Impossible Victories Read online

  Lieutenant Matthew Latham also received a gold medal from his brother officers and, on learning of the manner in which he had come by his terrible wounds, the Prince Regent personally paid the cost of a surgical operation to repair the worst of the damage. In 1813 Latham was rewarded with a captain’s commission in a Canadian Fencible regiment but remained with the Buffs and exchanged back at the same rank the following year. He retired from the Army in 1820 with an annual pension of £100, plus £70 per annum on account of his wounds. Subsequently, his defence of the colour was permanently commemorated by the Buffs with a magnificent silver centrepiece depicting the event.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Inglis, who had urged the 57th to ‘die hard.’ waited for two days before having the French grapeshot surgically extracted from his neck. After a spell of convalescent leave at home he returned to the Peninsula and took part in numerous hard-fought actions, ending the war as a major-general. ‘General Inglis,’ wrote Napier, ‘Was one of those veterans who purchased every step of their promotion with their own blood.’ In 1822 Inglis married at the age of 58 and had two sons, both of whom followed him into the service.

  The carnage at Albuera also brought promotion to many other officers, since vacancy and merit also played a part in the system, and of course advancement in the careers of a much greater number of NCOs and private soldiers. As a reward for the outstanding leadership displayed by the NCOs during the battle Beresford allowed each battalion in Houghton’s and Myers’ brigades to submit the name of one sergeant for promotion to the commissioned rank of ensign; selection cannot have been a difficult matter, since so few were left to choose from.

  The hardest-hit units, no longer able to function on their own, were formed into provisional battalions until their strength could be restored with reinforcement drafts. It would be two years before the Buffs and the 57th fought another battle. The 29th was sent home to recover and did not fight again during the war, arriving in Flanders just too late to participate in the Battle of Waterloo. The survivors of the 2/7th and 2/48th were absorbed by their respective 1st battalions.

  Writing of the astonishing motivation that imbued the British infantry at Albuera, Sir John Fortescue commented: ‘Such constancy as was displayed by these battalions is rare and has seldom been matched in the history of war. Whence came the spirit which made that handful of English battalions content to die where they stood rather than give way one inch? Beyond all question it sprang from intense regimental pride and regimental feeling.’ True, but to that must be added additional interlinked factors such as the contemporary attitude to the French and the close bonds of comradeship. To give best to the French was unthinkable, and, if it valued its reputation, no battalion would leave the line while others were still in place; likewise, no man would leave the ranks while his comrades were still fighting, for he would have to face them afterwards. It mattered not that on this occasion the French, scenting an easy victory, were at their most formidable; rather the reverse, in fact.

  Notes

  1. Quoted in Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Vol III, pp. 409–10.

  2. The rising was the result of a victory won by a small British army under Sir Thomas Graham at Barrosa, near Cadiz, the seat of the ‘free’ Spanish government, on 5 March 1811.

  3. Two former Vistula Legion lancer regiments served with the French Army, retaining the Polish uniform; in June 1811 they were designated the 7th and 8th Chevau-Léger Lanciers. Although the French 10th Hussars were credited with the capture of the King’s colour of the 66th, there are grounds for believing that it was actually captured by the 2nd Hussars, as part at least of the 10th are known to have been present with Godinot’s diversion force.

  4. Although the various depictions of Latham defending his colour, including the Buffs’ silver centrepiece, show his left arm missing and its staff intact, a photograph taken in old age reveals that it was his right arm which was amputated. It would have been entirely logical for him to have held the remains of the colour with his left hand, i.e. that furthest from the enemy, while he defended it with his right.

  5. L’Estrange’s method, subsequently known as the Albuera Square, was regularly practised by his regiment until the 1850s.

  6. Inglis, the third son of an Edinburgh surgeon, was born in 1764 and received his ensign’s commission in the 57th at the age of fifteen. He had joined the regiment in New York two years later and remained with it ever since, save for a period of several months the previous year when he had acted as brigade commander, notably at Busaco.

