_Bell's Indian and Colonial Library_
WELLINGTON'S MEN
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
BY
W.H. FITCHETT, B.A., LL.D.
In Paper Covers or Cloth
DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE.
Historic Battle Scenes. With 16 Portraits
and 11 Plans.
FIGHTS FOR THE FLAG. With 16
Portraits and 13 Plans.
HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE.
The Story of the Great War, 1793-1815.
Four Volumes. With Portraits, Facsimiles,
and Plans.
WELLINGTON'S MEN
SOME SOLDIER
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
_Kincaid's "Adventures in the Rifle Brigade";
"Rifleman Harris"; Anton's "Military
Life"; Mercer's "Waterloo"_
EDITED BY
W.H. FITCHETT, B.A., LL.D.
AUTHOR OF
"DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE," "FIGHTS FOR THE FLAG,"
"HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE," ETC.
[Illustration]
LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
AND BOMBAY
1900
_This Edition is issued for circulation in India and the Colonies
only._
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Soldier in Literature 1
I. From Torres Vedras to Waterloo-- 23
I. A Young Soldier 28
II. Retreats and Pursuits 41
III. Some Famous Battles 62
IV. The Imminent Deadly Breach 86
V. In the Pyrenees 105
VI. Quatre Bras 116
VII. The Rifles at Waterloo 126
II. One of Craufurd's Veterans-- 139
I. The King's Shilling 144
II. In the Peninsula 153
III. When the Fight is Over 171
IV. A Memorable Retreat 178
V. Stern Scenes 194
VI. Some Famous Soldiers 209
VII. The "Tommy Atkins" of a Century Ago 222
III. A Royal Highlander-- 235
I. About Soldiers' Wives 241
II. Fighting in the Pyrenees 257
III. The Hillside at Toulouse 276
IV. The 42nd at Quatre Bras 287
V. The Highlanders at Waterloo 297
IV. With the Guns at Waterloo-- 307
I. Waiting for the Guns 311
II. On March to the Field 327
III. Quatre Bras 335
IV. The Retreat to Waterloo 350
V. Waterloo 370
VI. After the Fight 397
THE SOLDIER IN LITERATURE
WELLINGTON'S MEN
THE SOLDIER IN LITERATURE
This volume is an attempt to rescue from undeserved oblivion a cluster
of soldierly autobiographies; and to give to the general reader some
pictures of famous battles, not as described by the historian or
analysed by the philosopher, but as seen by the eyes of men who fought
in them. History treats the men who do the actual fighting in war very
ill. It commonly forgets all about them. If it occasionally sheds a few
drops of careless ink upon them, it is without either comprehension
or sympathy. From the orthodox historian's point of view, the private
soldier is a mere unconsidered pawn in the passionless chess of some
cold-brained strategist. As a matter of fact a battle is an event which
pulsates with the fiercest human passions--passions bred of terror and
of daring; of the anguish of wounds and of the rapture of victory; of
the fear and awe of human souls over whom there suddenly sweeps the
mystery of death.
But under conventional literary treatment all this evaporates. To
the historian a battle is as completely drained of human emotion as
a chemical formula. It is evaporated into a haze of cold and cloudy
generalities.
But this is certainly to miss what is, for the human imagination,
the most characteristic feature of a great fight. A battle offers
the spectacle of, say, a hundred thousand men lifted up suddenly
and simultaneously into a mood of intensest passion--heroic or
diabolical--eager to kill and willing to be killed; a mood in which
death and wounds count for nothing and victory for everything. This
is the feature of war which stirs the common imagination of the race;
which makes gentle women weep, and wise philosophers stare, and the
average hot-blooded human male turn half-frenzied with excitement.
What does each separate human atom feel, when caught in that whirling
tornado of passion and of peril? Who shall make visible to us the
actual faces in the fighting-line; or make audible the words--stern
order, broken prayer, blasphemous jest--spoken amid the tumult? Who
shall give us, in a word, an adequate picture of the soldier's life in
actual war-time, with its hardships, its excitements, its escapes, its
exultation and despair?
If the soldier attempts to tell the tale himself he commonly fails.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he belongs to the inarticulate
classes. He lacks the gift of description. He can do a great deed, but
cannot describe it when it is done. If knowledge were linked in them to
an adequate gift of literary expression, soldiers would be the great
literary artists of the race. For who else lives through so wide and
so wild a range of experience and emotion. When, as in the case of
Napier, a soldier emerges with a distinct touch of literary genius, the
result is an immortal book. But usually the soldier has to be content
with making history; he leaves to others the tamer business of writing
it, and generally himself suffers the injustice of being forgotten in
the process. Literature is congested with books which describe the
soldier from the outside; which tell the tale of his hardships and
heroisms, his follies and vices, as they are seen by the remote and
uncomprehending spectator. What the world needs is the tale of the
bayonet and of "Brown Bess," written by the hand which has actually
used those weapons.
Now, the narratives which these pages offer afresh to the world are of
exactly this character. They are pages of battle-literature written by
the hands of soldiers. They are not attempts at history, but exercises
in autobiography. So they are actual human documents, with the salt
of truth, of sincerity, and of reality in every syllable. The faded
leaves of these memoirs are still stained with the red wine of battle.
In their words--to the imaginative and sympathetic hearer, at all
events--there are still audible the shouts of charging men, the roll
of musketry volleys, the wild cheer of the stormers at Ciudad Rodrigo
or Badajos, the earth-shaking thunder of Waterloo. Passages from four
of such autobiographies are woven into the pages of this book: Captain
Kincaid's "Adventures in the Rifle Brigade in the Peninsula, &c.";
Sergeant Anton's "Recollections of Service in the 42nd"; the tale of
"Rifleman Harris" in the old 95th; and Mercer's experiences in command
of a battery at Waterloo. All these books are old; three, at least, are
out of print, and form the rare prizes to be picked up by the fortunate
collector in second-hand bookshops. Anton's book was published in 1841,
Kincaid's in 1830, and is endorsed "very scarce." Captain Curling
edited "Rifleman Harris" in 1848. Mercer's "Journal of the Waterloo
Campaign" was written in 1830, and published as late as 1870. But it
consists of two volumes, in which the story of the great battle is
only an episode, and it has never reached any wide circle of readers.
Yet Mercer's account of Waterloo is the best personal narrative of the
great fight in English literature.
