vespãos and Spanish Avispónes had grown to battalions in their own right and Welbeloved now had a brigade of over two thousand men and the rank of Commodore, a rank that Wellington had insisted be titled Brigadier General.

  He had also received a knighthood and was Conde de Alba after his marriage to the Condesa. Quite an advance on his origins as the young son of an American loyalist scouting for Captain Ferguson during the war against the American colonists.

  Now he was riding towards Salamanca with his 2nd Battalion of Portuguese Vespãos in the northern foothills of the Sierra de la Peña de Francia. While being very aware of all that was going on around him, he mused to himself about the position of the tilde on the word peña.

  His command of spanish was improving all the time, but when he first came this way he had ignored the tilde and translated the name of the region as the mountains of the pain or penalty of France. This seemed most appropriate at the time.

  With the tilde in place, they became merely the mountains of French stone. This diminished them considerably in his opinion.

  The three-company battalion of Vespãos, with whom he was now riding, had enough men to field four companies that would be only fractionally under strength. A recent recruiting drive had resulted in over a hundred new men qualifying as Wasps; Vespas in portuguese; or probationary Hornets.

  The difficulty was in finding enough suitable officers, capable of leading a company, who could survive a selection and training regime that was many times tougher for officers than for soldiers. Nevertheless, some talented new lieutenants were in place, but of the company commanders, one was English; an original Hornet; one was German from the fourth battalion and one only was a brevet captain and Portuguese, promoted from lieutenant. Major Gonçalves, the commanding officer, was acting very like a mother hen with Brevet Captain da Silva; not quite convinced that he was experienced enough to do the job properly.

  To judge by the intensive and successful campaign, in which the Vespãos had been involved since before Torres Vedras, Welbeloved himself had no doubts whatever about his experience. It was only a question of directing four platoons instead of one.

  One of the reasons why Welbeloved was riding with the 2nd Battalion was that a third of their number, including those new lieutenants, was only recently out of training. Until recently, he had always been personally involved with the training of potential officers.

  Now this was very rarely possible and although he had complete faith in the men who did train them, riding out with them like this enabled him to spend time with each of them. He was able to ensure that they understood the way he thought about a whole host of matters; some of them seemingly quite unconnected with what they were doing now.

  The battalion was not in any hurry, riding in companies parallel to the main road from Salamanca to Ciudad Rodrigo. It was anticipated that any French supply column would choose to use the direct route, partly because the few other roads took a more circuitous route and partly because the condition of the main road was merely atrocious and the alternatives much, much worse.

  Riding across the arroyos and gullies of the streams coming down from the sierra was not always easy, but the main road could be kept under observation from the foothills over most of its length. The travelling here was much less demanding than it was on the northern side of the road, where Colonel MacKay was making a similar reconnaissance with A and D Companies of the British 1st Battalion.

  Both the British A Company and much of the new Portuguese battalion were due for a rest and if things seemed likely to be quiet until the new year, Welbeloved would send MacKay and A Company back to Santiago del Valle for a couple of weeks. MacKay and many of the others now had wives, mistresses and families back at the hidden base of the Hornets and would welcome some relaxation before Lord Wellington started next year’s campaigning.

  Welbeloved also would be delighted to see his wife and children again. It all depended whether Lord Wellington was planning anything other than the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz.

  He couldn’t see that the Portuguese were going to get the chance of a break, even though many of them deserved it. While the new boys had been training in Oporto, a couple of hundred of them had been with MacKay around Léon, helping General Santocildes harass the French Army of the North. They should welcome some relief, but needed to absorb all their new talent and get them settled into the existing battalion framework.

  Major Gonçalves would be hoping that the French were not going to be quiescent at all, so that he would have the excuse to introduce his novices to active service. Welbeloved was always ready to encourage his men to be aggressive, but he was becoming increasingly aware of his responsibilities as the commander of a force approaching divisional strength. Any strong action he encouraged now might well be interpreted by the enemy as an opening move by the army as a whole.

  At a time when Lord Wellington was hoping for a period of calm while he built up his strength and trained his new reinforcements, he wouldn’t want an overly aggressive move by the Hornets to provoke the French out of their own winter quarters into unwanted retaliation.

