SIX
The first night for the Coa wounded was as rainy and miserable as anyone could imagine. George Simmons and many of the others found themselves packed together on the stone flagstones of a little church. Simmons was deposited next to a man of the 43rd: ‘I was on the ground, very ill from loss of blood; he had been placed on a palliasse of straw and was dying, but his noble nature would not allow him to die in peace when he saw an officer so humbled as to be laid near him on bare stones.’ In agony, the soldier moved himself so that Simmons could share his straw. He did not last the night.
Strange as it may seem, Simmons and the dying man of the 43rd were among the lucky ones. There were others unable to move, bleeding to death, out on the hills, wallowing in the downpour. That night the French soldiers and their camp followers would be tracing the steps of Craufurd’s pickets, searching for fallen soldiers and their plunder. Often enough, a man who showed any sign of life was dispatched with a blow to the head as such thieves relieved him of his last earthly possessions.
In the churches or barns where Wellington’s few surgeons struggled to cope with the Coa wounded, there was little to be done by way of treatment. Bandages might be tied around wounds, or plasters made from brown sticky paper slapped across less serious lesions. Simmons knew his surgery, for he had studied it before joining the Army, and he knew that the heavy loss of blood from his thigh made his case a doubtful one. He drew a piece of paper and pencil from his jacket and began scribbling a note to his brother Maud, who was also serving in Portugal, as an ensign with the 34th. In it, he directed Maud about how he might best sell his possessions after his death, so as to gain a few pounds for the education of their other siblings.
To his own surprise, Simmons survived the night, and was transferred the next day to Pinhel, where there were many more wounded. The surgeons and commissaries who organised the evacuation had few proper wagons. The roads of the Beira frontier were in any case so atrocious that only little two-wheelers could negotiate them. Dozens of local peasants were therefore hired to drive bullock-drawn carts full of wounded. These wagons were themselves viewed as instruments of torture by many of the soldiers who were obliged to lie across their rude wooden slats. The vehicles were so crudely made that they lacked a proper axle; instead, the wheels rotated around a pole and emitted a head-splitting drone as they went along the roads.
The makeshift hospital in Pinhel was another charnel house, one even cruder than Simmons’s billet of the first night. A sergeant from one of the regiments nearby, hearing of the sanguinary engagement on the Coa, allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and peered inside: ‘They were the most shocking spectacle I ever beheld – many without arms, hands, legs and every other part … the cries of them would pierce the heart of a slave.’ When he went back the next morning, many had died.
In this miserable place, some of the 95th’s wounded subalterns found one another and joined forces. Lieutenant Harry Smith, an active fellow with a grasp of Spanish, was able to make himself understood to the Portuguese. He helped organise a party of wounded who would be taken over several days down the mountain tracks, to a place where they could be put in boats on the Mondego River, then cruise down to the coast where the Navy might be able to evacuate them.
Smith, who had a knack of emerging on top in any situation, was loaded into a local worthy’s sedan chair, hitched between two mules, while the others would ride in the back of bullock carts. Officers and men alike were thrown into these conveyances. It cannot be claimed that the commissioned class received any higher standard of care at this stage of the journey, except in one particular: each officer, even the pipsqueak subalterns, was assigned a soldier of his company to act as his servant. The day after the battle Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith sent these men down to ease the miseries of his young officers. The riflemen were able to look after their charges in the most basic way, by fetching water and guarding them as the convoy of sick made its way down towards the Mondego.
Private Costello, with his two leg wounds, was also one of those being bumped along in the carts. A couple of days out of Pinhel, one of the seriously wounded men who’d been propped up close by slumped across him: ‘Foam mixed with blood ran from his mouth which, with his glassy eyes fixed on mine, made me feel very uncomfortable. Being weak and wounded myself, I had no power to move him. Death put an end to his sufferings, and his struggles having ceased, I was able to recover myself a little.’ Costello called out to the driver again and again, trying to make himself heard above the din of the wheels. He was convinced the surly old Portuguese had heard him all right, but the shouts were ignored, and Costello endured hours before the dead man was lifted off him.
The journey itself was too much for many. Lieutenant O’Reilly of the 95th died two days after the battle. Not long after that, Lieutenant Pratt, whose neck wound left him in hideous discomfort, had grown angry with a Portuguese who would not help him: his shouting caused the artery in his neck to burst, and he quickly bled to death in front of his anguished friends.
At the end of each day’s stage, the men would be left in a barn or some little shrine, with scant chance of a visit from one of the handful of medics who accompanied the convoy. One soldier recorded, ‘The surgeons had neither the time nor opportunity to look after us. As a consequence of this neglect, maggots were engendered in the sores, and the bandages, when withdrawn, brought away on them lumps of putrid flesh and maggots.’ During the daytime marches, many a dressing slipped off or was clawed away by some delirious man scratching at his wounds. Hordes of flies would then swarm around the wound, laying eggs in the rotting matter.
