Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ French vedettes (pickets) or against the enemy’s main forces. In the bloody encounter at the Coa crossing in July 1810, both Smith brothers were wounded. Harry was sent back to Lisbon with a ball lodged in his ankle joint. A panel of surgeons debated whether to leave the lead in place or extract it. One of them said, ‘If it were my leg, out should come the ball.’ Smith cried out: ‘Hurrah, Brownrigg, you are the doctor for me,’ held up his leg and demanded cheerfully: ‘There it is; slash away.’ Marcellin Marbot would have applauded. After five terrible minutes, during which the extracting forceps broke, the ball was removed. Here, indeed, were the Roman virtues demanded from every soldier of that era.

      After two months in Lisbon, Smith returned to his regiment in the field early in 1811, briefly as a company commander, then once more as brigade-major. On arrival at the headquarters of Colonel Drummond, the benign old Guardsman who commanded 2nd Brigade, Smith asked: ‘Have you any orders for the picquets, sir?’ The colonel responded amiably: ‘Mr Smith, are you my brigade-major?’

      ‘I believe so, sir.’

      ‘Then let me tell you, it is your duty to post the picquets and mine to have a d—d good dinner for you every day.’ Smith wrote: ‘We soon understood each other. He cooked the dinner often himself, and I commanded the Brigade.’ This remark possesses at least partial credibility, for many commanders of the period did not much trouble themselves about the stewardship of their formations, save on the occasion of a battle.

      Having pursued Masséna out of Portugal, in January 1812 the British stood at the gates of Ciudad Rodrigo. Smith volunteered to lead the forlorn hope at the storming, but his divisional commander insisted that a younger – and frankly, more expendable – officer must take this post of utmost danger. Yet Smith endured peril enough that night. He was foremost among the Riflemen who mounted the ramparts amidst shocking losses. In the madness of close-quarter fighting, with many of his comrades already shot down, he was pressing forward through the darkness amid a heaving throng of friends and foes beside a Grenadier officer when ‘one of his men seized me by the throat as if I was a kitten, crying out, “you French—”. Luckily he left me room in the windpipe to d—his eyes, or the bayonet would have been through me in a moment.’ Following the losses at Ciudad Rodrigo, Smith received his captaincy. He remarks that his most notable task during several weeks of idleness that followed was to preside at the execution of British deserters captured in the French ranks. The firing squad botched the shooting, and the brigade-major was appalled to hear himself entreated by a desperately wounded former Rifleman: ‘Oh, Mr Smith, put me out of my misery.’ He was obliged to order the firing squad to reload, close in, and finish off the survivors. Desertion was a besetting problem for every army, in an age when despair rather than patriotism had caused many volunteers to enlist, and most of Bonaparte’s soldiers were unwilling conscripts. Only savage discipline held together regiments in which disease and semi-starvation were chronic conditions, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.

      In March 1812 the British began besieging Badajoz, an experience that was to prove the turning point of Harry Smith’s life. He spent the night of 6 April, one of the bloodiest of the Peninsular campaign, among the Light Division struggling to win through the great breach amid overwhelming enemy fire. Every hand- and foothold in the walls had been studded with French nails and sword-blades, sharp as razors. Every officer in the storming party save one was killed or wounded. A third of the Light Division died that night, as French fire tore into each successive party that dared the breach. As the attackers crossed the dry moat of the Santa Maria bastion, the French ignited a mass of combustible material beneath their feet, engulfing the British infantrymen in flames. Still the survivors pressed on, and still they fell. ‘Oh, Smith,’ a colonel cried out to the brigade-major, clutching his breast, ‘I am mortally wounded. Help me up the ladder.’ Smith said: ‘Oh no, dear fellow!’ ‘I am,’ said the colonel. ‘Be quick.’ And so Smith heaved the doomed man onto a ladder. Hour after hour through the darkness, the tumult of musketry and artillery fire persisted. Men fought amid rival screams of exhortation, exultation and agony. The hellish scene was lit by torches, burning fascines, gunflashes. At last the British survivors recoiled, acknowledging failure. They had sustained 2,200 casualties. Within its compass, this was an action as terrible as anything endured by attacking infantrymen in the First World War.

