CHAPTER XIII

THE AUXILIARIES: THE GERMANS AND THE PORTUGUESE

Of the two classes of foreign troops which assisted to make up the invincible divisions of the Peninsular Army, the one formed at the time an integral part of the British military establishment; the other was the contingent of an allied Power, placed at the disposition of Wellington, and incorporated with the units of his host, but preserving its own national individuality.

We must deal with the first class before we proceed to explain the position of the second. Copying old British precedent, the governments of George III. had taken into pay a number of foreign corps from the very commencement of the Revolutionary War. They were the successors of the Hanoverians against whom the elder Pitt had railed so fiercely in his hot youth, and of the Hessians who had taken such a prominent part in the War of American Independence.

The regiments raised in the early years of the great struggle with France had mainly been composed of Swiss, or of French royalist _emigrés_. Most of these corps had disappeared by 1809, and of those of them which survived the majority were doing garrison duty in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.[233] Wellington never had them under his hand. The foreign troops which came under his command were nearly all German, and consisted of regiments raised after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens.

[Sidenote: The King’s German Legion]

By far the largest number of them belonged to that admirable corps the King’s German Legion, whose history was written with great care and enthusiasm by Ludlow Beamish, while the generation which fought in the Peninsula was still alive. They were the legitimate representatives of the old Electoral army of Hanover, the comrades of the British troops in many a fight of the War of the Austrian Succession and of the Seven Years’ War. When in June, 1803, Napoleon invaded Hanover, and overran it with the troops of Mortier, the 15,000 men who formed the standing army of the electorate could make no effective resistance. They laid down their arms in accordance with the Convention of Lauenburg (July 5, 1803), which disbanded them, and permitted officers and men to go where they pleased, with the proviso that none of them would bear arms against France till they should have been exchanged for French officers or men in the hands of the English Government.[234]

The best and most loyal of the Hanoverian officers began at once to betake themselves to England, and by the end of the year were streaming thither by dozens and scores. Men soon began to follow in considerable numbers, and after two provisional infantry regiments had been formed in August, a larger organization, to be called the King’s German Legion, was authorized in December. It included light and line infantry, heavy and light cavalry, artillery and engineers. All through 1804 new units were being rapidly created, mainly from Hanoverians, but not entirely, for other recruits of German nationality were accepted. But all the officers, nearly all the sergeants, and the large majority of the rank and file came from the old Electoral army. By January, 1805, there were in existence a dragoon and a hussar regiment, four Line and two Light battalions, and five batteries of artillery.

In November, 1805, when Lord Cathcart’s expedition sailed for the Weser, to make a diversion in favour of Austria, the whole German Legion went with him. For a few short weeks the invaders were in possession of Bremen and Verden, Stade, and Hanover city, before the news of the disastrous peace that followed Austerlitz came to hand. During this space immense numbers of Hanoverians flocked to the colours, some old soldiers, others volunteers who had not served before. When the army evacuated Hanover in February, 1806, it brought back so many recruits that the Legion was raised to ten battalions of infantry and five regiments of horse.

These were almost the last genuine Hanoverians that were raised for service in the corps, for when the electorate was annexed to Jerome Bonaparte’s “Kingdom of Westphalia,” it became part of the French Imperial system, and was subjected to the conscription for Jerome’s service. Only a few individuals henceforth succeeded in getting to England and joining the Legion by circuitous ways. But there were some good recruits obtained at Stralsund and in Denmark during the Copenhagen Expedition at the end of 1807, when the Legion was for some weeks in the Baltic.

The battalions and squadrons were still mainly Hanoverian, when, in 1808, the larger half of them was sent to the Peninsula. In that year one Hussar regiment (the 3rd), two Light and four Line battalions (Nos. 1, 2, 5, 7), landed in Portugal. Of these only the two Light battalions and the Hussars marched with Moore, and re-embarked for England after his disastrous retreat. The four Line battalions remained in Portugal, as did two German batteries, and made part of Wellesley’s original army of 1809. They were joined in the spring of that year by the 1st Hussars, who (as has been already mentioned) were considered the most efficient light cavalry regiment in Portugal, and were long the chosen comrades of Craufurd’s Light Division.

[Sidenote: Recruiting the K.G.L.]

In the spring of 1811 the K.G.L. contingent in Portugal was increased by the 2nd Hussars and the two Light Battalions, who returned about two years after their departure in the company of Moore. In the winter of 1811–12 the two heavy dragoon regiments joined Wellington’s army. Thus in the beginning of 1812 four of the five cavalry regiments, and five (the 7th Line battalion had gone home) of the ten infantry battalions were serving in Spain. But at the end of the year the 2nd Hussars were drafted back to England, owing to depleted numbers.

It had now become impossible to keep the ranks of the Legion filled with the genuine Hanoverians who had been its original nucleus. Communication with the electorate was completely cut off, and German recruits of any kind had to be accepted. Many of them were volunteers from the English prison camps, where thousands of Napoleon’s German troops were lying. Of these only a fraction were Hanoverians born. The large majority could not, of course, share in the loyalty and enthusiasm of the original legionaries, being subjects of all manner of sovereigns in the Rheinbund, who had marched at Napoleon’s orders. The quality of men was much worse, and many enlisted only to escape from prison life, and readily deserted when they reached the front, having no interest in the cause for which they were fighting. From 1811 onward desertion, not at all usual in the early years of the Legion, became very common, and plunder and misconduct (previously very rare) were also rife. Matters became still worse when, later in the war, German recruits of any sort became so hard to obtain that Poles, Illyrians, and miscellaneous foreigners of any sort[235] were drafted out to fill the shrinking ranks. But the splendid Hanoverian officers still continued to get good service out of a rank and file that was no longer so homogeneous or loyal as it had been when the war began, and the regiments of the German Legion, the cavalry in especial, continued to be among Wellington’s most trusted troops. The charge of Bock’s Heavy Dragoons at Garcia Hernandez, on the day after Salamanca, was, as has been already stated, considered by Foy to have been the most brilliant and successful cavalry attack made in the whole Peninsular War. After the peace of 1814 all the “mongrels” were discharged, and the officers and native-born Hanoverian rank and file became the nucleus on which the new Royal Army of Hanover was built up. The fact that the aliens had been discharged in 1814 was the cause of all the K.G.L. battalions appearing at Waterloo in the following year with very small effectives, in no case reaching 500 of all ranks.

Another foreign corps which served under Wellington from the end of 1810 till 1814 had an origin and a history much resembling that of the German Legion. This was the Brunswick Oels Jägers, whose history starts from 1809. The hard-fighting Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, the nephew of George III., had made a gallant diversion in Northern Germany during the Wagram Campaign. At the head of a small body of adventurers, he had thrown himself into the middle of Jerome Bonaparte’s Kingdom of Westphalia, and had stirred up an insurrection there, particularly in his own old hereditary states. He was joined by several thousands of patriotic volunteers, and inflicted a series of small defeats on the Westphalians. But surrounded in the end by overwhelming numbers of enemies, he cut his way to the sea, and embarked the remnants of his followers aboard English ships at Brake on the Frisian coast. The British Government at once offered to take the refugees into its service, and from them organized the Brunswick Oels Jäger and Hussar regiments, whose black uniform reproduced that of the duke’s old troops.

[Sidenote: The Brunswick Oels Jägers]

The kernel of this corps was originally excellent—the officers were North-Germans, largely Prussians, who had risked their lives by joining an insurrection contrary to the orders of their sovereign, and could never return to their homes: while the rank and file had been patriotic volunteers. But, like the German Legion, the Brunswick regiment could find no more recruits of this sort when it had left Germany, and soon had to depend for the continuance of its existence on the men in the English prison camps, who could be induced to buy a release from confinement by enlisting in the British service. It is clear that the German Legion got the best of these turncoats, and that the worst fell to the lot of the Brunswick corps. Not only Germans but Poles, Swiss, Danes, Dutch, and Croats were drafted into it. They were a motley crew, much given to desertion—on several occasions large parties went off together. One great court-martial in 1811 sat on ten Brunswick Oels deserters in a body, and ordered four to be shot and the rest to be flogged. Such men had all the vices of the mercenary, though in time of battle they displayed many of the virtues. Their officers had a hard task to keep them together, and they could never be trusted at the outposts. But the regiment was full of good shots and bold adventurers, and furnished several of the detached rifle companies with which Wellington strengthened the light infantry of his brigades.

