Napoleonic Literature
Kincaid: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade
Chapter IV
Campaign of 1811 opens. Masséna's Retreat. Wretched Condition
of the Inhabitants on the Line of March. Affairs with the Enemy, near Pombal.
Description of a Bivouac. Action near Redinha. Destruction of Condacia
and Action near it. Burning of the Village of Illama, and Misery of its
Inhabitants. Action at Foz D'Aronce. Confidential Servants with Donkey-Assistants.
The campaign of 1811 commenced on the 6th of March
by the retreat of the enemy from Santarem.
Lord Wellington seemed to be perfectly acquainted
with their intentions, for he sent to apprize our piquets, the evening
before, that they were going off, and to desire that they should feel for
them occasionally during the night, and give the earliest information of
their having started. It was not, however, until daylight that we were
quite certain of their having gone, and our division was instantly put
in motion after them, passing through the town of Santarem, around which
their camp fires were still burning.
Santarem is finely situated and probably had been
a handsome town. I had never seen it in prosperity and it now looked like
a city of the plague, represented by empty dogs and empty houses; and,
but for the tolling of a convent bell by some unseen hand, its appearance
was altogether inhuman.
We halted for the night near Pernes. This little
town, and the few wretched inhabitants who had been induced to remain in
it under the faithless promises of the French generals, shewed fearful
signs of a late visit from a barbarous and merciless foe. Young women were
lying in their houses brutally violated — the streets were strewed with
broken furniture, intermixed with the putrid carcasses of murdered peasants,
mules, and donkeys, and every description of filth, that filled the air
with pestilential nausea. The few starved male inhabitants who were stalking
amid the wreck of their friends and property looked like so many skeletons
who had been permitted to leave their graves for the purpose of taking
vengeance on their oppressors, and the mangled body of every Frenchman
who was unfortunate or imprudent enough to stray from his column shewed
how religiously they performed their mission.
March 8th. — We overtook their rearguard this evening,
snugly put up for the night in a little village, the name of which I do
not recollect, but a couple of six pounders, supported by a few of our
rifles, induced them to extend their walk.
March 9th. — While moving along the road this morning,
we found a man who had deserted from us a short time before in the uniform
of a French dragoon, with his head laid open by one of our bullets. He
was still alive, exciting anything but sympathy among his former associates.
Towards the afternoon we found the enemy in force, on the plain in front
of Pombal, where we exchanged some shots.
March 11th. — They retired yesterday to the heights
behind Pombal, with their advanced posts occupying the town and moorish
castle, which our battalion, assisted by some Cácadores, attacked
this morning, and drove them from with considerable loss. Dispositions
were then made for a general attack on their position, but the other divisions
of our army did not arrive until too late in the evening. We bivouacked
for the night in a ploughed field under the castle, with our sentries within
pistol shot, while it rained in torrents.
As it is possible that some of my readers might
never have had the misfortune to experience the comforts of a bivouac,
and as the one which I am now in contains but a small quantity of sleep,
I shall devote a waking hour for their edification.
When a regiment arrives at its ground for the night
it is formed in columns of companies at full, half, or quarter distance,
according to the space which circumstances will permit it to occupy. The
officer commanding each company then receives his orders; and, after communicating
whatever may be necessary to the men, he desires them to "pile arms, and
make themselves comfortable for the night." Now, I pray thee, most sanguine
reader, suffer not thy fervid imagination to transport thee into elysian
fields at the pleasing exhortation conveyed in the concluding part of the
captain's address, but rest thee contentedly in the one where it is made,
which in all probability is a ploughed one, and that, too, in a state of
preparation to take a model of thy very beautiful person under the melting
influence of a shower of rain. The soldiers of each company have a hereditary
claim to the ground next to their arms, as have their officers to a wider
range on the same line, limited to the end of a bugle sound, if not by
a neighbouring corps, or one that is not neighbourly, for the nearer a
man is to his enemy, the nearer he likes to be to his friends. Suffice
it that each individual knows his place as well as if he had been born
on the estate, and takes immediate possession accordingly. In a ploughed
or a stubble field there is scarcely a choice of quarters; but, whenever
there is a sprinkling of trees it is always an object to secure a good
one, as it affords shelter from the sun by day and the dews by night, besides
being a sort of home or sign post for a group of officers, as denoting
the best place of entertainment; for they hang their spare clothing and
accoutrements among the branches, barricade themselves on each side with
their saddles, canteens, and portmanteaus, and, with a blazing fire in
their front, they indulge, according to their various humours, in a complete
state of gipsyfication.
There are several degrees of comfort to be reckoned
in a bivouac, two of which will suffice.
The first, and worst, is to arrive at the end of
a cold wet day, too dark to see your ground, and too near the enemy to
be permitted to unpack the knapsacks or to take off accoutrements; where,
unincumbered with baggage or eatables of any kind, you have the consolation
of knowing that things are now at their worst, and that any change must
be for the better. You keep yourself alive for a while in collecting material
to feed your fire with. You take a smell at your empty calibash, which
recalls to your remembrance the delicious flavour of its last drop of wine.
You curse your servant for not having contrived to send you something or
other from the baggage, (though you know that it was impossible). You then
damn the enemy for being so near you, though probably, as in the present
instance, it was you that came so near them. And, finally, you take a whiff
at the end of a cigar, if you have one, and keep grumbling through the
smoke, like distant thunder through a cloud, until you tumble into a most
warlike sleep.
The next, and most common one, is when you are not
required to look quite so sharp, and when the light baggage and provisions
come in at the heel of the regiment. If it is early in the day, the first
thing to be done is to make some tea, the most sovereign restorative for
jaded spirits. We then proceed to our various duties. The officers of each
company form a mess of themselves. One remains in camp to attend to the
duties of the regiment; a second attends to the mess; he goes to the regimental
butcher and bespeaks a portion of the only purchaseable commodities, hearts,
livers, and kidneys; and also to see whether he cannot do the commissary
out of a few extra biscuit, or a canteen of brandy; and the remainder are
gentlemen at large for the day. But while they go hunting among the neighbouring
regiments for news, and the neighbouring houses for curiosity, they have
always an eye to their mess, and omit no opportunity of adding to the general
stock.
Dinner hour, for fear of accidents, is always the
hour when dinner can be got ready; and the 14th section of the articles
of war is always most rigidly attended to by every good officer parading
himself round the camp-kettle at the time fixed, with his haversack in
his hand. A haversack on service is a sort of dumb waiter. The mess have
a good many things in common, but the contents of the haversack are exclusively
the property of its owner; and a well regulated one ought never to be without
the following furniture, unless when the perishable part is consumed, in
consequence of every other means of supply having failed, viz. a couple
of biscuits, a sausage, a little tea and sugar, a knife, fork, and spoon,
a tin cup, (which answers to the names of tea-cup, soup-plate, wine-glass,
and tumbler,) a pair of socks, a piece of soap, a tooth-brush, towel, and
comb, and half a dozen cigars.
After doing justice to the dinner, if we feel in
a humour for additional society, we transfer ourselves to some neighbouring
mess, taking our cups, and whatever we mean to drink, along with us, for
in those times there is nothing to be expected from our friends beyond
the pleasure of their conversation: and finally we retire to rest. To avoid
inconvenience by the tossing off of the bedclothes, each officer has a
blanket sewed up at the sides, like a sack, into which he scrambles, and,
with a green sod or a smooth stone for a pillow, composes himself to sleep;
and, under such a glorious reflecting canopy as the heavens, it would be
a subject of mortification to an astronomer to see the celerity with which
he tumbles into it. Habit gives endurance and fatigue is the best nightcap;
no matter that the veteran's countenance is alternately stormed with torrents
of rain, heavy dews and hoar-frosts; no matter that his ears are assailed
by a million mouths of chattering locusts, and by some villanous donkey,
who every half hour pitches a bray note, which, as a congregation of presbyterians
follow their clerk, is instantly taken up by every mule and donkey in the
army and sent echoing from regiment to regiment, over hill and valley,
until it dies away in the distance; no matter that the scorpion is lurking
beneath his pillow, the snake winding his slimy way by his side, and the
lizard galloping over his face, wiping his eyes with its long cold tail.
All are unheeded until the warning voice of the
brazen instrument sounds to arms. Strange it is that the ear which is impervious
to what would disturb the rest of the world besides should alone be alive
to one, and that, too, a sound which is likely to sooth the sleep of the
citizens, or at most, to set them dreaming of their loves. But so it is:
the first note of the melodious bugle places the soldier on his legs like
lightning; when, muttering a few curses at the unseasonableness of the
hour, he plants himself on his alarm post, without knowing or caring about
the cause.
Such is a bivouac; and our sleep-breaker having
just sounded, the reader will find what occurred by reading on.
March 12th. — We stood to our arms before daylight.
Finding that the enemy had quitted the position in our front, we proceeded
to follow them and had not gone far before we heard the usual morning's
salutation of a couple of shots between their rear and our advanced guard.
On driving in their outposts, we found their whole army drawn out on the
plain, near Redinha, and instantly quarrelled with them on a large scale.
