Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ join the main army which was expecting at any moment to receive Bonaparte’s assault. Early next morning, the day of Waterloo, Lambert sent Smith cantering forward to petition the Duke of Wellington for more congenial orders. He found the great man near Hougoumont, riding the ridge of Mont St Jean among his staff, deploying his divisions. Smith reported. The commander-in-chief directed Lambert’s brigade forthwith to move forward to occupy a position on the left of the British line.

      Sometimes, the witnesses of great events do not perceive their magnitude until afterwards. On the morning of Waterloo, almost every man on the field understood that he was a part of history being made. Smith was sublimely conscious of beholding his idol the Duke at the summit of his powers, concise and assured as ever in his vision of the day ahead. Wellington showed the Rifleman exactly where Lambert’s brigade must deploy. Finally he said: ‘Do you understand?’ ‘Perfectly, my lord.’ Then Smith turned his horse and hastened back to Lambert.

      As the brigade formed column for its advance to the field of Waterloo, Harry found time to instruct Juana to ride Tiny back into Brussels to await the outcome of the battle. Mrs Smith reached the great square of the city to encounter West the groom presiding over a heap of the family’s possessions. Orders had just come for the army’s baggage train to move to a village five miles further back. There, like Thackeray’s Becky Sharp with Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair, Juana and West spent an interminable afternoon, waiting upon news amid a torrent of rumour and alarms. Vitty the pug, infected by the excitement around him, leapt hither and thither, rejecting repose. Tiny the Andalusian would scarcely stand still. Word suddenly came that the French were upon them. Juana mounted and took Vitty in her arms. At that moment, the little horse bolted. For eight frightening miles he would not check until suddenly he gathered himself to leap a wagon, changed his mind and stopped. Juana was thrown over his head. She had just remounted and was gathering her breath when over the hill came a party of fast-riding horsemen. These proved to be British officers and troopers, together with one of her own servants, all bent on flight. ‘Pray, sir, is there any danger?’ she demanded of a hussar. ‘Danger, mum! When I left Brussels, the French were in pursuit down the hill.’ Unwillingly, she was persuaded to follow the party down the road. She sensed that she was in the company of scoundrels, however, when one man urged that she should throw away Vitty to hasten their flight. She arrived at Antwerp emotionally and physically exhausted, her face streaked with mud and tears. She took refuge in the care of the British commandant of the citadel and his wife, with whom she spent the long hours that followed, awaiting news of the outcome of the great clash of armies beyond Brussels.

      Lambert’s brigade came late to the field, yet in time to share with the rest of the British army the terrible blood price of the day. Wellington’s sixty-seven thousand men held the ridge of Mont St Jean against French bombardment and relentless assault, at the cost of fifteen thousand casualties. By nightfall, some British infantry squares still occupied the ground they had defended all day, but they were heaped regiments of the dead. One of Lambert’s units, the 27th, was reduced to two officers, both wounded, and 120 men. Smith himself, plunging to and fro through flame and smoke hour after hour, must by late afternoon have been within a few hundred paces of Marcellin Marbot. Two horses were badly wounded under the Englishman. There was an extraordinary moment late that afternoon, when firing died away across the battlefield. Away out on the left flank Smith felt sure the outcome of the battle had been decided, yet could not judge which side was victorious. The fog of war, so literal a term in the age of black powder, obscured the rest of the army from his gaze. Only when the smoke drifted away from the ridge of Mont St Jean could he see red coats still standing firm along its length, amid the wreckage of Bonaparte’s hopes. It was the supreme triumph of Wellington’s generalship against that of the Corsican, a victory gained by the stubborn defiance of the British infantryman. Smith saw that it was safe to surrender to rejoicing.