  7. Save for two regiments with Godinot, all the French cavalry was concentrated under Latour-Maubourg opposite the right of the British line. There was none opposite the 34th, on the extreme left of the line, although the numerous French gun teams, glimpsed imperfectly at a distance through the heavy smoke, may have given a contrary impression.

  8. For the 23rd, one of six British and two Hanoverian battalions which, at Minden in 1759, had carried out a similar advance, routing French cavalry and infantry in succession, it must have seemed as though history was repeating itself. See the author’s At All Costs!

  9. Napier suggests the counter-attacks by Abercrombie’s and Myers’ brigades coincided. Given the scale of ammunition expenditure described by Sherer, Abercrombie’s brigade must have been in action a minimum of 30 minutes before Myers commenced his advance.

  10. Sergeant William Gough was granted an ensign’s commission in the 2nd West India Regiment. Some accounts say that he ‘recovered’ the Buffs’ colour, others that he ‘recaptured’ it, which suggests fighting. Either way, it is reasonably safe to assume that the lancer who took it from Ensign Thomas was by now dead.

  11. Houghton’s brigade was brought out of action by Captain G. Cimitière, whose history was as unusual as his name, A French emigré serving as a corporal with the 14th Regiment in Flanders, he had used his local knowledge to lead his regiment out of a tight spot and been rewarded with an ensign’s commission in the 4th West India Regiment. The following year, 1796, he was, without purchase, promoted lieutenant in the 48th. He received a gold medal for his service at Albuera, became a lieutenant-colonel in 1824 and commanded the 48th until he retired four years later.

  12. After the battle the 57th’s survivors, recovering from their ordeal in a Spanish inn, agreed to devise a means by which their dead comrades’ example should never be forgotten. Ever since, on the anniversary of Albuera, that promise has been fulfilled by the 57th and its successor regiments in a moving ceremony known as the Silent Toast. The officers join the warrant officers and sergeants in the latter’s mess, forming a circle. The commanding officer, flanked by the regimental sergeant major and the junior sergeant, receives a silver cup filled with champagne from the officers’ mess sergeant and proposes the toast: To the Immortal Memory.’ There is no reply and no other words are spoken. The cup is then passed in complete silence from right to left around the circle, with each drinking from it in turn.

  13. Cole’s despatch says that the ‘Fusilier brigade lost 1,000 out of 1,500 men and 45 officers.’ The casualties are not in dispute and the impression that two-thirds of the brigade were down is supported by Lieutenant John Harrison’s recollections, included in the text. On the other hand, Michael Glover’s detailed research on the battle, incorporated in his history of the Royal Welch Fusiliers That Astonishing Infantry, gives the brigade’s strength as being 2,015 but concurs with the casualty figure of 1,045. Yet, even if the larger figure is accepted, it still produces a loss ratio in excess of 50 per cent, well beyond the level at which units are normally considered to a spent force.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Scarlet and Grey – The Battles

  of Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane,

  July 1814

  One of the causes of the American War of Independence had been the burden of taxation placed upon the colonists to provide for their defence by the regular armed forces of the Crown. The threat formerly posed by the French had been eliminated during the
Seven Years’ War and, that being the case, ran the argument, there was no further need for British regular troops to be stationed in North America at such prohibitive cost. There was, perhaps, a case to be made for a few garrisons in the west, where the Indians were beginning to oppose the increasing flow of white settlers, and for a small number of troops to man coastal defences along the eastern seaboard, but the general feeling was that any local emergency that might arise could be dealt with by local militias and minutemen.

  Much the same feeling existed within the infant United States during the 30 years which followed the end of the Revolutionary War, and in consequence the Regular Army maintained by Congress was tiny. It was moreover, a body upon which the general public was not inclined to look with any favour, for two reasons. The first was that, beyond providing aid for the civil power in extreme circumstances, it was an expensive institution which brought no apparent benefit to the majority of citizens; and the second was that, since the great majority of those serving in the ranks had enlisted out of sheer economic necessity, it was a refuge for the otherwise unemployable in a country where energy and enterprise were respected as nowhere else in the world.

