The Last Cartridge
Battle of Fuente Ovejuna
7th September 1810
A Tale of the Napoleonic Wars
Based on a True Story
French 51st Regiment
by Richard "Rifleman" Rutherford-Moore
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Billeted in a small village named Fuente Ovejuna (meaning "a spring where sheep drink") north-west of Cordoba in the province of Andalusia in Southern Spain, were ninety-six soldiers of the French 51eme Regiment de Infanterie de Ligne au L'Empereur Napoleon seconded to the Army of Spain under Napoleon's Brother, Joseph - now titular King of Spain - under a Capitaine, Cyr Billot . At right, the plaza mayor (center) of modern Fuente Ovejuna, the French rallying point just before occupying the church. The house used for Billot's HQ was around here. Apart from the usual pestiferous Spanish guerilleros - who they were gradually getting used to, having ambushed, shot and hanged enough of them in the surrounding hills of the Sierra Boyera - no other military threat existed there. Billot sent out strong foot patrols gathering the food and forage, repaired the flourmills and oil presses and every now and then scooped up a few sheep or goats in surprise raids from the mountainsides of the nearby Sierra Morena. For this small garrison in Fuente Ovejuna, it meant boredom. Great events were passing them by. Bailen was actually only three to four days march to the east; on a fine day Billot could see 'the battlefield' with the naked eye in the distant mountains to the east from the top of the bell tower in the village; he had no telescope, being a mere captain of infantry. Spain would eventually come under the Emperor Napoleon's will, Billot grimly mused - as everyone else did - but until then French soldiers would have to bolster up his brother's government. There had been one national revolt - he had read about it in the last Moniteur he'd seen, over two years ago - he knew it had been cruelly crushed 2 - but it was to a large degree the fault of the Emperor's Marshals of France; they came down to the Iberian Peninsula not as liberators but as conquerors, carving up the spoils from what was supposed to be the ally of France. The troops followed their example. After the revolt, Spain had split up into a number of provisional provincial juntas under the Supreme Junta, based in Cadiz. The problem for the French Army was to keep the peace until King Joseph's Government had had the time to create the more liberal regime under which Spain was now to be governed. Like Billot up in the bell tower, King Joseph in Madrid looked down on a seemingly peaceful scene, which was actually seething with discontent under the cover of the rooftops. The French had repeatedly crushed one Spanish army only to find another one suddenly appear somewhere else in another part of the country, supplied and armed by Britain. The drain on manpower in respect of troops, guns and supplies down here were an open incentive for Austria and Prussia to plan attacks on France, encouraged by bribes of British gold. They had tried again last year in 1809 but had been beaten by the Emperor at Wagram near Vienna; but they had come very close to victory, and the French had lost thousands of irreplaceable men killed and wounded. The morning sun touched the top of the bell tower. The sun rose over the plains to the east beyond the castle and reached the bell tower first. Billot turned and moved the few steps to the western side, looking out over the sierra in the distance towards Portugal. The infantry captain allowed his thoughts to wander for a few moments; from what he had briefly seen of Portugal, almost two years ago now, there wasn't anything there worth stealing. Anything of worth came from England - they had no mines, no industry, nothing but poor soil and rocks - except perhaps their strong port wine. But - there were still Spanish armies in the field, bolstered by English gold - if not for much longer, as they were all based in Portugal. As long as they existed, small garrisons of French soldiers in isolated villages throughout Spain would have to stay. Good luck to Massena, Billot thought - he like most Frenchmen in Spain longed to be back amongst fellow countrymen on the mainlands of Europe. In rich comfortable garrison towns like Strasbourg, Mainz and Brussels and away from this almost medieval sun-baked god-forsaken desert; with its religious Inquisition and widespread ignorance, thin wines, bad food, dry white dust and the endless, oppressive inescapable heat. Billot sighed; he took his hands from the warm stonework of the balustrade, turned and slowly climbed down the ladder to the balcony of the bell tower. Wooden steps then dropped down onto the paved floor twenty feet below, still hidden in the darkness of the early morning gloom. Cyr Billot had been in the regular French army since 1792, and even before that as a Revolutionary National Guard. He was two inches under six feet tall and well-built, dark complexioned with a long nose and piercing blue eyes, not yet forty years old. He had seen service all over Europe - his service record showed almost continuous fighting from 1792 in all Bonaparte's campaigns - he had met Bonaparte in 1794 during the Italian Campaign. Billot had seen Bonaparte and General Augereau personally pick up the regiment's fallen flag at Arcola in 1796 and carry it and the 51eme Demi-Brigade in the charge to victory across the river on a single shaky wooden plank bridge swept by the cross-fire of Austrian musketry and cannon fire. He had served from 1801 until 1805 in the brilliant campaigns of Marengo, Ulm and Austerlitz - in the frozen pursuit to Friedland where the Prussians and Russians were eventually crushed after the battle at Jena in 1806. Billot had spent a short spell in hospital after he had received a Prussian bullet in the left hip during terrible hand-to-hand fighting in the snow and ice around the 51eme's 'eagle' standard, which the Prussian cavalry had eventually carried away from the smoking heap of dead and wounded Frenchmen cut down or shot defending it.[17]
He walked with a slight limp as a result of this, and still suffered a little discomfort from the old wound - the bullet had chipped off a piece of bone from Billot's pelvis.