There was, however, one foreign regiment which was even more tiresome to manage than the Black Brunswickers. This was the _Chasseurs Britanniques_, a corps formed early in the Revolutionary War from French royalists, and taken into the British Service in 1801. It was recruited entirely from deserters of all sorts when it came out to Portugal in the spring of 1811. At absconding it was far worse than the Brunswickers—the latter were raised from many races, but at least they were not born Frenchmen as were the most important section of the Chasseurs. A glance down the names of the rank and file of the corps seems to show that after Frenchmen the next most important section were Italians, and that there were a few Poles and some Swiss, the latter supplying the men with Teutonic names. It seems to have been the working rule with the officers who accepted volunteers from the prison-camps to draft French and Italians into the Chasseurs, while Germans of all sorts went into the Legion or the Brunswick Corps, and Swiss partly into the Chasseurs, partly into Watteville’s old Swiss regiment: Poles and Croats went anywhere. Now a German prisoner who volunteered into the British service might do so from patriotic motives, and make an excellent soldier. A Swiss or an Italian or an Illyrian could not be very heavily blamed for desertion—he had been conscribed, and sent to fight for Napoleon, in a quarrel that was not his own. But the French deserter was no longer an old royalist, like the _emigré_ soldiers of 1794, but one of two things. Either he was a man who enlisted in the Chasseurs simply to get a chance of deserting back to his own friends, or else he was a _mauvais sujet_, a man without patriotic feeling or morality, who was ready to fight against his own countrymen for pay or plunder. Both classes were amply represented: the former fled back to the French ranks when they could, often taking valuable information with them. The latter were the worst class of mercenaries, since they had no inspiring cause to keep them true to their colours, while individually they were for the most part bad characters who had been the curse of their regiments while in the French service.

[Sidenote: The Chasseurs Britanniques]

The unenviable task of keeping together this body of deserters and adventurers fell to a body of officers who were almost without exception furious French royalists, the second generation of the _emigrés_. They looked upon the war with Bonaparte as a family feud, in which they fought under any colours (many of their kin were in the Russian or the Austrian, or the Spanish service) in order to avenge the death of Louis XVI., the atrocities of the Terror, or the Massacres of Quiberon. With old loyalty to the Bourbons, and personal hatred for the new French _régime_ as their inspiration, they were fierce and desperate fighters. They kept the miscellaneous horde committed to their charge under an iron discipline, and used the lash freely. All that their personal courage could accomplish was done, to make the Chasseurs an efficient fighting force. But they could not stop desertion, nor frequent misconduct. The most astonishing court-martial in the war was that held on October 5, 1812, upon no less than 18 Chasseurs who had deserted in a body, two corporals and 16 men, of whom all but two bore Italian names.[236] This was only the largest case of a constant series of defections. The regiment melted away whenever it came near the French lines, and Wellington had a standing order that it must never be trusted with the outposts. Yet as a fighting body it had no bad record—as witness Fuentes de Oñoro and many other fields. This was the work of the zealous service of its officers—and was indeed a wonderful _tour de force_. The material with which they had to work was detestable.

These were the only foreign corps, strictly speaking, in Wellington’s army, but there were two more units which had a large, indeed a preponderating, German element in them, though they were numbered in the British line. These were the 5/60th, the rifle battalion of the “Royal Americans,” and the 97th, a single-battalion corps which started its existence as Stuart’s “Minorca Regiment,” but got a place in the British line in 1804 as the “Queen’s Germans.” Neither of these battalions were purely German either in officers or men: of the 5/60th the disembarkation roll on its original landing in Portugal shows eighteen officers with German and ten with British names.[237] The colonel, De Rottenbourg, was a foreigner, but the second in command, Davy, an Englishman. The British element was not proportionally so strong in the rank and file at the commencement of the war, but was apparently increasing as it went on. English and Irish recruits were drafted in, in order that such a fine corps might not be spoilt with the bad class of German recruit such as was alone procurable in 1812 or 1813. When the corps returned from the Peninsula in 1814 it had only nine officers with German names and twelve with British, and I fancy the balance in the rank and file between the nationalities had changed in the same way. When amalgamated with the 1/60th, after the end of the war it had certainly 400 British to something under 300 Germans in its ranks.

