Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

The colonel was occupied at the regimental depot at Mons, training replacements, until June 1813 when he resumed command of his active squadrons on the Oder. The highlight of his service at Leipzig was an attempt to encircle and capture the tsar of Russia and the king of Prussia as they reconnoitred the French positions on 13 October before battle was joined. Marbot had almost completed a manoeuvre to cut off the glittering array of majesties from their own lines when a careless Frenchman dropped his carbine, which went off, betraying the presence of the chasseurs. The throng of enemy commanders and their staffs hastily turned and galloped away. If only his ploy had succeeded, lamented the colonel, ‘the destinies of Europe would have been changed’. As it was, he could only withdraw his men to the French line and share the army’s fate – decisive defeat. He himself was wounded, bizarrely, by an arrow in the thigh, fired by a Bashkir tribesman in the ranks of the Russians.

Marbot fought on with his regiment through the last bitter battles of the war. At Hanau, the regiment charged five times. Again and again it fought fierce actions to cover the retreat of the shrinking French army. In the winter of 1814, back at his depot in Belgium, which Bonaparte had claimed as French soil, Marbot found local people increasingly hostile and alienated. He fought one of his last little clashes in Mons itself, against Prussian cossacks.

After Bonaparte’s first abdication, Marbot was retained in the Bourbon army, and appointed to command the 7th Hussars. Inevitably, on the return of his idol from Elba he led his regiment to join the emperor’s colours. In the first surge of enthusiasm in April 1815 he perceived a chance that the English, and the rest of Europe, might acquiesce peacefully in the restoration of Bonaparte’s rule. He was swiftly disabused. On 17 June, after the action at Quatre Bras, Marbot was promoted major-general, though his appointment never took effect. He spent most of the day of Waterloo fuming in frustration on the French right wing, waiting to take to Bonaparte news of Grouchy’s arrival with his corps, which was expected hourly.

‘I cannot get over our defeat,’ he wrote in a letter shortly afterwards. ‘We were manoeuvred like so many pumpkins.’ He spent much of the afternoon pushing pickets forward in search of Grouchy. These men instead found themselves skirmishing with Blücher’s vanguard on the Wavre road. When Marbot sent gallopers to inform Bonaparte that strong Prussian columns were advancing upon Mont St Jean, the reply came back that he must be mistaken, these were surely Grouchy’s regiments. Marbot’s few hundred horsemen were driven relentlessly back upon the crumbling imperial army, and soon found themselves receiving the attentions of the British left. The colonel of the 7th Hussars received yet another wound – an English lance thrust in the side. He wrote in a letter soon afterwards: ‘It is pretty severe, but I thought I would stay to set a good example. If everyone had done the same, we might yet get along…No food is sent to us, and so the soldiers pillage our poor France as if they were in Russia. I am at the outposts, before Laon; we have been made to promise not to fire, and all is quiet.’ For Marbot, Bonaparte’s final exile to St Helena prompted despair, and political ruin. He himself, one among so many traitors to the Bourbons, was obliged to quit France for three years of exile in Germany.

To the end of his days, the proud veteran used his pen to defend his beloved emperor and the soldiers of the imperial army against all criticism of their strategy and tactics, and to celebrate their chivalry and courage. Bonaparte read one of Marbot’s works in the last year of his life on St Helena. In appreciation, he added to his will a legacy of 100,000 francs for his former officer, writing: ‘I bid Colonel Marbot continue to write in defence of the glories of the French armies, and to the confusion of calumniators and apostates.’ So indeed the colonel did. On his return from exile he became once more a serving soldier, in 1829 taking command of the 8th Chasseurs. He served as aide de camp to the Duke of Orleans in the following year, and at the age of nearly sixty received yet one more wound, as a general during the Medeah expedition in Algiers. A bullet struck him in the left knee. As he was being carried to the rear, he remarked to the Duke with a smile: ‘This is your fault, sir.’ The Duke demanded: ‘How so?’ Marbot answered: ‘Did I not hear you say, before the fighting began, that if any of your staff got wounded, you could bet it would be Marbot?’ He finally retired in 1848, and died in 1854.

Few warriors in history have taken part in so many of the great battles of their age as did Marbot. Even if a stiff deduction is made from his own account for Gallic extravagance, his courage seems as remarkable as his survival. He performed fifty deeds which, in the wars of the twentieth century, would have been deemed worthy of the highest decorations. Far more astonishingly, he lived to tell the tale. His gifts as a warrior might be described as those of the blessed fool, of whom every army needs a complement in order to prevail on the battlefield, and with which Bonaparte’s armies were exceptionally well-endowed. A century later, Marshal Lyautey declared gaiety to be the most important attribute of a soldier. This Marbot possessed in bountiful measure. He was too humble a servant of the emperor to receive much space in the histories of the period, yet his memoirs render him wonderfully accessible to posterity. Without them, he would remain a mere name, a moustache and pelisse among the glittering throng of bold spirits who surrounded the tyrant of France through the years of his wars. As it is, Marbot created one of the most enchanting contemporary portraits of the life of an officer of Bonaparte. If an Anglo-Saxon cannot suppress laughter at the Frenchman’s awesome conceit, nor can most of us withhold admiration from his boundless appetite for glory. He and his kind perceived the wars which ravaged Europe through their lifetimes merely as wondrous adventures.

