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Updated: June 28, 2025
Relatively to the forces engaged, Albuera and Möckern are the bloodiest battles of the Napoleonic wars. On the whole, Napoleon had dealt the allies heavier losses than he had sustained. But they could replace them.
Wellington, after the battles of Fuentes d'Onoro and Albuera, had been compelled to fall back again to the frontier in the face of greatly superior forces, and had maintained his old position on the Coa till the approach of winter compelled the French to retire into the interior, where they had their magazines and depots.
There were only five ladders for the two columns, which were close together; and a deep cut, made in the bottom of the ditch as far as the counter-guard of the Trinidad, was filled with water from the inundation. Into that watery snare the head of the fourth division fell, and it is said above a hundred of the fusiliers, the men of Albuera, were there smothered.
The struggle in the Wood at St. Julien will go down to history side by side with the fight at Albuera and the hand-to-hand struggle at Inkerman. It was a soldier's battle, and many brave men fell. When roll call was held in the morning only five officers and 188 men of the 10th responded, whilst the 16th Canadian Scottish could only muster five officers and 260 men unhurt.
May 15, 1811. The battle of Albuera one of the most glorious in the War.
It is hypercritical, no doubt, to look too closely at a term used by a wounded man with the flush of battle still upon him, but still a student of military history must smile at such a comparison between this action and such others as Albuera or Inkerman, where the numbers of British engaged were not dissimilar.
They still spread their grassy surface to the sun as on that beautiful morning not, historically speaking, so very long ago; but the King and his fifteen thousand armed men, the horses, the bands of music, the princesses, the cream-coloured teams the gorgeous centre-piece, in short, to which the downs were but the mere mount or margin how entirely have they all passed and gone! lying scattered about the world as military and other dust, some at Talavera, Albuera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse, and Waterloo; some in home churchyards; and a few small handfuls in royal vaults.
Lieutenant-Colonel Carden for so I shall call him, although not his real name had not been a month at quarters, when he proved himself a regular martinet; everlasting drills, continual reports, fatigue parties, and ball practice, and heaven knows what besides, superseded our former morning's occupation; and, at the end of the time I have metioned, we, who had fought our way from Albuera to Waterloo, under some of the severest generals of division, were pronounced a most disorderly and ill-disciplined regiment, by a Colonel, who had never seen a shot fired but at a review in Hounslow, or a sham-battle in the Fifteen Acres.
Here they play at it; and an army's shipped to land without commissariat, ambulances, medical stores, and march against the odds, as usual if it can march! "Albuera, my lord?" "Our men can spurt, for a flick o' the whip. They're expected to be constantly ready for doing prodigies to repair the country's omissions. All the country cares for is to hope Dick Turpin may get to York.
Next morning the joyful news came that Soult was retiring, and all felt with a thrill of triumph that their sacrifices and efforts had not been in vain, and that the hard-fought battle of Albuera was forever to take its place among the great victories of the British army.
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