As everybody has read Waverley and the Scottish
Chiefs and knows that one battle is just like another, inasmuch as they
always conclude by one or both sides running away; and as it is nothing
to me what this or t'other regiment did, nor do I care three buttons what
this or t'other person thinks he did, I shall limit all my descriptions
to such events as immediately concerned the important personage most interested
in this history.
Be it known then that I was one of a crowd of skirmishers
who were enabling the French ones to carry the news of their own defeat
through a thick wood at an infantry canter when I found myself all at once
within a few yards of one of their regiments in line, which opened such
a fire that had I not, rifleman-like, taken instant advantage of the cover
of a good fir tree, my name would have unquestionably been transmitted
to posterity by that night's gazette. And, however opposed it may be to
the usual system of drill, I will maintain, from that day's experience,
that the cleverest method of teaching a recruit to stand at attention is
to place him behind a tree and fire balls at him; as, had our late worthy
disciplinarian, Sir David Dundas himself, been looking on, I think that
even he must have admitted that he never saw anyone stand so fiercely upright
as I did behind mine, while the balls were rapping into it as fast as if
a fellow had been hammering a nail on the opposite side, not to mention
the numbers that were whistling past, within the eighth of an inch of every
part of my body, both before and behind, particularly in the vicinity of
my nose, for which the upper part of the tree could barely afford protection.
This was a last and a desperate stand made by their
rear-guard for their own safety immediately above the town, as their sole
chance of escape depended upon their being able to hold the post until
the only bridge across the river was clear of the other fugitives. But
they could not hold it long enough; for, while we were undergoing a temporary
sort of purgatory in their front, our comrades went working round their
flanks, which quickly sent them flying, with us intermixed, at full cry
down the streets.
Whether in love or war I have always considered
that the pursuer has a decided advantage over the pursued. In the first
he may gain and cannot lose; but in the latter, when one sees his enemy
at full speed before him, one has such a peculiar conscious sort of feeling
that he is on the right side, that I would not exchange places for any
consideration.
When we reached the bridge the scene became exceedingly
interesting, for it was choked up by the fugitives who were, as usual,
impeding each other's progress, and we did not find that the application
of our swords to those nearest to us tended at all towards lessening their
disorder, for it induced about a hundred of them to rush into an adjoining
house for shelter, but that was getting regularly out of the frying-pan
into the fire, for the house happened to be really in flames and too hot
to hold them, so that the same hundred were quickly seen unkennelling again,
half-cooked, into the very jaws of their consumers.
John Bull, however, is not a bloodthirsty person,
so that those who could not better themselves had only to submit to a simple
transfer of personal property to ensure his protection. We consequently
made many prisoners at the bridge and followed their army about a league
beyond it, keeping up a flying fight until dark.
Just as Mr Simmons and myself had crossed the river
and were talking over the events of the day, not a yard asunder, there
was a Portuguese soldier in the act of passing between us when a cannon-ball
plunged into his belly — his head doubled down to his feet, and he stood
for a moment in that posture before he rolled over a lifeless lump.
March 13th. — Arrived on the hill above Condacia
in time to see that handsome little town in flames. Every species of barbarity
continued to mark the enemy's retreating steps.
They burnt every town or village through which they
passed, and if we entered a church which, by accident, had been spared,
it was to see the murdered bodies of the peasantry on the altar.
While Lord Wellington, with his staff, was on a
hill a little in front of us, waiting the result of a flank movement which
he had directed, some of the enemy's sharpshooters stole, unperceived,
very near to him and began firing, but fortunately without effect. We immediately
detached a few of ours to meet them, but the others ran off on their approach.
We lay by our arms until towards evening, when the
enemy withdrew a short distance behind Condacia, and we closed up to them.
There was a continued popping between the advanced posts all night.
March 14th. — Finding at daylight that the enemy
still continued to hold the strong ground before us, some divisions of
the army were sent to turn their flanks, while ours attacked them in front.
We drove them from one stronghold to another, over
a large track of very difficult country, mountainous and rocky, and thickly
intersected with stone walls, and were involved in one continued hard skirmish
from daylight until dark. This was the most harassing day's fighting that
I ever experienced.
Daylight left the two armies looking at each other,
near the village of Illama. The smoking roofs of the houses showed that
the French had just quitted and, as usual, set fire to it, when the company
to which I belonged was ordered on piquet there for the night. After posting
our sentries, my brother-officer and myself had the curiosity to look into
a house, and were shocked to find in it a mother and her child dead, and
the father, with three more, living, but so much reduced by famine as to
be unable to remove themselves from the flames. We carried them into the
open air, and offered the old man our few remaining crumbs of biscuit,
but he told us that he was too far gone to benefit by them, and begged
that we would give them to his children. We lost no time in examining such
of the other houses as were yet safe to enter, and rescued many more individuals
from one horrible death, probably to reserve them for another equally so,
and more lingering, as we had nothing to give them, and marched at daylight
the following morning.
