Colin Campbell. Forbes Archibald

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СКАЧАТЬ were hurried on unduly by men who were too impetuous to adhere to the scheme sanctioned by their chief. After a four days' bombardment of the place the assault was ordered for the early morning of the 25th. The storming-party consisted of a battalion of the Royals, with the task of carrying the great breach; of the Thirty-Eighth, told off to assail the lesser breach further to the right; and of the Ninth, to act in support of the Royals. Colin Campbell had a special position and a special duty, of a kind seldom entrusted to a subaltern and markedly indicative of the estimation which he had thus early earned. He was placed in the centre of the Royals with twenty men of his (the light) company, having the light company of the Royals as his immediate support and under his orders, and accompanied by a ladder-party under an engineer officer. His specific orders were on reaching the crest of the breach to gain the ramparts on the left, sweep the curtain to the high work in the centre of the main front, and there establish himself. The signal for an advance to the assault was given prematurely, while it was still dark, by the explosion of a mine, and the head of the storming-party moved out of the trenches promptly but in straggling order. The space between the exit from the parallel and the breach, some three hundred yards, was very rugged, broken by projecting rocks, pools, seaweed and other impediments. These difficulties, the darkness, and the withering fire from the ramparts, increased the tendency to disorder, and presently Campbell was not surprised to find an actual check. The halted mass had opened fire and there was no moving it forward. He pushed on past the halted body having there lost some men of his detachment; and reached the breach, the lower part of which he observed to be thickly strewn with killed and wounded. "There were," to quote from his journal, "a few individual officers spread on the face of the breach, but nothing more. These were cheering, and gallantly exposing themselves to the close and destructive fire directed on them from the round tower and other defences. In going up I passed Jones of the Engineers[1] who was wounded; and on gaining the top I was shot through the right hip and tumbled to the bottom. Finding on rising that I was not disabled from moving, and observing two officers of the Royals who were exerting themselves to lead some of their men from under the line-wall near to the breach, I went to assist their endeavours and again went up the breach with them, when I was shot through the inside part of the left thigh." In the language of the brilliant historian of the Peninsular War – "It was in vain that Lieutenant Campbell, breaking through the tumultuous crowd with the survivors of his chosen detachment, mounted the ruins – twice he ascended, twice he was wounded, and all around him died."

      The assault failed; and the siege of San Sebastian was temporarily exchanged for a blockade. There was much angry discussion and recrimination as to the causes of the disastrous issue. It was remarked that no general or staff officer had quitted the trenches, and that what leading there was devolved entirely on the regimental officers. They, at least, had fought well and exposed themselves freely, and none had behaved himself more gallantly than Colin Campbell. This was heartily and handsomely acknowledged by Graham when he thus wrote in his despatch to Lord Wellington describing the assault: – "I beg to recommend to you Lieutenant Campbell of the Ninth, who led the forlorn hope, and who was severely wounded in the breach." Such a recognition, barren of immediate results though it was, Colin Campbell probably thought cheaply earned at the cost of a mere couple of bullet-holes. These, however, hindered him from participating in the desperate fighting of the final and successful assault on San Sebastian; and, indeed, when after the surrender of the place his division departed, he had to remain an invalid in the shattered town. He was now about to perpetrate the only breach of military discipline ever laid to his charge. Having heard of the early prospect of a battle, he and a brother officer who had also been wounded took the liberty of deserting from hospital for the purpose of joining their regiment. How long it took them to limp from San Sebastian to Oryarzun is not specified; but they reached the regiment on October 6th just in time to join the midnight march to the left bank of the Bidassoa opposite Andaya, and on the following morning to wade the river and enter France. The British cannonade awoke the French to find their country invaded by an enemy and hostile cannon-balls falling in their bivouacs.

      From Andaya the division in which Colin Campbell marched sprang up the slopes to assail the key of the position, the Croix des Bouquets. To that stronghold reinforcements were hurrying, and attacks on it had already been made in vain; "But," in the burning words of Napier, "at this moment Cameron arrived with the Ninth regiment, and rushed with great vehemence to the summit of the first height. The French infantry opened ranks to let the guns retire, and then retreated themselves at full speed to a second rise where they could only be approached in a narrow front. Cameron quickly threw his men into a single column and bore against this new position, which curving inwards enabled the French to pour a concentrated fire upon his regiment; nor did his violent course seem to dismay them until he was within ten yards, when, appalled by the furious shout and charge of the Ninth, they gave way and the ridges of the Croix des Bouquets were won as far as the royal road." The regiment in this encounter lost nearly one hundred men; and Colin Campbell, who commanded the light company in its front, was now again severely wounded. The breach of discipline he had committed in discharging himself from the hospital his colonel condoned with no sterner punishment than a severe reprimand, on account of his gallant conduct in the first action fought on French soil.

      CHAPTER II

      COLONIAL AND HOME SERVICE

      With the wound which struck him down on the Croix des Bouquets on the 7th of October 1813 Colin Campbell's active service in his original regiment ended, and on the 9th of November in the same year he was promoted to a captaincy without purchase in the Sixtieth Rifles. Still enfeebled by his wounds, he came home before the end of the year with the strongest recommendations to the Horse Guards from the commanders under whom he had served in the field, – recommendations which do not appear to have availed him materially. He made good his claim to a temporary wound-pension of £100 a year, but the application made on his behalf for staff-employment with Sir Thomas Graham in Holland was not successful.

      One would fain gain some introspection into the nature, character, and tendencies of this young soldier, who in his twenty-first year was already a veteran of war after more than five years of pretty constant active service. It would be pleasant to have opportunities for regarding him as something other than a mere military lay-figure, – to attain to some conversance with his habits, his tastes, his attitude towards his comrades, his relations with his family, the character of such study and reading as he could find time for, and so forth. But the means for doing this are altogether lacking. Lord Clyde was a very modest man, and it was with reluctance that he allowed his papers to be used for the purposes of a memoir. He, however, left it by his will to the discretion of his trustees to dispose of his papers, with the characteristic injunction: "If a short memoir should appear to them to be absolutely necessary and indispensable (which I should regret and hope may be avoided), then it should be limited as much as possible to the modest recital of the services of an old soldier." The trustees, seventeen years after Lord Clyde's death, judged wisely in sanctioning the compilation of a memoir, the material available for which was confided to the late General Shadwell who had been long and intimately associated with Lord Clyde both at home and on campaign. General Shadwell's biography of his chief is a most careful and accurate work; but probably because of a lack of such material as, for instance, familiar correspondence affords, it somewhat fails to furnish an adequate presentment of Colin Campbell as he was during the long years before he emerged from comparative obscurity, and became gradually a marked and characteristic figure familiar to and cherished by his fellow-countrymen.

      Campbell served with a battalion of the Sixtieth in Nova Scotia from October, 1814, to July, 1815, when ill-health caused by his wounds compelled him to return to Europe. After a course of thermal treatment in southern France he served for two years at Gibraltar, and early in 1819 followed to Barbadoes the Twenty-First Fusiliers to which regiment he had been transferred. The next seven years of his life he passed in the West Indies, – the first two years of the seven in Barbadoes, the latter five in Demerara, where he served as aide-de-camp and brigade-major to the Governor, General Murray. The tropical climate of the West Indies agreed with him, and notwithstanding recrudescences of Walcheren fever and frequent annoyances from his wounds he was able to enjoy life СКАЧАТЬ