Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings
it was safe to surrender to rejoicing.
At the end of that June day, ‘to my wonder, my astonishment, and to my gratitude to Almighty God’, the Smith brothers found that all three had survived. Charles had suffered a slight neck wound. Harry, physically and emotionally exhausted, sat down to make tea in a soldier’s mess tin for Major-General Sir James Kempt, Sir John Lambert and himself. Gazing upon the victorious field, he observed that never in his career as a soldier had he seen such slaughter. Everywhere stood men weeping for dead comrades or relatives, for this was an age when soldiers felt no shame to weep. As Charles Smith helped to gather the dead of his regiment, he glimpsed the corpse of a French officer of delicate mould and appearance, and was astonished on closer examination to discover that this was a young and beautiful woman. Harry Smith mused: ‘What were the circumstances of devotion, passion or patriotism which led to such heroism is, and ever will be, to me a mystery. Love, depend upon it.’
It was late in the afternoon of 19 June, the day following the battle, before the suspense of Juana Smith and thousands of other British camp followers at Antwerp was ended and they were assured that Boney was beaten. Yet still Juana knew nothing about the fate of her Harry. At three o’clock on the morning of the twentieth, against all the pleadings of her companions, she set out with West in quest of him. Arrived at Brussels at seven, she fell in with a party of Riflemen who, to her horror, dolefully declared that Brigade-Major Smith was killed. She hastened towards the battlefield, expecting every cart which passed laden with corpses to contain that of her beloved Harry. Reaching the field of Waterloo, she began to run distraught among fast-decaying bodies and newly-dug graves. Suddenly she met Charlie Gore, ADC to Sir James Kempt. ‘Oh, where is he?’ she cried. ‘Where is my Enrique?’ Gore replied easily: ‘Dearest Juana, believe me; it is poor Charles Smyth, Pack’s Brigade-Major [who is dead]. I swear to you, on my honour, I left Harry riding Lochinvar in perfect health, but very anxious about you.’
‘Oh, may I believe you, Charlie! My heart will burst.’
‘Why should you doubt me?’
‘Then God has heard my prayer!’
She rode on to Mons, arriving at midnight to snatch a few hours’ sleep. At dawn next morning, 21 June, she hurried on to Harry’s brigade bivouac at Bavay, where ‘soon, O gracious God, I sank into his embrace’.
Smith was made brevet lieutenant-colonel and a Companion of the Bath for his part at Waterloo. He was not yet thirty. The Duke of Wellington presented Juana to the Tsar of Russia, explaining: ‘Voila, Sire, ma petite guerrière espagnole qui a fait la guerre avec son mari comme la héroïne de Saragosse.’
So she had indeed. Many years of active service and glory lay before Harry, always with Juana at his side. He led armies to war against the Mahrattas in India and against the Kaffirs in South Africa, rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, and received a knighthood for his contribution to victory at Maharajpore in 1845. He was later elevated to a baronetcy, though sadly the couple bore no child to inherit the title, for his triumph at the 1846 battle of Aliwal in the Sikh Wars. In 1847 he was posted as governor and commander-in-chief at the Cape. In the highest commands, his superiors in London did not deem him a success, and he was eventually recalled from the Cape in 1852. Bluff, eager, hearty little Harry Smith lacked subtlety or political judgement, just as all his life he was reckless with money. In 1854, when Lord Raglan died in the Crimea, Harry was briefly considered a possible successor as commander-in-chief. He himself still chafed for action, and chronic indigence made him desperate for paid employment. But he was sixty-five years old. Lord Panmure, as secretary at war, wrote to Queen Victoria explaining that the most ardent of her lieutenant-generals had been passed over ‘from the circumstances of impaired health and liability to excitement’.
Poor Sir Harry died broke. All his solicitations failed to gain him the peerage he craved. Yet, perhaps more than any other man described in these pages, his life was happy and fulfilled, thanks to his peerless partnership with Juana. There must have been a tinge of melancholy about their childlessness, but to the end of his days, his letters to his wife whenever they found themselves apart were those of a young lover. It is hard to improve upon Smith’s own epitaph for himself, composed in 1844:
I have now served my country nearly forty years. 1 have fought in every quarter of the globe, I have driven four-in-hand in every quarter, I have never had a sick certificate, and only once received leave of absence, which I did for eight months to study mathematics. I have filled every staff situation of a regiment and of the General Staff. I have commanded a regiment in peace, and have often had a great voice in war. I entered the army perfectly unknown to the world, and in ten years by force of circumstances I was lieutenant-colonel, and I have been present in as many battles and sieges as any officer of my standing in the army. I never fought a duel, and only once made a man an apology, although I am as hot a fellow as the world produces; and I may without vanity say, the friendship I have experienced equals the love I bear my comrade, officer or soldier. My wife has accompanied me throughout the world; she has ever met with kind friends and never has had controversy or dispute with man or woman. HARRY SMITH.
If his words were not lacking in conceit, they were nothing less than the truth. Here indeed was the happy warrior, who enjoyed the rare good fortune to share his many campaigns with a perfect companion. For years, the old man celebrated the anniversary of his greatest battlefield triumph with a dinner, at which he caused his charger Aliwal to be led into the hall to share the feast. When the old horse was finally ailing, with many tears Sir Harry led him out to be shot.
Smith wrote in his autobiography of the soldier’s lot: ‘Fear for himself he never knows, though the loss of his comrade pierces his heart.’ In this, he spoke only for himself. He was indeed personally fearless, but many soldiers even of that era were made of softer metal. The record suggests that, like Marbot, Smith carried courage to the point of foolhardiness. Yet unlike some of his brother officers, he was prudent and humane in his stewardship of the lives of others under his command. He was not the stuff of which great captains are made, but he was the kind of British soldier who wins affection and respect as a great comrade. At a glittering soirée in London, he was once asked with wonderful naivety whether he had often faced great risk. ‘My horse did, sometimes,’ he answered lightly. Consider the answer Marcellin Marbot would have made to such a question! Sir Harry Smith Bart., KCB, died at the age of seventy-three in his London home, 1 Eaton Place West, on 12 October 1860. Juana survived for a further twelve years, almost to the day, living quietly in Cadogan Place, her existence devoted to keeping bright the flame of her husband’s memory and reputation. She was buried beside him at Whittlesey. Few couples have achieved such harmony and understanding in times of peace; perhaps none amid the thunder of war.
THROUGHOUT THE REIGN of Queen Victoria, Europe remained the focus of the civilised world. The memory of the wars of Bonaparte dominated the culture of warriors. This was a folly. If British and Continental soldiers of the later nineteenth century had paid less attention to the memories of 1815, and rather more to the experience of the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in the New World’s decisive conflict, it would have profited them greatly. The American Civil War taught dramatic and important lessons about the nature of future confrontations in arms between industrial societies, for anyone willing to heed them. Yet many European soldiers were foolish enough to suppose that nothing that happened within the mongrel, adolescent society of the United States could be relevant to their own affairs. They paid the price for their lack of interest in the American experience again and again between 1862 and 1914.
For the inhabitants of the North American continent, the Civil War was the most important event in their domestic experience, and produced the greatest soldiers in their history. No American general of the Second World War matched the gifts of Lee, nor perhaps even of Grant; few subordinate commanders showed the brilliance of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Philip Sheridan, James Longstreet and some of their peers. It is sometimes forgotten, even by Americans, that the nation lost twice as many dead in the conflict between 1861 and 1865 as it did in that between 1941 and 1945, when the US population