All these books are thus of rare interest and value. They belong to the
era of "Brown Bess," of the Peninsula, and of Waterloo. Each writer
represents a distinct type of soldiership. Kincaid was a captain in
one of the most famous regiments in British history--the Rifles in
Craufurd's Light Division. Harris was a private in another battalion of
the same regiment. Mercer commanded battery G--fondly described by its
Captain as "the finest troop in the service"--at Waterloo. Anton was a
Scottish soldier in that not least famous of Scottish regiments--the
42nd, or Royal Highlanders. They all took part in that chain of
memorable victories, which stretches from Roliça to Waterloo, and they
were all--though in widely different ways--fighting men of the highest
quality. Kincaid led a forlorn hope at Ciudad Rodrigo. Harris was one
of the unconquerable, much-enduring rearguard in Moore's retreat to
Corunna. Anton shared in the wild fighting of the 42nd at Toulouse.
Mercer fought his battery at Waterloo until, out of 200 fine horses in
his troop, 140 lay dead or dying; while of the men not enough survived
to man four guns; and these, as the great battle came to its end, fell,
smoke-blackened and exhausted, in slumber beside their blood-splashed
guns. Each writer, too, had, in an amusing degree, an intense pride in
the particular body to which he belonged. The army with him counted for
little, the regiment was everything.
Kincaid says, with entire frankness, if anybody who had not the good
fortune to belong to the "Rifles" expects to be named in his book, he
was "most confoundedly mistaken." "Neither," he adds, "will I mention
any regiment but my own, if I can possibly avoid it. For there is
none other that I like so much, and none else so much deserves it.
For we were the light regiment of the Light Division, and fired the
first and last shot in almost every battle, siege, and skirmish, in
which the army was engaged during the war." Kincaid admits that the
43rd and 52nd--the other regiments that formed the immortal Light
Division--deserved to be remembered, too; but the most flattering
compliment he can pay them is to say, "wherever we were, they were."
"Whenever it came to a pinch," he adds, "we had only to look behind
to see a line"--consisting of these two regiments--"in which we might
place a degree of confidence almost equal to our hopes in heaven. There
never was such a corps of riflemen with such supporters!"
Harris, again, cherishes the comforting persuasion that his particular
battalion could outmarch, outshoot, outlaugh, outdare--perhaps even
outdrink--any other in the British army. "We were," he says, "always
at the front in an advance, and at the rear in a retreat." He praises
the army as a whole, but it is only for the sake of erecting a pedestal
on which some new monument to the glory of the "Rifles" can be placed.
He recalls the memory of the British army as it approached Salamanca.
"The men," he says, "seemed invincible. Nothing, I thought, could
have beaten them." Yet the cream of it all was the "Rifles"! Harris's
working creed, in brief, consists of three articles: (1) that the
finest army in the world was that which Wellington led; (2) that the
finest regiment in that army was the 95th; and (3) that the best
battalion in the regiment was that his major commanded! "We had some
of as desperate fellows in the Rifles as had ever toiled under the
burning sun of an enemy's country in any age. There never were such a
set of devil-may-care fellows so completely up to their business as the
95th. They were in the mess before the others began, and were the last
to leave off. It was their business to be so.... There was, perhaps,
as intelligent and talented a set of men amongst us as ever carried a
weapon in any country. They seemed at times to need but a glance at
what was going on to know all about its 'why and wherefore.'"
Sergeant Anton, again, has all a good Scotchman's austere pride
in the superiority of a Scotch regiment over any other that ever
carried muskets. He has nothing but an imperfectly disguised pity
for those unfortunate people who have the bad taste to be born south
of the Tweed. Any Scotch regiment, he visibly holds, is necessarily
better than any possible regiment not brought up on porridge. And if
amongst the Scottish regiments there was any quite equal to the Royal
Highlanders, Sergeant Anton, at least, would like to know the name
of that surprising body. In the same fashion Captain Mercer, the one
educated man in this cluster of soldier-scribes, plainly cherishes a
hearty belief that battery G has the finest horses, the best equipment,
the smartest men, and the most perfect discipline, not merely in the
British army, but in any army known to history! Pride in the regiment
to which the soldier happens to belong is a fine element of military
strength. Under modern short-service conditions it grows faint; but
amongst Wellington's veterans it had almost the fervours of a religion.
It may be added that these writers are curiously distinct, and look at
war through very diverse eyes. Kincaid represents a type of officer in
which the British army of all days is rich; and whose qualities explain
some of the failures, and most of the triumphs of that army. He was
gallant in every drop of his blood; cool, hardy, athletic, a fit leader
of the fighting line. He had been reared in luxury, accustomed to feed
daintily every day, to lie softly every night; he was full of the
pride of his caste; yet in the actual business of fighting, Kincaid,
like all officers of the type to which he belonged, could outmarch the
privates in the ranks. He fared as hardly as they, shared their scanty
rations, lay like them on the wet soil, endured in every way as much,
and grumbled less. He was not only first in the charge, but last in
the retreat, and took it all--hunger, wet, cold, perils--with smiling
face, as part of the day's work. Harris, who views his officers through
a private's eyes, is never weary of dwelling on their hardihood, as
well as their pluck. "The gentlemen," he says, "bear it best." "It is
usually found," he adds, "that those whose birth and station might
reasonably have made them fastidious under hardship and toil, bear
their miseries without a murmur; while those whose previous life might
have better prepared them for the toil of war, are the first to cry out
and complain of their hard fate."
Kincaid belongs to this fine type of officer; but he had all the
limitations of his type. He knew nothing of the scientific side of
his profession. He fought by the light of nature, and looked on a
battle as a game of football. He was a true product of the English
public schools; gay, plucky, hardy, reckless. He lived under the
empire of great feelings--of patriotism, honour, &c.--but tortures
would not make him use great words to describe them. A shy and proud
self-disparagement is the note of Kincaid's type. They are almost more
afraid of being detected in doing a fine thing than others are of
being proved guilty of doing a base thing. Kincaid himself describes
how Ciudad Rodrigo was carried, but omits to mention the circumstance
that he volunteered for the forlorn hope, and led it. The tone of his
book is that of the officers' mess, bright, off-hand, jesting at peril,
making light of hardships. He tells the tale of heroic deeds--his own
or others'--with the severest economy of admiring adjectives. The only
adjectives, indeed, Kincaid admits are those of a comminatory sort.
Harris is a fair sample of the unconquerable British private of the
Peninsular age, with all the virtues, and all the limitations of his
class. He is stocky in body, stubborn in temper, untaught and primitive
in nature. He seems to have had no education. His horizon is singularly
limited. He sees little beyond the files to right and left of him. The
major who commands the battalion is the biggest figure in his world.
His endurance is wonderful. Laden like a donkey, with ill-fitting
boots and half-filled stomach, he can splash along the muddy Spanish
roads, under the falling rain, or sweat beneath the Spanish mid-summer
heats, from gray dawn to gathering dusk. He will toil on, indeed,
with dogged courage until his brain reels, his eyes grow blind, and
the over-wrought muscles can no longer stir the leaden feet. Harris
is loyal to his comrades; cherishes an undoubting confidence in his
officers; believes that, man for man, any British regiment can beat
twice its numbers of any other nation; while his own particular
regiment, the 95th, will cheerfully take in hand four times that ratio
of foes. Harris has no hate for a Frenchman; he respects and likes him
indeed, but he always expects to thrash him, and having shot his French
foe he is quite prepared to explore his pockets in search of booty.
For the British private in the Peninsula was by no means an angel in
a red coat. His vices, like his virtues, were of a primitive sort. He
drank, he swore, and alas, he plundered. If the valour which raged at
the great breach of Badajos, or swept up the slope of rugged stones at
San Sebastian, was of almost incredible fire, so the brutality which
plundered and ravished and slew after the city was carried, was of
almost incredible fierceness. Harris had no education or almost none;
yet he learned to write, and write well. His style, it is true, is
that of the uneducated man. He is most sensitive to things that touch
himself. He is conscious of the weight of his knapsack, of the blisters
on his feet, of the hunger in his stomach, and he drags all these
emotions into his tale. Yet Harris had, somehow, by gift of nature, an
unusual literary faculty. He sees, and he makes you see. It is true the
area of his vision is narrow. It is almost filled up, as we have said,
by his right- and left-hand files. It never goes beyond the battalion.
But on that narrow canvas he paints with the minuteness and fidelity of
a Dutch artist.
Sergeant-major Anton is really an economical and domestically inclined
Scotchman, whom chance has thrust into the ranks of the Royal
Highlanders; and who, finding himself a soldier, devotes himself to the
business with that hard-headed and unsentimental thoroughness which
makes the Lowland Scot about the most formidable fighting man the world
knows. For Anton is a Lowlander; heavy-footed, heavy-bodied, dour,
with nothing of a Highlander's excitability or clan-sentiment. A story
is current of how, in storming a kopje in South Africa, a Highland
soldier dislodged a Boer, and, with threatening bayonet, brought him to
a stand against a wall of rock. As he lingered for the final and fatal
lunge, another eager Scot called out "Oot o' the way, Jock, and gie
me room tae get a poke at him." "Na, na, Tam," shouted his frugal and
practically-minded comrade, "awa' wi' ye and find a Boer tae yersel'."
There is a touch of this severely practical spirit in Anton, and in
this, no doubt, he reflects his regiment. Given a French battery to
be stormed, here are men who, with bent heads, wooden faces, and
steady bayonets, will push on into the very flame of the guns, and
each man will do his separate part with a conscientious thoroughness
that no foe can withstand. The story of the fight on the hillside
at Toulouse illustrates this stern quality in Scottish soldiership.
But the domestic side of Anton's nature is always visible. He was
one of the few married men in his regiment, and he is never wearied
of describing what snug nests he built for his mate and himself in
the intervals betwixt marching and fighting, or when the troops had
gone into winter quarters. The value of Anton's book, indeed, lies
largely in the light it sheds on the fortunes and sufferings of the
hardy women, sharp of tongue and strong of body, who marched in the
rear of Wellington's troops; and who, to their honour be it recorded,
were usually faithful wives to the rough soldiers whose fortunes they
shared. Anton, it is amusing to note, is the only one of the group who
makes deliberate--and, it may be added, singularly unhappy--attempts
at fine writing. He indulges in frequent apostrophes to the reader,
to posterity, to his native country, and to the universe at large. In
his many-jointed sentences linger echoes of ancient sermons; far-off
flavours of the Shorter Catechism are discoverable in them. Anton,
however, can be simple and direct when he has an actual tale of
fighting to tell. He forgets his simplicity only when he moralises over
the battle-field the next day.
Mercer is much the ablest and most accomplished writer of the four. He
belonged to the scientific branch of the army, the artillery, and he
had studied his art with the thoroughness of a scholar. That Mercer was
a cool and gallant soldier of the finest type cannot be doubted. He
has, indeed, a fine military record, and rose to the rank of general,
and held command of the 9th Brigade of Royal Artillery. But Mercer was
a many-sided man in a quite curious degree. He was a scholar; a lover
of books; a country gentleman, with a country gentleman's delight in
horse-flesh and crops. He was, moreover, an artist, with a Ruskinesque,
not to say a Turneresque, sense of colour and form. A fine landscape
was for him a feast, only rivalled by the joy of a good book. He
lingers on the very edge of Quatre Bras, while the thunder of cannon
shakes the air, and while his own guns are floundering up a steep hill
path, to note and describe the far-stretching landscape, the glow of
the evening sky, the Salvator-like trees, the sparkle of glassy pools,
&c. Mercer is so good an artillery officer that he sees every buckle
in the harness of his horses, and every button on the uniforms of his
men; and yet he is sensitive to every tint and change in the landscape
through which his guns are galloping.
On the morning after Waterloo, his face still black with its smoke, and
his ears stunned with its roar, he picks his way across the turf, thick
with the bodies of the slain, into the garden of Hougoumont. The bodies
of the dead lie there, too; but Mercer is almost intoxicated with the
cool verdure of the trees, with the chant of a stray nightingale,
and even with "the exuberant vegetation of turnips and cabbages," as
well as with the scent of flowers! It is this combination of keen
artistic sensibility with the finest type of courage--courage which, if
gentle in form, was yet of the ice-brook's temper--which makes Mercer
interesting. Here was a man who might have fished with Izaak Walton,
or discussed hymns with Cowper, or philosophy with Coleridge; yet this
pensive, gentle, artistic, bookish man fought G Battery at Waterloo
till two-thirds of his troop were killed, and has written the best
account of the great battle, from the human and personal side, to be
found in English literature.
Here, then, are four human documents, of genuine historic value, as
well as of keen personal interest. They have their defects. There is
no perspective in their pages. To Rifleman Harris, for example, the
state of his boots is of as much importance, and is described with as
much detail, as the issue of the battle. These memoirs will not give
the reader the battle as a whole; still less the campaign; least of
all will they give the politics behind the campaign. But a magic is in
them, the magic of reality and of personal experience. They seem to
put the reader in the actual battle-line, to fill his nostrils with
the scent of gunpowder, to make his eyes tingle with the pungency of
ancient battle-smoke.