2 Harry and Juana (#ulink_7c4e9f17-b17f-5f1f-95ce-398464273e7a)

AMONG VISITORS TO SOUTH AFRICA who pass the Natal towns of Harrismith and Ladysmith, or at least glimpse them on the map, a diminishing number possess an inkling of the origins of their names. Yet these modest townships deserve to be remembered by Englishmen at least, for they commemorate one of the great love stories of history. Born in 1787, Harry Smith, fifth of eleven children of a Cambridgeshire surgeon, was in many respects an English counterpart of Marcellin Marbot, and by no means devoid of the Frenchman’s exuberance and bounce. He was bluff, brave, passionate, feckless and devoted to his calling as a soldier. Unlike Marbot, he rose from being an eager young swashbuckler to command armies in the field. In his later years, Smith was merely one among many competent British colonial generals. His real claim to fame is shared in equal parts with his wife, who showed herself one of the most remarkable women ever to serve – for serve she surely did – in the ranks of an army.

Smith was a slightly-built seventeen-year-old serving with his local Yeomanry when an inspecting general asked: ‘Young gentleman, would you like to be an officer?’ Smith answered eagerly: ‘Of all things.’ The general said: ‘Well, I will make you a rifleman, a greenjacket and very smart.’ One day in August 1805 the boy sat stiffly through a last dinner at home in Whittlesey, then ran to the stables to embrace his favourite hunter Jack and shed childish tears. His mother, too, sobbed when she kissed him for the last time. Then she suddenly composed herself, held Harry at arm’s length and offered him parting counsel. He should never enter a public billiard room, she said, ‘and if ever you meet your enemy, remember you are born a true Englishman…Now God bless you and preserve you.’ Smith claimed in old age that he never forgot his mother’s words during any one of the scores of great battles and skirmishes in which he pitted himself against the foe. He proudly quoted them to the end of his days, when he had become a famous general.

His first military experience was an authentic British folly. The young lieutenant and his regiment, the 95th Rifles, were sent to fight the Spanish with Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Auchmuty’s 1806 expedition to South America, which ended in devastating casualties and humiliating surrender at Buenos Aires. Smith and other survivors were repatriated by their captors. It was an inauspicious introduction to soldiering. In 1808 he sailed to Gothenburg for another rackety amphibious operation which was mercifully aborted before the troops could land. In August that year he ventured for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula, which was to play a central role in his life. He was posted as a brigade-major with Sir John Moore’s army, sent to expel the French governor-general Junot from Portugal following Bonaparte’s march into Spain. The function of brigade-major carried no field rank, but at the age of twenty-three Lieutenant Smith acted as executive officer of a force of some 1,500 men, much assisted by a command of the Spanish language which he had acquired in South America.

The British reached Salamanca before being obliged to turn back in what became the retreat to Corunna. Moore’s Riflemen played a vital, perhaps decisive, role in covering the withdrawal of the starving army through the snows, day after day fighting off French columns pressing the British rear, buying time for the long column of shuffling men and groaning carts making their way to the coast and safety. Smith was appalled by the behaviour of some of his compatriots, made of less staunch stuff than the Riflemen: ‘The scenes of drunkenness, riot and disorder we…witnessed…are not to be described; it was truly awful and heart-rending to see that army which had been so brilliant at Salamanca so totally disorganised.’ He excepted only the Rifles and Guards from these charges, and admitted his astonishment that on 16 January 1809 ‘these very fellows licked the French at Corunna like men’. The British stand at the coast, which cost Moore his life, secured the evacuation of the shattered army by the Royal Navy. By Smith’s own account, he got home to Whittlesey ‘a skeleton’, racked with ague and dysentery, plagued with lice, bereft of clothing and equipment.

Two months later, he sailed once more with his brigade for Portugal, accompanied by his brother Tom, who had also secured a commission in the Rifles. They reached Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army on the morning after its successful defence of Talavera, less a victory than a frustration of French ambitions. Over the months of marching and counter-marching that followed, Smith, like many British officers, spent every hour away from his duties shooting and coursing hares with his beloved greyhounds, in which he took great pride. Throughout the Spanish campaign his dogs often fed his mess on their quarry. Like every prudent officer, Smith loved and cherished his horses in a fashion that was essential when each man’s life depended upon the mettle of his mounts. For the Rifle regiments especially, bearing chief responsibility for reconnaissance, outpost duty and skirmishing, almost every day brought action of some kind, either against French vedettes (pickets) or against the enemy’s main forces. In the bloody encounter at the Coa crossing in July 1810, both Smith brothers were wounded. Harry was sent back to Lisbon with a ball lodged in his ankle joint. A panel of surgeons debated whether to leave the lead in place or extract it. One of them said, ‘If it were my leg, out should come the ball.’ Smith cried out: ‘Hurrah, Brownrigg, you are the doctor for me,’ held up his leg and demanded cheerfully: ‘There it is; slash away.’ Marcellin Marbot would have applauded. After five terrible minutes, during which the extracting forceps broke, the ball was removed. Here, indeed, were the Roman virtues demanded from every soldier of that era.

