Rejoin the Regiment. Embark for the Peninsula. Arrival in the
Tagus. The City of Lisbon, with its Contents. Sail for Figuera.
Landing extraordinary. Billet ditto. The City of Coimbra. A hard
Case. A cold Case, in which a favourite Scotch Dance is
introduced. Climate. The Duke of Wellington.
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 were about the usual time at sea, and indulged in the usual
amusements, beginning with keeping journals, in which I succeeded in
inserting two remarks on the state of the weather, when I found my
inclination for book-making superseded by the more disagreeable study
of appearing eminently happy under an irresistible inclination towards
sea-sickness. 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 outhouses;
but when I was, at length, compelled to admit it as the miserable
apology for the fair city that I had seen from the harbour, I began to
contemplate, with astonishment, and no little amusement, the very
appropriate appearance of its inhabitants.
The church, I concluded, had, on that occasion, indulged her numerous
offspring with a holiday, for they occupied a much larger portion of
the streets than all the world besides. Some of them were languidly
strolling about, and looking the sworn foes of time, while others
crowded the doors of the different coffee-houses; the fat
jolly-looking friars cooling themselves with lemonade, and the lean
mustard-pot-faced ones sipping coffee out of thimble-sized cups, with
as much caution as if it had been physic.
The next class that attracted my attention was the numerous collection
of well-starved dogs, who were indulging in all the luxury of extreme
poverty on the endless dung-heaps.
There, too, sat the industrious citizen, basking in the sunshine of
his shop-door, and gathering in the flock which is so bountifully
reared on his withered tribe of children. There strutted the spruce
cavalier, with his upper-man furnished at the expense of his lower,
and looking ridiculously imposing: and there--but sacred be their
daughters, for the sake of _one_, who shed a lustre over her squalid
sisterhood, sufficiently brilliant to redeem their whole nation from
the odious sin of ugliness. I was looking for an official person,
living somewhere near the Convent D'Estrella, and was endeavouring to
express my wishes to a boy, when I heard a female voice, in broken
English, from a balcony above, giving the information I desired. I
looked up, and saw a young girl, dressed in white, who was loveliness
itself! In the few words which passed between us, of lively
unconstrained civility on her part, and pure confounded gratitude on
mine, she seemed so perfectly after my own heart, that she lit a torch
in it which burnt for two years and a half.
It must not detract from her merits that she was almost the only one
that I saw during that period in which it was my fate to tread war's
roughest, rudest path,--daily staring his grim majesty out of
countenance, and nightly slumbering on the cold earth, or in the
tenantless mansion, for I felt as if she would have been the chosen
companion of my waking dreams in _rosier_ walks, as I never recalled
the fair vision to my aid, even in the worst of times, that it did not
act upon my drooping spirits like a glass of brandy.
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.
Our men were lodged for the night in a large barn, and the officers
billetted in town. Mine chanced to be on the house of a mad-woman,
whose extraordinary appearance I never shall forget. Her petticoats
scarcely reached to the knee, and all above the lower part of the
bosom was bare; and though she looked not more than middle aged, her
skin seemed as if it had been regularly prepared to receive the
impression of her last will and testament; her head was defended by a
chevaux-de-frise of black wiry hair, which pointed fiercely in every
direction, while her eyes looked like two burnt holes in a blanket. I
had no sooner opened the door than she stuck her arms a-kimbo, and,
opening a mouth, which stretched from ear to ear, she began
vociferating "_bravo, bravissimo_!"
Being a stranger alike to the appearance and the manners of the
natives, I thought it possible that the former might have been nothing
out of the common run, and concluding that she was overjoyed at seeing
her country reinforced, at that perilous moment, by a fellow upwards
of six feet high, and thinking it necessary to sympathize in some
degree in her patriotic feelings, I began to "_bravo_" too; but as her
second shout ascended ten degrees, and kept increasing in that ratio,
until it amounted to absolute frenzy, I faced to the right-about, and,
before our _tete-a-tete_ had lasted the brief space of three-quarters
of a minute, I disappeared with all possible haste, her terrific yells
vibrating in my astonished ears long after I had turned the corner of
the street; nor did I feel perfectly at ease until I found myself
stretched on a bundle of straw in a corner of the barn occupied by the
men.
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 a 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 every thing 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 that I should have found it much more
pleasant.