2 Harry and Juana

      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