It may be added that these books give pictures of such battle
landscapes as will never be witnessed again. They belong to the period
when war had much more of the picturesque and human element than it has
to-day. "Brown Bess" was short of range, and the fighting-lines came so
near to each other that each man could see his foeman's face, and hear
his shout or oath. War appealed to every sense. It filled the eyes. It
registered itself in drifting continents of smoke. It deafened the ear
with blast of cannon and ring of steel. It adorned itself in all the
colours of the rainbow. The uniforms of Napoleon's troops, as they were
drawn up on the slopes of La Belle Alliance, were a sort of debauch of
colour. Houssaye gives a catalogue of the regiments--infantry of the
line in blue coats, white breeches, and gaiters; heavy cavalry with
glittering cuirasses and pennoned lances; chasseurs in green and purple
and yellow; hussars with dolmans and shakos of all tints--sky-blue,
scarlet, green, and red; dragoons with white shoulder-belts and
turban-helmets of tiger-skin, surmounted by a gleaming cone of brass;
lancers in green, with silken cords on their helmets; carabineers,
giants of six feet, clad in white, with breastplates of gold and lofty
helmets with red plumes; grenadiers in blue, faced with scarlet, yellow
epaulettes, and high bearskin caps; the red lancers--red-breeched,
red-capped, with floating white plumes half a yard long; the Young
Guard; the Old Guard, with bearskin helmets, blue trousers and coats;
the artillery of the Guard, with bearskin helmets, &c.
Such a host, looked at from the picturesque point of view, was a sort
of human rainbow, with a many-coloured gleam of metal--gold and silver,
steel and brass--added. And colour counts at least in attracting
recruits. Harris joined the 95th because his eyes were dazzled with
the "smartness" of its uniform. Lord Roberts has told the world how
he joined the Bengal Horse Artillery purely because he found their
white buckskin breeches, and the leopard skin and red plumes on the
men's helmets, irresistible! Napoleon, it will be remembered, turned
the spectacular aspect of his army to martial use. On the morning of
Waterloo he brought his troops over the slope of the hill in eleven
stately columns; he spread them out like a mighty glittering fan in
the sight of the coolly watching British. To foes of more sensitive
imagination the spectacle of that vast and iris-tinted host might
well have chilled their courage. But the British--whether to their
credit or their discredit may be disputed--keep their imagination and
their courage in separate compartments. They are not liable to be
discouraged, still less put to rout, by the most magnificent display of
what may be called the millinery of war.
But that aspect of war has faded, never to revive. Khaki kills the
picturesque. Battle has grown grey, remote, invisible. It consists
of trenches miles long, in which crouch unseen riflemen, shooting
at moving specks of grey, distant thousands of yards; or in guns
perched on hills five miles apart bellowing to each other across the
intervening valleys. It is not merely that in a battle of to-day a
soldier cannot see the features of the man he kills; he probably does
not see him at all. The Highlanders at the Modder marched, panted,
thirsted, killed, and were killed, for eight hours, and never saw a
Boer! The soldier to-day sees neither the pin-pricks of flame nor the
whiff of grey smoke which tell that somebody is shooting at him. For
these are days of smokeless powder and long-range rifles. The man shot
at only learns that circumstance as he catches the air-scurry of the
passing bullet, and the atmosphere about him grows full of what one
half-terrified war correspondent calls "little whimpering air-devils."
The interest of these books is that they bring back to us living
pictures, as seen through living human eyes, of the great battles of a
century ago--battles which have grown obsolete in fashion, but which
changed the currents of the world's history, and of whose gain we are
the heirs to-day.
It is curious, in a sense even amusing, to note how diversely their
famous commander impressed these four soldiers, each occupied in
recording for the benefit of posterity what he saw. Anton apparently
never sees Wellington. The human horizon for the Scottish sergeant is
filled with the colonel of his regiment. Harris gravely records how he
saw the great Duke take his hat off on the field of Vimiero; for the
rest, he held the ordinary view of the rank and file of the Peninsula
that the Duke's long nose on a battle-field was worth 10,000 men.
Kincaid says he was so anxious to see the Duke when he joined the army
that, as he puts it, "I never should have forgiven the Frenchman that
killed me before I effected it." He was soon gratified, but seems quite
unable to give any description of the great soldier. He contemplated
him with the sort of frightened awe with which the youngest boy at Eton
would look at "the head" arrayed in his official robes; a vision to
be contemplated from a safe distance, without the least desire for a
nearer and personal acquaintance.
Mercer came closer to the great Duke, and regards him with a cooler
and therefore a severer judgment. Mercer had boundless confidence in
Wellington as a battle-leader, but not the least affection for him
as a man, and it is plain he had no special reasons for affection.
Wellington had many fine moral qualities, but anxious consideration for
other people, or even calm justice in his dealings with them, is not
to be included in their catalogue. The famous general order he issued
after the retreat from Burgos is an example of the undiscriminating
harshness with which Wellington could treat an entire army. And that
element of harshness--of swift, impatient, relentless discipline that
could not stay to discriminate, to weigh evidence, or even to hear
it--was one great defect of Wellington as a general. About his soldiers
he had as little human feeling as a good chess-player has about his
pawns. Mercer never came into intercourse with the Duke but with
disaster to himself, a disaster edged with injustice.
When his troop was in France, Mercer says he ran an equal risk of
falling under the Duke's displeasure for systematically plundering
the farmers, or for not plundering them! If a commander of a battery
allowed his horses to look in worse condition than those of another
battery he was relentlessly punished. "The quick eye of the Duke
would see the difference. He asked no questions, attended to no
justification, but condemned the unfortunate captain as unworthy of the
command he held, and perhaps sent him from the army." But the official
amount of forage supplied was quite insufficient for the purpose of
keeping the horses in high condition. Other troops supplemented the
supply by "borrowing" from the farmers, and there was no resource but
to imitate them, or to risk professional ruin by presenting at parade
horses inferior in look to those of other troops nourished on mere
felony. Wellington forgave neither the unlicensed "borrowing" of the
officers nor the want of condition in their horses. Yet one fault or
the other was inevitable.
The Duke, it seems, "had no love for the artillery," and all his
harshness was expended on that branch of the service. "The Duke of
Wellington's ideas of discipline," says Mercer, "are rigid; his modes
of administering them are summary, and he is frequently led into acts
of the grossest injustice." Thus the owner of a building where some of
Mercer's men were quartered--a thorough rogue--complained to the Duke
that the lead piping of his house had been plundered and sold by the
guilty British gunners. Wellington made no inquiry, took no evidence.
A staff officer rode to Mercer's quarters one day with a copy of
this complaint, on the margin of which was written in the Duke's own
hand-writing: "Colonel Scovell will find out whose troop this is, and
they shall pay double." This was the first intimation the unfortunate
Mercer had received of the charge against him. The Frenchman pretended
to estimate his loss at 7000 francs, and Mercer was advised, in high
quarters, to pay this sum in order to escape the Duke's wrath. Mercer
appealed to Sir George Wood, who told him his only chance lay in
evading payment as long as he could; then the Duke might be caught in a
more amiable mood. The actual thief--one of the French villagers--was
discovered and convicted; but this circumstance, Mercer records, "has
not in the least altered my position with the Duke of Wellington; for
none dare tell him the story; and even Sir Edward Barnes, who kindly
attempted it, met with a most ungracious rebuff!"
The French scoundrel, meanwhile, was dunning Mercer to get his 7000
francs. The situation remained thus for weeks, till the audacious
Frenchman ventured on a second interview with the Duke. The Duke had
dismounted, as it happened, in a very ill humour, at the door of his
hotel, and the Frenchman pursued him up the grand staircase with his
complaint. The Duke turned roughly upon him, "What the devil do you
want, sir?" The Frenchman presented his bill with a flourish, whereupon
the Duke exclaimed to his aide-de-camp, "Pooh! kick the rascal
downstairs!" The Frenchman and his bill thus vanished from the scene;
but Mercer's comment is "that I eventually escaped paying a heavy sum
for depredations committed by others is due, not to the Duke's sense of
justice, but only to the irritability of his temper."
On another occasion Sir Augustus Fraser, meeting him, said, "Mercer,
you are released from arrest." Mercer stared: but on inquiry,
discovered that he had been officially under arrest for a fortnight
without knowing it. At a review, just before passing the saluting
point, a horse in the rear division of his battery got its leg over the
trace. The limber gunners leaped smartly off, put things straight, and
jumped to their places again; but the division, with their 18-pounders,
had to trot to regain place, and were just pulling up when they reached
the saluting point. The precise and rhythmical order of the troop
was a little disturbed, and Wellington, in a burst of wrath, put Sir
Augustus Fraser himself, who was in command of all the artillery, the
major in command of the brigade, and Mercer, the captain of the guilty
troop, under arrest, where--happily all unconscious--they remained for
a fortnight. Later Mercer wished to apply for leave of absence, but Sir
George Wood declined to present the request, as he said, "'It would not
be prudent just now to remind the Duke of me in any way.' Rather hard
and unjust this," is Mercer's comment.
Mercer, however, tells one story, which shows that the Duke of
Wellington was capable of sly satire at the expense of the French. An
English officer walking on the boulevard was rudely pushed into the
gutter by a French gentleman, whom the Englishman promptly knocked
down. The Frenchman, it turned out, was a marshal. He complained to the
Duke, but could not identify the officer who had knocked him down. The
Duke thereupon issued a general order, desiring that "British officers
would, in future, abstain from beating marshals of France."
I
FROM TORRES VEDRAS TO
WATERLOO
I.--FROM TORRES VEDRAS TO WATERLOO
Kincaid, the author of "Adventures in the Rifle Brigade," was born at
Dalheath, near Falkirk, in 1787. He held a lieutenant's commission in
the North York Militia, but in 1809 when only twenty-two years old,
joined, as a volunteer, the second battalion of the famous 95th--the
"Rifles" in the immortal Light Division. His first military service
was of an unhappy sort. He took part in the Walcheren expedition, and,
spite of a cheerful temper and a good constitution, fell a victim
to the swamp-bred agues and fevers which destroyed that ill-led
and ill-fated expedition. He emerged from his first campaign with
shattered health and no glory. In 1811 his battalion was ordered to
the Peninsula, and with it Kincaid marched and fought from the lines
of Torres Vedras to Waterloo. In the hard fighting of those stern days
the Rifles played a brilliant part. Kincaid kept guard in the great
hill-defences of Torres Vedras, joined in the pursuit of Massena, when
that general fell suddenly back, shared in the fury of the breaches at
Ciudad Rodrigo, and in the yet wilder assault on the great breach at
Badajos, and took part in all the great battles of those years from
Fuentes to Vittoria. He survived the stubborn and bloody combats in the
Pyrenees, fought at Toulouse, Quatre Bras, and on the famous ridge
at Waterloo. His battalion stood almost in the centre of Wellington's
battle-line on that fierce day, and the most desperate fighting of the
day eddied round it.
Kincaid was thus a gallant soldier, in a gallant regiment, and played a
part in great events. But his promotion was slow; he only received his
captain's commission in 1826. He was more fortunate, indeed, after he
left the army than while he served in it. He was given a place in the
Yeomen of the Guard in 1844, was knighted in 1852, and died in 1862,
aged seventy-five.
Kincaid's "Adventures in the Rifle Brigade" is a book of great merits
and of great faults. It is brisk, stirring, and picturesque, and paints
with great vividness the life of a subaltern in a fighting regiment
and during fighting times. But the book lacks order. Dates are dropped
into it, or are left out of it, with the most airy caprice. It has
no intelligible relationship to history. It never gives the reader
a glimpse of the history-making events which serve as a background
to the marching and the fighting of the Rifles. Kincaid, in a word,
races through his campaigns as a youth might race across the hills in
a harrier-chase; or, rather, as a boy with a lively sense of humour,
might saunter through a fair--without a plan, except to get all the
fun he can, and stopping, now to laugh at a clown, now to stare at a
mimic tragedy, now to exchange a jest with some other boy. His choice
of incident is determined absolutely by the "fun" they include--the
flavour of humour, or the gleam of the picturesque, which he can
discover in them. He makes no pretension, that is, to connected and
adequate narrative. But his record of adventures is always amusing,
often vivid, and sometimes has a certain thrilling quality which, after
the lapse of so many years, yet keeps its power.
