Every Man Will Do His Duty (46 page)

As the battle did not commence till between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and was very obstinately contested on both sides, no great time was allowed, before the night set in, for those important manoeuvres which form so much of the interest of battles. All was sheer hard fighting.
The eventual advantage, however, remained manifestly on the side of the English; for it became easy to distinguish, towards the end of the day, that the struggle was carried on at a position removed considerably in advance of that on which the English had stood when first attacked. What might have been the result if the ground had been clear of hedges, ditches, walls, and deep roads, I cannot pretend to say; but it struck me at the time, when looking down with a sort of bird’s-eye view on the battle, that, cut up as the ground was, there could be little communication to the right and left between the different bodies of fighting men, and consequently that each regiment or mass must have acted very much for itself; somewhat in the way ships of war manage in a general action. Cavalry, I imagine, could not have been brought into play on such ground; and, indeed, there were no horses in the battle, on our side at least, except those of the field-officers and their aides-de-camp.

What I regretted most was not seeing the French battery taken; and, from General Napier’s account, it appears that if General Fraser’s division had been brought into action along with the reserve at the close of the day, this purpose might have been accomplished; after which the enemy could hardly have escaped a signal overthrow.
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It must have cost Sir John Hope a great effort of military self-denial to have resisted such a temptation; “but, on the other hand,” observes the judicious historian, “to continue the action in the dark was to tempt fortune; for the enemy were still the most numerous, and their ground was strong. The disorder the French were in offered such a favourable opportunity to get on board the ships that Sir John Hope, upon whom the command of the army had devolved, satisfied with having repulsed the attack, judged it more prudent to pursue the original plan of embarking during the night; and this operation was effected without delay, the arrangements being so complete that neither confusion nor difficulty occurred.”
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UNFORTUNATELY, WE
could not remain till the very last upon our elevated look-out station, from whence we had commanded so complete a view of this hard-fought field, being obliged to come down shortly after sunset, that we might get on board, if possible, before dark. We took the shortest way from the top of the hill by a little footpath, leading along a steep bank, till we gained the great Corunna high road. By this time the whole space between the field of battle and the town had become
pretty well crowded with wounded men, mingled with stragglers of all kinds, wending their way, as well as they might, towards the point of embarkation.

The first person we met, on coming to the road, was an elderly officer, I think of the 50th regiment, partly supported by a private soldier, and partly leaning on his sword. We helped him to gain a seat near the door of a little cottage, which we could see had been used as a temporary hospital, from the numerous wounded, dead, and dying men stretched all round it. This situation being on the face of the hill next the town, had not been exposed to the direct fire of the enemy, while the chance of any stray shots plunging into it, over the top of the ridge, seemed not great.

The old officer’s face soon turned so pale that a streak of blood flowing along his brow and cheek, though not broader than a thread, appeared as conspicuous as if it had been a line drawn on a sheet of paper. That he had received a serious wound was evident; but we had not the least idea he was dying.

“I should like the doctor to look at my head,” he said; and in a minute or two the surgeon came from the cottage. He took off the officer’s cap, cut away some of the hair, looked closely at the wound, and then paused.

“Well—sir—what—say—you?” asked the wounded man, whose words dropped slowly and laboriously from his lips.

“This is no time to trifle, sir,” replied the surgeon, for whom a dozen miserable sufferers were calling out; “and I am sorry to tell you this wound is mortal. It is my duty to say that you have but a short time to live!”

“Indeed! I feared so,” groaned the poor man. “And yet,” he sighed, “I should like very much to live a little longer, if it were possible.”

He spoke no more, but laid his sword on a large stone by his side, as gently as if its steel had been turned to glass, and that he was fearful of breaking it. What he meant by this action, we knew not; for he sunk dead upon the grass almost immediately afterwards.

On regaining the road, we were loudly appealed to by so many voices of men suffering from their wounds, and in despair of ever reaching the boats, that we knew not which way to turn or what to do. At first we gave our arms to those nearest us who could walk; but on these wretched men failing and others struggling to gain our assistance, it became quite evident that we should never reach the shore if we did not close our ears to these supplications. In fact, we had almost resolved, hard-hearted as it may seem, to walk along as fast as we could, without heeding the wounded and dying, when a number of artillery waggons, sent out from the city, came galloping along, with orders to glean up all the sufferers who could not readily find their way alone.

As we came nearer to Corunna, we found this precaution had already been taken, so that such of the wounded people as we now fell in with on foot (and these were many hundreds), were trudging on, I can hardly call it merrily, but with a degree of animation, which, considering the frightful predicament of many of them, was truly wonderful. Generally speaking, indeed, the soldiers displayed a great degree of fortitude. We passed a cart filled with men, none of whom uttered a complaint, though I could observe more than one stream of blood trickling on the road through the openings between the planks.

Hardly any trace of twilight remained when we entered the town; but, in consequence of orders given to illuminate the houses in the streets leading to the places of embarkation, no difficulty arose in marching the troops to the boats; an operation which, for obvious reasons, was purposely delayed till after it became quite dark.

