Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings
for having wedded herself to a heretic.
In those months, Juana and Harry Smith forged a partnership which remained undiminished in passion and mutual respect for almost half a century. Her prudent management of their slender purse and rickety little travelling household won his admiration. She seemed to care only for his survival and professional advancement. By the time they reached Cuidad Rodrigo on 19 November, after weeks of skirmishing with the French in their rear, at last they knew that they were safe for the winter. Many men were sick as well as hungry and weary. An existence exposed to the elements by day and night, without effective protective clothing, caused a host of combatants in the wars of Bonaparte to succumb to death without an enemy in sight. To be continually cold and wet was a soldier’s natural predicament. Only the hardiest prospered, Harry Smith with his relentless good cheer prominent among them.
The priest – ‘the padre’ as Smith called him – took over the cooking for their party. They found a billet in a little house, and the gallant captain resumed his habits of hare coursing or duck shooting every day. Thus Harry and Juana passed the army’s season in winter quarters, perfectly content in their own society, supporting each other in adversity in a fashion that must have contributed much to the welfare of both. It is realistic rather than cynical to emphasise Juana’s dependence upon the fluke of Harry Smith’s survival. If a chance bullet carried him away, as there was every prospect that it might, she would be bereft. The couple had no money. Juana’s claim upon Harry’s distant family was speculative. Her own people considered her an outcast. Her only course if Captain Smith perished would be to seek another protector in the ranks of Wellington’s army. And however much his fellow-Riflemen loved Juana, it must be questionable whether another of them would have married her. Her entire being, therefore, was subject to her husband’s welfare.
Wellington’s army set out in high spirits on the 1813 spring march that led to triumph at Vittoria. The weather bloomed, supplies were plentiful. British soldiers shared an absolute confidence that they were now on the verge of decisive victory. Juana’s horse Tiny was lame. Instead she rode a strange mare which slipped on a bank, rolled on its rider, and broke a small bone in her foot. Terrified of being left behind, she insisted that a mule should be found to carry her. This prompted half the division’s officers to set forth in search of a suitable beast, which was duly found. She was back on her own horse a few days later. Smith passed 21 June, the day of Vittoria, as ever in the thick of the battle, hastening to and fro with orders for his brigade. His wife was horrified to hear that soldiers had seen his horse go down, her husband apparently killed. Ignoring imprecations to remain in the rear, she hastened onto the battlefield, from which the French were now in flight. Amid the chaos of dead and wounded men, shattered and abandoned vehicles, West, the Smiths’ groom, urged his mistress to load a horse with plunder, of which Vittoria produced the richest harvest of the campaign. Juana would have none of it: ‘Oh, West! Never mind money! Let us look for your master.’ After hours of searching, Smith himself at last heard Juana’s loud lamentations. He croaked a greeting to her in a voice stripped hoarse by shouting commands through the bloody day. ‘Thank God you are not killed, only badly wounded!’ his wife exclaimed. Harry growled, ‘Thank God, I am neither.’ His only mishap was that his horse had fallen under him, apparently stunned by concussion from the near passage of a cannonball. In sharp counterpoint to Marcellin Marbot, Smith bore a charmed life. Through constant engagements in the years ahead, he would never be wounded. Consider the odds against his survival, never mind against his escaping injury: late in life, he computed that he had been within reach of the enemy’s fire some three hundred times in battles, sieges and skirmishes. It was no more likely that Harry Smith should survive all these encounters than that a spun coin should fall on its head three hundred times consecutively.
The only booty the Smiths gained from Vittoria was a smart little pug dog given to them by the Spanish mistress of a wounded French officer whom they assisted. ‘Vitty’, as they christened him, thereafter travelled with them to Waterloo and beyond.
