CHAPTER XVIII.
A WARNING.
"Soft; I did but dream.
O, coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight,
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? there's none else by."
Richard III.
Sir John Moore and General Paget, with the cavalry, covered the retreat; the former ordered several small bridges to be destroyed to check the enemy's advance; but such was the inefficiency of the engineer force, that in every instance the mines failed. The rain, the wind, and the sleet continued; more soldiers perished by the way, and more stragglers were taken or sabred by the enemy's light horse; then again demoralization and despair pervaded the ranks. So numerous did the stragglers of all corps become, that more than once they found themselves strong enough to face about and check the cavalry of Lallemand and Ribeaupierre. The Guards, Artillery, and Highlanders alone preserved their discipline.
So great was the fatigue endured by the troops, that, on the evening of the 10th, when the 3rd battalion of the Royal Scots entered Betanzos, it mustered, under the colours, nine officers, three sergeants, and three privates; "all the rest had dropped on the roads, and many did not rejoin for three days."
At this place, which is a village at the foot of a hill, where the Mandeo was crossed by a wooden bridge, on which the engineers were hard at work, they were attacked by Ribeaupierre's dragoons, who, however, were repulsed by the 23th Regiment; the bridge was destroyed, and its beams and planks hurled into the swollen stream, which swept them away to the Gulf of Ferrol.
And here a party of straggling invalids, exhausted by fatigue, were closely pressed by the French cavalry; a Sergeant Newman, of the 2nd battalion of the 43rd, who was himself nearly worn out, rallied them with his pike, and gradually collected four hundred men of all regiments. With great presence of mind, he formed those poor fellows into subdivisions, and made them fire and retire by sections, each re-forming in rear of the others, so that he most effectually covered the retreat of the disabled men who covered all that fearful road—conduct so spirited that he was publicly thanked by Generals Fraser and Fane.
The destruction of the bridge more decidedly secured the retreat; but more men perished between Betanzos and Lugo than anywhere else, since that rearward march began. Moore, by his energy, massed the army, now reduced to fourteen thousand infantry, which, on the morning of the llth January, fell back on Corunna, under his immediate and personal superintendence.
"Stanhope," said he to his favourite aide-de-camp, who was almost ever by his side, "we are now within a few miles of Corunna; ride forward with me, as I am all anxiety to see if our fleet is in the bay—Kennedy will accompany us."