Swallowing Portugal Will Settle My Spanish Bellyache Page 7

  When the summons came to join Welbeloved at São Martinho, Pom was acting lieutenant of the fifth platoon. The original platoon of Portuguese Hornets had been split up. Gonçalves and Dodds had used the men to provide a sergeant and two corporals for each new platoon and the rest were split between Dodds’s Number One Platoon and Pom’s Number Five Platoon.

  The young man could therefore rely for moral, physical and practical support on one third of his platoon. These were his veteran Hornets; all of them being capable of ensuring that youth, inexperience and impetuosity were never allowed to override sound military and Hornet traditions.

  Welbeloved welcomed them to his temporary base and explained that the reality of the move was that Gonçalves was now to garrison São Martinho and free the two companies of Hornets to concentrate on frustrating any French efforts to resupply Masséna from Spain.

  There should be no interruption of the training programme. He merely wanted it moved to a more rugged and wilder venue, with the additional possibility of active contact with the enemy and the advantage of the Portuguese Wasps improving the Hornets’ relationship with the Ordenança, also Portuguese.

  Sergeant Major Evans and his veterans had now returned from escorting the Condesa to Santiago del Valle so C and D Companies were up to full strength. The additional platoon in Gonçalves company could rotate every two weeks on escort duty for the now regular wagon train moving through occupied Spain, taking supplies, but essentially bringing back Roberto’s modified Baker rifles and French carbines.

  Escort duty was not something that the Hornets normally considered. Vere thought of it as a waste of valuable trained men, which is why he had urged the formation of the armed wagon train to relieve them of the necessity. Only the fact that the fortnightly train to Santiago had to traverse French-occupied Spain, carrying essential weapons and supplies, justified the extra protection of one of the Portuguese platoons.

  Welbeloved approved of the way Gonçalves had reorganised his company and spent the day before he left discussing their continued training programme with their officers and the appointed sergeants and corporals. It was significant to him that these were the first of his brigade officers in whom he had not invested personal time and effort during their initiation into the Hornet methods and tradition. It brought home to him that he now had to rely on others whom he had trained to pass on his ideas and methods.

  Judging by their enthusiastic response to his questions and the eagerness they showed to uphold the reputation that the Hornets had gained, his instructors were doing a magnificent job in a very short time. After all, he had given his handpicked original band of men six months intensive training before he was ready to take them on their first expedition.

  Next morning, just a few of those original veterans were included in the two companies of Hornets and Wasps that rode out with him. The thirty Wasps were in Number Two Platoon in Tonks’s D Company; Royal Marine replacements for Gonçalves’s Portuguese.

  The Portuguese official guerrilla force, the Ordenança, had numbers scattered throughout the mountains. They would certainly warn him when the French made any move. He valued their co-operation and admired their stoic patriotism, but was in no doubt that they could not stand against the disciplined French soldiers, even if they outnumbered them massively and that scenario hardly ever occurred.

  With this in mind he left Captain Paul Davison and his company to watch the garrison at Celorico and took Captain Percival Tonks down to the valley of the Côa, close to Almeida. Working from there, he could monitor whatever the French decided to do, either directly from Spain or through the devastated, but still powerful fortress town of Almeida.

  Until the French started their invasion of Portugal, A and B Companies in Spain, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hamish MacKay had been concentrating their efforts against the French supply lines from Madrid, running north and south of the Gredos Mountains, west to the Spanish-Portuguese frontier.

  Helped by the guerrilleros, the resultant shortage of food and supplies had delayed the start of the invasion until nearly a month after the fall of Almeida. Now, the garrisons of Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida only had to forage for themselves. The Spanish Guerrilleros were now so much better organised and far more numerous and aggressive, that MacKay had been able to withdraw two of his companies and take them south to interfere with and infuriate the French forces laying siege to Cadiz.

  Only since Foy had escaped did the French in Spain perceive the need for urgent supplies to be sent through to Masséna. The activity between the three towns increased as the garrisons reluctantly released some of their own supplies to be concentrated at Almeida for the attempt.

  For the French it was vitally important that this gathering together of supplies should be guarded by strength enough to deter the guerrilleros. Welbeloved thought long and hard about whether he should let D Company loose on them to disrupt their efforts.

  General Foy would have reached Madrid by now, but with the best will in the world, it would be several weeks before supplies could be organised from beyond Salamanca.

  By the time that happened, Captain Burfoot, Lieutenant Hickson and the new company of Spanish Wasps; the Avispas; would have been trained and armed well enough to lead the guerrilleros into making life very difficult for them.

  Until then, Welbeloved decided that it suited him to let the French build up whatever urgent relief supplies they could without interfering. Foy would have warned them not to send a small escort, but it didn’t seem reasonable to expect them to denude their garrisons recklessly. He doubted that they could scrape together more than five or six hundred men in the next few weeks.