Kincaid's tale is best served by re-grouping its incidents under
distinct heads. In his earlier chapters, for example, he gives
curiously interesting sketches of what may be called the non-fighting
side of a soldier's life--the marches, the bivouacs; the gossip of the
camp fires; the hardships--of muddy roads, of rain-filled skies, or of
dust and heat and thirst, of non-existent rations, and of sleepless
nights--which the soldier has to endure. So the reader gets a glimpse
the orthodox historians quite fail to give of the hardy, resourceful,
much-enduring British soldier of the Peninsula. Kincaid may be left to
tell all this in his own words, though with generous condensation.
CHAPTER I
A YOUNG SOLDIER
Kincaid dismisses, as not worth remembering or recording, all the tame
days of his life before he became a soldier on active service, and
plunges abruptly into his tale:--
"I joined the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade (then the 95th), at Hythe
Barracks, in the spring of 1809, and, in a month after, we proceeded to
form a part of the expedition to Holland, under the Earl of Chatham.
"With the usual quixotic feelings of a youngster, I remember how
desirous I was, on the march to Deal, to impress the minds of the
natives with a suitable notion of the magnitude of my importance, by
carrying a donkey-load of pistols in my belt, and screwing my naturally
placid countenance up to a pitch of ferocity beyond what it was
calculated to bear.
"We embarked in the Downs, on board the _Hussar_ frigate, and
afterwards removed to the _Namur_, a seventy-four, in which we
were conveyed to our destination. We landed on the island of South
Beeveland, where we remained about three weeks, playing at soldiers,
smoking mynheer's long clay pipes, and drinking his vrow's butter-milk,
for which I paid liberally with my precious blood to their infernal
mosquitoes; not to mention that I had all the extra valour shaken out
of me by a horrible ague, which commenced a campaign on my carcass, and
compelled me to retire upon Scotland, for the aid of my native air, by
virtue of which it was ultimately routed.
"I shall not carry my first chapter beyond my first campaign, as I am
anxious that my reader should not expend more than his first breath
upon an event which cost too many their last.
"I rejoined the battalion, at Hythe, in the spring of 1810, and,
finding that the company to which I belonged had embarked to join
the first battalion in the Peninsula, and that they were waiting
at Spithead for a fair wind, I immediately applied, and obtained
permission, to join them. We anchored in the Tagus in September; no
thanks to the ship, for she was a leaky one, and wishing foul winds to
the skipper, for he was a bad one.
"To look at Lisbon from the Tagus, there are few cities in the universe
that can promise so much, and none, I hope, that can keep it so badly.
I only got on shore one day for a few hours, and as I never again had
an opportunity of correcting the impression, I have no objection to its
being considered an uncharitable one; but I wandered for a time amid
the abominations of its streets and squares, in the vain hope that I
had got involved among a congregation of stables and out-houses; but I
was at length compelled to admit it as the miserable apology for the
fair city that I had seen from the harbour.
"It pleased the great disposer of naval events to remove us to another
and a better ship, and to send us off for Figuera next day with a
foul wind. Sailing at the rate of one mile in two hours, we reached
Figuera's Bay at the end of eight days, and were welcomed by about a
hundred hideous-looking Portuguese women, whose joy was so excessive
that they waded up to their arm-pits through a heavy surf, and insisted
on carrying us on shore on their backs! I never clearly ascertained
whether they had been actuated by the purity of love or gold."
Kincaid joined Wellington's forces at what might well have seemed a
very gloomy juncture. The British army was in full retreat. The star
of Massena shone in the ascendant. Talavera and Busaco had been fought,
and fought apparently in vain. Spain was abandoned, Portugal invaded.
Wellington seemed to be retreating to his ships. The secret of the
great lines of Torres Vedras, which were to finally arrest Massena's
advance, and save not only Portugal, but the Peninsula--perhaps
Europe--had been so well kept that even Wellington's own forces
were in ignorance of their existence. Yet Kincaid shows an easy and
careless unconsciousness of the disquieting aspect the campaign wore.
It was enough for him that he marched and fought with his regiment,
and shared all its fortunes. He scarcely looks beyond the files of
his own company, and has no doubt whatever that the French will be
satisfactorily thrashed in the end!
"We proceeded next morning to join the army; and as our route lay
through the city of Coimbra we came to the magnanimous resolution
of providing ourselves with all manner of comforts and equipments
for the campaign on our arrival there; but when we entered it at
the end of the second day, our disappointment was quite eclipsed by
astonishment at finding ourselves the only living things in the city,
which ought to have been furnished with twenty thousand souls.
"Lord Wellington was then in the course of his retreat from the
frontiers of Spain to the lines of Torres Vedras, and had compelled
the inhabitants on the line of march to abandon their homes, and
to destroy or carry away everything that could be of service to
the enemy. It was a measure that ultimately saved their country,
though ruinous and distressing to those concerned, and on no class
of individuals did it bear harder, for the moment, than our own
little detachment, a company of rosy-cheeked, chubbed youths, who,
after three months' feeding on ship's dumplings, were thus thrust,
at a moment of extreme activity, in the face of an advancing foe,
supported by a pound of raw beef, drawn every day fresh from the
bullock, and a mouldy biscuit.
"The difficulties we encountered were nothing out of the usual course
of old campaigners; but, untrained and unprovided as I was, I still
looked back upon the twelve or fourteen days following the battle
of Busaco as the most trying I have ever experienced, for we were
on our legs from daylight until dark, in daily contact with the
enemy; and, to satisfy the stomach of an ostrich, I had, as already
stated, only a pound of beef, a pound of biscuit, and one glass of
rum. A brother-officer was kind enough to strap my boat-cloak and
portmanteau on the mule carrying his heavy baggage, which, on account
of the proximity of the foe, was never permitted to be within a
day's march of us, so that, in addition to my simple uniform, my
only covering every night was the canopy of heaven, from whence the
dews descended so refreshingly that I generally awoke, at the end of
an hour, chilled, and wet to the skin; and I could only purchase an
equal length of additional repose by jumping up and running about
until I acquired a sleeping quantity of warmth. Nothing in life can
be more ridiculous than seeing a lean, lank fellow start from a
profound sleep at midnight, and begin lashing away at the Highland
fling as if St. Andrew himself had been playing the bagpipes; but it
was a measure that I very often had recourse to, as the cleverest
method of producing heat. In short, though the prudent general may
preach the propriety of light baggage in the enemy's presence, I will
ever maintain that there is marvellous small personal comfort in
travelling so fast and so lightly as I did.
"The Portuguese farmers will tell you that the beauty of their
climate consists in their crops receiving from the nightly dews the
refreshing influence of a summer's shower, and that they ripen in
the daily sun. But they are a sordid set of rascals! Whereas I speak
with the enlightened views of a man of war, and say, that it is poor
consolation to me, after having been deprived of my needful repose,
and kept all night in a fever, dancing wet and cold, to be told that
I shall be warm enough in the morning? It is like frying a person
after he has been boiled; and I insisted upon it, that if their sun
had been milder and their dews lighter I should have found it much
more pleasant.
"Having now brought myself regularly into the field, under the
renowned Wellington, should this narrative, by any accident,
fall into the hands of others who served there, and who may be
unreasonable enough to expect their names to be mentioned in it, let
me tell them that they are most confoundedly mistaken! Every man may
write a book for himself, if he likes; but this is mine; and, as I
borrow no man's story, neither will I give any man a particle of
credit for his deed, as I have got so little for my own that I have
none to spare. Neither will I mention any regiment but my own, if I
can possibly avoid it, for there is none other that I like so much,
and none else so much deserves it; for we were the light regiment of
the Light Division, and fired the first and last shot in almost every
battle, siege, and skirmish in which the army was engaged during the
war.
"In stating the foregoing resolution, however, with regard to
regiments, I beg to be understood as identifying our old and gallant
associates, the 43rd and 52nd, as a part of ourselves, for they bore
their share in everything, and I love them as I hope to do my better
half (when I come to be divided); wherever we were, they were; and
although the nature of our arm generally gave us more employment in
the way of skirmishing, yet, whenever it came to a pinch, independent
of a suitable mixture of them among us, we had only to look behind to
see a line, in which we might place a degree of confidence, almost
equal to our hopes in heaven; nor were we ever disappointed. There
never was a corps of riflemen in the hands of such supporters!"
On October 12, Wellington entered the lines of Torres Vedras, and
Massena found his advance barred by frowning lines of trenched and
gun-crowned hills, the screen behind which his great antagonist had
vanished. During the last few days of the retreat and pursuit the pace
of events quickened; the British rearguard was sharply pressed, and
Kincaid, for once grows consecutive and orderly in his narrative:--
"_October 1, 1810._--We stood to our arms at daylight this morning,
on a hill in front of Coimbra; and, as the enemy soon after came
on in force, we retired before them through the city. The civil
authorities, in making their own hurried escape, had totally
forgotten that they had left a jail full of rogues unprovided
for, and who, as we were passing near them, made the most hideous
screaming for relief. Our quarter-master-general very humanely took
some men, who broke open the doors, and the whole of them were soon
seen howling along the bridge into the wide world, in the most
delightful delirium, with the French dragoons at their heels.
"We retired the same night through Condacia, where the commissariat
were destroying quantities of stores that they were unable to carry
off. They handed out shoes and shirts to any one that would take
them, and the streets were literally running ankle deep with rum, in
which the soldiers were dipping their cups and helping themselves as
they marched along. The commissariat, some years afterwards, called
for a return of the men who had received shirts and shoes on this
occasion, with a view of making us pay for them, but we very briefly
replied that the one-half were dead, and the other half would be
d----d before they would pay anything.
"We retired this day to Leria, and, at the entrance of the city,
saw an English and a Portuguese soldier dangling by the bough of a
tree--the first summary example I had ever seen of martial law.
"We halted one night near the convent of Batalha, one of the finest
buildings in Portugal. It has, I believe, been clearly established,
that a living man in ever so bad health is better than two dead
ones; but it appears that the latter will vary in value according to
circumstances, for we found here, in very high preservation, the body
of King John of Portugal, who founded the edifice in commemoration
of some victory, God knows how long ago; and though he would have
been reckoned a highly valuable antique, within a glass case, in an
apothecary's hall in England, yet he was held so cheap in his own
house, that the very finger which most probably pointed the way to
the victory alluded to, is now in the baggage of the Rifle Brigade.
Reader, point not thy finger at me, for I am not the man.
"Retired on the morning of a very wet, stormy day to Allenquer, a
small town on the top of a mountain, surrounded by still higher ones;
and, as the enemy had not shown themselves the evening before, we
took possession of the houses, with a tolerable prospect of being
permitted the unusual treat of eating a dinner under cover. But by
the time that the pound of beef was parboiled, and while an officer
of dragoons was in the act of reporting that he had just patrolled
six leagues to the front, without seeing any signs of an enemy,
we saw the indefatigable rascals, on the mountains opposite our
windows, just beginning to wind round us, with a mixture of cavalry
and infantry; the wind blowing so strong that the long tail of
each particular horse stuck as stiffly out in the face of the one
behind, as if the whole had been strung upon a cable and dragged by
the leaders. We turned out a few companies, and kept them in check
while the division was getting under arms, spilt the soup as usual,
and, transferring the smoking solids to the haversack, for future
mastication, we continued our retreat.
"Our long retreat ended at midnight, on our arrival at the handsome
little town of Arruda, which was destined to be the piquet post of
our division, in front of the fortified lines. The quartering of our
division, whether by night or by day, was an affair of about five
minutes. The quarter-master-general preceded the troops, accompanied
by the brigade-majors and the quarter-masters of regiments; and
after marking off certain houses for his general and staff, he split
the remainder of the town between the majors of brigades; they,
in their turn, provided for their generals and staff, and then
made a wholesale division of streets among the quarter-masters of
regiments, who, after providing for their commanding officers and
staff, retailed the remaining houses, in equal proportions, among the
companies; so that, by the time that the regiment arrived, there was
nothing to be done beyond the quarter-master's simply telling each
captain, 'Here's a certain number of houses for you.'
"Like all other places on the line of march, we found Arruda totally
deserted; and its inhabitants had fled in such a hurry, that the
keys of their house doors were the only things they carried away,
so that when we got admission through our usual key--transmitting
a rifle-ball through the keyhole: it opens every lock--we were not
a little gratified to find that the houses were not only regularly
furnished, but most of them had some food in the larder, and a
plentiful supply of good wines in the cellar; and, in short, that
they only required a few lodgers capable of appreciating the good
things which the gods had provided; and the deuce is in it if we were
not the very folks who could!
