The Last Cartridge
Battle of Fuente Ovejuna
7th September 1810
A Tale of the Napoleonic Wars
Based on a True Story
Preparations
by Richard "Rifleman" Rutherford-Moore
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Billot had been sitting in the Company Headquarters puffing at a short clay pipe and writing up the company's daybook with a goose quill pen he had just cut when an Officier d'ordonnance galloped up, followed by an escort of eight Chasseurs. He dismounted, asking the sentry there to hold his horse as there was nowhere to tether it. At right, the church door barricaded by the French and the scene of terrible fighting late in the day as Spanish troops battled into the church. He was on his way to Cordoba - With Haste, as scrawled in the secretary's handwriting on the dispatch in his sabretache; 6 miles an hour on average for as long as the horse lasted. [7] He had come from the Monasterio Pass late the day before but thought to refresh himself at the village on the way; he had been spotted and picked up by Billot's pickets on the outskirts and directed to Company Headquarters in the village. As the courier gabbled away with the news, Billot had already deduced that he had taken the wrong road after passing the foothills of the sierra, losing most of his escort and was now probably lost himself.
The courier went on to say whilst French counter-measures were being prepared and their troops were concentrating under Marshal Mortier to meet the threat, small isolated garrisons in places such as Fuente Ovejuna were to retreat toward Seville or Cordoba. He was surprised (but somewhat relieved) that the single infantry company were still here - taking the wrong road in the dark had saved his life - had he known the guerilleros had intercepted the message bound for Billot at Fuente Ovejuna in the sierra the day before and even at that moment the terrified courier was being slowly tortured again with a hot blade to reveal more information, he would not perhaps have been in such haste to leave the safety of the village.
The messenger gulped down a cup of watered wine, mounted his horse, wished Billot bonne chance! and set off once more, clattering down the paved main street followed by his escort in the direction of the high road to Cordoba as Billot had discreetly pointed out. Billot knocked the ash from his pipe with his hand and looked up at the rough map drawn on the plaster of the wall. Allowing for two hours either way, and the courier's limited grasp of terrain, Spanish lethargy and the state of the roads and the heat and dust, he did a swift mental calculation - Jesu! - the Spanish could have reached Fuente Ovejuna already! He slipped his pipe in his waistcoat pocket, stood up, picked up his shako perched on the rack of loaded muskets and walked out past the two sentries into the growing light. He could tell by the expressions on his men's faces that the Chasseurs had told them all about the approaching threat.
Ten minutes later, the foot patrol came jogging in from the lookout place. Instead of seeing the usual calm of Fuente Ovejuna in a post-dawn siesta, the caporal in charge of the picket blinked under the peak of his shako as he stood, panting for breath in the sunshine; many of the soldiers were rushing around in the main square getting Under Arms, hurried along by other shouting NCOs. Captain Billot - the caporal noted that his captain had put on his best full-dress uniform complete with his white gloves and brass gorget, a sure sign of trouble - was speaking calmly to his lieutenant in the centre of the square. The village alcalde, weeping between two French soldiers, was standing nearby wringing his hands in despair. The caporal saluted Billot, and made his report. Billot did not seem surprised, but nodded and ordered him to his pelaton at once. The caporal made it just in time as the entire pelaton marched west out of the village, dragging a goat along with them.
The caporal just put Billot's infallible foreknowledge of events down to some sort of occult means.
The Spanish column had split up into its two brigades in a cloud of blinding and choking white dust from the road surface. Morillo had sent one of them slightly north by a track known to the guerillero. The other brigade would continue down the main road after a brief halt to give time to the other to push further along. If any Frenchmen remained in the village, they would be quickly surrounded, intimidated and captured. Scouts were sent out to find out if the garrison was still there. Everything was going to plan. Morillo was an able general who had fought the French before. He had also learned that to stand still in Spain was to invite disaster, as the French could concentrate large forces in hours. The only way to win was to press on, keep them unbalanced - and keep going. It was Morillo's bad luck that he was going to meet a man far lower in rank who had exercised both his mind and his men for weeks in an exercise to solve a theoretical problem he had set for himself. It had relieved some of the monotony; Morillo was now going to offer him the same problem in reality - how to defend his post with only his single company of infantry if attacked by a more numerical enemy.
