Sir John Moore at Corunna

Some retreats are defeats, and some retreats are the saving of an army for a war not yet begun. The difference is decided not in the cabinet rooms that ordered the campaign, but on a stretch of frozen road in a country whose maps the commander has had three weeks to learn, by a man who knows he will be blamed in London for the only choice that keeps the regiments alive. The Peninsula will be won by other men, in other years; but it will be won only because one man on a Galician hillside understood that an army embarked is an army preserved, and that the price of preservation would be paid out of his own name.

THE GLASGOW SOLDIER

He is Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, forty-seven years old, born at Trongate in Glasgow on the thirteenth of November 1761, son of Dr John Moore the physician and novelist, and Jean Simson. He took his commission in the 51st Foot at thirteen, in 1776, the year the American colonies declared themselves loose from the Crown, and he has been a soldier of the King ever since: Corsica, the West Indies, Ireland in the year of the United Irish rising, Holland, Egypt, Sicily, Sweden. At Shorncliffe Camp in Kent he built the light infantry into a thinking arm, men trained to skirmish, to judge ground, to fire by aimed shot rather than by volley. He is a Whig in his sympathies and a Scot in his bearing, and he is in the Peninsula because Sir Arthur Wellesley is not. The cabinet of the Duke of Portland sent him into Spain in October 1808 with thirty thousand men and orders that contradicted themselves every fortnight. By Christmas he was at Sahagún, within striking distance of Soult's isolated corps, when the intercepted dispatch reached him: the Emperor himself, with two hundred thousand men, was turning north to crush the only British army in the field. The choice on the night of the twenty-fourth of December was the choice of a professional. He turned the army west.

THE RETREAT INTO GALICIA

Two hundred and fifty miles to Corunna across the mountains of Galicia, in the first weeks of January, in shoes that gave out in the second week. The road from Astorga to Lugo to Betanzos climbs over passes that are stone and ice in winter. The army marched at night to keep ahead of Soult's cavalry, slept in the day where there was shelter and where there was not, lost men to drink at Bembibre when the wine vaults were broken open, lost men to the cold on the high col above Nogales, lost the military chest down a ravine because no team could be found to draw it. The commissariat had failed; the Spanish allies promised everywhere had appeared nowhere. Discipline frayed and the general rode back along the column at every halt to mend it by his own voice. He wrote to his mother in Bath in plain hand: the country had not risen as London had been told it would rise, and the army that had been sent to support an insurrection found itself supporting nothing but its own retreat. The men hated him for the marching and loved him for sharing it. On the eleventh of January the head of the column saw the masts of Admiral Hood's transports in the bay of Corunna. The fleet was there. The army had walked to the sea.

THE SIXTEENTH OF JANUARY

The morning is cold and clear after three days of rain. The high ground south of the town, above the village of Elviña, has been chosen as the line: a low ridge that covers the road down to the quays. Soult has come up with twenty thousand men and has placed a heavy battery on the Peñasquedo ridge opposite, a thousand yards across the shallow valley. The embarkation has been in progress for three days; fifteen thousand men, the sick first, then the cavalry's saddles and the guns, then the line battalions by brigade. Three hours more, perhaps four, and the rearguard itself can go down to the boats. At two in the afternoon Soult opens the battery and sends his columns forward against the British right at Elviña. Moore is on horseback at the centre, in the red coat of a lieutenant-general, the aide-de-camp John Hardinge at his right hand, Sir John Hope on the left wing. The 42nd Highlanders are sent in against the village and take it. The general rides to the head of the Guards brigade and sends them in behind.