After two months in Lisbon, Smith returned to his regiment in the field early in 1811, briefly as a company commander, then once more as brigade-major. On arrival at the headquarters of Colonel Drummond, the benign old Guardsman who commanded 2nd Brigade, Smith asked: ‘Have you any orders for the picquets, sir?’ The colonel responded amiably: ‘Mr Smith, are you my brigade-major?’

‘I believe so, sir.’

‘Then let me tell you, it is your duty to post the picquets and mine to have a d—d good dinner for you every day.’ Smith wrote: ‘We soon understood each other. He cooked the dinner often himself, and I commanded the Brigade.’ This remark possesses at least partial credibility, for many commanders of the period did not much trouble themselves about the stewardship of their formations, save on the occasion of a battle.

Having pursued Masséna out of Portugal, in January 1812 the British stood at the gates of Ciudad Rodrigo. Smith volunteered to lead the forlorn hope at the storming, but his divisional commander insisted that a younger – and frankly, more expendable – officer must take this post of utmost danger. Yet Smith endured peril enough that night. He was foremost among the Riflemen who mounted the ramparts amidst shocking losses. In the madness of close-quarter fighting, with many of his comrades already shot down, he was pressing forward through the darkness amid a heaving throng of friends and foes beside a Grenadier officer when ‘one of his men seized me by the throat as if I was a kitten, crying out, “you French—”. Luckily he left me room in the windpipe to d—his eyes, or the bayonet would have been through me in a moment.’ Following the losses at Ciudad Rodrigo, Smith received his captaincy. He remarks that his most notable task during several weeks of idleness that followed was to preside at the execution of British deserters captured in the French ranks. The firing squad botched the shooting, and the brigade-major was appalled to hear himself entreated by a desperately wounded former Rifleman: ‘Oh, Mr Smith, put me out of my misery.’ He was obliged to order the firing squad to reload, close in, and finish off the survivors. Desertion was a besetting problem for every army, in an age when despair rather than patriotism had caused many volunteers to enlist, and most of Bonaparte’s soldiers were unwilling conscripts. Only savage discipline held together regiments in which disease and semi-starvation were chronic conditions, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.

In March 1812 the British began besieging Badajoz, an experience that was to prove the turning point of Harry Smith’s life. He spent the night of 6 April, one of the bloodiest of the Peninsular campaign, among the Light Division struggling to win through the great breach amid overwhelming enemy fire. Every hand- and foothold in the walls had been studded with French nails and sword-blades, sharp as razors. Every officer in the storming party save one was killed or wounded. A third of the Light Division died that night, as French fire tore into each successive party that dared the breach. As the attackers crossed the dry moat of the Santa Maria bastion, the French ignited a mass of combustible material beneath their feet, engulfing the British infantrymen in flames. Still the survivors pressed on, and still they fell. ‘Oh, Smith,’ a colonel cried out to the brigade-major, clutching his breast, ‘I am mortally wounded. Help me up the ladder.’ Smith said: ‘Oh no, dear fellow!’ ‘I am,’ said the colonel. ‘Be quick.’ And so Smith heaved the doomed man onto a ladder. Hour after hour through the darkness, the tumult of musketry and artillery fire persisted. Men fought amid rival screams of exhortation, exultation and agony. The hellish scene was lit by torches, burning fascines, gunflashes. At last the British survivors recoiled, acknowledging failure. They had sustained 2,200 casualties. Within its compass, this was an action as terrible as anything endured by attacking infantrymen in the First World War.

Shortly before dawn, Smith was horrified to receive orders from Lord Fitzroy Somerset: Lord Wellington, as Wellesley now was, insisted that the assault must be renewed. Yet even as the two men discussed the ghastly prospect, they heard British bugles beyond the city walls. They had received a miraculous deliverance. While the French threw everything into repelling the 4th and Light Divisions, elsewhere the British had forced the Citadel and Olivenca gate. Picton’s diversionary attack succeeded where the main assault failed. Badajoz was won. ‘There was no battle, day or night, I would not willingly re-enact except this,’ wrote Smith. Early in the morning, his tunic slashed by musketballs, his body stiff with bruises and cuts sustained in the assault, the Rifleman wandered among the great heaps of British dead before the breach. He met a forlorn colonel of the Guards searching for the body of a brother, who was known to be lost. ‘There he lies,’ the colonel said at last. He produced a pair of scissors and turned to Smith: ‘Go and cut a lock of his hair for my mother. I came for the purpose, but I am not equal to it.’

In the wake of the city’s capture, maddened by their losses, Wellington’s soldiers gave way to a debauch of a kind common among survivors of such a battle, yet shameful to the history of the British army. For two days, ten thousand men of the victorious army indulged in an orgy of drunkenness, looting and rape in the hapless city of Badajoz, in which Spanish allies suffered as grievously as vanquished Frenchmen. Until the fever of violence abated, for twenty-nine hours British officers were powerless to restore any semblance of discipline. Never was the contrast more vivid between the officer class of that era, dedicated to an extravagantly formal code of manners which it cherished even in war, and the brutes upon whom such gentlemen depended to fight their battles. An extraordinary capacity for endurance and sacrifice was demanded of them. They assuaged their sufferings with excesses matching those of Henry V’s foot-soldiers after Agincourt.