This was a most distinguished corps: the green-coated rifle companies which it supplied to many brigades of the Peninsular Army were universally praised for their cool courage and admirable marksmanship. The battalion had very few deserters save for one period in 1808–9, when it had received a batch of recruits from Junot’s Army of Portugal, who proved unsatisfactory. It would be an absolute insult to the 5/60th to class them with the Brunswickers or the Chasseurs Britanniques.

The 97th being a single-battalion corps, with nothing to maintain it but a depôt which could only collect German recruits in the same fashion as the K.G.L., wasted down to a very small remnant after two years of war, and was sent back to England in 1811, with a handsome epitaph of praise by Wellington. It never got to the front again, remained at home on a very weak establishment, and was disbanded at the end of the war. Like the 5/60th it was not wholly German; among the officers we find individuals with British names like Carter, Biscoe, Wilson, Lyon. Its colonel and one of its two majors were English, and there was a proportion of non-Germans among its rank and file. Its Peninsular record if short was distinguished.

[Sidenote: The Portuguese Army in 1809]

It remains to speak about the Portuguese, who formed about two-fifths of Wellington’s fighting force. We have already had occasion to speak of the way in which they were distributed among the British troops, when dealing with the character of Beresford,[238] and the composition of the Peninsular divisions.[239] But the inner mechanism of the Portuguese army remains to be detailed. It consisted in 1809 of twenty-four regiments of infantry of the line, each of two battalions, save the 21st which had been cut up at Soult’s storm of Oporto in March, and only mustered one.[240] There were also six light infantry battalions of caçadores, all raised in 1808–9, and twelve weak regiments of horse. The artillery, divided into four local regiments of unequal strength (those of Lisbon, Oporto, Elvas, and Algarve), supplied nine or ten field batteries, and a number of garrison companies which manned the guns of Elvas, Almeida, Abrantes, Peniche, and many other minor fortresses. There was in addition an abnormal corps, the Loyal Lusitanian Legion, raised by Sir Robert Wilson at Oporto in 1808, which furnished three battalions of light infantry, a squadron of horse and an incomplete battery. This legion, which had done very good service in 1809–10, was absorbed into the regular army in 1811, its three battalions becoming the 7th, 8th, and 9th caçadores. At the same time Wellington ordered the raising of three new light battalions bearing the numbers 10, 11, and 12.

The establishment of a Portuguese two-battalion line regiment was nominally 1540 men, that of a caçador battalion 770 men: they were each divided into six strong companies. The cavalry regiments, with a nominal effective of 590 men, seldom showed 300 apiece in the field. The infantry corps, with the conscription to keep their ranks full, could from 1809 onward generally take the field with over 1200 of all ranks, not including men in hospital or detached, and very seldom shrank as low as 1000. The caçador battalions were generally somewhat weaker in proportion to their nominal effective, rarely showing more than 500 men in line.

The organization of the Portuguese Army was made on a strictly local basis, each of the twenty-four line regiments having its proper recruiting district. Two corps were furnished by the province of Algarve, five by the Alemtejo, four by Lisbon city and its surrounding district, three by the rest of Portuguese Estremadura, four by the Beira, four by Oporto and the Entre-Douro-e-Minho, and two by Tras-os-Montes.[241] Some of the recruiting-districts being less populous than others, had a greater difficulty in keeping up their territorial regiments. This was especially the case with the five corps of the Alemtejo, where the waste bears a greater proportion to the inhabited land than in other provinces of Portugal.

The caçador battalions were mainly raised in the better peopled north, which supplied not only the three (Nos. 7, 8, 9), formed from the Lusitanian Legion (all raised in and about Oporto), but also numbers 3, 4, 6, and after 1811 the additional numbers 10, 11, 12. The southern provinces only provided numbers 1, 2, 5. These brown and dark green battalions, whose sombre colours contrasted strongly with the bright blue and white of the Portuguese line,[242] supplied, along with the green British riflemen, the main skirmishing line of Wellington’s army. Eight of the twelve were raised and commanded by British officers, only the remaining four by Portuguese colonels.

Portugal is not a country abounding in horses, and of the twelve dragoon regiments of which its cavalry consisted, three (Nos. 2, 3, 12) were never put into the field at all, but utilized as dismounted troops in garrison duty. Of the other nine corps several were mere fragments, and none ever took anything like its establishment of 500 sabres to the front. Three hundred was as much as was usually shown: in the 1811 campaign the two regiments which Wellington used in the Fuentes de Oñoro campaign had not 450 mounted men between them.