The next stages of the British march were bitter, through villages sacked and burned by the retreating enemy. In the house where the Smiths were billeted on the night of 25 June, their Navarese host said: ‘When you dine, I have some capital wine, as much as you and your servants like.’ With heavy emphasis, he invited the brigade-major to inspect his cellar. ‘He had upon his countenance a most sinister expression. I saw something exceedingly excited him; his look became fiend-like.’ Harry followed his host by candlelight into the cellar, where with a flourish the Spaniard pointed to the floor: ‘There lie four of the devils who thought to subjugate Spain!’ On the flags lay the bodies of four French dragoons, where their host had stabbed them after inciting them to drink themselves into insensibility. Smith recoiled in disgust: ‘My very frame quivered and my blood was frozen, to see the noble science of war and the honour and chivalry of arms reduced to the practices of midnight assassins…Their horses were still in his stable.’
In his memoirs, Smith vividly describes his wife’s progress through the fierce rainstorms and hard marching of the days that followed, the horses slipping and stumbling, scant shelter to be found. Each officer possessed his own little flock of goats. Behind the Rifles rode Smith’s groom West with spare horses and baggage, and behind them in turn trailed the captain’s personal servants and Antonio his goatboy, with Juana. There were many days when duty prevented him from taking any care of his wife: ‘I could devote neither time nor attention to her…I directed her to the bivouac and most energetically sought to collect my Brigade…When I got back, I found my wife sitting, holding her umbrella over General Vandaleur (who was suffering dreadfully from rheumatism).’ It is a peerless image.
Smith’s military career suffered the same frustrations about promotion as did that of Marbot. Neither possessed wealth or influence. While Smith was almost certainly the more intelligent officer, it is unlikely that anyone saw him as a Wellington in the making. The eager young captain thought his majority secure at Vera in October, when before the attack his brigade commander, Colonel Colborne, ‘who had taken a liking to me as an active fellow’, said: ‘Now, Smith, you see the heights above us?’ ‘“Well,” I said, “I wish we were there.” The colonel laughed. “When we are,” he says, “and you are not knocked over, you shall be a brevet-major, if my recommendation has any weight.”’ The Light Division stormed the heights sure enough, and Colborne submitted his recommendation, but Smith had another year to wait before he got his step.
It was his good fortune, however, to be recognised as a member of an elite of an elite, a Rifleman of General Robert Crauford’s legendary Light Division. ‘Ours,’ wrote Smith’s closest friend Johnny Kincaid, ‘was an esprit de corps, a buoyancy of feeling animating all which nothing could quell. We were alike ready for the field or the frolic, and, when not engaged in the one, went headlong into the other…In every interval between our active service, we indulged in all manner of childish trick and amusement with an avidity and delight of which it is impossible to convey an adequate idea. We lived united, as men always are who are daily staring death in the face on the same side and who, caring little about it, look upon each new day added to their lives as one more to rejoice in.’ Kincaid’s words represented no romantic flight of fancy. Every man who served with the Light Division in the Peninsula attests to the fact that it was one of the greatest bands of brothers in the history of warfare, and that Harry Smith was among the most celebrated of its young stars.
Whenever the army was in the presence of the enemy, Juana suffered agonies of apprehension about the fate of her Harry. Before every battle they bade a farewell to each other as fond and grave as if they were parting for eternity – as indeed they might have been. One such night in November before her husband met the French at the Nivelle, looking utterly forlorn, Juana suddenly declared: ‘You or your horse will be killed tomorrow.’ The irrepressible Harry burst out laughing and said, ‘Well, of the two such chances, I hope it may be the horse.’ Next day as they advanced to storm the French redoubt his cherished hunter ‘Old Chap’ was hit, and fell atop his master, pouring forth a torrent of blood. Some soldiers dragged Smith’s gory figure from under the dead animal, exclaiming ‘Well, d—my eye if our old Brigade-Major is killed, after all.’ Smith said: ‘Come, pull away, I am not even wounded, only squeezed.’ When he was freed to carry a surrender document to the enemy lines for signature, his French counterpart