But while a line of some sort was being formed, the screen of light troops which Graham had thrown forward, to detain the enemy, during the deployment of the main body, had done its duty by allowing itself to be knocked to pieces while attacking fivefold numbers. It had to be sacrificed to gain time, and carried out its orders completely. We will take the fortunes of the right-hand force first.
Browne’s composite battalion had started from a position close under the edge of the pine wood; it had first to cross a broad but shallow ravine, and then to climb the gentle slope of the Cerro, where it became fully visible to the enemy, though there was a little cover here and there upon the hillside, in the form of scattered bushes and slight dips in the ground. The French allowed the line to advance a little way up the ascent, and then opened upon it both with a field battery placed close to the chapel on the summit, and with the musketry fire of the three battalions which formed their right wing. Blakeney, our ever-useful authority for this side of the battle, says that the first salvo of the French knocked over more than 200 officers and men out of 536 forming the line. Browne ordered the men to close to the centre, and endeavoured to continue his climb; this was done with much difficulty, but, before the advance could be resumed, more than fifty men more were killed or wounded. All the exertions of the colonel could not form a third line—fourteen officers out of twenty-one were down, and more than half the rank and file. The remainder now scattered; the men did not retreat, but threw themselves down, and commenced independent firing from behind bushes, hillocks, and any other cover they could find. The French made no attempt to fall upon them by descending the hill, as would have seemed natural. The reason was that by the time that the flank battalion had been disposed of, the main body of Dilkes’s brigade had come out of the wood, and was visible forming up at the foot of the hill to deliver the real assault.
The Guards had obtained the necessary time to come up and choose their ground through the absolute martyrdom of the flank battalion. Dilkes did not repeat the attack on the same slope over which Browne had advanced, but pushed some distance to the right, where the hillside showed more cover in the way of scattered bushes and trees, and some dead ground hid the men by its steepness from the fire of the battery on the crest above. Blakeney describes them as strung out on a most irregular front, a confused mass rather than a formed line. The whole, while advancing, kept taking ground to their right, so as to come up the hillside opposite Ruffin’s left wing. Their extreme flank was covered by Norcott’s two companies of rifles in more extended order. Partly owing to the cover, partly to the difficulty found by the French guns in getting their fire to bear, Dilkes’s brigade got wellnigh to the top of the hill before it suffered any very serious losses. But on clearing the last underwood, and reaching smooth ground, it was charged by the four battalions of Ruffin’s left—two of the 24th Line supported by the two reserve battalions of grenadiers réunis. This was the crisis of the battle in the southern half of its progress. By all the rules of French military art four battalion columns, fresh and well ordered, charging down hill, should have been able to break through a disordered line of decidedly inferior strength pushing upwards against them. Dilkes had only 1,400 men, the four French battalions just over 2,000. Nevertheless, the impossible happened. When the two columns of the 24th Ligne came down, with drums beating and levelled bayonets, against the centre of the firm, if disorderly, line in front, they were checked by the furious fire that broke out against them from the semicircle into which they had pushed. This was one more example of the fact established at Maida five years before, and reaffirmed at Vimiero, Talavera, and Bussaco, that no column could break the British line by mere impetus. In this case the French had every advantage, since they were absolutely intact troops, and had the ground entirely in their favour, while the Guards and the wing of the 67th opposed to them had marched two miles in haste, had then climbed a steep 200-foot slope under fire, had lost their order, and were firing up hill. But the fire was delivered with astounding accuracy, considering that the men were blown with their climb and dreadfully exhausted. The whole head of each of the descending columns was blown to pieces. The rest came to a standstill, and crowding together in a disorderly clump, opened an irregular fire against the British line.
The Marshal, who was present in person on the top of the Cerro, then brought up his reserve, the two battalions of grenadiers under General Chaudron Rousseau. He himself and the brigadier were both distinctly seen leading on the column, the Marshal waving his large white-plumed hat over his head. This charge was delivered against the right of Dilkes’s line, where the 3rd Guards and wing of the 67th lay, that of the 24th Ligne had been more against the centre and the 1st Guards. But the result was the same, though the contest was more long and bloody. The grenadiers are said to have struggled forward, losing heavily at each step, till their front was within a very few yards of Dilkes’s line: it was only then that they halted and began to fire—a fatal step in such a contest, where impetus was the sole chance of the attacking mass, and superiority in musketry fire (owing to the longer front) was on the side of the English line. This of course was a terribly murderous business to both sides, as the figures presently to be quoted will show. But as in all similar contests during the Peninsular War, the line hit harder than the column. The four French battalions began at last to give way, and could not be kept together. Then Victor tried to bring in the two left battalions of his line to their aid, but these two units were pestered and impeded, when they began to move off from their first position, by the remains of Browne’s flank battalion, which (though reduced to under 300 muskets) began to press forward again, when the troops hitherto in their front commenced to move off to the right. ‘They darted from behind trees, briars, brakes, and out of hollows,’ says Blakeney. ‘I could imagine myself like Roderick Dhu upon Benledi’s side—it was a magic effect. We confidently advanced up the hill and, unlike most advances, in this one our numbers increased as we proceeded, soldiers of the flank battalion joining at every step.’ This scattered little force hung on to the flank of Victor’s right, and prevented it from rallying the broken force now recoiling from in front of Dilkes. The flankers had even the good fortune to capture a howitzer from the left of Victor’s battery placed by the chapel on the hilltop; another gun was taken by the 1st Guards in their forward progress.