A SECOND ABOVE ELVIÑA

Twenty-five minutes past three by Hardinge's watch. The general has reined in to watch the Highlanders work forward through the lanes of Elviña, and is half-turned in the saddle to give an order down the line. What he is thinking at this instant cannot be recovered, but the shape of it can: that the right is holding, that the village will be retaken, that the boats will have the army by dark, that London will say what London will say. To embark in the face of an enemy is held by the manuals to be the most dangerous operation in war; he is bringing it off. The ball is a French six-pounder solid shot, fired from the Peñasquedo battery at a flat trajectory, coming down the line at the height of a horseman's chest. It strikes him in the left shoulder below the clavicle, carries away the muscle and the rib, drives splinters of bone into the lung, and lodges against the spine. He is knocked from the horse onto the frozen ground. Hardinge is beside him in fifteen seconds and reaches for the sash to staunch the wound. The general's hand stops him. No surgeon, he says: the ball is in the spine and the surgeon can do nothing the orderly cannot. He asks to be carried, not back to the dressing station, but to his billet in the town. Six men of the 42nd lift him onto a blanket. He keeps the hilt of his sword from striking the wound with his right hand. He asks, as they go, whether the French are beaten back from the village; Hardinge tells him they are. He nods, and says nothing more on the road.

THE BILLET AT THE CONVENTO

They lay him on the camp-bed in the upper room of his quarters in the town. The surgeon McNair examines the wound and confirms what the general had already known on the ground. The haemorrhage from the subclavian cannot be controlled; the spine is gone; it is a question of hours. Outside, the guns on the ridge continue. The room fills slowly with officers as the afternoon thins into evening. He is conscious throughout. He gives the rearguard command to Hope by name and in order: which brigades to embark in which sequence, which battalions to hold the line until the last, the disposition of the artillery that cannot be saved and must be spiked. He asks after Colonel Paget, after Anderson his oldest friend in the army, after the wives of the officers cantoned at Coimbra and whether their pensions are in proper order. He dictates a line to his mother. He asks Hardinge whether his old friend Colonel Graham is safe; he is told he is. He says he has always wished to die this way. Towards nine in the evening, when the breathing has shortened, he speaks the words that Hardinge will set down on deposition the next morning: 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 says it three times. The third time is the last thing he says.

THE BURIAL ON THE BASTION

They bury him that night on the landward bastion of the citadel of San Carlos, in the uniform he was wearing, without a coffin because no coffin can be found in the town and there is no time to make one. The officers of his staff dig the grave with their own hands and with the pioneer's spade, by the light of lanterns, the French guns still firing on the heights above the town. No drum is beaten and no volley is fired over the grave, because to do so would draw the battery onto the burial party. Before the morning, the rearguard is down at the quays; the last battalions are taken off in the boats; the transports stand out to sea on the wind from the south-east and carry fifteen thousand men, with their colours and their wounded, home to Plymouth, where they land on the twenty-second of January, ragged and barefoot, having saved the army of the Peninsula by walking to the sea.

THE JUSTICE OF HIS COUNTRY

The dispatches reached London before the army did. The Whig press said what the Whig press would say; the ministerial press said what the ministerial press would say. There was a debate in the Commons on the conduct of the campaign and Castlereagh defended the dead general handsomely. By April, Wellesley was back in Portugal with a fresh army, and the war Moore had refused to lose in January was fought for five years on the ground Moore had refused to surrender, until the French were driven over the Pyrenees and the Emperor with them. In the spring of 1817, in the curacy of Donoughmore in County Down, an Anglican clergyman named Charles Wolfe read an old paragraph in the Edinburgh Annual Register about a soldier buried by lantern-light on a Spanish bastion, and wrote thirty-two lines that began not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corpse to the rampart we hurried. The poem was printed anonymously in the Newry Telegraph and was not attributed to Wolfe until after his own death six years later. For the rest of the century, English-speaking children learned it by heart at the school desk, and so the country did, in the end, the justice he had three times asked for. In the San Carlos garden above the harbour at A Coruña the grave is kept by the city; the inscription, in Spanish and English, says only that he fell at the head of his army. The bastion has been planted with cypresses, and the sea below it is the sea the transports sailed on.