  This, then, was the unfortunate relationship which existed between the nation and its army when the United States declared war upon Great Britain on 19 June 1812. One cause of the war was the high-handed attitude of the Royal Navy, which not only stopped American vessels in pursuance of its blockade of Napoleonic Europe, but also impressed their crews. Another was the desire of a vocal political lobby in Washington that Canada should be absorbed into the United States. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War Canada had provided a new home for the numerous loyalists in the former colonies who had not wished to sever all links with the mother country and whose lives had been made a misery because of their views. Many had lost everything and, understandably, even 30 years after the event, considerable bitterness towards the United States still existed on the Canadian side of the border. Indeed, in the west there was active Canadian support for an Indian confederation under Chief Tecumseh which was resisting white encroachment on their land, thereby providing fuel for the war faction in Washington. None of these problems were insoluble, and all could have been sorted out at the diplomatic level without undue difficulty, given a degree of goodwill; unfortunately that commodity was totally lacking on both sides.

  At sea, the small US Navy won a number of single-ship actions with its few superbly constructed frigates, but it was unable to prevent the imposition of a British blockade on the American coast, provoking an anti-war reaction from the New England states, which relied heavily upon maritime commerce for their living.

  On land, nothing occurred that might have changed the American public’s indifferent opinion of its army. On 17 July the British captured Fort Mackinac, strategically located on the island of the same name in the straits connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan. On 15 August Fort Dearborn, on the site of modern Chicago, was abandoned and its small garrison captured after a brief struggle with Indians allied to the British. The following day Brigadier-General William Hull, with 2,500 men at his disposal, tamely surrendered Detroit to General Sir Isaac Brock, who had only 350 regulars, 400 Canadian militiamen and 600 Indians with him, scarcely a shot being fired.

  These events in the west, however, were of less importance than what was about to take place on the Niagara front. Here the 30-mile-wide Niagara peninsula, bounded on the north by Lake Ontario and on the south by Lake Erie, was separated from up-state New York by the Niagara river, connecting the two lakes and with the famous falls approximately half-way along its length. Near the river’s mouth Fort George was balanced on the American bank by Fort Niagara, and at the southern end of the river the British had also built Fort Erie, within sight of the American town of Buffalo to the south-east.

  In October an American force consisting of 900 regulars and 2,270 militia, commanded by Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer, was detailed to cross the Niagara. Unfortunately for Van Rensselaer, only his regulars would make the crossing, the militia standing firm upon their constitutional right not to be employed abroad. Brock, having returned from Detroit, was at Fort George and, rounding up 600 British regulars and 600 Canadian militia, he attacked the American position on Queenston Heights on 13 October. The result was a decisive British victory in which 250 Americans were killed and wounded and 700 captured. British losses amounted to just fourteen men killed (one of whom was Brock himself) and 96 wounded. Throughout the engagement the American militia had, to their eternal shame, stood idly by on their own bank of the river while their comrades were overwhelmed. The following month a further invasion of Canada, this time involving 5,000 men under Major-General Henry Dearborn moving north along the Lake Champlain route, had to be abandoned when, once again, the militia element refused to cross the border.

  In the spring of 1813 the Americans returned to the offensive, with mixed success. A 1,600-strong force under Brigadier-General Zebulon Pike crossed Lake Ontario and seized York, as Toronto was then called, on 24 April. After a powder magazine exploded, killing Pike and causing 320 casualties among his men, the enraged survivors burned the town’s public buildings before returning home a fortnight later. In military terms the expedition achieved nothing and was actually counter-productive since it hardened Canadian attitudes.

  Towards the end of May, Dearborn sailed from Sackett’s Harbor with 4,000 men and effected a landing near Fort George. The landing was opposed by the 700-strong garrison of the fort under Brigadier-General John Vincent who, rather than risk being bottled up to no purpose, began withdrawing west along the shore of Lake Ontario towards Burlington Bay. Fort Erie was also abandoned and occupied by another American force which had crossed the Niagara, thereby bringing the entire Canadian bank of the river under American control. At last it began to seem as though the Americans were beginning to make some headway, especially when an amphibious raid against Sackett’s Harbor, mounted by Lieutenant-General Sir George Prevost, the British commander-in-chief North America, was decisively repulsed by Brigadier-General Jacob J. Brown’s small garrison on 29 May.

