An Act Of Courage h-7 Read online

  An Act Of Courage

  ( Hervey - 7 )

  Allan Mallinson

  Badajoz: Christmas 1826 Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons is a prisoner of the Spanish, incarcerated in the infamous fortress of Badajoz. As he plans his escape, his thoughts return to the year 1812 when he was a cornet in Wellington's Peninsular Army. He and the Sixth had survived Corunna to endure three more years of brutal fighting that would culminate in one of the most vital and vicious confrontations of the campaign - the siege of Badajoz. While Hervey paces his prison cell, and re-lives the bloodshed of battles past, friends from expected quarters rush to his aid ...

  'As good on the details of the workings of a cavalry regiment in 1820 as ever Patrick O'Brian was on the workings of an 1820 warship.' Spectator

  AN ACT OF COURAGE

  ALLAN MALLINSON

  To

  Duggie

  Lieutenant-Colonel C. R. D. Gray

  Skinner’s Horse

  1909–2004

  The Ultimate Cavalryman

  Also by Allan Mallinson

  A CLOSE RUN THING

  THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS*

  A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR

  A CALL TO ARMS

  THE SABRE’S EDGE

  RUMOURS OF WAR

  *Published outside the UK under the title HONORABLE COMPANY

  FOREWORD

  The cuts in the British infantry announced last year will change the face of soldiering for ever. Regiments whose names the Duke of Wellington would have seen each day in the ‘morning states’ during the long years of the Peninsular War and Waterloo will disappear – the Royal Scots, Green Howards, Cheshires, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Black Watch, to name but a few. No longer will a man – commissioned or enlisted – join a tight-knit band of six hundred brothers, his county regiment, and stay with them throughout his service as they move as a body from post to post. Instead an infantryman will go from one battalion to another within a large ‘regional’ unit – what is known as ‘trickle posting’. It is, of course, a judgement as to what effect these cuts will have – how continuing commitments and new contingencies will be met by fewer battalions – and what effect the enormous change in regimental organization will have on recruiting, retention and cohesion, the three areas in which the county regiments have been so strong. However, from the long perspective of military history – which is the perspective of my tales – it appears there is but one unvarying lesson of war: there is never enough infantry. Vide Iraq.

  This, I believe, is the first lesson of war because the man himself is the first weapon of war – all too easily forgotten in an age of beguiling and expensive technology. The man and the regiment are inextricably linked: trust and cohesion in battle come from soldiers living and training together, long term, and acquiring a sense that they are part of something bigger than just the collection of individuals who answer the roll call on a particular day. It was never planned thus. Ironically, the regimental system, which the historian Sir John Keegan has called ‘an accidental act of genius’, grew out of the eighteenth century’s penny-pinching arrangements for raising more troops.

  In the period of which I write, the danger in not keeping infantrymen together in the battalions in which they train is well illustrated by a letter from one of the Duke of Wellington’s generals after the Battle of Talavera (where, in An Act of Courage, we shall find Matthew Hervey in the thick of things once more). Complaining of the poor performance of a ‘detachment battalion’, one in which the men were cobbled together from half a dozen different regiments, the general observes, ‘They have no esprit de corps for their interior economy among them, though they will fight. They are careless of all else, and the officers do not look to their temporary field-officers and superiors under whom they are placed, as in an established regiment. I see much of their indiscipline.’

  So the new ‘mobility’ of infantrymen, as they change from one battalion to another, was not unknown in Wellington’s day. In Wellington’s army, too, the officers – both infantry and cavalry – would often move from one regiment to another as vacancies occurred, since that was what promotion by purchase required. The duke himself served in half a dozen regiments on his way to becoming lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot, which was renamed The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in his honour (and which is now also to be disbanded).