Our post that night was one of terrific grandeur.
The hills behind were in a blaze of light with the British camp-fires,
as were those in our front with the French ones. Both hills were abrupt
and lofty, not above eight hundred yards asunder, and we were in the burning
village in the valley between. The roofs of houses every instant falling
in, and the sparks and flames ascending to the clouds. The streets were
strewed with the dying and the dead, — some had been murdered and some
killed in action, which, together with the half-famished wretches whom
we had saved from burning, contributed in making it a scene which was well
calculated to shake a stout heart, as was proved in the instance of one
of our sentries, a well known "devil-may-care" sort of fellow. I know not
what appearances the burning rafters might have reflected on the neighbouring
trees at the time, but he had not been long on his post before he came
running into the piquet, and swore, by all the saints in the calendar,
that he saw six dead Frenchmen advancing upon him with hatchets over their
shoulders!
We found by the buttons on the coats of some of
the fallen foe that we had this day been opposed to the French ninety-fifth
regiment, (the same number as we were then,) and I cut off several of them,
which I preserved as trophies.
March 15th. — We overtook the enemy a little before
dark this afternoon. They were drawn up behind the Ceira, at Foz D'Aronce,
with their rearguard, under Marshal Ney, imprudently posted on our side
of the river, a circumstance which Lord Wellington took immediate advantage
of; and, by a furious attack dislodged them in such confusion that they
blew up the bridge before half of their own people had time to get over.
Those who were thereby left behind, not choosing to put themselves to the
pain of being shot, took to the river, which received them so hospitably
that few of them ever quitted it. Their loss, on this occasion, must have
been very great, and we understood at the time that Ney had been sent to
France in disgrace in consequence of it.
About the middle of the action I observed some inexperienced
light troops rushing up a deep roadway to certain destruction, and ran
to warn them out of it, but I only arrived in time to partake the reward
of their indiscretion, for I was instantly struck with a musket-ball above
the left ear, which deposited me, at full length, in the mud.
I know not how long I lay insensible, but, on recovering,
my first feeling was for my head, to ascertain if any part of it was still
standing, for it appeared to me as if nothing remained above the mouth;
but, after repeated applications of all my fingers and thumbs to the doubtful
parts, I at length proved to myself satisfactorily that it had rather increased
than diminished by the concussion; and, jumping on my legs, and hearing,
by the whistling of the balls from both sides, that the rascals who had
got me into the scrape had been driven back and left me there, I snatched
my cap, which had saved my life, and which had been spun off my head to
the distance of ten or twelve yards, and joined them a short distance in
the rear, when one of them, a soldier of the sixtieth, came and told me
that an officer of ours had been killed a short time before, pointing to
the spot where I myself had fallen, and that he had tried to take his jacket
off, but that the advance of the enemy had prevented him. I told him that
I was the one that had been killed, and that I was deucedly obliged to
him for his kind intentions, while I felt still more so to the enemy for
their timely advance, otherwise I have no doubt but my friend would have
taken a fancy to my trousers also, for I found that he had absolutely unbuttoned
my jacket.
There is nothing so gratifying to frail mortality
as a good dinner when most wanted and least expected. It was perfectly
dark before the action finished, but, on going to take advantage of the
fires which the enemy had evacuated, we found their soup-kettles in full
operation, and every man's mess of biscuit lying beside them in stockings,
as was the French mode of carrying them; and it is needless to say how
unceremoniously we proceeded to do the honours of the feast. It ever after
became a saying among the soldiers whenever they were on short allowance,
"Well, d - n my eyes, we must either fall in with the French or the commissary
today, I don't care which."
As our baggage was always in the rear on occasions
of this kind, the officers of each company had a Portuguese boy in charge
of a donkey, on whom their little comforts depended. He carried our boat-cloaks
and blankets, was provided with a small pig-skin for wine, a canteen for
spirits, a small quantity of tea and sugar, a goat tied to the donkey,
and two or three dollars in his pocket for the purchase of bread, butter,
or any other luxury which good fortune might throw in his way in the course
of the day's march. We were never very scrupulous in exacting information
regarding the source of his supplies; so that he had nothing to dread from
our wrath, unless he had the misfortune to make his appearance empty-handed.
They were singularly faithful and intelligent in making their way to us
every evening, under the most difficult circumstances. This was the only
night during Masséna's retreat in which ours failed to find us;
and, wandering the greater part of the night in the intricate maze of camp-fires,
it appeared that he slept, after all, among some dragoons within twenty
yards of us.
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