Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings
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