Note 583 — SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER VIII

The amusing story told of this storm by Harry Smith in his autobiography (i. pp. 97-8) is too good to be omitted. ‘My brigade was sent to support the 7th Division, which was hotly engaged. I was sent forward to report to Lord Dalhousie, who commanded. I found his lordship and his Q.M.G. Drake in deep conversation. I reported pretty quick, and asked for orders (the head of the brigade was just getting under fire). I repeated the question, “What orders, my lord?” Drake became somewhat animated, and I heard his lordship say, “Better take the village.” I roared out, “Certainly, my lord,” and off I galloped, both calling to me to come back, but “none are so deaf as those who won’t hear.” I told General Vandeleur we were immediately to take the village. The 52nd deployed into line, our Riflemen were sent out in every direction, keeping up a fire nothing could resist.... The 52nd in line and the swarm of Riflemen rushed at the village, and though the ground was intersected by gardens and ditches nothing ever checked us, until we reached the rear of it. There was never a more impetuous onset—nothing could resist such a burst of determination.’ Smith’s addition that the brigade took twelve guns in this charge seems (as Mr. Fortescue remarks) to be of more doubtful value.

Naturally there is nothing of this in Dalhousie’s dispatch—a most disappointing paper. It is mostly in a self-exculpatory tone, to justify his lateness and the absence of his two rear brigades. He says that they came up at the same time as Vandeleur, which is certainly untrue, as neither of them had a single casualty all day. And they could not have failed to catch a shell or two if they had been anywhere near the fighting-line during the subsequent capture of Crispijana and Zuazo. Mr. Fortescue’s note that Captain Cairnes’s letter in the Dickson Papers, p. 916, proves that Barnes’s brigade had arrived by this time, is a misdeduction from Cairnes’s carelessness in talking of Grant’s brigade as ‘our first brigade,’ meaning thereby our leading brigade, not the brigade officially numbered 1. When Cairnes says that the ‘first brigade’ and the guns were ‘in their place,’ while the rest arrived very late in the action, we need only contrast the casualty lists—1st Brigade nil, 2nd Brigade 330 casualties, 3rd Brigade nil, to see what he means.