Adventures with the Connaught Rangers, 1809-1814

by William Grattan

The conflagration of La China continued all night, and story after story fell in until it became a heap of ruins. The following day, the 1st of November, the advance of the French entered Madrid, and on that day our army commenced its retreat upon Rodrigo and Portugal. On the side of Burgos matters were in the same state. The attack against the citadel, having failed, in default of means to carry it on, the army before it broke up on the 20th of October, and by the admirable arrangements of Lord Wellington, who took the command in person, gained two marches on the enemy before he was aware of it. Nevertheless a vigorous pursuit took place, and the Burgos army was closely pressed, until it reached the heights of San Christoval, where it was joined by the troops that had occupied Madrid.

Up to this time no serious disaster had occurred, although from the heavy rains that had fallen, which rendered the roads nearly impassable, and the scanty supply of rations which the troops received, it was feared that, if Soult pressed on vigorously, our army would shortly become much disorganised; but the Marshal took six days, that is to say, from the 10th to the 16th of November, to examine the ground occupied by the British General. On the 14th, our army was in battle array close to the spot where we had fought the battle of Salamanca the July before, but Soult, although at the head of 90,000 soldiers, and two hundred pieces of cannon, declined the offer, and confined his operations to the sending a brigade or two on the line of our communication with Rodrigo. On the 17th, Lord Wellington commenced his march for the frontiers of Portugal, and from that moment he was closely pursued by Marshal Soult. The rain fell in torrents, almost without any intermission; the roads could no longer be so called, they were perfect quagmires; the small streams became rivers, and the rivers were scarcely fordable at any point. In some instances the soldiers were obliged to carry their ammunition boxes strapped on their shoulders to preserve them, while passing a ford which on our advance was barely ankle deep. The baggage and camp-kettles had left us; the former we never saw until we reached Rodrigo, and the latter rarely reached us until two o’clock in the morning, when the men, from fatigue, could make but little use of them. The wretched cattle had to be slaughtered, as our rations seldom arrived at their destination before the camp-kettles, and when both arrived, there was not one fire in our bivouac sufficient to boil a mess.

Officers as well as soldiers had no covering except the canopy of heaven; we had not one tent, and the army never slept in a village. We thus lay in the open country; our clothes saturated with rain, half the men and officers without shoes, nothing to eat, or, at all events, no means of cooking it. What then could be much worse than the situation in which the army was placed? But this was not the worst, because, from the nature of the retreat, and the pursuit, neither the cavalry nor artillery horses could be supplied with forage. The retreat each day generally began at four in the morning, in the dead dark of night; towards eight the army had gained perhaps six miles', perhaps not five, start of the enemy. At ten they were at our heels. The rear, as a matter of necessity, for the preservation of the whole, was then obliged to face about and show a front, to enable the remainder to proceed on their retreat. The position taken up was, as a matter of course, according to the urgency of the moment, sometimes in a vast tract of ploughed land, where the troops were drawn up ankle deep in mud. In this position, those who were not fighting were obliged to remain, in their tattered uniforms, worn to rags after two years' service, scarcely a good pair of shoes or trousers on any, and the greater part without the former. The ague had also attacked the bulk of the army, and as the soldiers picked up the acorns that fell from the oak trees (these, by the way, are the property of the pigs in Spain, but the pigs, fortunately for themselves, had not yet appeared in the woods we now traversed), many were unable to eat them, so much were they enfeebled by the disorder.

Yet under all these privations, the soldiers, at least the “Connaught Rangers,” never lost their gaiety. Without shoes they fancied themselves “at home,” and there were few, I believe, who would not have wished themselves there in reality. Without food they were nearly at home, and without a good coat to their backs equally so! My man, Dan Carsons, came up to me, and with a broad grin said, “By gor, Sir, this same place” (at the time we were, and had been for hours before, standing in a wet ploughed field) “puts me greatly in mind iv Madrid.”—“Of Madrid! why, Dan, no two places can be more unlike.”—“By Jasus, Sir, the’re as like as two paise, only that we want the houses, and the fires, and the mate, and the dhrink, and the women! But, excepting that, don’t the jaws iv the boys with the ague, when they rattle so, put your honour greatly in mind iv the castonetts?” Dan’s joke was not quite so palatable as it might have proved at a more fitting opportunity, or in a more fitting place, for at that moment I felt a queer sort of motion about my own jaws, which in less than an hour proved itself to be a confirmed attack of ague. On this night the rain never ceased; the rations could not be cooked, having arrived too late, and the army had no food except biscuit.

What I have related took place on the 16th. The following day matters became worse, the rain continued to come down in torrents, and in the passage of one river, out of ten that we forded, a woman and three children were lost, as likewise some baggage mules, which the women of the army, in defiance of the order against it, still contrived to smuggle into the line of retreat. The rations arrived alive (I mean the meat), as usual after midnight, but no kettles reached us for an hour after the poor famished brutes had been knocked on the head. Each man obtained his portion of the quivering flesh, but before any fires could be re-lighted, the order for march arrived, and the men received their meat dripping with water, but little, if anything, warmer than when it was delivered over to them by the butcher. The soldiers drenched with wet, greatly fatigued, nearly naked, and more than half asleep, were obliged either to throw away the meat, or put it with their biscuit into their haversacks, which from constant use, without any means of cleaning them, more resembled a beggarman’s wallet than any part of the appointments of a soldier. In a short time the wet meat completely destroyed the bread, which became perfect paste, and the blood which oozed from the undressed beef, little better than carrion, gave so bad a taste to the bread that many could not eat it. Those who did were in general attacked with violent pains in their bowels, and the want of salt brought on dysentery. A number of cavalry and artillery horses died on this night, and fatigue and sickness had already obliged several men and officers to remain behind, so that our ranks were now beginning to show that we had commenced, in downright earnest, a most calamitous retreat.