  The sooner they sent their first relief convoy, the smaller it would be and the easier it would be for the Hornets to stop it dead in its tracks. If he included his new Portuguese company, he could call upon four hundred well-armed and well-trained soldiers. It ought to be enough to cope with whatever the French could send without a great deal of exertion.

  He withdrew his men to rejoin C Company around Celorico, leaving a single platoon to observe.

  ***

  It was never a good plan to assume that the French would do as you expected. Even when all the evidence told you that it wasn’t possible or sensible, they had an army that believed absolutely in its own ability to succeed.

  The convoy that left Celorico nearly two weeks later had an escort of two hundred cavalry and a thousand infantry. They surrounded ox-drawn wagons by the score and squadrons of mules, all laden with stores and fodder.

  It wasn’t the size of the escort that impressed Welbeloved or even the fact that the amount of food and ammunition that had been accumulated had to have left their garrisons on the verge of starvation and with little enough powder to defend themselves. What did concentrate his mind was the indisputable evidence that the French were at last taking the threat of the Hornets seriously.

  No longer, apparently, were they prepared to throw their lives away against the accurate and rapid fire of the Hornets’ breech-loaders. They intended to go through the mountains in a series of night marches. Either that or they were attempting to get to Masséna without stopping at all, which really was not practicable.

  He watched with amazement as they came pouring out of the town in the late afternoon and organised themselves into an order of march giving the maximum of protection to the slow-moving and axle-screeching ox-carts and herds of heavily laden mules.

  At first, he had wondered whether it was an elaborate dress rehearsal for an early morning start, but as the evening had closed in and the convoy started to move, he had to accept that they were paying him the compliment of trying to adapt to his tactics. It made a change from assuming that they could impose their own by brute force.

  The idea amused him. The strength of the escort showed that they were still relying on brute force. The ragged, badly armed masses of the French revolution were resurrected in an attempt to bludgeon their way through the enemy.


  He sent messages to all the local Ordenança. Now was the time for them to redouble their efforts to stop Almeida and Celorico being resupplied by foraging. They should try and force them to wait and rely on massive reinforcements from Spain, if they ever came.

  He left a couple of platoons to shadow and report on the convoy and its route and retired on São Martinho to consider the best way of dealing with this new problem.

  Oxen were not the fastest of draught animals but they could pull heavier wagons over rougher ground and were generally much more reliable in poor conditions. It was just as well. Conditions here could have been worse, but not much.

  The rain was turning into wet snow in the mountains and the roads had great potholes covered with a layer of icy, wet mud.

  At dawn, the French made camp in the middle of a wide valley and surrounded themselves with a protective screen of heavy wagons. Packing twelve hundred men, several hundred oxen, two hundred horses and the same number of mules inside the perimeter was quite a feat, but a hundred wagons, nose to tail, enclosed a secure area easily two hundred yards across.

  They had succeeded in bringing a portable fortress with them, but had managed only a dozen miles during the hours of darkness. The march would become more difficult for them from now on. The mountains would not release them for another six or seven nights and then only if they were unmolested during their journey.

  The Hornets had no intention of leaving them unmolested but would have to work out how they were to stop them. Looking at the encampment from half a mile away, Welbeloved could see no way of doing significant damage to it, even with the superior range and accuracy of the Hornets’ weapons. He needed to be high enough to fire down over the barricade and the nearest hills were too far away for accuracy.

  He got C Company to trail their coats by trotting insolently close around the perimeter. The French cavalry escort must have heard tales of the strange and deadly tactics of the Hornets. They stayed secure behind their barriers and ignored them, even though the odds appeared to be two to one in their favour.

  Two platoons of Hornets were left to loiter in full view of the encampment to annoy the cavalry and make the point that they were ready to take advantage of the slightest error; the smallest chink in the enemy armour. It was, of course, possible that some of the escorting troops were members of the garrison that had been evicted rather ignominiously from São Martinho just a few weeks ago. They would have no desire to come out and face more humiliation.

  The rest of the Hornets went exploring, or rather going over familiar ground with new eyes. The French had planned this emergency expedition with great attention to detail. They were aware of what was an ideal site for one of their temporary fortresses and they had passed through this way times enough to have selected in advance the best camping places at suitable intervals to accommodate each full night’s march.

  Welbeloved tried to visualise their likely route in his mind’s eye and decide that they must surely be committed to the road they were following for the next two stages of their journey. After that, they would be able to opt for the longer route past São Martinho or the shorter way that would take them through the momentarily unmanned defences that Lord Wellington had built.

  At the end of tonight’s march they would have the choice of several sites equally as good as their present resting place, but the following night could offer only the one ideal stopover area that Welbeloved could recall.

  As they rode along, he gathered around him the two company commanders, Davison and Tonks and the two sergeants major, Thuner and Evans and picked their brains to support his own memories of the terrain. All agreed that little could be attempted until the third night, but that Thuner’s particular expertise in explosive devices ought to be allowed to enliven the end of the second stage.

  Welbeloved had been using explosives for many years. He had instructed insurgents and partisans in many countries about how to use them against the invading French. Always it had needed gunpowder and lengths of smouldering fuse; quick or slow match soaked in a solution of nitre.

