Then came the opportunity: the French, pulling themselves together, were preparing to rush up the last twenty yards of the ascent and to run in upon the guns, when Craufurd waved his hat to the battalions lying in the road behind him, the appointed signal for action, and (it is said) called to the men behind him ‘Now 52nd, revenge the death of Sir John Moore.’ The crest was at once covered by the long red line, and the fronts of the French brigades received such a volley at ten paces as has been seldom endured by any troops in war. The whole of the heads of their columns crumbled away in a mass of dead and dying. The centre and rear stood appalled for one moment; then Major Arbuthnot wheeled in three companies of the 52nd upon the right flank of Simon’s leading regiment, while Lloyd of the 43rd did the same upon the extreme left, so as to produce a semicircle of fire[435]. It was impossible to stand under it, and the French broke and went hurtling down the hill, the wrecks of the front battalions carrying the rear ones away with them. So steep was the slope on their left that some are said to have lost their footing and to have rolled down to the bottom of the ravine before they could stop. The Light Division followed as far as Sula, and beyond, not stopping till Loison’s people had taken refuge in the wooded ground beyond that village, and the French guns by Moura had begun to play upon their pursuers. The rush had carried away the whole of the enemy, save one battalion upon Ferey’s extreme left, which had moved so far down in the slope of the ravine that it had become separated from the rest. This solitary column, pressing forward, came to the sky-line not in front of Craufurd, but at the very head of the ravine, below Cleeves’ battery. Here it was dealt with by the leading unit of Coleman’s Portuguese brigade, which was standing in line near the chaussée. The 1st battalion of the 19th regiment, under Major McBean, charged it and rolled it back into the cleft, down whose bottom it hastily recoiled, and joined the rest of the flying division.
This made an end of Loison’s two brigades as a serious attacking force. They reeled back to their original position, under cover of the 25th Léger, which Mermet sent out to relieve them. But later in the day they pushed some skirmishers up the hill again, and bickered with Craufurd’s outposts. Wellington, seeing that the Light Division was fatigued, sent the light companies of Löwe’s German brigade and A. Campbell’s 6th Caçadores, from the reserves, to take up the skirmishing. It stood still about Sula, but the French got a few men into the village, whom Craufurd had to evict with a company of the 43rd.
Loison lost, out of 6,500 men used in the attack, twenty-one officers killed and forty-seven wounded, with some 1,200 men. His senior brigadier, Simon, was wounded in the face, and taken prisoner by a private of the 52nd. The loss of the Light Division was marvellously small—the 3rd Caçadores and the 95th, who had fought through the long skirmish up the hill, had seventy-eight and forty-one casualties respectively, but the 43rd and 52nd had the astounding record of only three men killed, and two officers and eighteen men wounded. McBean’s Portuguese battalion lost one officer and twenty-five men: the German light companies had nearly fifty casualties, but this was later in the day. Altogether, Loison’s attack was repelled with a loss of only 200 men to the allies.
It only remains to tell of one more section of the Battle of Bussaco; it was entirely independent of the rest. When Ney started Loison to his right of the deep ravine, he had sent forward Marchand’s division to his left of it, along the great chaussée. On turning the sweep of the road beyond Moura, the leading brigade of this column (6th Léger and 69th Line, five battalions) came under a terrible artillery fire from the three batteries which Wellington had placed at the head of the ravine, those of Cleeves, Parros, and Lawson. They, nevertheless, pushed along the road till they came level with a small pine wood on their left, which was full of the skirmishers of Pack’s Portuguese brigade—the whole of the 4th Caçadores had been sent down into it from the height above. The flanking fire of these light troops was so galling that the French brigade—apparently without orders and by an instinctive movement—swerved to its left, and went up the hillside to turn the Caçadores out of their cover. After a sharp bickering they did so, and then emerging from the wood on to the smooth slope of the height below the convent wall, got into a desperate musketry duel with Pack’s four Line-battalions, who stood in front of them. They were now in disorder, and their brigadier, Maucune, had been wounded. But they made several attempts to storm the hillside, which were all beaten back by the Portuguese musketry and the fire of Lawson’s artillery on the right. The second brigade of Marchand (that of Marcognet) pushed as far along the road as the preceding brigade had gone, but stopped when it came under the fire of Cleeves’ and Parros’s guns, to which that of Ross’s (from across the ravine) was also added, when Loison’s attack had been beaten off. Seeing that Marchand was making no headway, that Loison had been routed, and that Reynier’s corps was out of action, Ney called back his column, which fell back behind Moura. Maucune’s brigade had suffered severely—it had lost its brigadier, the colonel of the 6th Léger, and thirty-three other officers with some 850 men. The rear brigade (Marcognet’s) had suffered less—its casualty list, however, was fully 300 killed and wounded. There had been a little skirmishing meanwhile opposite Wellington’s centre, for during the main attack Ney had sent forward some voltigeur companies from his reserves to occupy the line of skirmishers at the foot of the heights, which Spencer’s 1st Division had thrown out. These two thin screens of light troops paired off against each other, and contended all the morning with some loss, but no appreciable advantage on either side[436].