  For a force high in the esteem of the commander-in-chief, it would be a singularly unfortunate occurrence and one that Welbeloved would do much to avoid.

  MacKay, with the Hornets and Gonçalves with the Vespãos, both understood this; even if they didn’t like it; and would try to make any response to the expected relief column proportionate.

  It was all just a little like one of those competitive games of cricket that he had observed with a great deal of puzzlement over the last ten years. They now had written rules that they called laws; if you could believe it; to ensure fair play by both sides.

  In warfare they had unwritten rules. They seemed to work on the principle of- if you won’t do anything unacceptable, then I won’t, perhaps. None of these rules was enforceable and Welbeloved was convinced that they only existed for the convenience of the stronger side at any specific time.

  He had his own rules that generally meant that he tried not to shoot unarmed men and treated prisoners with the respect that they deserved. He did not acknowledge any convention of ‘sporting chance’ or ‘fair fight’. An enemy soldier had only one purpose and that was to kill people that his officers told him to kill.

  Welbeloved had no quarrel with this; it was what he did himself and it was rarely personal. It was not like fighting a duel, where two people shot at each other at the drop of a kerchief. If somebody was armed and was coming to kill you, it was greatly to be preferred that you killed him or captured him first, whether he was ready or not.

  Except that this reconnaissance that his men were engaged upon now, was having to assume that a column of armed enemy soldiers was not going to be coming to try and kill them, but only trying to take food and reinforcements to the garrison in Ciudad Rodrigo.

  Should that indeed be the case, the enemy would send troops sufficient to do the job, with just enough light cavalry to explore the size and whereabouts of Wellington’s army.

  In Welbeloved’s opinion, two divisions of infantry and four regiments of horse would be enough to achieve that objective, depending on how many troops they thought they were facing. Twice that number; that is twenty thousand foot and two thousand sabres would be at the upper end of acceptability.

  Wellington had been using the Hornets and his contacts with the guerrilleros to spread rumours that would reach the French, about sickness and disease in his army. At any one time, the French themselves had more than one in ten men too sick to fight and would certainly believe stories of numbers greater than that in the English camp.

  Marshal Marmont, in command of the Army of Portugal, had a much greater proportion of sick after the terrible months that they had endured in Portugal. Welbeloved guessed at a fit and effective total of forty thousand, but acknowledged that all those men were immediately available for action. Marmont’s army was possibly the only enem
y army in Spain that had few men detached for garrison duty or suppression of guerrilla activity. The only garrison he had to concern himself about was the three thousand men cooped up in Ciudad Rodrigo.

  On the other hand, the Marshal was still engaged in a prolonged struggle to rebuild his army after its terrible losses; over thirty thousand; that it had suffered in its disastrous Portuguese adventure. On that basis he might well consider that taking most of his army to relieve Ciudad Rodrigo should be considered a training exercise that would be an ideal way of binding them all together.

  If he could provoke a few small skirmishes at the same time, what could be a better way of honing the skills of his men and unsettling the enemy? After all, everyone knew that Wellington was a general who only ever fought on the defensive, so there was no real risk.

  Welbeloved shrugged. As always, he would observe what there was to see and make up his mind then and not before. Evening found the Vespãos in the hills, some miles south of the city of Salamanca, from where they could observe the road west to Ciudad Rodrigo and the road south towards Plasencia.

  All traffic on those roads vanished from sight well before dusk. If Spanish, travellers would make sure that they had reached their destination before dark. If they were French, they would have been travelling in a large, armed party and would wish to do the same. Even the main roads were not safe from guerrilleros and it was better to be behind closed doors once the sun had gone down.

  From ten miles away, even Welbeloved’s quality Dolland glass showed little sign of the thousands of troops that must have been billeted in the town and camped round it.

  Once the sun had set, however, there was no mistaking the thousands of campfires in the fields surrounding the ancient city. They were mostly on the far side of the River Tormes, as was the town itself, but forty or fifty thousand men needed space and a two to three mile wide halo made up of twinkling lights was a spectacle to be remembered.

  * * *