  However, an examination of the annual Army Lists during the years of the Peninsular War (1808–1814), which record the name and seniority of every officer, shows a high degree of stability. Fortunately for the cohesion of the fighting battalions, officers seemed happy enough to stay with their regiments, accepting that promotion would be slow or might not come at all. Perhaps this was because many officers had little real appetite for promotion: there was, after all, no great financial advantage to it (indeed, it usually required capital outlay). Perhaps they did not see the army as a ‘career’, and therefore did not have a strong commitment to the profession of arms, content instead to be in agreeable, gentlemanlike company, doing their bit to defeat Bonaparte until their share of the family fortune permitted them to retire to an equally agreeable sporting life as a country gentleman. As a rule they brought neither great intellect nor address to the regiment. But they did bring absolute physical courage. As many an old soldier would say later, ‘The NCOs showed us how to fight, and the officers how to die.’

  There were, of course, exceptions to the ‘brave amateur’ rule. There were aristocrats who regarded generalship as a natural extension of their rank in life, and who applied themselves to it as diligently and effectively as they would to any undertaking touching on their fortune and honour. The Duke of Wellington is the pre-eminent exemplar. There were others of humbler birth driven – as today – by some intense professional instinct or hunger for promotion. Without money or influence, theirs was a precarious and frequently disappointing quest, especially during the long period of retrenchment after the Napoleonic Wars. Matthew Hervey is one such man, and in this latest volume we see him struggling with his ghosts and the desire for advancement – and also with the consequences of being an ambitious, capable, but relatively junior officer in a rapidly atrophying organization.

  One may speculate on what might have become of Hervey, and others like him, had not Bonaparte occasioned the expansion of His Majesty’s land forces and the Royal Navy in the first place. The young Master Hervey was in the classical remove at Shrewsbury when His Majesty’s government saw the opportunity to carry the war to the French on the Continent instead of just at sea and in the colonies. He would otherwise perhaps have followed his brother to Oxford (where their father had been), and taken Holy Orders as they had. Would he have enjoyed making sermons? Who knows: one of Hervey’s contemporaries in the Peninsula, Ensign George Gleig, who left Oxford to join the 85th (Buckinghamshire Volunteers), was afterwards ordained and some years later became chaplain-general. But, to begin with at least, Hervey, like Gleig, was one of those of whom Dr Johnson wrote: ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for never having been to sea nor having been a soldier.’

  And Hervey is nothing if not a thinking man – a thinking soldier. But he is also a son of the country parsonage, and alumnus of the old, if provincial, public school. His is a Tory view of history, and an instinctive Tory perspective of the future. Life does not leave him untouched, however; quite the opposite. Mine are tales of regimental soldiering, but the exposure of this moral, principled, if somewhat naïve, son of the minor English gentry to the reality of war, life and the march of time is the theme of this series.

  All my arrangements preparatory to the attack on Badajoz are in train, and I believe are getting on well; some of the troops have marched for the Alentejo, and others will follow soon; and
I intend to go myself the last, as I know that my removal from one part of the country to the other will be the signal for the enemy that the part to which I am going is to be the scene of active operations . . . Pray let us have plenty of horses for cavalry and artillery, and the reinforcements for our infantry, as early as you can. If we should succeed at Badajoz, I propose to push our success early in the year as far as I can.

  Viscount Wellington of Talavera to the Prime Minister,

  19 February 1812

  CHAPTER ONE

  HONOURED IN THE BREACH

  Badajoz, 10 p.m., 6 April 1812

  ‘Tout va bien!’

  The forlorn hope, clambering in pitch darkness over fallen masonry in the dry ditch, could hear the sentries calling to each other on the walls above.

  Then a shot rang out.

  ‘Alarme! Alarme!’

  A single shot: the game was up. Some movement had betrayed them, perhaps, or the clank of a scabbard – and an alert sentry.

  ‘Aux armes!’

  The storming party had known it would come, but a few minutes more and they could have gained the top of the rubble.