Masséna still had it in his power to attack again, for Mermet’s division of the 6th Corps, and the whole of Junot’s 13,000 infantry had not yet advanced and had hardly lost a man. But the result of Ney’s and Reynier’s efforts had been so disheartening that the Marshal refused to waste more lives on what was clearly a hopeless enterprise. He could now see Wellington’s army concentrated on the two points that had been attacked. Hill’s heavy column of 10,000 men had now lined the heights on Leith’s right: Cole had edged the 4th Division close in to Craufurd’s left, and Coleman and the Germans were visible in the rear. If Masséna had still 20,000 fresh infantry, the English general had 33,000 who had not yet come up into the fighting-line. It was useless to persist. Accordingly, the skirmishing along Ney’s front was allowed to die down in the afternoon, and the French divisions retired to their camps.
The total loss of Wellington’s army had been 1,252 officers and men, of whom 200 were killed, 1,001 wounded, and fifty-one missing. No officer over the rank of a major had been killed: and the only senior officers wounded were the Portuguese brigadier Champlemond and Colonel Barclay of the 52nd. Of the casualties, 626 were in the ranks of the British, 626 in those of the Portuguese regiments—a strange coincidence in the losses of the two allied armies. The Portuguese line, indeed, had done their fair half of the fighting, as the return showed—in no instance with discredit, in some with high merit. If the 8th and 9th Portuguese had broken before Foy’s attack, it was under severe stress, and when attacked by superior numbers. On the other hand, Pack’s brigade, Coleman’s 19th, and the Caçadores of the Light Division won the highest praises from their commanders, and had taken a most distinguished part in the victory. Wellington now knew exactly how far they could be trusted, and could estimate at last the real fighting value of his army—at least, for a defensive battle in chosen and favourable ground. It would be another matter to calculate how far the allied host was capable of taking the offensive.
The total loss of the French, as shown by the return—which was not quite complete—presented to Masséna on October 1, was 4,498, of whom 522 were killed, 3,612 wounded, and 364 missing (i.e. prisoners). After his usual fashion he represented it to the Emperor as being ‘about 3,000[437].’ One general (Graindorge), two colonels, and fifty-two other officers had been killed, four generals (Maucune, Foy, Merle, Simon) were wounded—the last was also a prisoner; five colonels and 189 other officers were wounded. The 2nd Corps in all had lost at least 2,043 officers and men, the 6th Corps at least 2,455[438]. It may be remembered that of all the battles in the Peninsular War this was the one in which the proportion of officers to men hit on the French side was highest, one to sixteen—the average being one to twenty-two in ordinary engagements. The excessive proportion of casualties in the commissioned ranks bears witness to a desperate attempt to lead on the men to an impossible task, in which the officers sacrificed themselves in the most splendid style.
Masséna must not be too much blamed for his experiment. He had still to ascertain the fighting value of Wellington’s army—and estimated it too low, because of the extreme prudence which his adversary had hitherto displayed. He was handicapped by the impossibility of using his artillery effectively, and the position in front of him was strong—even stronger than he guessed, because of the road of communication along the rear of the plateau—but not too strong to be forced, if the defenders did not fight well. Moreover, it was immensely long—nine miles from end to end, so that two blows delivered with a corps each in the centre might have pierced the line before the enemy’s distant reserves could get up. Favoured by the fog—as we have seen—Reynier actually won the heights for a moment, though Ney never got near the crest. The mistake lay not so much in making the trial as in under-rating the warlike efficiency of the enemy. Strokes like Wallace’s charge with the 45th and 88th, or Craufurd’s masterly advance with the 43rd and 52nd, are beyond the common experiences of war. Masséna put forty-five battalions[439] into his fighting-line—they were repulsed by twenty-four, for that was the number of Anglo-Portuguese battalions which engaged more than their light-companies[440]. This could not have been foreseen. But the lesson was learnt. Before the lines of Torres Vedras, a fortnight later, Masséna refused to take any more risks of the kind, and the campaign assumed a very different character, because the invader had learnt to respect his enemy.
(1) NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF BUSSACO