It must have been just at this crisis that the whole French mass broke; up to this moment it had been recoiling sullenly, still keeping up some fire from its rear. But now the observer saw[153], ‘with loud and murmuring sounds, Ruffin’s division and Rousseau’s chosen grenadiers rolling with a whirling motion down into the valley below, leaving their two brave generals mortally wounded on the hill, which was left in possession of their bloodstained conquerors.’
The exhausted victors halted for a short time to re-form, and were in a more orderly line than they had hitherto shown when they commenced to follow the enemy down the slope. The casualties in this part of the field may now be stated, for neither party was to lose many more men in the last episode of the fight. Dilkes’s brigade and Browne’s flank battalion had gone up the hill with 76 officers and 1,873 men. They lost 25 officers and 588 men—about 10 men out of every 31 in the fight. The French loss was positively more, proportionately not quite so great. In the six battalions of Ruffin and Chaudron Rousseau there seem to have been about 108 officers and 3,000 men present; of these 36 officers and 840 men were left on the hill, i. e. 10 men in every 35. The trophies remaining with the victors were two guns and 107 unwounded prisoners, beside the multitude of disabled men left on the slope[154].
While this bloody business had been going on upon the Cerro del Puerco, it may be asked what were the Spaniards on the coast road doing—Whittingham’s squadrons and the five battalions of Cruz Murgeon and Beguines. The last named, with his three battalions, shepherding what was left of the baggage-train, quietly marched off along the sea, and joined La Peña by the Torre Bermeja. Whittingham was of a little positive use; he continued all through the fight to ‘contain’ and occasionally to bicker with the French cavalry regiment (1st Dragoons) that faced him near the Torre Barrosa. The two battalions of Cruz Murgeon supported him. This force certainly did not do its share—180 German Hussars, 300 Spanish horse, and 1,000 Spanish foot simply kept out of action 400 French horse. This was something, but not much, for the dragoons could not have interfered very effectively on the hill against Dilkes’s advance, because the south side of the Cerro is too precipitous for horsemen. In short, Whittingham’s statement in his report to La Peña, that ‘all the cavalry fulfilled its duty brilliantly’ is a sad overstatement of the case.
Let us turn now to the other half of the fight, where Wheatley’s brigade and Duncan’s guns were facing Leval on the open plain just outside the edge of the wood. At the moment when Browne attacked the Cerro, Barnard’s rifles and Bushe’s Portuguese were throwing themselves in a no less resolute fashion upon the six French battalions in their front. They had the advantage of being invisible to the enemy till they emerged from the wood, only 300 yards in his front, and of being supported, within a few minutes of their arrival, by Duncan’s ten guns, while Browne had no artillery assistance whatever, and was seen by the French for half a mile before he got near them.
The confusion in Leval’s division on being suddenly attacked by an unexpected swarm of skirmishers pouring out of the wood was extreme. So much were they taken aback, that Vigo-Roussillon of the 8th Line assures us in his memoirs that a false alarm of cavalry was raised, and that his regiment, and the first battalion of the 54th, formed square before the mistake was recognized, and caught some shells from Duncan’s guns in that uncomfortable situation, before they had time to deploy for action against infantry. This they had to do under a heavy fire from Barnard’s riflemen, who had advanced quite close to them. Leval’s fighting formation was the usual ‘column of divisions,’ i. e. a front of two companies and a depth of three in each battalion, or (since these units averaged 650 men each, and the companies over 100 bayonets) a front of seventy-two men and a depth of nine. The length of Barnard’s skirmishing line, with his 400 rifles, seems to have covered the front of the right battalion of the 54th and the left battalion of the 8th—some 1,300 men. The 95th did considerable execution on them while they were getting out of square formation: but when the columns advanced firing, the skirmishing line had to fall back. Its loss was heavy—sixty-five killed and wounded; among the latter Barnard, commanding the battalion. The next troops whom the French encountered were the flank companies of the 20th Portuguese—330 men only, who had advanced on the right rear of the 95th, supporting them in échelon. This was a new corps, which had been sent to Cadiz the moment it was raised in 1809, and had never been under fire before. Considering their hopeless position, alone in front of an advancing division, the Portuguese behaved very well; they held their ground for some time, while their colonel, Bushe, as is recorded by an eye-witness, rode slowly backward and forward behind them with his spectacles on, crying as the balls whistled past, ‘Que bella musica,’ to encourage his men. But he was soon mortally wounded[155], and after his fall the line melted away and drifted to the rear, after having kept a battalion of the French 8th engaged for some minutes: proportionately its loss was much the same as that of the Rifles—56 killed and wounded out of 332 present—one man in six.
The first act of the drama on this front was thus complete; the detaining force sent out by Graham had been, as he expected, driven in with loss, though not an appalling loss of 50 per cent., such as Browne’s gallant flankers had suffered on the Cerro. But the main body was now up, and had formed in the edge of the wood, to the left of Duncan’s guns, with no loss or interruption, since it had been well covered all the time. There were now some 1,400 men in line: the 28th, 450 strong, on the left, then the 211 bayonets of the Coldstreamers, the 87th, nearly 700 strong, in the centre; beyond them the right wing of the 67th, about 250 bayonets, next to the guns, which were still under the protection of the flank companies of the 47th which served as their escort throughout the fight. The broken screen of light troops which had just retired was by no means out of action; the 95th formed up again behind the 28th, the Portuguese behind the 87th, and both were used again before the battle was over.