Lord Wellington wished for a battle, if he could fight one on advantageous terms, before his army became disorganised; but this was not to the interest of the French army; and the Duke of Dalmatia, who could at any time make choice of his own field from his vast superiority in horsemen, was too experienced a tactician to be led into so fatal an error as that of fighting. Experience had shown him that a retreat, such as the one I am describing, would cost him little trouble to inflict as great a loss upon our army as if he gained the advantage in a battle, and that it would be a bloodless victory to him; whereas, if a general action took place, and the entire of the two armies were thrown into the fight, he could not expect to get off with a loss of less than six or eight thousand men, with the chance, perhaps the probability, of being defeated.

No Marshal in the French army knew the good and the bad qualities of the soldiers he now followed better, few so well, as Soult. He had pursued them to Corunna, and fought them at Albuera. Knowing then, as he did, their imperfection in retreat, and their superlative perfection in a pitched battle, it would have been strange had he risked by a battle, what it was as clear as the noon-day he would gain without one, namely, the loss to us of several thousand men and horses, who, if they did not fall into his hands, or die on the retreat, were sure to be lost to our ranks in consequence of its effects. The game was in his hands, and if he lost it by bad play, the fault would be his, and his only. He did not do so, but played a safe game, and when battle was offered him near Salamanca, he reneged. He finessed well, and though he did not drive us before him at the point of the bayonet, his flank movement on the Rodrigo line, by a side wipe, effected his purpose just as well for him.

A circumstance occurred on this day that so strongly marks the difference between the British soldiers and the soldiers of any other nation on such a retreat as we were engaged in, that I cannot avoid noticing it. I have already said that we had no means of cooking our meat, and that the soldiers and officers, for all shared the same privations alike, carried their meat raw, or nearly raw; consequently it was not an additional supply of “raw material” that we so much needed as the means of dressing what we had. Nevertheless, towards noon, while a portion of the army was engaged in a warm skirmish with the enemy’s advance, which lay through a vast forest of oak, some hundreds of swine, nearly in a wild state, were discovered feeding upon the acorns which had fallen from the trees the autumn before. No flag of truce ever sent from the advance post of one army to the advance of another had a more decisive effect. Our soldiers immediately opened a murderous fire upon the pigs, who suffered severely on the occasion, being closely pursued on the route, which they followed with that stupid—and for them, on this occasion, fatal—pertinacity which the pig tribe are so proverbial for, namely, going to the rear when they ought to go straight forward. Had this herd of swine deviated from the old beaten track of pigs in general—had they, in short, gone forward instead of rearward—many valuable lives, in the eyes of the owners at least, would have been saved, because they would have soon reached the French advance, and our fellows, once more placed vis à vis with the riflemen of the grande nation, would have left off the pursuit—if for nothing else but to save their bacon! This rencontre, one of the most curious that came within my knowledge during my Peninsular campaigns, or indeed during my sojourn in this world, led to consequences the most comic as well as tragic. Colonel O‘Shea, who commanded the cavalry of the French advance ordered to support the tirailleurs, was astounded when he saw the direction which the British fire took. He could not be mistaken; the fire of the advance of his own soldiers had slackened—ceased. It immediately occurred to him that some corps must have got in rear of our advance, and he galloped up to the tirailleurs to ascertain the real state of affairs. He was soon undeceived; but when he learned the cause of the retrograde movement on the part of our men, he could not avoid—and who could?—laughing heartily.

Meanwhile the discomfited and routed pigs fled, and soon got out of the clutches of the advanced guard. The bulk of the fugitives took the road to their rights but here they were again wrong. Had those ill-fated animals known anything of the “rules of the road,” they would have kept to the left. On the right they were encountered by a nearly famished brigade that had received no rations at all in the preceding twenty-four hours; and when they were, as has been seen, so roughly handled by men whose haversacks were amply stocked with meat, what chance had they—I ask the question fearlessly—of any mercy from a body of famished, ferocious fellows? The question I have just put is easily answered. They had none to expect, and none did they receive. Neither age nor sex was spared; and out of this fine herd of swine, scarcely one in one hundred escaped unhurt. No victory was ever more complete; and the grunting and squeaking of the wounded pigs and hogs throughout the forest was a sad contrast with the merriment of the soldiers, who toasted, on the points of their bayonets—intended for other and more noble game—the mangled fragments of their former companions.

Day was drawing to its close, and the 3rd Division, commanded by Sir Edward Pakenham, was about to retire from the ground it had held during several hours in face of the enemy, when a warm fire of musketry on our left led us to suppose we were outflanked. The officers of the staff galloped in the direction from whence the firing proceeded. Sir Edward did the same, but it was some time before they reached the scene of action. In the meantime the different regiments were so arranged as to be ready either to advance or retreat, as circumstances might require; and the French corps in our front made demonstrations of a similar kind. In this state of suspense we remained for nearly an hour, when at last Sir Edward returned, with the news that the firing was caused by a fresh attack on the pigs that had escaped the first brunt of the attack against them. He ordered the different advance posts to be placed, which he superintended in person; the soldiers then prepared to fell timber for fires, and some ran to an uninhabited village—they were all uninhabited on the line of our march for that matter—for the purpose of getting dry wood, that is to say, the doors and roofs of the houses, to enable us to light up the green timber, which was the only fuel we could command. The soldiers and officers of all ranks were nearly exhausted from cold and wet; and had the village in question belonged to the king of England, much less to a parcel of Spanish peasants, it would have shared the same fate as the one in question.