[Sidenote: Beresford’s Work]

Beresford’s conversion of the disorganized and depleted army of which he took the command in 1809 into a serviceable and well-disciplined force was a remarkable achievement. He found it in a chaotic state—Junot had disbanded the whole, save a few battalions which he sent to France to serve Napoleon. The regiments had collected again as best they could, but the cadres were incomplete, and the corps of officers left much to be desired. The Portuguese army before 1808 had all the typical faults of an army of the _ancien régime_ which had rusted in a long period of peace. It was full of old or incapable officers put into place by court intrigues or family influence. Promotion was irregular and perfectly arbitrary; the lower commissioned ranks of the regiments were choked with officers whose want of education and military knowledge made them unfit for higher posts. They had often grown grey as lieutenants, and were perfectly useless in a crisis. The pay was very low, and the temptation to make up for the want of it by petty jobbing and embezzlement too strong.

When Beresford took command, in the early spring of 1809, he had found about 30,000 regular troops in arms on an establishment which ought to have shown nearly 60,000. The deficiency in mere numbers could be remedied by a stringent use of the conscription: but the deficiencies of organization could not. Beresford complained that “Long habits of disregard of duty, and consequent laziness, made it not only difficult but almost impossible to induce many senior officers to enter into any regular and continued attention to the duties of their situations, and neither reward nor punishment would induce them to bear up against the fatigue.”[243] In the lower ranks there was a good deal of zeal, there being great numbers of young officers from the higher classes, who had just accepted commissions from patriotic motives; but there was also a heavy dead-weight of old and slack officers, and an appalling want of professional knowledge.

Beresford made it a condition of accepting his post that he should be allowed a free hand to retain, dismiss, or promote, and should be permitted to introduce a certain amount of British officers into the army. The Regency granted his request, of necessity and not with enthusiasm. He then proceeded to use his permission with great energy. A vast number of old officers, both in the higher and lower ranks, were put on half pay: only a minority of the colonels and generals were retained on active service. All the regiments which had been cursed with notoriously inefficient commanders were placed in charge of British officers, of whom four or five were drafted into every unit. Beresford’s system was that “since national feeling required management,” and “he must humour and satisfy the pride of the nation,” a sufficient number of the higher places must be left to natives, but each must have British officers either immediately over or immediately under him. Where a Portuguese general commanded a brigade, it was managed that the colonels of his two regiments should both be English. Where there was a Portuguese colonel, his senior major was English; where an English colonel, his senior major was Portuguese. In addition there were two, three, or four British captains in each regiment, but hardly any subalterns. For, to encourage good officers to volunteer into the Portuguese service, it was provided that every one doing so should receive a step in promotion, lieutenants becoming captains, and captains majors. This system seems to have worked well, though friction was bound to occur, since the blow to Portuguese national pride, when so many high posts were given to foreigners, was a heavy one.

[Sidenote: The Portuguese Officers]

Yet according to those who had the working of the newly organized army in their hands, the effect was very satisfactory. “The Portuguese captains are piqued into activity and attention, when they see their companies excelled in efficiency by those under English, and do from emulation what a sense of duty would never, perhaps, bring them to. There are a variety of oblique means and by-paths by which the parts of a Portuguese corps are constantly, and almost insensibly, tending to return to their old habits, to which they are so much attached. To nip this tendency, from time to time, in the bud, it is necessary to be aware of it: without the constant surveillance of English subordinate officers (who ever mingling with the mass of the men cannot but be aware of what is going on) the commanding officer can rarely be warned in time.”[244] D’Urban, the author of this memorandum, adds that one of his great difficulties was to secure that the junior officers of the old noble families were kept up to their work. “Even supposing a sufficient energy of character in a native officer, he does not, and will not, unless he be a _fidalgo_ himself, exercise coercive or strong measures to oblige one of that class to do his duty. He is aware that by doing so he will make a powerful enemy, and all the habits of thought in which he has been educated inspire him with such a dread of this, that no sense of duty will urge him to encounter it. Whenever a regiment is commanded by a non-_fidalgo_ it never fails to suffer extremely: the noblemen are permitted to do as they please, and set a very bad example.” The only remedy was to see that any regiment where the _fidalgos_ were numerous had an English colonel.