On the morning following the storm, while the rampage was at its height, two Spanish women approached the lines of the 95th Rifles. The elder, throwing back her mantilla, addressed Captain Johnny Kincaid and another officer. She was the wife of a Spanish officer absent on duty, she said. She did not know whether her husband was alive or dead. The home of herself and her young sister had been pillaged by British looters. Blood still trickled down the women’s necks from their ears, out of which the rings had been torn. In despair, and for the salvation of the fourteen-year-old sister who stood beside her, she threw herself on the mercy of the British officers. Kincaid wrote: ‘She stood by the side of an angel! A being more transcendently lovely I had never before seen – one more amiable I have never known!’

The younger girl’s name was Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, daughter of an old Spanish family now impoverished by the devastation of war. The romantics of the Rifle Brigade, among whom she became known simply as Juana, took her to their hearts. Kincaid wrote: To look at her was to love her; and I did love her, but I never told my love, and in the mean time another and more impudent fellow stepped in and won her!’ The ‘more impudent fellow’ was, of course, Harry Smith. In truth, Kincaid bore his friend no ill-will. In one of the most enchanting passages of Kincaid’s own memoirs, he says of Juana Smith: ‘Guided by a just sense of rectitude, an innate purity of mind, a singleness of purpose which defied malice, and a soul that soared above circumstances, she became alike the adored of the camp and of the drawing-room, and eventually the admired associate of princes. She yet lives, in the affections of her gallant husband, in an elevated situation in life, a pattern to her sex, and everybody’s beau ideal of what a wife should be.’

Smith was obliged to seek the commander-in-chief’s permission to marry. It is hard to believe that Wellington regarded this impulsive alliance of one of his young officers with much enthusiasm. Yet he consented, and even gave away the bride. Though Harry was a staunch Protestant the couple were married a few weeks later by a Catholic chaplain of the Connaught Rangers. Juana’s sister, curiously enough, having played her part in creating the romance, faded from the story. Nothing further is known of her, and nowhere in his own writing does Smith allude to her again. As for Juana’s feelings, it is hard to escape an assumption that only despair, an absolute need for a protector, could have driven her to accept the hand of a heretic, a grave and terrible step for a Spanish woman of her time.

The subsequent triumph of Harry and Juana’s union should not mask the fact that at the outset it was inauspicious. Rankers in Wellington’s army often had a woman companion in the field, with whom they might or might not go through some formal ceremony of marriage. Many such camp followers lived with two, three, even four ‘husbands’ before a campaign was over, as each in turn was killed. Yet officers, gentlemen, rarely emulated their men’s behaviour. They might somewhere maintain a Spanish or Portuguese mistress, but seldom took her on campaign. It is hard to believe that, outside the tightly-knit family of the Rifles, Wellington’s officers thought well of Smith’s misalliance.

Yet as a breed, soldiers are sentimental men. The presence of a young woman, a child bride, beside the campfires of the Rifle Brigade moved Harry Smith’s brother officers to ecstasies. A cynic might suggest that their enthusiasm was reflexive, when from one month to the next they enjoyed the company of no other woman with the attributes of a lady. Objective observers asserted that young Mrs Smith was not conventionally pretty as Johnny Kincaid suggested, nor even handsome, being possessed of a dark, severe countenance. But all who met her testified to Juana’s remarkable personal grace; and to the brilliancy of her devotion to her husband and everything which pertained to him.

As the army marched once more, and Smith with it, his new bride spent what passed for a honeymoon learning to ride a sidesaddle made for her by a horse-artilleryman. Her mount was an Andalusian thoroughbred named Tiny, which carried her to the end of the war and beyond. Her first battle as a soldier’s wife was that of Salamanca on 22 July 1812. Before the great clash began, much to Juana’s dismay Smith’s groom West led her to the rear. That night, thanking God for Harry’s safe deliverance, she slept on the battlefield amid the groans of the wounded. Next morning she accompanied her husband once more on the victorious British line of march. Each evening she joined him by the fireside, entrancing the Rifles’ little mess by dancing and singing to her own guitar. She lay down to sleep in a tiny tent specially made for her, beside her husband when he was not doing duty, anyway sharing the hardships of bare ground and bitter weather, hunger and thirst, without complaint save that she could not bear to see ‘Enrique’, as she always called Harry, suffer likewise. She talked freely to officers and men alike, which won their hearts, though she learned scarcely a word of English during the campaign. ‘Blackguards as many of the poor gallant fellows were,’ wrote Smith, in words that echoed his beloved Wellington’s view of his own soldiers, ‘there was not a man who would not have laid down his life to defend her.’

The couple enjoyed a brief interlude of comfort during the British stay at Madrid in August and September. But the approach of a superior French army made retreat to Portugal inevitable. Smith’s little personal train, which included thirteen greyhounds, was swelled by the addition of a local priest who threw himself on the Rifleman’s mercy, asserting that he feared French retribution. The Rifles dubbed the man ‘Harry Smith’s confessor’, though in fact Smith’s poor Catholic wife suffered many snubs from her fellow-countryman for having wedded herself to a heretic.