Billot's physique defied further inconvenience - he had walked out of hospital having discharged himself despite the surgeons and gone straight back into the Grande Armée for the campaign of 1807; instead he had been sent to Spain. He was reputed to be superhumanly fit; but also an intelligent, efficient officer and an inspiring leader of men. But - he was also known to be a bit of a firebrand; men below him had been promoted over his head because of his outspoken criticisms. He was unmarried, had not seen his mother and father - Claude and Rose, still living outside Lille; the regimental depot town of the 51eme Infanterie - for eighteen years and had no ties except to the army.
He had marched with Marshal Junot on the road through Spain to Lisbon; when the Portuguese Regency fled on the ships of the Royal Navy, Billot had been recalled from Portugal - sent with others in a force to capture Cadiz. They had been down here in Andalusia ever since. He had formerly - before Spain - been clean-shaven; he now cultivated a moustache and whiskers. Grey streaks were appearing at his temples, giving him a rather hawk-like stare as he looked down his long nose at you with those eyes of his; only a winning smile showing white even teeth changed him in an instant from a fierce warrior into a friendly schoolmaster. He loved to travel - and kept a journal of all his campaigns, hand-written in his thin script. He was also a skilled linguist, speaking German and Spanish. [5]
He usually wore a patched short plain dark blue surtout jacket, the simple undress uniform of the French infantry officer on duty; open at the neck, with a ordinary black cravat tied around his neck above his white linen shirt. Underneath, he wore a plain white wool waistcoat and linen pantaloons, the ends of which were tucked into brown-topped black boots. To cover his head, a plain bicorne hat - his regulation shako without its full-dress cords was hanging on a peg in his quarters, the cheap finery adorning it discarded by Billot as unnecessary on a campaign.
His full-dress habit jacket with the gilt epaulettes on the shoulders, the shako cords and tall feather plume, the brass gorget and the white kidskin gloves were wrapped up with a spare shirt in the boat-cloak in his portmanteau in his quarters - that; with the razor and strap, a brass candlestick and a pewter soup plate; a silver-handled knife, fork and spoon (looted from the Governor's house at the Castelo San Jorge in Lisbon), a small purse with a few coins in it and his diary with the quill pen and travelling inkwell was practically all Billot owned in the world apart from the thin black-hilted sword hanging at his waist from the slim white leather belt - and Pepita, one of the two company mules - all these, and his arrears of pay, which were long overdue. Billot had only one vice - he smoked too much tobacco; and he once indulged in too much wine, in good company with his fellow officers sitting in Boulogne as part of the Invasion Army of England.
He was thought of by his fellow regimental officers in the 51eme Infanterie as an example of quite an above-average officer, did he but know it - above all, he was known to be devoted to the men of his Company; many of them loved him like a father, dragged away from their homes as they were by the Conscription, placed in the ranks of the French Army and marched far away from their homeland.
Billot organised his men with this in mind - the danger was that in time they would become lazy, indifferent and relax their guard - boredom was soldiers' greatest enemy. [16] Not many of his men were veterans now. The gaps caused by casualties in Prussia had been filled up with new drafts - conscripts; they did not want to fight and even had to be taught to look after themselves. One of them - a young sixteen-year-old who Billot suspected was sent as a substitute for the man whose name had really been drawn in the conscription ballot - was barely out of the schoolroom. Above half of them had fallen out on the march down here from the weight of their equipment and three hundred out of the complete draft of six hundred were now dead; killed by disease, starvation or sunstroke; as a comparison only sixty men out of the battalion muster had been killed by bullet or cannonball from the enemy in the last two years.
