3. The Battle of Maida (10)
Varying Accounts of Victory and Defeat
Sir John Stuart spent the evening of his victory in dining on board Sidney Smith’s flagship the Pompée, where he received many compliments, heard the whole story of the siege of Acre from his self-centred voluble entertainer, and was finally invested with a shawl of honour, after the Oriental fashion, by his host. At daybreak he re-landed, and marched his force to Maida and the French camp, where a certain amount of valuable camp equipage was picked up. Stuart slept at Maida that eve, having (according to his Quarter-Master General) spent the greater part of the day in the agonies of composition of his dispatch. This seems corroborated by the fact that it is dated on the morning of July 6th, while the battle had taken place on the morning of the 4th. Bunbury bitterly remarks that for forty-eight hours after the victory the whole army was kept “kicking their heels and eating grapes about the hill-sides of Maida”, while the enemy was on his way towards a place of safety, unmolested save by the brigands of the hills.
Stuart’s losses, which he carefully sums up in his dispatch, had been astoundingly small. One officer only had been killed, a Captain McLean of the 20th light company, who had served in Kempt’s battalion. I know no other case where a battle of such importance was fought with the loss of one single officer to the winners. There were also the moderate number of forty-four men killed, and thirteen officers and 269 men wounded—a total casualty list of 327. It is notable to see how the losses were distributed; Kempt had fifty-nine killed and wounded, including the Corsicans. Acland showed by far the heaviest proportional losses in the whole army—169 killed and wounded, more than half the total list. Cole had eighty-four casualties, while Oswald and the 20th, who came up only at the very end of the fight, lost five and seven men respectively.
Still, it is an astounding fact that with a loss of 327 men Stuart’s troops had killed, wounded, or taken a full 2,000 Frenchmen. Reynier in his dispatch acknowledges a loss of 1,300, but this figure is too low. He had sixteen officers killed, forty wounded, and apparently eight unwounded prisoners; of rank and file a full 900 were prisoners—more than half of them wounded—nearly 500 were killed (Stuart says that he had buried 700, but this is probably inaccurate, for that number of killed would by all battle averages presuppose at least 2,800 wounded, and the French lost nothing like that total). The full number of wounded who were not captured must have been about 900, for 200 were afterwards taken at Cotrone, and Reynier had 500 in his hospitals on September 1st over and above his normal sick. Besides these we must allow for deaths and recoveries in August. If we put the total loss at 2,000 and a trifle over, we are certainly very near the mark.
Reynier’s dispatch, which he wrote at Catanzaro on July 5th—twenty-four hours before Stuart got his completed—is a curious document, in that he shows no notion whatever of the reason why he was beaten. He throws all the blame on his men; he had, he says, only 5,350 men (understating by a thousand), but that ought to have sufficed to throw 6,000 or 7,000 English into the sea. He thinks he acted for the best, “but I was not well seconded either by the number or the morale of the troops. Many of the soldiers did not conduct themselves with the vigour of regiments who had so distinguished themselves in earlier battles. A part of them are still so demoralized that I could not count on their standing in face of the enemy again. Combien je suis malheureux d’avoir été abandonné par mes troupes au moment où elles devroient décider la victoire.” And then he proceeds to say that they will disgrace themselves, if not strengthened at once by reinforcements whose morale is intact. He had no news from Verdier at Cosenza; his only hope was in prompt aid from Naples. Of the character of the English tactics or the effectiveness of their fire there is not a word. All blame is thrown on the cowardice of the rank and file.
César Berthier, Joseph Napoleon’s Chief of the Staff at Naples, found an easier way to account for Reynier’s defeat than did that general himself. He had the effrontery to write to Napoleon that there were 9,000 English at Maida, and that they had already been joined before the battle by 3,000 or 4,000 Calabrese brigands. “Ils étaient treize mille et nous avions cinq mille et cinquante!” His 9,000 British were manufactured by counting as present every battalion quartered in Sicily, crediting Stuart with the 35th, 61st, and Corsican Rangers, whose light companies only were with Kempt, and with the 39th and Chasseurs Britanniques, of whom not a man sailed at all. Moreover, Ross’s disembarkation during the action is said to have brought 2,500 men to Stuart, in addition to his other forces—it really, as we saw, consisted of 600 bayonets, one depleted battalion. But that was the way in which history was written to please Napoleon.
He did not, however, believe it, since he read the London papers with deep interest and generally believed them when it came to a conflict of evidence. I have noted several clear examples of this—especially after Talavera.
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