  A blazing carcass arched over the ramparts, lighting up the breach as if full moon – seconds only, but enough to give the French their mark. They opened a furious musketry. Artillery soon followed. Lead and grape cut down the struggling infantry before a man could reach the razor-sharp blades of the chevaux de frise, which the defenders had dragged to the rupture when the siege guns ceased firing at last light.

  Cornet Matthew Hervey, standing dismounted with the rest of His Majesty’s 6th Light Dragoons on the high ground half a mile east of the great border fortress of Badajoz, took a firmer hold on Jessye’s reins. It had been four years to the day since he had taken an outside seat on the Red Rover for the Sixth’s depot at Canterbury. Two weeks before that, he had sat in the upper remove of Shrewsbury School, the master still hopeful that Hervey would follow his brother to Oxford and thence take Holy Orders, as their father before them. But the army had claimed him. It had from his earliest days; above all, the cavalry. In large measure it was Daniel Coates’s doing, ‘the shepherd of Salisbury Plain’, sometime trumpeter to General Tarleton and adopted master-at-arms and rough-rider to the younger son of the Horningsham parsonage. Thus armed with a cradle-knowledge of his ‘profession’, the seventeen-year-old Cornet Hervey had sailed with the Sixth to Portugal in the summer of 1808 – only to limp home with them via Corunna six months later.

  What a learning that had been. When the Sixth went back to Portugal, but three months after Corunna, he felt himself the complete troop-officer. He feared nothing, not the enemy, nor the Sixth’s own dragoons, nor his own fitness for the rank. And the three years of advance and withdrawal which had followed – offensive and defensive, siege and counter-siege – had confirmed him in his own estimation. He had remained a cornet, however, for although there had been deaths among the lieutenants, the consequent free promotions had not reached down as far as him (and he could not afford to buy his promotion in another regiment even if he had wanted to). They no longer sported in the mess with the old toast, ‘To a short war, and a bloody one!’

  There would be bloody war tonight; that was certain. He had seen sieges enough in those three years to know that this one at Badajoz would be a sight harder than the others. He knew how strong were the defences. Badajoz was the guardian of the road to Madrid; when it had been in allied hands it had been a sure guardian of the road to Lisbon. Three summers ago, the Sixth, with the rest of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army, had marched into Badajoz after the bruising victory at Talavera, and there they had stayed a full three months. And then, forced to abandon the fortress because the Spanish could not, or would not, support them, they had crossed into Portugal. A year of covering had followed, like the wary boxer: Lord Wellington, as by this time Sir Arthur Wellesley had become, could do little more than land the occasional blow – but stinging blows, so that the French began to weaken. However, like the wounded pug fighting on with all the instinct of years at the booth, it was a slow weakening, and never so certain that Wellington dare drop his guard or overreach himself. So that, eventually, every man in the army knew there would be no knockout blow, just a fight until the French at last quit the country, and while the other allies forced the same on France’s eastern borders.

  But this siege was not their first attempt to dislodge the French from the great guardian of the Madrid high road: twice, the year before, Badajoz had held out against Wellington’s men. And in the depths of a freezing January just past, Ciudad Rodrigo, a fortress almost as strong, had claimed a thousand dead and wounded before the Union flag was hoisted above its castle. No, Badajoz would not fall tonight without a heavy butcher’s bill. The Sixth would not pay, of course. There was no job for the cavalry on a night like this. Tonight it was an affair of the bayonet.

  Hervey knew what the men with the bayonets were saying, too: if the defenders of Ciudad Rodrigo had been put to the sword, in the old way, the French here at Badajoz would not be resisting, for Wellington’s engineers and gunners had made a practicable breach. The mood in the ranks of red was not in favour of quarter; certainly not if the French continued to put up a fight. Those were the ‘rules of war’.

  But above all Hervey feared for the Spanish, the civil population of the city. He did not suppose the people of Badajoz were any more or less disposed to the French than they were elsewhere. True, they had had the French in their town for a year and more, but that did not make them afrancesado. Yet somehow that was what the men with the bayonets thought.

