Moore · 1809
Sir John Moore at Corunna
On the afternoon of the sixteenth of January 1809, on the high ground above the port of Corunna in north-western Spain, Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, forty-seven years old, the Glasgow-born commander of the British army in the Peninsula, was hit in the left shoulder by a French cannonball during the rearguard action that covered the embarkation of his fifteen-thousand-strong army onto the Royal Navy transport fleet in the harbour below. The army had marched two hundred and fifty miles in retreat across Galicia in the previous three weeks, harassed by Marshal Soult's army of twenty-five thousand, in mid-winter, in shoes that had given out on the second week. Moore had fought the rearguard action at Corunna to hold Soult off the embarkation. The ball took him below the left clavicle, shattered the rib-cage, and lodged near the spine. He was taken back to the officer's billet in the town and died at about nine in the evening. His last words, by his ADC Captain John Hardinge: *I hope my country will do me justice. I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice.* The army embarked successfully overnight and reached Plymouth on the twenty-second of January. Charles Wolfe's poem *The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna* (1817), with its opening line *not a drum was heard, not a funeral note*, became the schoolroom-memorised piece of nineteenth-century English-language military elegy.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of the sixteenth of January 1809, on the high ground above Elviña village just south of Corunna on the north-western Spanish coast, in heavy winter cold with a clear sky after three days of rain. He is forty-seven years old. He is Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, born at Trongate, Glasgow, on the thirteenth of November 1761, son of the Glasgow physician-and-novelist Dr John Moore and Jean Simson, schooled at Glasgow High School and the Steventon Naval Academy, in the British Army since the 1776 thirteen-year-old commission, in the forty-seventh year of his life and his fifteenth as a general officer.
He is on horseback at the centre of the British line, in the red-coat infantry uniform of a lieutenant-general, with the aide-de-camp Captain John Hardinge at his right elbow and the brigadier Sir John Hope on the left wing. The army is engaged in the rearguard action against the French force under Marshal Nicolas Soult that has been pursuing them in the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile retreat across Galicia since the third of January. The Royal Navy transport fleet under Admiral Samuel Hood is in the harbour below the town, taking the fifteen-thousand-man army onto the transports as fast as the rowing-boats can clear the quay; the rearguard action this afternoon is the defence of the embarkation.
He thinks: Soult has the twenty-five thousand. We have the fifteen thousand. We can hold the high ground for the three hours we need for the final embarkation.
He thinks: the army is in shoes that gave out three weeks ago. The march across the Galician mountains in January has been the worst the British army has had to do since the Walcheren expedition of 1799.
He thinks: I will lose three or four hundred more men this afternoon holding the line. We will be at the quayside by sunset.
He thinks: the criticism in London will be that I gave up the Peninsula. The criticism in London will be wrong about the strategic choice. The Peninsula will be the British army's graveyard or the French army's graveyard, by Wellesley's judgement, over the next four years. The decision today saves the army for that.
At twenty-five past three by Hardinge's watch, a French six-pounder ball, fired at about a thousand yards from the Soult battery on the Penasquedo ridge, comes down the line at about thirty feet of altitude and strikes Sir John Moore in the left shoulder, below the clavicle, shattering the rib-cage on the left side and lodging near the spine. He is knocked off the horse onto the ground. Hardinge is on the ground beside him within fifteen seconds.
Hardinge: I will get the surgeon, sir. Moore: no surgeon. The ball is in the spine. Have me carried to the billet at the Convento de San Carlos. Hardinge and a party of four Highlanders of the Forty-Second carry Moore on a blanket the half-mile back to the Convento. He is laid on a camp-bed in the upstairs guest-room. The army surgeon McNair examines him and confirms that the wound is mortal; the spine has been damaged and the haemorrhage from the shattered subclavian artery cannot be controlled.
Moore was conscious through the evening. He gave the detailed handover of the rearguard command to Sir John Hope, dictated a brief letter to his mother Jean Moore in Bath (the letter is in the National Library of Scotland), and asked Hardinge to ensure that the officers' wives at the cantonments in Coimbra were paid the pension entitlements. He died at about nine in the evening of the sixteenth of January 1809. His last words, by Hardinge's deposition the next day: I hope my country will do me justice. I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice.
He was buried on the bastion of the Convento de San Carlos at the Corunna citadel that night, by his officers, in his uniform, by the light of flickering lanterns under the French artillery still firing in the distance. The grave was a bastion-corner of the citadel; the officers dug it themselves with their bayonets and the pioneer's spade. The army embarked overnight; the British transport-fleet sailed for Plymouth at first light on the seventeenth. About 4,000 British dead through the retreat and the Corunna action; about 35,000 French dead-and-wounded inflicted on Soult's army through the retreat. Wellington (then Wellesley) returned to Portugal with the second British army in April 1809 and ran the five-year Peninsular campaign that broke the French in Spain and was a major factor in the fall of Napoleon. The Moore grave at Corunna is preserved as a Spanish-British war-memorial in the San Carlos Garden of the citadel.
Charles Wolfe (the Anglican curate of Donoughmore, County Down) wrote the poem The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna in the spring of 1817, eight years after the event, from a newspaper account in the Edinburgh Annual Register of 1809. The poem was first printed anonymously in the Newry Telegraph in 1817 and was attributed to Wolfe only after his death in 1823. The poem became the schoolroom-memorised piece of nineteenth-century English-language military elegy. The opening four lines (not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, / as his corpse to the rampart we hurried; / not a soldier discharged his farewell shot / o'er the grave where our hero we buried) are, by the 1850 popular-recitation tradition, the most-memorised piece of English-language martial poetry of the nineteenth century after Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade.