“The multitude of soldiers’ wives stuck to the army like bricks: averse to all military discipline, they impeded our progress at times very much, particularly in retreats. They became the subject of a General Order, for their own special guidance. They were under no control, and were always first mounted up and away, blocking up narrow passes and checking the advance of the army with their donkeys, after repeated orders to follow in rear of their respective corps, or their donkeys would be shot. On the retreat from Burgos I remember Mrs. Biddy Flyn remarking, ‘I would like to see the man that wud shoot my donkey: faith, I’ll be too early away for any of ’em to catch me. Will you come wid me, girls?’ ‘Aye, indeed, every one of us.’ And away they started at early dawn, cracking their jokes about divisional orders, Wellington, commanding officers, and their next bivouac. Alas! the Provost Marshal was in advance—a man in authority, and a terror to evil doers: he was waiting a mile or two on, in a narrow turn of the road, for the ladies, with a party all loaded. He gave orders to shoot the first two donkeys pour exemple. There was a wild, fierce and furious yell struck up, with more weeping and lamentation than one usually hears at an Irish funeral, with sundry prayers for the vagabone that had murdered the lives of the poor darling innocent crathers. ‘Bad luck to the ugly face of the Provost, the spy of the camp, may he niver see home till the vultures have picked his eyes out, the born varmint,’ and so on. The victims picked up what they could carry, and marched along with the regiment, crying and lamenting their bitter fate. It was wonderful what they endured—but in spite of this warning they were foremost on the line of march next morning again. As Mrs. Skiddy, their leader, said, ‘We must risk something to be in before the men, to have the fire and a dhrop of tay ready for them after their load and their labour: and sure if we went in the rare the French, bad luck to them, would pick me up, me and my donkey, and then Dan Skiddy would be lost entirely without me.’”
The soldiers’ wives were indeed an extraordinary community—as hard as nails, expert plunderers, furious partisans of the supreme excellence of their own battalion, much given to fighting. Many of them were widows twice and even thrice over—for when a married man was shot, and his wife was a capable and desirable person, she would receive half a dozen proposals before her husband was forty-eight hours in his grave. And since the alternative was a hazardous voyage back to relatives in England or Ireland, who had probably broken off with the “girl who ran away with a soldier,” most of the widows concluded to stop with the battalion, with a new spouse and a new name. As the war dragged on many of the men picked up Portuguese and Spanish helpmates, who joined the regimental drove, and made it strangely polyglot. At the end of the struggle in 1814 there was a most harrowing scene at Bordeaux, when the general order was issued that all these foreigners who could not prove that they had been legitimately married to soldiers, with the colonel’s leave, were to be refused transport to the British Isles.[282] There were hundreds of them, and only in a few cases could the men find money to get them taken home in private merchantmen. The bulk marched back to the Peninsula in charge of a brigade of homeward bound Portuguese—a most melancholy and distressful assembly.[283]
Ladies at the Front
It is extraordinary to find that a sprinkling of the officers of the Peninsular Army were unwise enough to take their wives with them to the front—thereby securing a life of wearing anxiety for both, and of dire hardship for the poor ladies. One of the best known cases was that of Hill’s senior aide-de-camp, Captain Currie, whose wife I have found mentioned half a dozen times as making tea for the second division staff, and holding a little reception whenever the division was settled down for a few days. Another was Mrs. Dalbiac, wife of the colonel of the 4th Dragoons, whose adventures on the field of Salamanca are mentioned by Napier.[284] But the best chronicle of the ups and downs of a young married couple may be found in the breezy autobiography of Sir Harry Smith, then a subaltern in the 95th Rifles. His tale is well known—he rescued a young Spanish lady among the horrors of the sack of Badajoz, married her two days later, and had her with him for the remaining three years of the war. The story of their Odyssey, as related by him, is one of the most touching narratives of loyal love, and hardship cheerfully borne, that any man can read. They lived together for forty years in storm and sunshine, and she survived to christen the town of Ladysmith by her name, while her husband was commanding the forces in South Africa. He gave his name to the sister town of Harrismith, less well remembered now than the long-besieged place with which the memory of Juana Smith is linked.
There is a sketch in Paris by the well-known artist, Colonel Lejeune, who, when a prisoner at Elvas, made a drawing of an English military family which passed him. As he describes it in his diary, “The captain rode first on a very fine horse, warding off the sun with a parasol: then came his wife very prettily dressed, with a small straw hat, riding on a mule and carrying not only a parasol, but a little black and tan dog on her knee, while she led by a cord a she-goat, to supply her with milk. Beside madame walked her Irish nurse, carrying in a green silk wrapper a baby, the hope of the family. A grenadier, the captain’s servant, came behind and occasionally poked up the long-eared steed of his mistress with a staff. Last in the procession came a donkey loaded with much miscellaneous baggage, which included a tea-kettle and a cage of canaries; it was guarded by an English servant in livery, mounted on a sturdy cob and carrying a long posting-whip, with which he occasionally made the donkey mend its pace.”[285] If this picture is not exaggerated, it certainly helps us to understand the strong objection which Wellington had for ladies at the front, and all forms of impedimenta.
CHAPTER XVII
A NOTE ON SIEGES
Every one knows that the record of the Peninsular Army in the matter of sieges is not the most brilliant page in its annals. It is not to the orgies that followed the storm of Badajoz or San Sebastian that allusion is here made, but to the operations that preceded them, and to the unhappy incidents that accompanied the luckless siege of Burgos. Courage enough and to spare was lavished on those bloody leaguers; perseverance was shown in no small measure; and to a certain extent professional skill was not lacking. But the tale compares miserably with the great story of the triumphs of Wellington’s army in the open field. Reckless bravery had to supply the place of the machinery and organization that was lacking, and too much blood was spilt, and sometimes spilt to no effect.
The responsibility for these facts is hard to distribute. As is generally the case when failures are made, it is clear that a system was to blame rather than any individual, or body of individuals. Great Britain had been at war with France for some sixteen years; but in all her countless expeditions she had never, since 1794, been compelled to undertake regular sieges on a large scale. The battering of old-fashioned native forts in India, the blockades of Malta or Alexandria, the bombardments of Flushing or Copenhagen, need hardly be mentioned. They were not operations such as those which Wellington had to carry out in 1811 or 1812. For a long time the Peninsular War had been considered as a purely defensive affair; it was concerned with the protection of Portugal, almost (we might say) of Lisbon, from the French invader. The home Government kept sending reinforcements to Wellington, but they were under the impression that an over-powerful combination of the enemy’s forces might some day force him to re-embark. He himself regarded such a contingency as by no means impossible.
Wellington’s Battering Train