Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings

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       2 Harry and Juana

      AMONG VISITORS TO SOUTH AFRICA who pass the Natal towns of Harrismith and Ladysmith, or at least glimpse them on the map, a diminishing number possess an inkling of the origins of their names. Yet these modest townships deserve to be remembered by Englishmen at least, for they commemorate one of the great love stories of history. Born in 1787, Harry Smith, fifth of eleven children of a Cambridgeshire surgeon, was in many respects an English counterpart of Marcellin Marbot, and by no means devoid of the Frenchman’s exuberance and bounce. He was bluff, brave, passionate, feckless and devoted to his calling as a soldier. Unlike Marbot, he rose from being an eager young swashbuckler to command armies in the field. In his later years, Smith was merely one among many competent British colonial generals. His real claim to fame is shared in equal parts with his wife, who showed herself one of the most remarkable women ever to serve – for serve she surely did – in the ranks of an army.

      Smith was a slightly-built seventeen-year-old serving with his local Yeomanry when an inspecting general asked: ‘Young gentleman, would you like to be an officer?’ Smith answered eagerly: ‘Of all things.’ The general said: ‘Well, I will make you a rifleman, a greenjacket and very smart.’ One day in August 1805 the boy sat stiffly through a last dinner at home in Whittlesey, then ran to the stables to embrace his favourite hunter Jack and shed childish tears. His mother, too, sobbed when she kissed him for the last time. Then she suddenly composed herself, held Harry at arm’s length and offered him parting counsel. He should never enter a public billiard room, she said, ‘and if ever you meet your enemy, remember you are born a true Englishman…Now God bless you and preserve you.’ Smith claimed in old age that he never forgot his mother’s words during any one of the scores of great battles and skirmishes in which he pitted himself against the foe. He proudly quoted them to the end of his days, when he had become a famous general.

      His first military experience was an authentic British folly. The young lieutenant and his regiment, the 95th Rifles, were sent to fight the Spanish with Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Auchmuty’s 1806 expedition to South America, which ended in devastating casualties and humiliating surrender at Buenos Aires. Smith and other survivors were repatriated by their captors. It was an inauspicious introduction to soldiering. In 1808 he sailed to Gothenburg for another rackety amphibious operation which was mercifully aborted before the troops could land. In August that year he ventured for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula, which was to play a central role in his life. He was posted as a brigade-major with Sir John Moore’s army, sent to expel the French governor-general Junot from Portugal following Bonaparte’s march into Spain. The function of brigade-major carried no field rank, but at the age of twenty-three Lieutenant Smith acted as executive officer of a force of some 1,500 men, much assisted by a command of the Spanish language which he had acquired in South America.

      The British reached Salamanca before being obliged to turn back in what became the retreat to Corunna. Moore’s Riflemen played a vital, perhaps decisive, role in covering the withdrawal of the starving army through the snows, day after day fighting off French columns pressing the British rear, buying time for the long column of shuffling men and groaning carts making their way to the coast and safety. Smith was appalled by the behaviour of some of his compatriots, made of less staunch stuff than the Riflemen: ‘The scenes of drunkenness, riot and disorder we…witnessed…are not to be described; it was truly awful and heart-rending to see that army which had been so brilliant at Salamanca so totally disorganised.’ He excepted only the Rifles and Guards from these charges, and admitted his astonishment that on 16 January 1809 ‘these very fellows licked the French at Corunna like men’. The British stand at the coast, which cost Moore his life, secured the evacuation of the shattered army by the Royal Navy. By Smith’s own account, he got home to Whittlesey ‘a skeleton’, racked with ague and dysentery, plagued with lice, bereft of clothing and equipment.

      Two months later, he sailed once more with his brigade for Portugal, accompanied by his brother Tom, who had also secured a commission in the Rifles. They reached Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army on the morning after its successful defence of Talavera, less a victory than a frustration of French ambitions. Over the months of marching and counter-marching that followed, Smith, like many British officers, spent every hour away from his duties shooting and coursing hares with his beloved greyhounds, in which he took great pride. Throughout the Spanish campaign his dogs often fed his mess on their quarry. Like every prudent officer, Smith loved and cherished his horses in a fashion that was essential when each man’s life depended upon the mettle of his mounts. For the Rifle regiments especially, bearing chief СКАЧАТЬ