  It was not to be. Dearborn, in poor health, followed up the retreating Vincent slowly. During the evening of 5 June his advance guard, consisting of 2,000 men under Brigadier-Generals John Chandler and William H. Winder, encamped for the night at Stony Creek, near present day Hamilton. Chandler and Winder were that curse of the American military system that would endure until the second half of the nineteenth century, namely political appointees whose abilities fell far short of their ambitions, and in this instance they do not even appear to have protected their camp by posting an adequate picket line. At 02:00 the following morning Vincent’s entire command came storming out of the darkness, routing the Americans, taking their artillery and baggage, and capturing Chapman and Winder. Two days later the remnants of the latter’s force straggled into Fort George.

  At about this time a Canadian renegade named Joseph Willcocks, a newspaper editor and member of the Legislative Assembly, approached Dearborn with an offer to raise a Canadian unit for service with the American army. Driven by self-interest and political venom, Willcocks clearly believed that the United States would prove to be the eventual winner in the war and absorb Upper Canada. That being the case, he reasoned, any assistance he gave now would be amply rewarded with high office when the time came. He was granted a major’s commission in the US Volunteers and with his unit of ‘mounted scouts/ formed from fellow renegades and malcontents, served as guides to American patrols, simultaneously paying off old scores, looting private property and burning farms. Naturally, the Canadians responded by sniping and it became unsafe for American troops, whose morale had already been broken by the débâcle at Stony Creek, to stray too far from the fort, save in strength. Even this precaution came to naught when a raiding column, 540 strong, was ambushed at Beaver Dams, less than twenty miles distant, with the result that it surrendered to a British lieutenant commanding a much smaller force of
Indians. Dearborn was promptly dismissed.

  After this, the American garrison at Fort George simply withered away. Together, sickness, the departure of time-expired militiamen and the demand for troops elsewhere had, by the beginning of December reduced its size to some 400 men. When, on 10 December, one of Willcocks’ patrols was wiped out, the fort’s commander, Brigadier-General George McClure, decided to abandon the post and withdraw across the river, having burned down the nearby village of Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake), this task being entrusted to a grateful Willcocks, whose home town it was. Simultaneously, Fort Erie was evacuated.

  American officers themselves described the burning of Newark as a ‘flagrant act of barbarity’, so it is hardly surprising that Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond, the British commander in Upper Canada, should respond vigorously and at once. During the night of 18/19 December Fort Niagara was captured by a daring coup-de-main. Drummond’s deputy, Major-General Phineas Riall, then advanced south along the American bank of the Niagara and, brushing aside New York state militia, burned Lewiston, the Black Rock navy yard and Buffalo in reprisal for the atrocities at York and Newark. On the Niagara front, therefore, the Americans ended the year considerably worse off than they had begun it.

  Elsewhere, they had also enjoyed mixed success. On 10 September they emerged the victors from a hard-fought naval action on Lake Erie and as a direct result of this the small British garrison of Detroit, consisting of 800 regulars and 1,000 Indians under Brigadier-General Thomas Proctor, found itself in a position of strategic isolation and, thoroughly demoralised, commenced a disorganised retreat into Canada along the Thames river. Following up with a force of 3,500 regulars and militia, Major-General William Harrison found Proctor’s men drawn up near Moravian Town. After firing a couple of volleys, the British regulars fell apart under the impact of a cavalry attack, although the Indians fought on until Tecumseh, their great war chief, was killed, then melted away. Yet, somehow, the American War Department managed to blight even this small but important success by ordering the disbandment of Harrison’s militia regiments and posting his regulars to the Niagara front. Harrison, a capable and experienced soldier, resigned his commission in disgust.