      Shortly before dawn, Smith was horrified to receive orders from Lord Fitzroy Somerset: Lord Wellington, as Wellesley now was, insisted that the assault must be renewed. Yet even as the two men discussed the ghastly prospect, they heard British bugles beyond the city walls. They had received a miraculous deliverance. While the French threw everything into repelling the 4th and Light Divisions, elsewhere the British had forced the Citadel and Olivenca gate. Picton’s diversionary attack succeeded where the main assault failed. Badajoz was won. ‘There was no battle, day or night, I would not willingly re-enact except this,’ wrote Smith. Early in the morning, his tunic slashed by musketballs, his body stiff with bruises and cuts sustained in the assault, the Rifleman wandered among the great heaps of British dead before the breach. He met a forlorn colonel of the Guards searching for the body of a brother, who was known to be lost. ‘There he lies,’ the colonel said at last. He produced a pair of scissors and turned to Smith: ‘Go and cut a lock of his hair for my mother. I came for the purpose, but I am not equal to it.’

      In the wake of the city’s capture, maddened by their losses, Wellington’s soldiers gave way to a debauch of a kind common among survivors of such a battle, yet shameful to the history of the British army. For two days, ten thousand men of the victorious army indulged in an orgy of drunkenness, looting and rape in the hapless city of Badajoz, in which Spanish allies suffered as grievously as vanquished Frenchmen. Until the fever of violence abated, for twenty-nine hours British officers were powerless to restore any semblance of discipline. Never was the contrast more vivid between the officer class of that era, dedicated to an extravagantly formal code of manners which it cherished even in war, and the brutes upon whom such gentlemen depended to fight their battles. An extraordinary capacity for endurance and sacrifice was demanded of them. They assuaged their sufferings with excesses matching those of Henry V’s foot-soldiers after Agincourt.

      On the morning following the storm, while the rampage was at its height, two Spanish women approached the lines of the 95th Rifles. The elder, throwing back her mantilla, addressed Captain Johnny Kincaid and another officer. She was the wife of a Spanish officer absent on duty, she said. She did not know whether her husband was alive or dead. The home of herself and her young sister had been pillaged by British looters. Blood still trickled down the women’s necks from their ears, out of which the rings had been torn. In despair, and for the salvation of the fourteen-year-old sister who stood beside her, she threw herself on the mercy of the British officers. Kincaid wrote: ‘She stood by the side of an angel! A being more transcendently lovely I had never before seen – one more amiable I have never known!’

      The younger girl’s name was Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, daughter of an old Spanish family now impoverished by the devastation of war. The romantics of the Rifle Brigade, among whom she became known simply as Juana, took her to their hearts. Kincaid wrote: To look at her was to love her; and I did love her, but I never told my love, and in the mean time another and more impudent fellow stepped in and won her!’ The ‘more impudent fellow’ was, of course, Harry Smith. In truth, Kincaid bore his friend no ill-will. In one of the most enchanting passages of Kincaid’s own memoirs, he says of Juana Smith: ‘Guided by a just sense of rectitude, an innate purity of mind, a singleness of purpose which defied malice, and a soul that soared above circumstances, she became alike the adored of the camp and of the drawing-room, and eventually the admired associate of princes. She yet lives, in the affections of her gallant husband, in an elevated situation in life, a pattern to her sex, and everybody’s beau ideal of what a wife should be.’

      Smith was obliged to seek the commander-in-chief’s permission to marry. It is hard to believe that Wellington regarded this impulsive alliance of one of his young officers with much enthusiasm. Yet he consented, and even gave away the bride. Though Harry was a staunch Protestant the couple were married a few СКАЧАТЬ