They received - at intervals - rations from headquarters but these were generally sparse and unappetising, and often just the hard-baked squares of iron-hard army bread. The system in the French Army was to 'subsist off the land' - some French soldiers had become so good at it that they were almost piratical in their methods - the odd church-plate or cache of coins were discovered along with searches for hidden pots of grain and olive oil, buried by the Spanish to hide it from French raids.3 'Informers' were persuaded to reveal the location of mountain valleys where herds of sheep and cattle were grazing. Billot's company store held grain, salted meat, olive oil and flour, dried fruits and even dried fish.
Capitaine Billot on one occasion had even issued a ration by request to the Spanish villagers; Colonel Bony, Billot's commanding officer, would not have approved - but he wasn't here. Billot was no student of Caesar, but he understood perfectly well the maxim of 'Divide and Conquer'. He received in perfect confidence information about guerillero movements in return for the food ration.
The single compagnie of the 51eme played games and ran foot races, tried to win over the Spanish, baked soft bread loaves, trod new wine made from gathered grapes, practised at mock battles , traded for tobacco, repaired and used the olive oil press, fed and groomed Billot's old mule, drilled and went on long foot patrols - all under the watchful eyes of Capitaine Cyr Billot.
The Marques de la Romana and his army of 12,000 men were requested to advance by the Supreme Junta, based in Cadiz. [18] The month before - August - they had advanced into Spain and been defeated. A brigade of Portuguese cavalry was sent to reinforce him from Lisbon - the Spanish were notoriously weak in this arm, having lost many fine horses to the French in past defeats. Any advance into Andalusia from around Badajoz and the valley of the Guadiana toward Seville and Cordoba entails entering dangerous defiles. [10]
In August, the Spanish had become bogged down in two of them, and the French army under Gerard had crushed a part of it trying to hold an isolated hill in desperation. La Romana now held most of them already; at Aracena, Santa Alla and Guadalcanal; and he also dispatched troops to attack and hold vital villages on the Sierra Morena side of them, to the east - denying the use of the three main roads and passes through the sierra to the French, and to give him early warning of any French advance.
Quite unknown to Cyr Billot, as he walked from his quarters at first light to the Company Headquarters - formerly the village posada - pondering how he would celebrate his birthday in little over two weeks time; a division of the Spanish Army were already besieging Castillo de los Gueridos at that moment, just four leagues away [6] attacking there at dawn - the outnumbered French garrison there had just repulsed the first attack on the gates of the town. Another column; Morillo's Division of about 2,000 men, supported by artillery and some cavalry were even now bearing down on the village of Fuente Ovejuna. The passes and roads barred, the two divisional columns would then unite and march to Seville protecting La Romana's flank, preceded by the Portuguese cavalry.
Fuente Ovejuna has an ancient Moorish castillo on a hill. Billot had rejected it as a strongpoint from the start - it had a difficult approach route, but was pretty isolated and once bottled up in it and surrounded the tiny garrison would be useless - the village and road were way out of supporting musket range. The French had no artillery and no proper engineers. In there, they would be no better than prisoners of war. The village stood astride the road, and it was for that the garrison was there for - it would become known in later years when military philosophy became a written science as "controlling the 'hearts and minds' of the people"; collect forage and store it, controlling food supplies; and monitor any traffic or communications. So Billot had quartered his men in the main houses there, making one a guardroom and another a depot.
It was not by pure chance that Billot was warned of the coming threat. One of his foot patrols were relieving the four men in the night-guard just after dawn on a height where Billot had established a small stone-built guard-post under a woven mat of rushes held up by branches as a sunshade. They saw in the distance far-off up the main road the glimmer of steel in a cloud of dust in the distance - anything coming down that road was not likely to be friendly and there seemed to be lots of them. No 'soup' orders had been posted the night before [9] - it could not be a friendly force. It was here Billot's training took over - the caporal ended the speculation, and gave short succinct orders. The patrol relieved the four night-guards, then turned and made their way back to Fuente Ovejuna as fast as they could to report, leaving the now wide-awake soldiers as look-outs. The caporal told them to run back to the village and report what the dust cloud was in reality as soon as it became clear to them. If they saw soldiers appear anywhere else in the vicinity they were to fire off their muskets to give the alarm, then run for it as best they could.
They were unaware that from the nearby olive grove, a single vigilant pair of Spanish eyes was watching them.
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