In those months, Juana and Harry Smith forged a partnership which remained undiminished in passion and mutual respect for almost half a century. Her prudent management of their slender purse and rickety little travelling household won his admiration. She seemed to care only for his survival and professional advancement. By the time they reached Cuidad Rodrigo on 19 November, after weeks of skirmishing with the French in their rear, at last they knew that they were safe for the winter. Many men were sick as well as hungry and weary. An existence exposed to the elements by day and night, without effective protective clothing, caused a host of combatants in the wars of Bonaparte to succumb to death without an enemy in sight. To be continually cold and wet was a soldier’s natural predicament. Only the hardiest prospered, Harry Smith with his relentless good cheer prominent among them.

The priest – ‘the padre’ as Smith called him – took over the cooking for their party. They found a billet in a little house, and the gallant captain resumed his habits of hare coursing or duck shooting every day. Thus Harry and Juana passed the army’s season in winter quarters, perfectly content in their own society, supporting each other in adversity in a fashion that must have contributed much to the welfare of both. It is realistic rather than cynical to emphasise Juana’s dependence upon the fluke of Harry Smith’s survival. If a chance bullet carried him away, as there was every prospect that it might, she would be bereft. The couple had no money. Juana’s claim upon Harry’s distant family was speculative. Her own people considered her an outcast. Her only course if Captain Smith perished would be to seek another protector in the ranks of Wellington’s army. And however much his fellow-Riflemen loved Juana, it must be questionable whether another of them would have married her. Her entire being, therefore, was subject to her husband’s welfare.

Wellington’s army set out in high spirits on the 1813 spring march that led to triumph at Vittoria. The weather bloomed, supplies were plentiful. British soldiers shared an absolute confidence that they were now on the verge of decisive victory. Juana’s horse Tiny was lame. Instead she rode a strange mare which slipped on a bank, rolled on its rider, and broke a small bone in her foot. Terrified of being left behind, she insisted that a mule should be found to carry her. This prompted half the division’s officers to set forth in search of a suitable beast, which was duly found. She was back on her own horse a few days later. Smith passed 21 June, the day of Vittoria, as ever in the thick of the battle, hastening to and fro with orders for his brigade. His wife was horrified to hear that soldiers had seen his horse go down, her husband apparently killed. Ignoring imprecations to remain in the rear, she hastened onto the battlefield, from which the French were now in flight. Amid the chaos of dead and wounded men, shattered and abandoned vehicles, West, the Smiths’ groom, urged his mistress to load a horse with plunder, of which Vittoria produced the richest harvest of the campaign. Juana would have none of it: ‘Oh, West! Never mind money! Let us look for your master.’ After hours of searching, Smith himself at last heard Juana’s loud lamentations. He croaked a greeting to her in a voice stripped hoarse by shouting commands through the bloody day. ‘Thank God you are not killed, only badly wounded!’ his wife exclaimed. Harry growled, ‘Thank God, I am neither.’ His only mishap was that his horse had fallen under him, apparently stunned by concussion from the near passage of a cannonball. In sharp counterpoint to Marcellin Marbot, Smith bore a charmed life. Through constant engagements in the years ahead, he would never be wounded. Consider the odds against his survival, never mind against his escaping injury: late in life, he computed that he had been within reach of the enemy’s fire some three hundred times in battles, sieges and skirmishes. It was no more likely that Harry Smith should survive all these encounters than that a spun coin should fall on its head three hundred times consecutively.

The only booty the Smiths gained from Vittoria was a smart little pug dog given to them by the Spanish mistress of a wounded French officer whom they assisted. ‘Vitty’, as they christened him, thereafter travelled with them to Waterloo and beyond.

The next stages of the British march were bitter, through villages sacked and burned by the retreating enemy. In the house where the Smiths were billeted on the night of 25 June, their Navarese host said: ‘When you dine, I have some capital wine, as much as you and your servants like.’ With heavy emphasis, he invited the brigade-major to inspect his cellar. ‘He had upon his countenance a most sinister expression. I saw something exceedingly excited him; his look became fiend-like.’ Harry followed his host by candlelight into the cellar, where with a flourish the Spaniard pointed to the floor: ‘There lie four of the devils who thought to subjugate Spain!’ On the flags lay the bodies of four French dragoons, where their host had stabbed them after inciting them to drink themselves into insensibility. Smith recoiled in disgust: ‘My very frame quivered and my blood was frozen, to see the noble science of war and the honour and chivalry of arms reduced to the practices of midnight assassins…Their horses were still in his stable.’

In his memoirs, Smith vividly describes his wife’s progress through the fierce rainstorms and hard marching of the days that followed, the horses slipping and stumbling, scant shelter to be found. Each officer possessed his own little flock of goats. Behind the Rifles rode Smith’s groom West with spare horses and baggage, and behind them in turn trailed the captain’s personal servants and Antonio his goatboy, with Juana. There were many days when duty prevented him from taking any care of his wife: ‘I could devote neither time nor attention to her…I directed her to the bivouac and most energetically sought to collect my Brigade…When I got back, I found my wife sitting, holding her umbrella over General Vandaleur (who was suffering dreadfully from rheumatism).’ It is a peerless image.

