Stories

My shoes had given out long before. The men tied strips of raw oxhide about their feet, bloody side in, and so we went: the women carrying children, the children carrying loaves, the loaves mouldered black. I saw a wife of the 43rd fall down in the snow and her man would not leave her; a sergeant cut him across the back with a scabbard, and still he sat with her. When we came up the pass again the French dragoons had taken the lot.

NoteHarris's dictated memoirs are the best private-soldier document we have of the Peninsula. His plain voice gives the retreat a reality no dispatch can.

SourceRecollections of Rifleman Harris, 1848. Public domain.

For three days and three nights Badajoz was a hell. Our own officers could not go among the soldiery without being shot at; men quarrelled over the plate of a sacristy and killed one another in the streets. I saw a Rifleman lying drunk upon a damasked bed, the curtains pulled down for his blanket, an image of the Virgin at his feet. The priests were weeping in their own church. The General would not have it stopped; he could not.

NoteKincaid's humour and honesty make him the best-loved of the Peninsular memoirists. Wellington's own reports after Badajoz are terse and ashamed.

SourceAdventures in the Rifle Brigade by Sir John Kincaid, 1830. Public domain.

He was brought down at twenty past one. The ball had broken his spine. He lay on a cot in the midshipmen's berth, covered with a sheet; the powder-monkeys had to be kept from staring at him. He asked constantly, 'How goes the day with us?' and when told we had eighteen prizes he said twice, 'God be praised, I have done my duty.' He died at half past four, his hand upon Hardy's.

NoteBeatty's official account remains the primary source. Nelson's body was preserved in a cask of brandy for the voyage home, hence the sailor's name for rum: 'Nelson's blood.'

SourceThe Death of Lord Nelson by Dr William Beatty, 1807. Public domain.

We were four thousand of the Guard left. The cold had glued the muskets to our hands; to let go was to leave the skin behind. When the Russian artillery opened upon us at Krasny we did not even form square, for we could not. We marched in column straight through the fire, and when we came out upon the further side we counted not the dead but the living, and they were less than half.

NoteBourgogne's memoir is the retreat from Moscow as a sergeant lived it: frost-bitten, starved, and still, to the end, faithful.

SourceMémoires du Sergent Bourgogne, 1835. Public domain.