Billot dismissed his lieutenant, mounted his mule standing ready saddled in the square and trotted off after the small infantry column heading west. He caught up with them just as they were approaching the high road, ordered them to halt - Repose sur Vos Armes - then as the soldiers rested from the short march called for the sergeants and proceeded to give them detailed orders personally, telling off small parcels of soldiers in turn and pointing the way for them to go. He had experienced sergeants, who he could rely on to place the men once they understood the plan. Each man was marching unencumbered by knapsack or capote, carrying only shoulder belt and weapons, with a full giberne. Billot galloped off again back towards the village, towards a second smaller pelaton marching along up the road. These too he placed along two stone walls beside a small cowshed, in which he placed several men. One of his soldiers looked at him sheepishly as he'd reversed his musket and smashed it through the pantiles, sending them crashing to the ground, then poked his head out of the hole in the roof. Billot had been a stickler for not damaging the village unduly during his company's enforced occupation of it.
Billot's eyebrows raised. "You'll let the rain in!" he called, smiling; it hadn't rained at Fuente Ovejuna for over six months.
The four pickets from the observation point arrived at that point, cap in one hand, musket in the other; pounding down the road sweating profusely and saluting; blurting out "Diegos, my captain! Hundreds of them! Half a league away!" Billot acknowledged their beathless salutes, and sent them into the village to fetch water - "Not from the spring, mind - fetch water only from the village", he shouted after them as they hurried away along the road.
Morillo
Behind Morillo, sitting on his horse listening to the report of his scouts, his command - two brigades of infantry - had piled arms during the lull and sat down in the road under the settling dust cloud caused by the shuffling of many hundreds of feet. Some reached into haversacks and began to gnaw at their flinty ships' biscuit-bread. One of the artillery mules pulling the cannon in the rear brayed loudly, wanting water. A soldier leaned on one of the Divisional cannons, quickly taking his hand away with an oath as the hot metal burned his palm. The few horses in the traces pulling the artillery dropped their heads in exhaustion.
The scouts reporting to Morillo droned on - there were Frenchmen in the village, but not many - a single company, less than a hundred men. One of the scouts had met a man ostensibly gathering olives in his hat on a bleak hillside and had taken him back to the officer in charge. He had told them everything they wanted to know - the man was with a well-known guerillero band that lived - in abject but patriotic poverty - in the mountains of the sierra. He had watched the French for three days and nights - even now the French were getting ready to march out by the Cordoba road, as they had seen the Spanish advance early that morning from a look-out place and ran off - a second French courier alone on a tired horse had just gone by that road too, two hours ago. They had caught the first one in the sierra, so his message had never been delivered. An ambuscade of partisans waited for the second courier even now on the other side of the village, so he would never reach his destination.
The lonely guerillero had come back with them, and he stood there now in front of Morillo, chewing olives which he picked out from the tatty felt hat held in his hand; a strange sight in leather breeches held up by a broad belt but ending above the knees, from which bandy bare legs stuck out with feet laced up in raw bullock-hide; his upper body clad in a dirty brown shirt and a buttonless French chasseur cavalry tunic with no sleeves. The man's skin was wrinkled and dark like sun-dried raisins, but with a shiny new French cavalry carbine and an ammunition pouch for it slung over his back. A rolled and tied-up tattered woollen blanket seemed to be his only other possession. He chewed carefully, spitting the olive stones out onto the road, which attracted flies.
Morillo did not ask him his name.
The day was early, the sun still climbing. It was not yet too hot to march - they had been on the march for four hours already, setting out an hour before dawn. Entry into the village would give Morillo's men good heart, and a welcome rest with plenty of water. By now, his advance guard of mounted men under an officer was well down the Cordoba road, and would report any threatening movements by the French. Morillo ordered up two companies of light infantry troops and told them to follow the road over the hill in front into the village; one squad to precede them - the rest of the column would follow. Once the French were out in the open on the other side of the village, they would have them.
Billot had never studied his profession. He had never heard of many of his Emperor's successful strategies which had been applied by him so well through the French Army, leading to a succession of victories against more well equipped and professional armies. Billot had learned one practical lesson though by being a part of the scheme on many occasions; at the expense of boot-leather battles could be won. By bringing together more soldiers at a given place than your enemy, he would be forced to surrender or fight at bad odds, already half-defeated. The French army had a countermeasure prepared for this tactic, in case it should ever be applied to them in reverse. Each small French Corps was a self-contained miniature army, with a general staff, infantry, artillery and attached cavalry. It could be overthrown in time, but before that point a relief within a days marching distance would arrive.
