THE BUGLE-BOY OF BADAJOZ.
'Mother! mother! come out of the cold ground; come to your little José, who is so lonely now!' wailed a boy stretched on his mother's grave, while wetting with his tears the flowers that had been laid there, and the green turf, into which he dug his little hands in the wildness of his great grief.
It was in the cemetery of the Penha Convent at Cintra, and when ravaged Portugal lay wasted and bleeding under the feet of the French army, led by Marshal Junot, the Duc d'Abrantes, to Lisbon, in 1808, a period that seems long ago now, yet was fresh enough in the memory of our fathers.
It was on a glorious evening in autumn, and the hill of Cintra, the base of which is clothed with wood, but which terminates in loose crags and splintered pinnacles, was bathed in warm light, while every fissure was covered with amaryllis and aglow with crimson geranium, and giant evergreen oaks and cork-trees were intertwined with vines, all adding to the beauty of the scene.
On one hand towered up the hill with the Penha Convent, on the other were the ruins of a Moorish castle; but the sunshine and the scenery were lost on the orphan boy. He saw only his mother's grave, and all the rest of the world seemed dark to him indeed.
'Look up, my boy,' said a voice, as a hand was kindly laid on his neck, and, rising from the turf, he found himself face to face with an officer of Cazadores, or Portuguese Light Infantry. He was a handsome and pleasant-looking man, clad in green uniform faced with scarlet, and wearing silver epaulettes. 'Who lies here that you weep for?' he asked.
'My mother,' replied the boy, in a tone of infinite tenderness.
'And your father?'
'Was De Castro, the guerilla chief, whom the French shot at the gate of the Torre Vilha. You have heard, perhaps?'
'Yes; he was taken prisoner in Lisbon; a brave fellow—I knew him well,' replied the officer, with kindling eyes and lowering brow.
'My mother never held up her head afterwards—and—and three days ago she left me—and—and they brought her here,' said the boy, with a fresh fit of heavy weeping, as he pressed his knuckles into his inflamed eyes.
In tatters, and dusky in complexion, yet rich in colour, like the beggar-boys of Murillo's famous picture in the Dulwich Gallery, he was a handsome little fellow, with a clear olive skin, sparkling eyes of the deepest hazel, and thick, wavy black hair.
'Have you no brother or sister?' asked the officer, patting his uncovered head, for poor José was without hat or cap.
'None now. I had a sister once.'
'And she?'
'Was carried off by the French voltigeurs, and was never seen again. Poor Theresa!' said the boy, in a gasping voice.
'And have you no home, my little fellow?'
'None, but the church porch.'
'Then come with me, and I will find you another.'
'Where, senhor?'
'Under the colours of His Majesty Pedro the Third.'
The boy's face lighted up. It was too soon for him to despair yet; he had youth and hope, 'youth, with which the linen folds seem robes of purple, the chaplet of cowslips becomes a monarch's crown, and the wooden bench is as an ivory throne of empire.'
So little José Francisco de Castro, for such was his name, gave his hand in confidence to Captain Dom Pedro de Lobiera, and became a bugle-boy in the Seventh Regiment of Cazadores, among the Portuguese troops under the gallant Marshal Beresford, and destined to co-operate more immediately with that division of the British army which, led by Lieutenant-General Sir John Hope, took possession of Lisbon in 1808.
A curious combination of wrath and exultation made José's heart beat tumultuously on the day he first assumed his uniform, and he slung with a green cord over his shoulder the bugle with which he was to summon his comrades.
He had an admirable ear for music, and soon mastered all the many bugle-calls requisite for the manœuvres of light troops in the field, and by his coolness and bravery, while yet in his teens, became a prime favourite with his captain, with his colonel, the Viscount de Sa (whose 'orderly bugler' he became), and with the whole of the Seventh Cazadores he became a species of regimental pet.
When the battle of Salamanca was won by Wellington in the glorious summer of 1812, when we attacked the Duc de Ragusa, and when Park's Portuguese column was foiled in the first attempt to storm the Arapiles, two steep, rugged, and solitary hills that overlook the plain, it was José's bugle sounding the 'rally' amid the hottest of the fire that caused the southern hill to be re-won; and when Marshal Beresford was unhorsed and wounded in the leg, while charging at the head of the 11th Light Dragoons, and again while leading a Portuguese brigade, it was 'José de Castro, a bugle-boy of the Seventh Cazadores,' that helped him to remount, as the Portuguiz Telegrafo of that week records.
