Military Power

Probably the only man to have fought at both the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and the Battle of Waterloo (1815), Miguel de Alava had been just a lowly midshipman in the Spanish fleet when the combined fleets of France and Spain had been so decisively defeated by Admiral Horatio Nelson. By 1811 Alava (now a Major-General in the Spanish Army) he was appointed to be the Spanish Liaison Officer at the Headquarters of General Wellington in Portugal.

He was present at Salamanca in July 1812 when Wellington was informed that the French Army of Marshal Marmont was on the move. With food in one hand and his telescope in the other, Wellington had seen the opening for which he had waited all morning. Marmont had sent three Divisions marching straight across the front of Wellington’s main striking force. Turning to the Spaniard Wellington exclaimed “Mon cher Alava, Marmont est perdu” (“my goodness Alava, Marmont is undone”) and putting spurs to his horse galloped off to order the Third Division to mount an immediate attack on the leading French Division.

At the Battle of Orthez, (February 27, 1814) Alava was again watching the battle unfold alongside Wellington. Picton’s Division had just taken the ridge on which the French had initially deployed. Suddenly Alava was hit by a spent bullet. Wellington just laughed at him ‘and telling him it was nonsense and that he was not hurt’ when another bullet (a piece of case shot) hit him on the hilt of his sword, driving it against his hip bone which knocked him to the ground. He was able to remount and continued directing the battle although he was in considerable pain.

If Wellington had thought that he had seen the last of the Spanish General at the end of the Peninsula war he would be badly mistaken. In 1815, Napoleon escaped his exile on Elba and, returning to Paris, raised a new army. Wellington took a stand at Waterloo where, no doubt much to his surprise, General Alava turned up again (as the newly appointed Spanish ambassador to the court of Louis XVIII) on that famous battlefield that would finally put an end to Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions once and for all.