  He started. A great fiery flash lit the Trinidad bastion, and a second later came a terrible roar. Jessye squealed. Hervey put his left hand to her muzzle and shortened the reins as he peered at the distant fortress walls. There was smoke now to mix with the mist coming off the Guadiana river. He shivered. Poor infantry: there was no glory in this. Weeks of sodden cold in the trenches, then consigned to oblivion in the dark of the night. Some of them would get through the breach, perhaps, if fortune favoured them and their blood boiled hot enough. And then what?

  ‘Poor bastards, sir!’

  ‘Yes, Serjeant Armstrong. Poor bastards.’

  At that range, in the pitch darkness, they did not actually see the limbs and the guts scattered like ash from a volcano for a hundred yards about the breach, but they knew well enough what a mine did. The defenders had lost no time, evidently, counter-tunnelling under the breach.

  ‘By God, sir, them French is putting up a fight and a half,’ said Armstrong, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I wish I were down there!’

  That one mine might mean another was of no consequence to either of them.

  ‘So do I, Serjeant Armstrong; so do I.’

  The whole front was now musketry. Hervey had no idea what were the plans for the assault – how many breaches or escalades, or where – but he had watched the assaulting divisions assembling late that afternoon: four of them, no small affair. If they all succeeded in breaking into the fortress there would be a desperate fight inside unless the French struck their colours at once. He did not see how the defenders could make any sortie now, with so many troops at the walls, yet that was why the Sixth and the other regiments of cavalry were here. Only three weeks ago the French had poured out and driven off the working parties in the parallels below where they stood now. Humiliating it had been. They had filled in the trenches and carried off the picks and shovels (the French commander had offered a bounty for every entrenching tool). But there was no chance of that tonight; not with musketry and cannonading so intense.

  ‘Hot work for our friends, Hervey.’ The voice was assured, the glow of the cigar familiar and comfortable.

  ‘Indeed, Sir Edward. I was just thinking that our chances of action seem small.’

  Serjeant Armstrong retired a respectful distance.

  Captain Sir Edward Lankester lowered his voice but a fraction. ‘You imagine the real reason we are posted thus, He
rvey?’

  ‘I imagine as we are ordered, Sir Edward. I cannot suppose our arms will be needed in the breaches.’

  Sir Edward kept silent for a moment. ‘What do you imagine will happen when the army is through the breaches?’

  Hervey sighed: cruel necessity. ‘I should not wish to be a Frenchman.’

  ‘Ay. You cannot contest a practicable breach and then expect quarter. There’ll be precious little of it. It was not that of which I was minded, though. What of the Spanish?’

  Hervey grimaced. When Ciudad Rodrigo had fallen, it had been three hours and more before the officers got their men back in hand. The riot and destruction had been prodigious, just as the looting and despoiling on the retreat to Corunna – and a good many Spaniards abused along the way.

  They stood silent the while, trying to make out the progress of the storming from the powder flashes, the rattle of small arms and the explosive roar of the field pieces. There seemed a deal too much of all three to suggest the breaches and escalades were being carried – not with the bayonet, at any rate. There should have been a great display of fireworks and then a full-throated roar as the storming parties went to it with cold steel – and a feu de joie, perhaps, as they took the place. But a fire-fight like this spelled trouble. It meant the infantry could not gain a footing on the walls. And they couldn’t keep up an assault for ever: some time soon they would be exhausted, all forward momentum lost. Then the defenders would have carried the day, again – or, rather, the night.

  That was how it had been the last time at Badajoz, and the first time too, by all accounts. Not that he had seen for himself any of it; only heard the course of things, and then what the survivors had told them in the dejected days that followed. A man did not like to have his friends cut down, but if the result was victory he could bear it. To be thrown off the walls of Badajoz and taunted by the French was not to be borne. The men with the bayonets were certain of one thing: the French could not have defied them if the Spaniards had not been helping them. A fortress standing against two assaults by Nosey’s men – what else could be the explanation?