Smith’s military career suffered the same frustrations about promotion as did that of Marbot. Neither possessed wealth or influence. While Smith was almost certainly the more intelligent officer, it is unlikely that anyone saw him as a Wellington in the making. The eager young captain thought his majority secure at Vera in October, when before the attack his brigade commander, Colonel Colborne, ‘who had taken a liking to me as an active fellow’, said: ‘Now, Smith, you see the heights above us?’ ‘“Well,” I said, “I wish we were there.” The colonel laughed. “When we are,” he says, “and you are not knocked over, you shall be a brevet-major, if my recommendation has any weight.”’ The Light Division stormed the heights sure enough, and Colborne submitted his recommendation, but Smith had another year to wait before he got his step.

It was his good fortune, however, to be recognised as a member of an elite of an elite, a Rifleman of General Robert Crauford’s legendary Light Division. ‘Ours,’ wrote Smith’s closest friend Johnny Kincaid, ‘was an esprit de corps, a buoyancy of feeling animating all which nothing could quell. We were alike ready for the field or the frolic, and, when not engaged in the one, went headlong into the other…In every interval between our active service, we indulged in all manner of childish trick and amusement with an avidity and delight of which it is impossible to convey an adequate idea. We lived united, as men always are who are daily staring death in the face on the same side and who, caring little about it, look upon each new day added to their lives as one more to rejoice in.’ Kincaid’s words represented no romantic flight of fancy. Every man who served with the Light Division in the Peninsula attests to the fact that it was one of the greatest bands of brothers in the history of warfare, and that Harry Smith was among the most celebrated of its young stars.

Whenever the army was in the presence of the enemy, Juana suffered agonies of apprehension about the fate of her Harry. Before every battle they bade a farewell to each other as fond and grave as if they were parting for eternity – as indeed they might have been. One such night in November before her husband met the French at the Nivelle, looking utterly forlorn, Juana suddenly declared: ‘You or your horse will be killed tomorrow.’ The irrepressible Harry burst out laughing and said, ‘Well, of the two such chances, I hope it may be the horse.’ Next day as they advanced to storm the French redoubt his cherished hunter ‘Old Chap’ was hit, and fell atop his master, pouring forth a torrent of blood. Some soldiers dragged Smith’s gory figure from under the dead animal, exclaiming ‘Well, d—my eye if our old Brigade-Major is killed, after all.’ Smith said: ‘Come, pull away, I am not even wounded, only squeezed.’ When he was freed to carry a surrender document to the enemy lines for signature, his French counterpart burst out laughing on beholding his blood-soaked figure. Even Wellington was suitably impressed when Smith reported to him. Juana gasped in horror that evening when first she caught sight of her husband. He assured her that of her tragic prophecy the previous night, only the lesser half had been fulfilled.

Juana courted danger with the lightest of hearts. Once when the French staged a local attack, the Light Division was temporarily hustled into retreat. Smith had to muster with his brigade while his wife struggled into a habit and rode for her life, a few minutes ahead of the enemy. Vitty the pug was left behind with the baggage, but a bugler of the 52nd had the presence of mind to whip the little dog into a haversack and carry him off, as French fire crackled around the retreating regiment. For some hours the enemy held possession of the brigade baggage train. When the British regained the position, the Smiths were crestfallen to discover that a goose which they were fattening for Christmas dinner had vanished.

It is hard to imagine how Juana, a gently-reared, convent-educated young Spanish woman, adapted to a life among foreigners whose language she could not speak, and whose customs were wholly alien to her. She was deprived of female society, of a home and any vestige of comfort. Instead, she lived amid an army in which the highest chivalry co-existed with the basest cruelty. She was indefatigable in visiting the sick and wounded, sometimes riding Tiny across empty country in the army’s rear, scoured by French dragoons, to reach the hospitals. One night in France the couple were billeted upon an elderly widow who served them with bouillon in a Sevres bowl which Juana admired. Their hostess remarked that it was one of her wedding presents, never used since her husband’s death. Two mornings later on the road to Toulouse, the Smiths were appalled to see their servant enter, carrying the very same bowl full of milk. Juana, surely mindful of the pillage of her own home in Badajoz, burst into tears. Harry’s man shrugged off his master’s reproaches: ‘Lord, sir, why the French soldiers would have carried off the widow an’ she had been young, and I thought the bowl would be so nice for the goats’ milk in the morning.’ That night, when Harry returned to the cottage in which they were staying, there was no sign of his wife. At last she entered, weary and mudstained. She had ridden thirty miles back to Mont de Marsan to return the widow’s bowl. Reader, remember: she was barely sixteen.

‘When I was first troubled with you,’ Harry wrote to Juana some years later, ‘you were a little, wiry, violent, ill-tempered, always faithful little devil, and kept your word to a degree which, at your age, and for your sex, was as remarkable as meritorious, but, please Almighty God, I shall have this old woman with me, until we both dwindle to our mother earth, and when the awful time comes, grant we go together at the same moment.’ It is not hard to perceive the springs of Harry’s devotion.