On the plains of Talavera de la Reyna, at the heights of Busaco, and by the green hill of Albuera, when the Anglo-Portuguese army fought Soult—that memorable hill, by whose slope, at the close of the terrible day, the men of our old 'Die Hards' of the 57th were seen lying in two distinct ranks, dead but victorious—the Seventh Cazadores, when wavering under the dreadful fire of the French infantry, and menaced by the heavy cavalry of Latour-Maubourg, were rallied in square by the bugle of José de Castro.
He was 'ever foremost in the path of danger,' says the Jornal de Commercio of Lisbon; 'and the notes of his bugle were heard in many of the desperate onsets and bayonet charges of those well-fought fields. In all these actions he did his duty; but his name ought ever to be remembered for a deed of valour, for which, at the time, he gained well-merited applause, and which was long afterwards passed from mouth to mouth whenever the terrible siege of Badajoz was mentioned.'
It is to the third siege of the city that the paper refers.
'Give me your hand, José,' said the Viscount de Sa on one occasion. 'What a boy you are! You beat the trumpeter who blew two trumpets at once at the siege of Argos.'
As yet he seemed to have a charmed life; no ball had ever touched him. He was a good, devout, and very grave boy, for, as Captain de Lobiera said, he believed 'that the spirit of his dead mother accompanied him wherever he went.'
It was on the 6th of March, 1812, that the army of Wellington broke up from its cantonments, and, ten days after, crossed the Guadiana, and three divisions, under Beresford and Picton, at once invested Badajoz, then garrisoned by five thousand men under Generals Phillipon and Vaillant, whose tenacious resistance caused some uneasiness to the British leader, as a defeat under its walls might have seriously disarranged all his plans for the future.
Before the Seventh Cazadores entered the trenches they had halted a few miles from Badajoz, after a long and harassing day's march. The rain fell in torrents that night. Amid the misty gloom, in the distance, the guns of the beleaguered city were seen to flash redly out upon the night, and weird was the glare of the port fires as they sputtered on the gusty wind.
All that comfortless night, José, like the rest of his comrades, spent the weary hours in the open air. He placed his canteen on the ground, put his knapsack above it, and, thus improvising a seat, strove to sleep, with his greatcoat and blanket spread over his shoulders for warmth. And when the chill gray dawn came, he was so stiff that, at first, he could scarcely place the cold mouth of the bugle to his lips.
'Now, my men—la générale!' cried the Viscount de Sa, as he leaped on his horse, and the buglers, at the head of whom stood little José de Castro, poured clearly and melodiously on the morning wind, 'the générale,' that old warning for the march—a warning long since disused in the British service, where it was well known once.
Then the Cazadores took the road for Badajoz, and that night were there in the trenches.
It is recorded of José that before the Cazadores marched that morning he and a comrade bugler, Diaz of Belem, gave up the little pay they possessed to repair the loss of a poor woman whose hen-roost had been pillaged of its inmates in the night.
The early weeks of 1812 were cold and rainy at Badajoz, and the howling tempests of wind often concealed at night the noise of the shovels and pickaxes, as the troops broke ground, within a hundred and sixty yards of Fort Picurina, and pushed forward the trenches, till they achieved an opening four thousand feet long—a work of five days' duration, under a dreadful shower of shot and shell.
Our artillery had succeeded in making a practicable breach, by which the columns of assault might enter whenever the order to advance was given; but the position of the enemy was strong by nature, and made more so by art. Enormous beams of timber, loaded shell, huge stones, hand grenades, cold shot, all to be launched from the hand, with relays of ready-loaded muskets, were there, for those who were to keep the breaches; in these, too, were hundreds of live bombs and sunken powder-barrels, ready to blow an assaulting force to pieces; and it became evident that the chances of that force proving successful were small, unless some of the unforeseen accidents of war turned the tide in their favour.
This point, say the Portuguese, it was the good fortune of José de Castro to achieve. For the actual truth of the episode which won him the name of 'The Bugle Boy of Badajoz,' we do not vouch. There is not a word of it in Napier, or in the despatches of the Duke of Wellington; but yet it was universally believed in the army of Marshal Beresford.
It is related in history that when the final, and, to so many, fatal, night of the 6th of April came—that awful night of horror and of triumph when Badajoz was won—when more than two thousand of our officers and men perished in the breaches alone, and when the heart of the 'Iron Duke' gave way to a passionate burst of grief for the slaughter of his gallant soldiers—on that night, we say, the 'unforeseen accident,' recorded by history, was a feint attack unexpectedly becoming a real one; but the Portuguese have it that José de Castro, being of an inquiring turn of mind, and having, during his service, had many opportunities of hearing the French bugle-calls, had learned them all to perfection, and now resolved to turn his knowledge thereof to good account.