Six days after the battle, the sick were getting close to the river where they would find more comfortable transport. Many had been disgusted by the Portuguese town officials whom they had encountered on the way. At one point Harry Smith had threatened to hang the local magistrate, if he did not furnish some oxen and drivers to pull the sick wagons. The locals, it can be imagined, did not react well to such usage, and four days after leaving Pinhel, Simmons’s servant, Private Short, threatened to kill the driver of his master’s cart. Happily, the dispute was resolved without further bloodshed.
The river passage went smoothly enough, the men then being transferred to a naval transport, which sailed them around to Lisbon, where they arrived on 7 August, after a hellish journey of thirteen days. Here, the officers and men went their separate ways. Smith, Simmons and some of the other subalterns limped into the Golden Lion Hotel, an establishment that catered for the British officers going to or from their regiments.
The following day, appalled by the size of the bill at the Golden Lion, Simmons hired himself a room in the Rua de Buenos Ayres. Harry and Tom Smith also decamped, but to another address, the rent a little higher, of course, as befitted young gentlemen of their standing. All of them just wanted to recuperate as fast as possible. None required immediate surgery, although Harry Smith still had a ball lodged in the heel of one foot. It was simply a matter of taking rest, sending your servant out for food, and trying to maintain one’s composure as an Englishman, amid the stench of garlic or frying sardines and the incessant shouting of the inhabitants. Simmons wrote home to his father, ‘The people are not worthy of notice. I met with great barbarity all the way. They would let you die in the streets before they would assist you.’
Those whose wounds allowed a rapid recovery, and whose spirit remained ardent, did not like to linger at Lisbon, for the outgoings were inevitably greater than those they incurred sleeping under the stars and messing with the other officers of their company. A wound could be turned to your financial advantage, of course, with a visit to the Medical Board resulting in a pension. A lieutenant who had lost an eye or one of his arms could augment his income to the tune of £70 per annum. A great many who were in receipt of such a payment fully intended to return to their regiments.
Those who were seriously wounded but who escaped a lasting disability were entitled to a one-off gratuity of a year’s pay. The more gentlemanly sort used this benefit for the purpose for which it was intended and, with their colonel’s leave, sailed home for a year’s convalescence. However, some of the hardier types with no great expectations, of whom there were many in the 95th, calculated that a man who had been sick in Lisbon for a few months but then rejoined his regiment with a year’s pay in his pocket was a man who had made himself a devil of a good bargain.
Soldiers too found themselves parading before the Medical Board, where they might also receive ‘blood money’ for a wound. For those who’d had limbs amputated or other serious injuries, the board often took the decision to invalid them back to England. They would be put on a ship for Haslar on the Solent; there it would be decided whether they could be sent to an invalids’ or veterans’ battalion, or were so seriously crippled that they needed to be pensioned off. A man sent out in this way could receive a decent stipend – some got as much as ninepence a day, rather more than they were paid in their regiments, although there, at least, many of the essentials of daily life were found for them. Others, though, were cast out with a few pence a day and considered themselves hard done by.
Among those who had been evacuated, feverish, from the Guadiana, or shot up from the Coa, there was another category of soldier. By the late summer of 1810, it was clear that quite a few – hundreds, certainly – had realised the benefits of lingering about Lisbon. The alternative, after all, was a return to the floggings and grapeshot of regimental service. The wine was cheap in the Portuguese capital and there was always plenty of company around the barracks at Belem, just outside Lisbon, where hundreds of men discharged from general hospital but not yet deemed fit to return to their corps would gather. ‘It was a place noted for every species of skulk,’ one of the hardier riflemen recorded, ‘better known to my fellow soldiers as the “Belem Rangers”.’
These skulkers earned the contempt of stout-hearted soldiers, whose privations in hospital left them all the more eager to return to their companies. But those who preferred to parade in Belem, or similar establishments in the interior, eventually numbered thousands. Late in the summer of 1810, Brigadier Craufurd wrote to Wellington estimating that, even in the Light Division, many of the five hundred soldiers from the 43rd, 52nd and 95th who were absent from their battalions and loitering about the Portuguese capital were in fact ‘fit to join regiments’.
For the man determined not to leave hospital, there were various tricks. ‘Some of the younger soldiers, benefiting by the instruction given to them by old malingerers, caused sores or slight wounds, which under ordinary circumstances, would have healed quickly, to become inflamed and daily worse,’ one experienced army surgeon wrote. ‘Tongues rubbed against whitewashed walls certainly puzzled us doctors. Fits were common and constantly acted in the barrack yard, lameness was a general complaint, and not a few declared themselves hopelessly paralysed.’
