A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 4, Dec. 1810-Dec. 1811 : $b Massena's retreat, Fuentes de Oñoro, Albuera, TarragonaOman, Charles
History
A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 4, Dec. 1810-Dec. 1811 : $b Massena's retreat, Fuentes de Oñoro, Albuera, Tarragona
Oman, Charles
Peninsular War, 1807-1814
Regiment.’ Gough was given a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy at once, and
Sergeant Masterson, who had captured the eagle, received a commission
in his own regiment; he and his descendants have served in it almost
throughout the nineteenth century.
[157] See letter in Rait’s _Life of Lord Gough_, vol. i. p. 53.
[158] A hereditary name of glory in the 87th. The present
representative of the family won his Victoria Cross at Ladysmith
in 1900.
The rout of the 8th Ligne was not the last triumph of the 87th on that
day; driving the remains of that unfortunate corps in front of them,
they came upon the battalion of the 45th Ligne, which had hitherto been
standing in reserve behind the French battery, and which Leval had just
ordered up to support the broken first line. Gough, with the greatest
difficulty, succeeded in forming about half his scattered though
victorious regiment to face this new enemy. But there was hardly a
collision: all the other French units were broken by this time, and the
45th hesitated. ‘After firing until we came within about fifty paces
of them,’ writes Gough, ‘they (for us fortunately) broke and fled, for
had they done their duty, fatigued as my men were at the moment, they
might have cut us to pieces.’ That this battalion cannot have behaved
well is sufficiently shown by the casualty list--out of 700 men present
it only lost 55--far the smallest proportional loss in the whole French
army that day. Probably the weakness of its resistance is partly to be
accounted for by the fact that it was being outflanked by the wing of
the 67th, who must have been extending in this direction at the moment,
prolonging the line of the 87th eastward. In its double victory the
87th lost 173 men out of 700 in the field. There remains the left wing
of this fight to be dealt with. Here the French 54th, in two battalion
columns, was facing the British 1/28th and the 200 Coldstreamers on
their right. This was the only part of the field in which the French
tried at all to manœuvre: the right battalion of the 54th began to
deploy and to turn the British flank, by moving westward into the edge
of the pine wood, but with little effect. We have a short account of
this fight in the memoirs of Cadell of the 28th.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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