The military memoirs of an infantry officer, 1809-1816

16 May 1811

Battle of Albuera

CHAPTER IX.

The troops in Medellin rejoined their friends in Don Benito on the 29th, and on the 31st, the whole retreated to Quarena. On the 1st of April, we retraced our steps to La Zarza, and next morning to Merida. Sir Thomas Graham being under the necessity of withdrawing his troops from Llerena, retired slowly towards Albuera, where it was generally understood the covering army was to assemble. On the afternoon of the 5th, we again crossed the Guadiana, marched to St Servan, and on the 6th, to a small eminence near the village of Lobon.

CHAPTER IX.

Early on the 7th, Sir Rowland Hill moved from Lobon, to a field on the left bank of the Albuera, a short distance from Talavera-la-Real. Marshal Marmont having dispatched a small body of infantry to the assistance of his friend Soult, Lord Wellington gave orders for two arches of the beautiful bridge of Merida to be destroyed, that their junction with the army of Soult might be retarded to the latest possible period.

CHAPTER IX.

Strolling at a short distance from our bivouac, in company with two friends, on the 6th of April, we perceived a Spanish peasant reposing under the cooling shade of a large tree. After a few preliminary questions, we inquired whence he came, and his business in the vicinity of our camp. To these interrogatories he unhesitatingly replied, that he was an inhabitant of a mountain village, twenty miles distant, and that his only object was to kill as many Frenchmen as he could, _after_, not _in_, the great battle which he imagined had become inevitable, from the proximity of the army of Soult to ours. And to prove that such was his intention, he pulled a tremendous knife from his side-pocket, with which he assured us, he sent _eleven Frenchmen_ to sleep with their fathers on the morning subsequent to the battle of Albuera. On upbraiding him for his cruelty, and inquiring how he could perpetrate such cold-blooded atrocities, he very coolly replied, that it was the duty of every loyal Spaniard like himself, to send as many Frenchmen into another world as they could, wherever they might find them, whether in the field of battle, or in a private retreat--whether armed or unarmed--or whether they might be in the enjoyment of health, or writhing under the effects of severe wounds. From this doctrine, we not only most decidedly dissented, but endeavoured to convince him that conduct such as his was highly derogatory to his character as a man; for either revenge or inhumanity towards an enemy, when he can no longer offer resistance, was no less an insult to human nature, than it was contrary to the laws and usages of war. Finding, however, that we could not bring him to coincide with us in opinion, we bade the Albuerian assassin adieu, in the fervent hope that we might never again find ourselves near his polluted person.

CHAPTER XI.

"Did you ever hear a good reason given why Marshal Beresford did not either destroy, or capture the remains of the French army after the battle of Albuera?" is a question which has been privately put to me more than a hundred times, and to which I shall now endeavour thus publicly to return a satisfactory answer.