When the action was over and the army withdrawn to the position they had occupied in the morning, every demonstration was made of an intention to retain possession of the ground. In this view, large fires were kindled along the line, and these being kept up during the whole night, effectually deceived the enemy and gave time for the different corps not only to retire at leisure in good order, but to embark almost as regularly as if nothing had happened. Such is the effect of discipline well understood. Each soldier having taken his place in the boats, was rowed on board the particular ship destined to receive him; for, it may not be uninteresting to mention, that, on visiting the field before the battle, we found the officers of each regiment in possession of the tickets, specifying the name and number of the transport in which their corps was to be embarked. Accordingly, when the troops marched into Corunna, in the middle of the night, they proceeded without any halt, straight to the shore, where they found the men-of-war’s barges and launches, and the flat-bottomed boats of the transports, all ranged in order ready to receive them. As soon as it was known what regiment was approaching, a certain number of the boats were brought to the edge of the beach, when, without noise or confusion, the soldiers stepped in, and the word being given to shove off, in half-an-hour the empty boats rowed back again to the point of embarkation, having deposited these gallant freights in their respective vessels. I must say, indeed, that nothing during the whole of these memorable scenes excited my admiration more than the cheerfulness with which the harassed soldiers bore so many inevitable but trying humiliations. Their gallant bearing in the morning, when assailed by the formidable columns of the enemy, was certainly very brilliant; and still more admirable did their courage appear, when standing inactive, while their ranks were ploughed up by the
French battery. But I am not sure if their genuine stamina and merit as soldiers were not fully as much evinced in their orderly demeanour when the excitement of action was past and when the darkness rendered it easy for any man to straggle without the possibility of detection.

The embarkation of the troops had not entirely ended when the day broke on the morning of the 17th of January; and had not Corunna been a fortified place, the enemy might have rushed on, and greatly harassed, if not cut off the rear. As it was, the pickets and other detachments from the different corps left to keep the fires lighted had to scamper for it briskly enough. But the French cavalry having pushed forward at the first peep of dawn, to ascertain what was the situation of affairs, found the bird flown, the camp empty, and only a long line of well-heaped fires remaining to show the diligence of the last lingerers on the field. On galloping briskly over the ridge, they had the mortification to see the last of the retiring pickets crowding into the gates of Corunna, under cover of the guns of the fort. The walls were manned partly by the rear-guard of the British army, and partly by the Spaniards, who behaved upon this occasion with a degree of steadiness which deserves particular mention, as it was almost the only instance in which the English forces had been effectually seconded by the people they came to assist. The baffled cavalry pulled up their horses on coming within range of the grape and canister shot from the works; and thus terminated the second campaign of the great Peninsular war.

Shortly afterwards we could distinguish from the boats, as we passed to and from the shore to the transports, the heads of the enemy’s columns showing themselves, one by one, over the tops of the ridge on which the English had been posted; and presently the whole of that part of the ground which faced the harbour was speckled with French troops.

As the French approached Corunna, they were not slack in bringing up those heavy guns which had harassed our position in such style the day before, and trying their efficacy on the ships. It was playing at long bowls indeed; for the point to which the guns were brought must have been more than a mile off, and, being much elevated above the sea, the balls plunged at random amongst the fleet of transports. They only excited a bustle among the merchant ships, many of which cut their cables, and, the wind being fair, they drifted out of the harbour in groups of ten or twelve. I was rowing past one transport, when the boat was hailed by a military officer. We lay upon our oars to hear what he had to say

“I wish you would give us some help here,” he cried; “we are all soldiers on board, and don’t know how to get the anchor up, or how to set the sails.”

“Where’s the master and his crew?” we asked.

“Oh!” replied the soldier, laughing, “the scamps took to their boat upon a shot passing between the masts; and here we are, a parcel of land-lubbers, as you see, willing enough to work, shot or no shot, if you will be good enough to put us in the way.”

As the ship by which we had been hailed was already full of troops, I put a midshipman and a couple of the boat’s crew on board, and then proceeded with the fifty men we were embarking. Presently I saw my friends, the soldier-sailors, heaving up their anchor and making sail in very good style. The ragamuffin of a skipper joined his vessel off the port; and the midshipman returned with many thanks from the troops who had been so unhandsomely deserted.

Another transport, however, lying considerably in shore of the one which we relieved, and consequently nearer to the battery, got under weigh in the most deliberate style imaginable, made sail regularly, and, having accidentally cast the wrong way on tripping her anchor, did not wear round with her head off shore, but filled upon the larboard tack, and stood on, nearing the guns more and more every minute, and drawing all their fire upon her. After a time she tacked and sailed leisurely out to sea, actually delaying to make all sail till she was beyond the reach of shot.

Meanwhile three, if not four, of the transports lying nearest to the town of Corunna managed matters so ill that, on cutting their cables, without first having their sails properly set, they could not clear the point, and so went plump ashore, just inside a small rocky island, on which the castle of San Antonio is built, at the distance of two or three hundred yards from the walls at the north-western angle of the city. The hard granite on which Corunna stands being an overmatch for the ribs of these vessels, it very soon pierced their sides and laid them on their beam-ends. A dozen boats were employed for a full hour to remove the troops to other transports. But even these provoking ship-wrecks proved, as will be seen presently, highly useful to the purpose then in hand, the orderly embarkation of the rearguard, and the other remaining troops, consisting of several thousand chosen men, who still kept the enemy at bay, while their comrades passed from the shore to the fleet.

A midshipman, I believe of the
Ville de Paris,
had been sent on shore with a message to Sir Samuel Hood, who superintended the embarkation of the army On his way to the landing-place, he observed the transports alluded to bilged and deserted; and having done his errand, and being in no great hurry to return, he pulled between the castle of San Antonio and the sally-port which opens from the salient angle of the bastion, forming the extreme point of the principal works in that quarter of the citadel.

“It would be a great shame,” quoth the middy, “if these vessels, wrecked though they be, should fall into the hands of the French; so I shall go on board and set fire to them.”

This exploit he accordingly executed; but although there rose a considerable smoke from the wrecks during the afternoon, the flames did not burst out till about an hour or two after sunset, almost at the moment named for assembling the launches and barges of the fleet to embark the rear-guard, affording a splendid illumination, in which the soldiers marched down to the boats in companies and embarked with as much ease and celerity as if it had been noon-day: and, before breakfast-time next morning, the whole fleet of men-of-war and transports stood out to sea.