Such were the difficulties under which Beresford and the body of picked British officers whom he selected as his subordinates built up the army, which by 1811 was fit to take its place in battle line along with its allies, and in 1812–14 did some of the most brilliant service of the Peninsular War. Some of the exploits of the Portuguese brigades hardly obtain in Napier’s history the prominence that is their due. While he acknowledges the good service of the Light Division caçadores at Bussaco and elsewhere, there is scarcely praise enough given to Harvey’s brigade at Albuera, who received and repulsed _in line_ the charge of Latour-Maubourg’s dragoons, a feat of which any British troops would have been proud. And the desperate resistance for many hours of Ashworth’s Portuguese at St. Pierre near Bayonne is hardly noticed with sufficient gratitude—forming the centre of Hill’s thin line, pressed upon by overwhelming numbers, and with both flanks turned from time to time, they fought out a whole long morning of battle, and never gave way an inch, though their line was reduced to a thin chain of skirmishers scattered along a hedge and a coppice. The advance of the 13th and 24th Portuguese at the storm of St. Sebastian, across a ford 200 yards wide and waist-deep, swept by artillery fire from end to end, does however receive from Napier its due meed of admiration. This was a great achievement—every wounded man was doomed to drowning: on the other side was the blazing breach, where the British assault had come to a dead stop after dreadful slaughter, but the Portuguese regiments won their way over the deadly water, and took their share in the final assault with unflinching courage.

On the whole, the caçador battalions had the finest record in the Portuguese Army, the cavalry the least satisfactory. Some good work is recorded of them, _e.g._ the charge of Madden’s squadrons saved the whole of La Romana’s army at the combat of Fuente del Maestre in 1810, and that of D’Urban’s brigade gave efficient help to Pakenham’s great flank attack at Salamanca in 1812. But there were some “untoward incidents,” such as the general bolt at the battle of the Gebora, and the panic at the combat of Majadahonda, just before Wellington’s entry into Madrid. Of the last D’Urban writes,[245] “My poor fellows are still a most daily and uncertain sort of fighting people. At Salamanca they followed me into the enemy’s ranks like British dragoons; yesterday they were so far from doing their duty that in the first charge they just went far enough to land me in the enemy’s ranks. In the second, which (having got them rallied) I rashly attempted, I could not get them within 20 yards of the enemy—they left me alone, and vanished before the French helmets like leaves before the autumn wind. They require a little incentive of shouts, and the inspiring cheers of a British line advancing near them. I am afraid they will never be quite _safe_ by themselves, or in silence.” These are bitter words, but the record of Majadahonda is not a creditable one.

[Sidenote: The Portuguese Militia]

Of the Portuguese militia and the irregular levies of the Ordenança it is not necessary to speak here at length. They formed part of Wellington’s tools for carrying on the war, but not of his army. For, excepting in the Lines of Torres Vedras, he never put the militia side by side with the regulars, but always left them out in the open country, to watch frontiers or harass French lines of communication. They were under strict orders not to fight—orders which enterprising officers like Silveira and Trant sometimes disobeyed, to their own sorrow. Their duty was to screen the countryside against small French detachments, to make the movement of the enemy save in large bodies impossible, to capture convoys, or to cut off stragglers. Their most brilliant exploit was the capture of Masséna’s hospitals at Coimbra in 1810. More could not be expected from levies only intermittently under arms, not furnished with proper uniforms, and officered by civilians, or by the inefficients weeded out of the regular army. They were a valuable asset in Wellington’s hands, but not a real fighting force. Even far on in the war, so late as 1812, whole brigades of them broke up in panic in face of a very small force of cavalry—as at the unhappy combat of Guarda, where Trant and Wilson tried to do too much with these amateurs.

As to the ordenança or _levée en masse_, it had not even the organization of the militia, and was largely armed with pikes for want of muskets. Its only duty was to infest the countryside and prevent the enemy from foraging. The French shot them as “brigands” whenever caught; it was their natural practice to retaliate by making away with all stragglers and marauders who fell into their hands. Wellington offered a bounty for prisoners, but it was not very often asked for, or paid.