      At the end of that June day, ‘to my wonder, my astonishment, and to my gratitude to Almighty God’, the Smith brothers found that all three had survived. Charles had suffered a slight neck wound. Harry, physically and emotionally exhausted, sat down to make tea in a soldier’s mess tin for Major-General Sir James Kempt, Sir John Lambert and himself. Gazing upon the victorious field, he observed that never in his career as a soldier had he seen such slaughter. Everywhere stood men weeping for dead comrades or relatives, for this was an age when soldiers felt no shame to weep. As Charles Smith helped to gather the dead of his regiment, he glimpsed the corpse of a French officer of delicate mould and appearance, and was astonished on closer examination to discover that this was a young and beautiful woman. Harry Smith mused: ‘What were the circumstances of devotion, passion or patriotism which led to such heroism is, and ever will be, to me a mystery. Love, depend upon it.’

      It was late in the afternoon of 19 June, the day following the battle, before the suspense of Juana Smith and thousands of other British camp followers at Antwerp was ended and they were assured that Boney was beaten. Yet still Juana knew nothing about the fate of her Harry. At three o’clock on the morning of the twentieth, against all the pleadings of her companions, she set out with West in quest of him. Arrived at Brussels at seven, she fell in with a party of Riflemen who, to her horror, dolefully declared that Brigade-Major Smith was killed. She hastened towards the battlefield, expecting every cart which passed laden with corpses to contain that of her beloved Harry. Reaching the field of Waterloo, she began to run distraught among fast-decaying bodies and newly-dug graves. Suddenly she met Charlie Gore, ADC to Sir James Kempt. ‘Oh, where is he?’ she cried. ‘Where is my Enrique?’ Gore replied easily: ‘Dearest Juana, believe me; it is poor Charles Smyth, Pack’s Brigade-Major [who is dead]. I swear to you, on my honour, I left Harry riding Lochinvar in perfect health, but very anxious about you.’

      ‘Oh, may I believe you, Charlie! My heart will burst.’

      ‘Why should you doubt me?’

      ‘Then God has heard my prayer!’

      She rode on to Mons, arriving at midnight to snatch a few hours’ sleep. At dawn next morning, 21 June, she hurried on to Harry’s brigade bivouac at Bavay, where ‘soon, O gracious God, I sank into his embrace’.

      Smith was made brevet lieutenant-colonel and a Companion of the Bath for his part at Waterloo. He was not yet thirty. The Duke of Wellington presented Juana to the Tsar of Russia, explaining: ‘Voila, Sire, ma petite guerrière espagnole qui a fait la guerre avec son mari comme la héroïne de Saragosse.’

      So she had indeed. Many years of active service and glory lay before Harry, always with Juana at his side. He led armies to war against the Mahrattas in India and against the Kaffirs in South Africa, rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, and received a knighthood for his contribution to victory at Maharajpore in 1845. He was later elevated to a baronetcy, though sadly the couple bore no child to inherit the title, for his triumph at the 1846 battle of Aliwal in the Sikh Wars. In 1847 he was posted as governor and commander-in-chief at the Cape. In the highest commands, his superiors in London did not deem him a success, and he was eventually recalled from the Cape in 1852. Bluff, eager, hearty little Harry Smith lacked subtlety or political judgement, just as all his life he was reckless with money. In 1854, when Lord Raglan died in the Crimea, Harry was briefly considered a possible successor as commander-in-chief. He himself still chafed for action, and chronic indigence made him desperate for paid employment. But he was sixty-five years old. Lord Panmure, as secretary at war, wrote to Queen Victoria explaining that the most ardent of her lieutenant-generals had been passed over ‘from the circumstances of impaired health and liability to excitement’.

      Poor Sir Harry died broke. All his solicitations failed to gain him the peerage he craved. Yet, perhaps more than any other man described in these pages, his life was happy and fulfilled, thanks to his peerless partnership with Juana. There must have been a tinge of melancholy about their childlessness, but to the end of his days, his letters to his wife whenever they found themselves apart were those of a young lover. It is hard to improve upon Smith’s own epitaph for himself, composed in 1844:

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