Rifles - Mark Urban [41]
The makeshift hospital in Pinhel was another charnel house, one even cruder than Simmons’s billet of the first night. A sergeant from one of the regiments nearby, hearing of the sanguinary engagement on the Coa, allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and peered inside: ‘They were the most shocking spectacle I ever beheld – many without arms, hands, legs and every other part … the cries of them would pierce the heart of a slave.’ When he went back the next morning, many had died.
In this miserable place, some of the 95th’s wounded subalterns found one another and joined forces. Lieutenant Harry Smith, an active fellow with a grasp of Spanish, was able to make himself understood to the Portuguese. He helped organise a party of wounded who would be taken over several days down the mountain tracks, to a place where they could be put in boats on the Mondego River, then cruise down to the coast where the Navy might be able to evacuate them.
Smith, who had a knack of emerging on top in any situation, was loaded into a local worthy’s sedan chair, hitched between two mules, while the others would ride in the back of bullock carts. Officers and men alike were thrown into these conveyances. It cannot be claimed that the commissioned class received any higher standard of care at this stage of the journey, except in one particular: each officer, even the pipsqueak subalterns, was assigned a soldier of his company to act as his servant. The day after the battle Lieutenant Colonel Beckwith sent these men down to ease the miseries of his young officers. The riflemen were able to look after their charges in the most basic way, by fetching water and guarding them as the convoy of sick made its way down towards the Mondego.
Private Costello, with his two leg wounds, was also one of those being bumped along in the carts. A couple of days out of Pinhel, one of the seriously wounded men who’d been propped up close by slumped across him: ‘Foam mixed with blood ran from his mouth which, with his glassy eyes fixed on mine, made me feel very uncomfortable. Being weak and wounded myself, I had no power to move him. Death put an end to his sufferings, and his struggles having ceased, I was able to recover myself a little.’ Costello called out to the driver again and again, trying to make himself heard above the din of the wheels. He was convinced the surly old Portuguese had heard him all right, but the shouts were ignored, and Costello endured hours before the dead man was lifted off him.
The journey itself was too much for many. Lieutenant O’Reilly of the 95th died two days after the battle. Not long after that, Lieutenant Pratt, whose neck wound left him in hideous discomfort, had grown angry with a Portuguese who would not help him: his shouting caused the artery in his neck to burst, and he quickly bled to death in front of his anguished friends.
At the end of each day’s stage, the men would be left in a barn or some little shrine, with scant chance of a visit from one of the handful of medics who accompanied the convoy. One soldier recorded, ‘The surgeons had neither the time nor opportunity to look after us. As a consequence of this neglect, maggots were engendered in the sores, and the bandages, when withdrawn, brought away on them lumps of putrid flesh and maggots.’ During the daytime marches, many a dressing slipped off or was clawed away by some delirious man scratching at his wounds. Hordes of flies would then swarm around the wound, laying eggs in the rotting matter.
Six days after the battle, the sick were getting close to the river where they would find more comfortable transport. Many had been disgusted by the Portuguese town officials whom they had encountered on the way. At one point Harry Smith had threatened to hang the local magistrate, if he did not furnish some oxen and drivers to pull the sick wagons. The locals, it can be imagined, did not react well to such usage, and four days after leaving Pinhel, Simmons’s servant, Private Short, threatened to kill the driver of his master’s cart. Happily,