However, the accomplished skulker did not consider it very proper to lie about in hospital, for there they made deductions from your pay, and that was money better spent on gin or Madeira. A man ‘awaiting instructions’ at Belem Barracks could claim his full six or seven pence day’s pay, and spend it with alacrity. Poring over his regimental returns, Wellington eventually noticed that something was amiss. On 23 October, Headquarters issued a General Order:
1. The Commander of the Forces has observed with the greatest concern, the large number of men returned sick in general hospital, compared with the returns received from the medical officers of the number of men actually on their books in the hospitals. 2. The former, at present, is more than double the latter, and it must be owing to some existing abuse.
In short, Wellington had realised that a great many men whose regiments assumed they were in hospital had actually been discharged but were not coming back. It might seem surprising that Headquarters did not tumble to the tricks of the Belem Rangers earlier, but by autumn 1810 it was trying to rein them in. The more artful skulkers had already tried to save themselves from such measures by adopting a shrewder line. Private Billy McNabb of the 95th was one such.
McNabb, a native of Falkirk, was thirty-eight and had been in the Army long enough to lose any dreams of glory. He was also a clever fellow who knew how to work the system. He had sailed from Dover with the 1st Company but had soon discovered that a man of his age could not manage the marches as well as a Costello fifteen years his junior, or indeed risk his life with the same nonchalance. When the Army first set up hospitals in Portugal, there had been no staff, apart from a handful of surgeons or assistant surgeons. These few experts were soon given hundreds of patients to look after. A soldier who could read and write, like McNabb, might ingratiate himself with those in charge and gain a position assisting them. Then he would receive the handsome sum of an additional sixpence a day as a ward orderly. As long as he remained in the good books of his medical masters, they would resist the regiment’s attempts to get their man back.
Wellington, however, had got wind of the tricks of men like McNabb. His Army was simply too short of trained soldiers to allow them to hang about the rear, currying favour with the surgeons by day and drinking themselves insensible at night. His General Order directed the hospitals to employ Portuguese civilians in place of the McNabbs, who, it added sternly, ‘are to be sent by the first opportunity to their regiments’.
The paths of Privates Costello and McNabb thus crossed bright and early one morning that October. Captain Samuel Mitchell, a tough Scot who had been shot in the arm at the Coa while at the head of his 6th Company, had heard reports of his countryman. Having recovered his health in Lisbon, Mitchell was quite determined that McNabb should join the party returning for service with the 95th. The old soldier insisted his services were indispensable at the hospital, ‘so was tied to a bullock cart and amid the jeers of the soldiers, conveyed back to his regiment’. The party set off with McNabb stumbling along, suffering the taunts of Costello and others, much as someone in the pillory might.
For George Simmons, hobbling about on his wounded leg, and Harry Smith, there was still a little time for recuperation and reflection. They sometimes escaped the city’s heat by making up a bathing party and dipping in the icy Atlantic waters. Neither man particularly wanted to delay his departure, for Smith had a rare kind of hunger for advancement and Simmons simply could not afford life in Lisbon.
While he was at the Rua de Buenos Ayres, Simmons received a letter from his parents. Brother Maud had sent home reports of the gravity of George’s injuries. They had learned too that officers of the 95th were more exposed to danger than those of almost any other regiment in the Army. George tried to allay their fears, writing, ‘You make me blush at the idea or observation in the letter, “a dangerous regiment”. My dear father, “the more danger the more honour”. Never let such weak thoughts enter your head.’
Simmons, like Costello, could not wait to get back to his brothers in arms. They had seen the horrible sights of war all right, but they had reacted in quite the opposite way to McNabb and his ilk. For most of those injured in the 95th did not want to join the ranks of the Rangers. To come through the fire and blood, having conducted yourself in a way that drew the praise of messmates, was just about all that was worth living for. The ironic humour, the softly spoken determination in the face of death: these were the things that drew them back, not the fear of the lash or any desire to please some tyrant like Craufurd.
Had Simmons wanted to give in to his parents’ fears, there were some avenues open to him. An exchange of commissions with an officer serving in some quiet corner of England was one route. Of course, he did not consider it for a moment. He had not forgotten his altruistic notion of helping to educate his brothers, and soon enough he’d be finding money from his meagre pay to send home again. But a powerful new idea now motivated his soldiering, expressed to his father this way: ‘I have established my name as a man worthy to rank with the veterans of my regiment, and am esteemed and respected by every brother officer.’ Simmons regretted only that his wound had not been suffered in a general action – a battle in which both armies were arrayed under their commanders in chief – for the blood money was usually better under such circumstances. All the more unfortunate for the young subaltern, since a general action was exactly what his comrades who remained with the 95th were about to experience.