The Smiths were with the British army at Toulouse in March 1814 when word came of Bonaparte’s abdication. Harry’s old battalion of the Rifles, which had sailed from England in 1808 numbering 1,050 officers and men, had in the meantime received only one draft of a hundred men, and now returned home just five hundred strong. Those five hundred were recognised, however, as the greatest skirmishing unit in the world. Johnny Kincaid observed wryly that the Rifles sailing from France looked a ‘well-shot corps…Beckwith with a cork leg – Pemberton and Manners with a shot each in the knees, making them as stiff as the other’s tree one – Loftus Gray with a gash in the lip and minus a portion of one heel which made him march to the tune of dot and go one – Smith with a shot in the ankle – Eeles minus a thumb – Johnston, in addition to other shot-holes, a stiff elbow, which deprived him of the power of disturbing his friends as scratcher of Scotch reels upon the violin – Percival with a shot through his lungs – Hope with a grapeshot lacerated leg – and George Simmonds with his riddled body held together by a pair of stays, for his was no holiday waist.’ Smith’s survival with so small a loss of his own blood was an extraordinary accident.

The captain was now presented with a painful dilemma, however. His brigade was given immediate orders to sail for America, where the British were committed to a new war. No leave was being granted. He himself might choose to resign his post and go home. But, for all his reputation as one of the boldest and brightest spirits in Wellington’s army, he still craved and needed promotion. Amid grief and many tears, he agreed with Juana that they should part. She was to go to London with Harry’s brother Tom and all the money the couple could muster, lodge in the capital and learn English while he campaigned. She flatly refused to approach his family in Cambridgeshire until he himself could escort her there. ‘Many a year has gone by,’ he wrote in his autobiography about the day of their separation, ‘still the recollection of that afternoon is as fresh in my memory as it was painful at the moment – oh, how painful!…I never was unmanned until now, and I leaped on my horse by that impulse which guides the soldier to do his duty.’ Heaven knows what would have befallen Juana if her husband had not returned.

Smith was appalled by the incompetence of the American expedition – a British attempt to escalate on land a struggle with the former colonists that had begun as the naval war of 1812 – and by General Robert Ross’s handling of his small army at Bladensburg, outside Washington, on 24 August 1814. The brigade-major described the burning of the American capital as ‘barbarous’, though he and his comrades ate eagerly enough the supper which they discovered on the White House table. As the British force withdrew towards the fleet, the soldiers riddled with dysentery, Ross deputed Smith to proceed to London with his despatch, reporting victory of a kind at Washington, together with an exposition of the acute difficulties of proceeding further. Little more than three weeks later, the Rifleman was in England. After seven years’ absence from his own country, he revelled in the spectacle of southern England in glorious summer sunshine; and even more, of course, in his reunion with Juana. He delivered his despatch to the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street, then hastened to his wife. From the window of the house where she was lodging she glimpsed his hand on the coach door as he peered forth in search of the right number, and shrieked: ‘Oh Dios, la mano de mi Enrique!’ He wrote later: ‘Oh! you who enter into holy wedlock for the sake of connexions – tame, cool, amiable, good, I admit – you cannot feel what we did!’ After the joy of their encounter, he was summoned back first to meet the prime minister the Earl of Liverpool, and then to an audience with the Prince Regent. Here was heady stuff for a twenty-seven-year-old soldier without experience of high places. Now at last, he was granted his majority.

Juana for the first time met her father-in-law, who travelled to London for the encounter. Old Mr Smith burst into tears of ‘joy, admiration, astonishment and delight’ at the spectacle of this passionate young woman in full Spanish costume. She immediately threw herself into his arms. The happy family journeyed together to Whittlesey, where there was a great reunion with Vitty the Pug, with Harry’s old hunter Jack, and finally with Tiny the Andalusian, whom the Smith grooms had found hard to manage. Juana, of course, had no such difficulty. ‘Don’t make a noise,’ she said, ‘and he will follow me like a dog.’ And so the horse did – into the family drawing room.

After just three weeks of domestic tranquillity, Major Smith was summoned again to Horse Guards. There was more news from America, all bad. General Ross had attempted to take Baltimore and failed, with the loss of his own life. Sir Edward Pakenham was to replace him, and Smith was appointed to become his assistant adjutant-general, a senior staff post. The commander-in-chief and his large staff set forth across the wintry Atlantic in November 1814, crowded into a frigate. They landed before New Orleans on 26 December, four days after the army had been put ashore. The subsequent battle, disastrous for British arms, cost Pakenham’s life. Its conduct shocked Smith. Since the débâcle in South America at the outset of his military career, he had never seen his countrymen so utterly confounded. In Spain, Wellington’s army set about its business with a confidence founded upon absolute faith in its leader, which was seldom misplaced. Now, in America, Smith once more stood witness to folly and mismanagement of the most grievous kind. There was only one Wellington. Many lesser British generals were utterly unworthy of their commands.

