Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ his memoirs, Smith vividly describes his wife’s progress through the fierce rainstorms and hard marching of the days that followed, the horses slipping and stumbling, scant shelter to be found. Each officer possessed his own little flock of goats. Behind the Rifles rode Smith’s groom West with spare horses and baggage, and behind them in turn trailed the captain’s personal servants and Antonio his goatboy, with Juana. There were many days when duty prevented him from taking any care of his wife: ‘I could devote neither time nor attention to her…I directed her to the bivouac and most energetically sought to collect my Brigade…When I got back, I found my wife sitting, holding her umbrella over General Vandaleur (who was suffering dreadfully from rheumatism).’ It is a peerless image.

      Smith’s military career suffered the same frustrations about promotion as did that of Marbot. Neither possessed wealth or influence. While Smith was almost certainly the more intelligent officer, it is unlikely that anyone saw him as a Wellington in the making. The eager young captain thought his majority secure at Vera in October, when before the attack his brigade commander, Colonel Colborne, ‘who had taken a liking to me as an active fellow’, said: ‘Now, Smith, you see the heights above us?’ ‘“Well,” I said, “I wish we were there.” The colonel laughed. “When we are,” he says, “and you are not knocked over, you shall be a brevet-major, if my recommendation has any weight.”’ The Light Division stormed the heights sure enough, and Colborne submitted his recommendation, but Smith had another year to wait before he got his step.

      It was his good fortune, however, to be recognised as a member of an elite of an elite, a Rifleman of General Robert Crauford’s legendary Light Division. ‘Ours,’ wrote Smith’s closest friend Johnny Kincaid, ‘was an esprit de corps, a buoyancy of feeling animating all which nothing could quell. We were alike ready for the field or the frolic, and, when not engaged in the one, went headlong into the other…In every interval between our active service, we indulged in all manner of childish trick and amusement with an avidity and delight of which it is impossible to convey an adequate idea. We lived united, as men always are who are daily staring death in the face on the same side and who, caring little about it, look upon each new day added to their lives as one more to rejoice in.’ Kincaid’s words represented no romantic flight of fancy. Every man who served with the Light Division in the Peninsula attests to the fact that it was one of the greatest bands of brothers in the history of warfare, and that Harry Smith was among the most celebrated of its young stars.

      Whenever the army was in the presence of the enemy, Juana suffered agonies of apprehension about the fate of her Harry. Before every battle they bade a farewell to each other as fond and grave as if they were parting for eternity – as indeed they might have been. One such night in November before her husband met the French at the Nivelle, looking utterly forlorn, Juana suddenly declared: ‘You or your horse will be killed tomorrow.’ The irrepressible Harry burst out laughing and said, ‘Well, of the two such chances, I hope it may be the horse.’ Next day as they advanced to storm the French redoubt his cherished hunter ‘Old Chap’ was hit, and fell atop his master, pouring forth a torrent of blood. Some soldiers dragged Smith’s gory figure from under the dead animal, exclaiming ‘Well, d—my eye if our old Brigade-Major is killed, after all.’ Smith said: ‘Come, pull away, I am not even wounded, only squeezed.’ When he was freed to carry a surrender document to the enemy lines for signature, his French counterpart burst out laughing on beholding his blood-soaked figure. Even Wellington was suitably impressed when Smith reported to him. Juana gasped in horror that evening when first she caught sight of her husband. He assured her that of her tragic prophecy the previous night, only the lesser half had been fulfilled.

      Juana courted danger with the lightest of hearts. Once when the French staged a local attack, the Light Division was temporarily hustled into retreat. Smith had to muster with his brigade while his wife struggled into a habit and rode for her life, a few minutes ahead of the enemy. Vitty the pug was left behind with the baggage, but a bugler of the 52nd had the presence of mind to whip the little dog into a haversack and carry him off, as French fire crackled around the retreating regiment. For some hours the enemy held possession of the brigade baggage train. When the British regained the position, the Smiths were crestfallen to discover that a goose which they were fattening for Christmas dinner had vanished.

      It is hard to imagine how Juana, a gently-reared, convent-educated young Spanish woman, adapted to a life among foreigners whose language she could not speak, and whose customs were wholly alien to her. She was deprived of female society, of a home and any vestige of comfort. Instead, she lived amid an army in which the highest chivalry co-existed with the basest cruelty. She was indefatigable in visiting the sick and wounded, sometimes riding Tiny across empty country in the army’s rear, scoured by French dragoons, to reach the hospitals. One night in France the couple were billeted upon an elderly widow who served them with bouillon in a Sevres bowl which Juana admired. Their hostess remarked that it was one of her wedding presents, never used since her husband’s death. Two mornings later on the road to Toulouse, the Smiths were appalled to see their servant enter, carrying the very same bowl full of milk. Juana, surely mindful of the pillage of her own home in Badajoz, burst into tears. Harry’s man shrugged off his master’s reproaches: ‘Lord, sir, why the French soldiers would have carried off the widow an’ she had been young, and I thought the bowl would be so nice for the goats’ milk in the morning.’ That night, when Harry returned to the cottage in which they were staying, there was no sign of his wife. At last she entered, weary and mudstained. She had ridden thirty miles back to Mont de Marsan to return the widow’s bowl. Reader, remember: she was barely sixteen.

      ‘When I was first troubled with you,’ Harry wrote to Juana some years later, ‘you were a little, wiry, violent, ill-tempered, always faithful little devil, and kept your word to a degree which, at your age, and for your sex, was as remarkable as meritorious, but, please Almighty God, I shall have this old woman with me, until we both dwindle to our mother earth, and when the awful time comes, grant we go together at the same moment.’ It is not hard to perceive the springs of Harry’s devotion.

      The Smiths were with the British army at Toulouse in March 1814 when word came of Bonaparte’s abdication. Harry’s old battalion of the Rifles, which had sailed from England in 1808 numbering 1,050 officers and men, had in the meantime received only one draft of a hundred men, and now returned home just five hundred strong. Those five hundred were recognised, however, as the greatest skirmishing unit in the world. Johnny Kincaid observed wryly that the Rifles sailing from France looked a ‘well-shot corps…Beckwith with a cork leg – Pemberton and Manners with a shot each in the knees, making them as stiff as the other’s tree one – Loftus Gray with a gash in the lip and minus a portion of one heel which made him march to the tune of dot and go one – Smith with a shot in the ankle – Eeles minus a thumb – Johnston, in addition to other shot-holes, a stiff elbow, which deprived him of the power of disturbing his friends as scratcher of Scotch reels upon the violin – Percival with a shot through his lungs – Hope with a grapeshot lacerated leg – and George Simmonds with his riddled body held together by a pair of stays, for his was no holiday waist.’ Smith’s survival with so small a loss of his own blood was an extraordinary accident.

      The captain was now presented with a painful dilemma, however. His brigade was given immediate orders to sail for America, where the British were committed to a new war. No leave was being granted. He himself might choose to resign his post and go home. But, for all his reputation as one of the boldest and brightest spirits in Wellington’s army, he still craved and needed promotion. Amid grief and many tears, he agreed with Juana that they should part. She was to go to London with Harry’s brother Tom and all the money the couple could muster, lodge in the capital and learn English while he campaigned. She flatly refused to approach his family in Cambridgeshire until he himself could escort her there. ‘Many a year has gone by,’ he wrote in his autobiography about the day of their separation, ‘still the recollection of that afternoon is as fresh in my memory as it was painful at the moment – oh, how painful!…I never was unmanned until now, and I leaped on my horse by that impulse which guides the soldier to do his duty.’ Heaven knows what would have befallen Juana if her husband had СКАЧАТЬ