After a lighted carcase, composed of the direst combustibles, and of giant size, had been flung blazing from the walls by the French, compelling the assault to be anticipated by half-an-hour, when the stormers neared the great breach, José and his comrade, Diaz of Belem, advanced with the rest of the Cazadores.
When Diaz was in the act of taking some brandy from his canteen, a sixteen-pound shot took off his head. Yet, bugle in hand, José kept on, resolved to put in practice the scheme he had formed, and with which he had acquainted his colonel, the Viscount de Sa, and his captain, De Lobiera.
As leaves are swept before a tempest, the stormers came sweeping up the rough débris of the breach covered with dead and wounded men, encumbered by these at every step, shells bursting, shot and grenades falling among them. Their shouts were terrible; the yells of the French more terrible still! Up, up they went, till they found the perilous gap was crossed by a glittering, dreadful, and impassable chevaux-de-frise, composed of sword-blades, keenly edged and sharply pointed, fixed in ponderous beams, chained together, and strongly wedged in the shot-riven ruins. Beyond it were masses of the French pouring in their deadly fire, sweeping the gap with sheets of lead as the wind sweeps a tunnel.
Under the chevaux-de-frise the gallant José contrived to creep unseen, and, getting beyond it, to conceal himself among a heap of dead. On again crept, his dark blue uniform, splashed with blood clay, enabling him to pass unnoticed among the French, till he reached an angle of the ramparts.
Then he put his bugle to his lips and blew loudly and clearly, again and again, above the awful din of the assault, the French recall!
On this the French gave way, fell back, and eventually fled across the river into Fort San Christoval, where, next day, they surrendered as prisoners of war to Lord Fitzroy Somerset, the future Lord Raglan of Crimean fame.
The action of José de Castro, say the Portuguese, was noised about, after the surrender of Badajoz, until it reached the ears of the Commander-in-Chief—the great Duke—who sent for him, and presented him with a sum equal to a hundred guineas English, which, in consequence of his youth, Captain Pedro de Lobiera was to pay him in small instalments. It is also said that the Duke gave the money from his own private purse. José also received a good service medal, and the Portuguese decoration No. 3.
He was now only eighteen, and the honours he received might have turned an older head; but he continued to be as grave, modest, and well-dispositioned as, when a boy, Captain de Lobiera found him beside his mother's grave in the cemetery of the Penha Convent at Cintra; and while many were promoted to commissions, he followed the fortunes of the Peninsular army with his bugle slung at his back.
That bugle was heard on the plains of Vittoria, and among the passes of the Pyrenees, where De Castro was wounded and conveyed to the town of Elizondo. There, while stretched on a pallet of straw, in the vestibule of a convent, which had been turned into a military hospital, he was attended and nursed by a lay sister, who turned out to be his sister Theresa, who had been carried off by the French, but had achieved her escape after their defeat and total rout at Vittoria.
It would be difficult to describe the mingled joy and grief of such a meeting; but both were of brief duration. As soon as José was reported fit for duty, he rejoined the Seventh Cazadores, with whom he served at Nivelle, Orthes, and Bordeaux.
His bugle was heard for the last time in battle near the hill of Toulouse, when he sounded the charge by the order of the Viscount de Sa. In that advance the latter fell wounded from his horse, and, seeing that Captain de Lobiera, the next senior officer, was defenceless, his sword-blade having been broken off near the hilt by a ball, he gave him his own, saying:
'Lead on, De Lobiera! forward, the Cazadores! I can do no more to-day.'
And once again the bugle of José sounded the command to charge.
When the army was disbanded at the peace, José endeavoured to support himself by teaching music, but in a way so humble that he led a life of privation and penury, and sought, in vain, a pension from the Portuguese Government.
It was at the little town of Golega, on the Tagus, in Portuguese Estramadura, that we last heard of 'the Bugler of Badajoz.' This was more than twenty years ago, and he was earning a precarious livelihood by teaching the cornet.
He was then an old man, bent with years and infirmity, and had for the last time renewed his prayer for a pension to the Portuguese Government. 'Let us charitably hope it will be granted,' said a writer in the Lisbon Jornal de Commercio of that year, 'for there is now in the Ministry a soldier who has not forgotten the part he bore himself in the bloody episodes of the Peninsular War, one who has left an arm on a gory battlefield, and whose hearing has been destroyed by the thunder of artillery—the noble and valiant Viscount de Sa (the son of his old colonel). This gallant soldier will yet have ears for the petition of the poor trombadero, and be able to award him the meed he merits.'
THE
VOYAGE OF THE 'BON ACCORD'.