  When he had come to Spain with his first band of marauders; even before the Spanish started to call them Los Avispónes Morenos, the Brown Hornets; Rifleman Trelawney had become fascinated with the destructive power of gunpowder. The Condesa at that time had volunteered to become his willing assistant.

  She had continued after his death and used her active imagination to invent more sophisticated ways of exploding her mines, grenades and petards.

  Sergeant Major Johan Thuner had proved himself an apt pupil in putting her theories into practice. He was now using a variation of one of her original mines; one in which she had used a captured pistol with its trigger tied to a long cord, to fire a charge of powder into a mine that brought down a cliff.

  Instead of a pistol he was now using a simple lock, but one that exploded a reliable percussion cap directly into the mine. He still used long lines of cord, but the cap produced instant detonation and not the rather hit and miss option of impregnated slow match.

  As dawn was getting close, the French were feeling tired but triumphant. They had jeered at the last two platoons of Hornets when they withdrew in the middle of yesterday afternoon. The night’s march had been unpleasant, more sleet than rain and lots and lots of mud.

  When moving, the oxen had just two speeds, slow and slower. It could only be borne because no horse could pull the same heavy weight as a reliable, but snail’s pace ox.

  The column had ignored two good bivouac areas and had travelled slightly farther than on the first night, but once clear of this wooded area, the fields opened out and there was a large form of arena where the wagons could fan out to form a defensive wall. They could all lie in their bivouacs and laugh at the helpless goddams.

  Dawn would be arriving in half an hour, but there was little indication that the sun existed at all. The sleet was now more snow than rain and the only way Thuner could be sure that the French were close was by listening to the frightful screeching of the solid wooden axles on the ox carts.

  He guessed that half the cavalry and infantry would precede the wagons and was happy enough to let them go by before pulling on the cord that sent a big old chestnut tree plunging across the road, its roots blown out of the ground.

  Most of the roots had been loosened beforehand and the charge buried below. Very likely the noise of the explosion would have been lost in the screeching of the axles, because that noise didn’t stop until each wagon had come up against the one immediately in front, until the whole convoy was jammed up tight behind the fallen tree.

  When he could hear the yells and curses clearly and the screeching had stopped, Thuner pulled firmly on his trigger cords. At measured intervals along the line, six buried kegs of powder hurled the packed rocks surrounding them into the closely packed wagons and oxen waiting at the head of the jam.

  The small band of Hornets left quietly. There was nothing they could do until daylight when they would be distant, but interested observers.

  CHAPTER 7

  By the middle of the afternoon, Vere had the whole camp on the move, back along the road that the Hornets had travelled over since capturing the chasseurs. He wanted to move west before running south towards the lines. Doing so would help them to avoid any French troops who might be camped due south of the Hanoverians.

  His other thought was that he had left the half naked prisoners locked in the village church and that they would undoubtedly have freed themselves by now. It was more than likely that they were trudging this way at this moment to try and get back to their friends.

  He had been too busy to worry about it earlier, but he felt that it would be a kindness to lead them south into captivity, rather than leave them to be a burden on their friends. He would even let them have their uniforms back if they agreed to go quietly.

  Two nights later they camped ten miles north of the lines, together with the French prisoners that they had swept up along the way, bivouacking in co
nsiderable discomfort in the middle of a Hanoverian army. Their uniform tunics and breeches had been returned to them and they had been fed. Perhaps it was this last concession that made most of them grudgingly willing to accept their lot, as they had been stumbling along with no trouble at all.

  In the morning, nine hundred men set out on the final march to bring them safely behind the lines. The squadron of Germans on their new horses was detached and rode on the flanks of the columns of marching men. Captain Katz, with Vere’s full approval, wanted his men to get used to their mounts and the somewhat different equipment that the chasseurs had provided.

  The marching infantry reflected the losses they had suffered at Buçaco, particularly among their officers. Their battalion was reduced to three companies, one of them with five platoons, the other two with four. The larger company marched in the van, with the prisoners immediately behind them and the other two companies following the prisoners.

  Lieutenant Weiss and his troop of Dragoon Hornets provided the vanguard and forward scouts. Three troops and four platoons of Hornets followed the baggage animals and wagons in anticipation that the French by now would have discovered that they had been tricked and would have had, perhaps a full day to react.

  Vere and Roffhack had discussed this possibility and had taken what precautions they could. They had agreed that the only way they could be intercepted was by cavalry and they had been most careful to keep the main body of the Hornets from the eyes of Colonel Grandjean and his deputy. The French would be expecting to have to deal with two hundred horsemen and four hundred infantry at the most and Grandjean would be aware that the infantry were down to less than ten cartridges per man.

  Half the morning had gone and the feeling was growing that they had a real chance of getting clear away. Almost the last of their food had been eaten before dawn and they were on the road at first light. Even the rain had eased up, with brisk winds blowing the clouds inland before they could shed much of their load.