After the battle of New Orleans, Smith was sent to the enemy’s lines to arrange a truce for the burial of the dead. He found his American counterpart Colonel James Butler, the future president General Andrew Jackson’s adjutant-general, ‘a rough fellow’ who carried a drawn sword lacking a scabbard on his belt. Smith apologised for the delay in bringing forward the surgeons. Butler, gazing out upon the heaps of British dead and dying, said: ‘Why now, I calculate as your doctors are tired; they have plenty to do today.’ Smith riposted outrageously: ‘Do? Why, this is nothing to us Wellington fellows! The next brush we have with you, you shall see how a Brigade of the Peninsular Army (arrived yesterday) will serve you fellows out with the bayonet.’ He asked Butler why he carried a drawn sword. The American, matching Smith’s spirit, answered boldly: ‘Because I reckon a scabbard of no use so long as one of you Britishers is on our soil. We don’t wish to shoot you, but we must, if you molest our property; we have thrown away the scabbard.’

Smith was pleasantly surprised to notice that the Americans had not stripped the dead in the fashion of the French, indeed had taken only British soldiers’ boots, of which they were much in want. He and Butler fell out, however. The American seems to have been a grave fellow, unaccustomed to the manners of such insouciant cavaliers as Smith. Butler may have been disconcerted by the bearing of this English professional warrior, who was content to fight almost anyone wherever he was ordered, with scant heed to weighing the merits of the cause. Casualties that seemed appalling to the Americans gave no pause to such as Smith, who had seen Badajoz. In his eyes, losses were merely the price soldiers paid for practising their trade. Wellington seldom grieved for long over the casualties of his battles, and indeed he could not afford to.

At New Orleans Smith told Jackson’s man that he hoped next time they met, it would be Butler’s turn to ask leave to bury American dead. Yet after a few more weeks of desultory skirmishing, the invaders acknowledged failure. Smith, appointed military secretary to Pakenham’s successor Sir John Lambert, was one of the few men of the army in America who returned to England with an enhanced reputation. His courage on the battlefield was no more than that expected of any officer of those days, but his eager fellowship, zeal and efficiency marked him out for future advancement. He remained unfailingly popular with his comrades. The latter point should not be taken for granted among successful warriors. Many of those depicted in these pages were disliked or resented by their peers. Yet few men failed to warm to bluff, plain, eager, guileless Harry Smith.

As his ship entered the Bristol Channel on the homeward voyage, its passengers, eager for news, lined the side when it passed an outbound merchantman. A voice cried out from the deck: ‘Ho! Bonaparter’s back again on the throne of France!’ Smith, ever the career soldier, tossed his hat to the sky and cried out in exultation: ‘I’ll be a lieutenant-colonel yet, before the year’s out!’ Arrived at Whittlesey in a chaise, he found Juana, emotional as ever, fainting with fear that the vehicle brought some stranger bearing bad news for her. She recovered soon enough, of course, and Smith observed happily that never again in their marriage did they face a long separation. He himself embarked upon buying horses for the new campaign with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy off to play in a great match. One of his younger siblings, Charles, was to join the Rifle Brigade as a volunteer, and brother Tom was already in the field. There was one alarm before the Smiths departed. The whole family rode out together on the last evening. As they approached home, Harry glimpsed a fence and ditch at the edge of the town, and could not resist an exuberant flourish: ‘I’ll have one more leap on my war horse.’ He set his old mare at it. To the horror of them all, she came down. Her rider found himself with a leg trapped between the fence and his struggling mount. For a few terrible seconds he was sure that his leg must be broken, ‘and there was an end to my brigade majorship!’ Instead, to everyone’s relief horse and rider scrambled to their feet unscathed.

Major Smith set out next day for Harwich with Charles, Juana, assorted servants and West the groom, reaching Sir John Lambert and his brigade at Ghent on 5 June. Once again he was to fill his old post as brigade-major. A few days later, on 15 June 1815, the force was abruptly summoned to march for Brussels. Next afternoon, as they approached the Belgian capital, they were given fresh orders for Quatre Bras. Bonaparte and his army were closing upon the city from the west. A great battle was plainly imminent. As the column passed through Brussels, they were appalled by the scenes of confusion, haste, muddle and civilian flight which met their eyes. They encountered a mob of Hanoverians galloping for the coast, proclaiming that the French had already turned their rear. Smith went to report to Lambert, whom he found sitting down to dinner with Juana and his ADC. That cool commander contemptuously dismissed the Hanoverian rumour, and urged his brigade-major to enjoy a magnificent turbot which his butler had brought up from Brussels.

That evening came a thunderstorm which drenched the armies and reduced the ground to a quagmire. During the night Lambert’s brigade was ordered forward, a movement which the regiments found hard to execute amid the mud and the milling throng of panic-stricken camp followers and baggage carts. The troops were further disgusted when orders arrived instructing them to clear and hold open the road for further reinforcements, rather than join the main army which was expecting at any moment to receive Bonaparte’s assault. Early next morning, the day of Waterloo, Lambert sent Smith cantering forward to petition the Duke of Wellington for more congenial orders. He found the great man near Hougoumont, riding the ridge of Mont St Jean among his staff, deploying his divisions. Smith reported. The commander-in-chief directed Lambert’s brigade forthwith to move forward to occupy a position on the left of the British line.

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