As more time passed, more French troops would arrive, each giving support until the enemy would be found to be pinned down and struggling. Napoleon's masterstroke would then be played; the French would appear in the enemy's rear and the game would be over. It took a great Commander, tough soldiers, supreme confidence and a very efficient staff to run this system; and by 1809 the French had all four, and Napoleon was successfully applying this strategy throughout Europe, leaving behind in his path the smoking remains of the enemy armies as he dictated terms from their capital cities.
Capitaine Billot - a very small cog in this military machine - was about to apply his Emperor's strategy to a single sunburned Spanish village. He had deployed eight pelaton in an outer defence line, strengthened by another a few hundred yards in the rear. Only the lieutenant with ten men guarded the village - Billot had ordered the alcalde to get all the villagers out; anyone left inside in one hour would have to stay there. No one needed encouragement - in battles between the Spanish and the French, rarely, were prisoners taken in any house-to-house fighting.
Billot - to his credit - had never even considered surrender, or the fact that he was up against odds of twenty to one. He didn't speak to his men about La Gloire - "Glory" - he had been on too many battlefields for that; but he had trained many himself, and set an example to them. He didn't consider himself God, or that he ought to ask a superior for orders. He was just here - and at a time and a place. He was a soldier in command of soldiers, and he held their lives in his hand. To retreat now in the face of superior forces would risk being harassed by their infantry, overrun by Spanish cavalry on the road, pounded by their heavy guns - and for the survivors to be finally either shot where they stood or taken to the prison hulks to join the lads from Bailen - a quick death was preferable to that.
Billot blew out a plume of smoke and dropped the remnant of his cigar, grinding it under his boot. Ten minutes ago he had seen one his soldiers, dressed in shirt, breeches and shoes only, and laid flat on the hilltop to his front, slither quickly back down the slope a few yards on his belly to drop below the skyline out of sight of the enemy before turning to look straight over to him and waving his musket up and down slowly in his left hand; a signal for "The enemy is infantry - company strength"; Billot had trained a section of his men to perform the light infantry and skirmishing duties of the French voltigeur. The soldier had then run quickly down the slope to the right and out of Billot's sight. The soldier running to his right had signalled that no enemy were on the left side of the village yet; it could not be for long but Billot clenched his teeth and hoped to have time to give the advance-guard of this column a bloody nose before they came up. It would cause them to loose Time - the most precious commodity. He turned, smiled and snapped his fingers at the sergeant with the village goat sucking at a short clay pipe sitting on the ground in the shade of a small olive tree with his back to the stone wall. The sergeant got up and walked left, down the line of soldiers sitting in the same way, dragging the goat behind him using a musket-sling tied around it's neck; Billot walked away to the right.
The officer leading the two Spanish companies had detached a vanguard of twenty men to lead the advance, and he sat on his horse in front of it. He had found the pale horse under him standing alone on the lonely battlefield of Talavera de la Reina, saddled but with no rider. His own horse had been shot and killed the day before so he mounted this one. The horse had a curious gait, having been wounded in the course of duty later, galloping through a field where Spanish soldiers had thrown down their arms and run away; their fixed bayonets had cut the legs of his horse as he trotted after them waving his sword trying to rally the broken soldiers. No matter how much he fed it on the unripe grain and green chopped straw he was given for a forage allowance, it never put any weight on but seemed to have unending endurance.
He couldn't understand it - it had been a standing joke in the early days that you could hang your greatcoat and hat on its spavined hindquarters - the joke didn't sound very funny now as most of the Spanish officers animals were in a similar condition or simply dead on the road somewhere. He would - perhaps - find another and better animal in the village or from the French rearguard; as a reader of Voltaire and a stoic he always tried to keep his spirits up by looking on the brighter side of things. The road in front lifted up and over a small rise, passing between two olive groves penned in by dry stone walls either side. It dropped down into the village on the other side in the far distance; he could see the church tower. He could now see a small shed by the road, with man dressed in shirt and breeches standing with a goat and a mule by the glimmer of water - the spring on the map - cool water! Glancing behind him, he could now see the rest of the column; another vanguard of fifty men, completely covered in a cloud of the thin white dust from their march.
They seemed to be catching him up - they could sense the water and shade of the village houses already. The French must be long gone by now, and they left in a hurry too, to forget the goat and mule - his eyes narrowed - he should order the sergeant to secure it for him before anyone else thought of it, as food was already short. The mule he could sell. He spurred his horse, which answered by increasing its speed by a fraction. To ask it for more, he knew, would be a waste of time.
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