"Those who wish a description of the lines of Torres Vedras, must
part. I know nothing, excepting that I was told that one end of them
rested on the Tagus, and the other somewhere on the sea; and I saw,
with my own eyes, a variety of redoubts and fieldworks on the various
hills which stand between. This, however, I do know, that we have
since kicked the French out of more formidable-looking and stronger
places; and, with all due deference be it spoken, I think that the
Prince of Essling ought to have tried his luck against them, as he
could only have been beaten by fighting, as he afterwards was without
it! And if he thinks that he would have lost as many men by trying,
as he did by not trying, he must allow me to differ in opinion with
him.
"In very warm or very wet weather it was customary to put us under
cover in the town during the day, but we were always moved back
to our bivouac on the heights during the night; and it was rather
amusing to observe the different notions of individual comfort, in
the selection of furniture, which officers transferred from their
town house to their no house on the heights. A sofa, or a mattress,
one would have thought most likely to be put in requisition; but
it was not unusual to see a full-length looking-glass preferred to
either.
"We certainly lived in clover while we remained here; everything we
saw was our own, seeing no one there who had a more legitimate claim;
and every field was a vineyard. Ultimately it was considered too much
trouble to pluck the grapes, as there were a number of poor native
thieves in the habit of coming from the rear every day to steal some,
so that a soldier had nothing to do but to watch one until he was
marching off with his basket full, when he would very deliberately
place his back against that of the Portuguese, and relieve him of his
load, without wasting any words about the bargain. The poor wretch
would follow the soldier to the camp, in the hope of having his
basket returned, as it generally was, when emptied."
Massena held on to his position in front of the great lines he dared
not attack till November 12, then he fell back to Santarem, whence he
could still keep Wellington blockaded. He held this position till March
1811, nearly five months in all--months of cold, rain, and hunger--a
miracle of stubborn and sullen endurance. Kincaid, acting on his usual
principle that all time not occupied in actively doing something is to
be counted as non-existent, passes over the tale of these months in
a dozen lines. His narrative only becomes full again when Wellington
sallies out of his hilly stronghold and presses in pursuit of Massena.
We then have graphic pictures of the hardships of a soldier's life:--
"Massena, conceiving any attack upon our lines to be hopeless, as
his troops were rapidly mouldering away with sickness and want, at
length began to withdraw them nearer to the source of his supplies.
He abandoned his position, opposite to us, on the night of November
9, leaving some stuffed-straw gentlemen occupying their usual posts.
Some of them were cavalry, some infantry, and they seemed such
respectable representatives of their spectral predecessors, that,
in the haze of the following morning, we thought that they had been
joined by some well-fed ones from the rear; and it was late in the
day before we discovered the mistake, and advanced in pursuit.
"It was late ere we halted for the night, on the side of the road,
near to Allenquer, and I got under cover in a small house, which
looked as if it had been honoured as the headquarters of the
tailor-general of the French army, for the floor was strewed with
variegated threads, various complexioned buttons, with particles and
remnants of cabbage; and, if it could not boast of the flesh and fowl
of Noah's ark, there was an abundance of the creeping things which it
were to be wished that that commander had not left behind.
"On our arrival at Valle, on November 12, we found the enemy behind
the Rio Maior, occupying the heights of Santarem, and exchanged
some shots with their advanced posts. In the course of the night
we experienced one of those tremendous thunderstorms which used to
precede the Wellington victories, and which induced us to expect a
general action on the following day. I had disposed myself to sleep
in a beautiful green hollow way, and, before I had time even to dream
of the effects of their heavy rains, I found myself floating most
majestically towards the river, in a fair way of becoming food for
the fishes. I ever after gave those inviting-looking spots a wide
berth, as I found that they were regular watercourses.
"Next morning our division crossed the river, and commenced a false
attack on the enemy's left, with a view of making them show their
force; and it was to have been turned into a real attack, if their
position was found to be occupied by a rearguard only; but, after
keeping up a smart skirmishing fire the great part of the day, Lord
Wellington was satisfied that their whole army was present; we were
consequently withdrawn.
"This affair terminated the campaign of 1810. Our division took
possession of the village of Valle and its adjacents, and the rest
of the army was placed in cantonments, under whatever cover the
neighbouring country afforded."
Here are some of Kincaid's pictures of a British army in winter
quarters, with one fierce campaign behind it, and another, almost
sterner still in character, before it:--
"Our battalion was stationed in some empty farm-houses, near the end
of the bridge of Santarem, which was nearly half a mile long; and our
sentries and those of the enemy were within pistol-shot of each other
on the bridge.
"I do not mean to insinuate that a country is never so much at peace
as when at open war; but I do say that a soldier can nowhere sleep so
soundly, nor is he anywhere so secure from surprise, as when within
musket-shot of his enemy.
"We lay four months in this situation, divided only by a rivulet,
without once exchanging shots. Every evening, at the hour
'When bucks to dinner go,
And cits to sup,'
it was our practice to dress for sleep: we saddled our horses,
buckled on our armour, and lay down, with the bare floor for a
bed, and a stone for a pillow, ready for anything, and reckless of
everything but the honour of our corps and country; for I will say
(to save the expense of a trumpeter) that a more devoted set of
fellows were never associated. We stood to our arms every morning at
an hour before daybreak, and remained there until a grey horse could
be seen a mile off (which is the military criterion by which daylight
is acknowledged, and the hour of surprise past), when we proceeded to
unharness and to indulge in such luxuries as our toilet and our table
afforded.
"Our piquet-post, at the bridge, became a regular lounge for the
winter to all manner of folks. I used to be much amused at seeing our
naval officers come up from Lisbon riding on mules, with huge ships'
spy-glasses, like six-pounders, strapped across the backs of their
saddles. Their first question invariably was, 'Who is that fellow
there' (pointing to the enemy's sentry close to us), and, on being
told that he was a Frenchman, 'Then why the devil don't you shoot
him!'
"Repeated acts of civility passed between the French and us during
this tacit suspension of hostilities. The greyhounds of an officer
followed a hare, on one occasion, into their lines, and they very
politely returned them. I was one night on piquet at the end of the
bridge when a ball came from the French sentry and struck the burning
billet of wood round which we were sitting, and they sent in a flag
of truce next morning to apologise for the accident, and to say that
it had been done by a stupid fellow of a sentry, who imagined that
people were advancing upon him. We admitted the apology, though we
knew well enough that it had been done by a malicious rather than a
stupid fellow from the situation we occupied.
"General Junot, one day reconnoitring, was severely wounded by a
sentry, and Lord Wellington, knowing that they were at that time
destitute of everything in the shape of comfort, sent to request his
acceptance of anything that Lisbon afforded that could be of any
service to him; but the French general was too much of a politician
to admit the want of anything."